Is US democracy in peril?

S P SETH

Having led the charge to promote democracy and free speech all over the world, the US has often found itself in a quandary. Which is: how to reconcile the practice and precept/ideology of democracy at home. And that is denting its democratic credentials internationally. One important reason often cited for limiting freedoms at home is the need to deal effectively with the terrorists and jihadists who have become a living nightmare, as evidenced by the recent terrorists attacks in Paris. It is, therefore argued that it is necessary to take extraordinary measures by way of anti-terrorist legislation, large scale surveillance and the like to ensure the security of people against wanton terrorist attacks. In the process, the security imperative is tending to compromise freedom and free speech.

The question that arises then is: how effective is this obsession with security leading to mass surveillance of people, as revealed by Edward Snowden?  Now living as a political refugee in Russia, he has maintained that he revealed the US National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence dragnet because he was not comfortable with the way his government was indiscriminately spying on people and he wanted to start a public debate to curb its scale and intensity. On the face of it, there is nothing to suggest that Snowden was doing it to profit from it as an agent of a hostile foreign government. Indeed, his revelations have seriously compromised US’ relations with some of its closest friends like, for instance, Germany where the NSA was found to have been listening in on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private mobile phone. Although there have been attempts to patch together the estranged relationship, there is now a deep lack of trust, at least on the German side, about what the US might be doing unknown to the German state and its people.

It is not just that the NSA has been caught spying on one of their closest friends in Europe and its leader; it has somehow devalued the image of the United States that many Germans admired in the post-WW11 period. In a long article on Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and contemporary Germany, George Packer, a staff writer of the New Yorker, quotes Peter Schneider, a German novelist and writer who sums up this sense of great disappointment with the United States as a role model at one time. Schneider says, “You have created a model of a savior, and now we find by looking at you [the USA] that you are not perfect at all—much less, you are actually corrupt, you are terrible businessmen, you have no ideals anymore.” Cataloguing America’s sins, so to say, like the disastrous Iraq War, drones, the unmet expectations of the Obama Presidency, and now spying, “You actually have acted against your own promises, and so we feel very deceived.” Indeed, this is a very widely held view in many parts of the world that the USA is no longer the ideal or model that was once promoted as the standard bearer of western democracy and liberal capitalism. It was not true even then in its entirety but is further tarnished in the wake of all that has gone terribly wrong in the world under American leadership.

As if this was not enough, the release of a summary of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report---the total report exceeds six thousand pages--- on the CIA’s torture of detainees after 9/11 to extract confessions and intelligence on terrorism only reinforces how far the US has gone off the track as a healthy and functioning democracy. Commenting on it, the New Yorker says, “ It’s hard to describe it [the report] as a positive development when a branch of the federal government releases a four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-page [summary] report that explains, in meticulous detail, how unthinkable cruelty became official policy.”  The Republican Senator John McCain described the report as “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose—to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies--- but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.” It is important to stress that all the torture inflicted on detainees by the CIA failed to actually produce actionable intelligence, but people like the former vice-president Dick Cheney still swear by its usefulness in the war against terror.

Talking about the close collaboration in torture and other intelligence gathering and related projects between the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ (Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), David Bromwich writes in the London Review of Books, “… the evidence suggests that Anglo-Saxon democracies in our time have influenced each other chiefly in the cause of social control and illegal violence.” Indeed, in the United States, there has been a culture of impunity for the CIA operatives responsible for torture of suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Even as the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was going about its work, which the CIA did everything to impede and thwart, President Obama had assured the CIA operatives early in 2009 that under no circumstances they would be prosecuted. Which simply nullifies whatever has been revealed in the report, as there is no accountability about it.

Indeed, there is a line of defence to explain and justify torture at the time. And it goes like this: That the recourse to worst forms of torture occurred between 2001 and 2008 to extract information and confession in a climate of panic and fear when those responsible, out of a misplaced but genuine love for their country, did things that, if understood in the context of the times, should be overlooked and even forgiven. By this logic, forgiveness is in order for all sorts of infractions and human rights violations because circumstances for such heinous crimes will always be found understandable in their context.

The US is still considered an open society and hopefully will remain so to prevent any repetition of the torture practices of post-9/11 detainees. But there is genuine concern that a regime of anti-terror legislation, mass scale surveillance, drone strikes and the likes might further erode democratic freedoms and values. David Cole, a professor in law and public policy at Georgetown University, thus expresses this concern in his article in the New York Review of Books; “Increasingly, our governments seem to be insisting that our lives be transparent to them [through mass surveillance], while their policies remain hidden from us. For the sake of democracy itself, we must do all we can to resist that impulse.” 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au