15
U.S.’s controversial decisions regarding the treatment of prisoners-of-war at Guantanamo,
planned military tribunals, and the abu Ghraib person torture scandal and the legal justifications
for torture concocted by the Bush Administration. In a third domain, new justifications for
restrictions on long-established civil and human rights standards have come as a shock to a
regime used to U.S. leadership – rhetorically, at least -- on rights’ issues. Domestic and
international levels of law are closely interwoven in the construction of the human rights regime,
and similarly interwoven and eroded when a leading state violates such seemingly inviolable
fundamentals as article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ guarantee
of a right to detainees to have their cases “promptly” reviewed by a judge and subject to a speedy
trial -- habeus corpus within the Anglo-American tradition.
30
These shifts are somewhat
ancillary to this paper’s focus on al-Qaeda, but accentuate how norms and policies emerge out of
an interactive context.
These three post-9/11 shifts reinforce the sense that the conduct of global politics was
both changing radically prior to 9/11, and has changed even more since 9/11. A non-state
normative movement using terror as a tool has become international relations player; thrust
religion back into the heart of what constitutes appropriate authority and power in global politics;
and helped justify shifts in deeply embedded international law regimes. An actor seemingly on
the margins of global politics embodied ongoing shifts and continues to be part of international
relations’ historical evolution. 9/11 is primarily an exemplar of these shifts, though I also argue
that it served to advance yet further change. As the actor behind 9/11, therefore, Al-Qaeda
29
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, available at:
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/secstrat.htm
30
International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession
by General Assembly resolution 2200 A (XXI) of 16 December 1966; entry into force on 23 March 1976).
Convention