Chapter 7: 'The state, terrorism, and crimes against humanity'. BLOCK 1, BOOK 1. Flashcards
STATE CRIMES
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HOW ‘THE STATE’ CAN BE UNDERSTOOD’
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- Traditionally - within criminology ‘THE STATE is most commonly understood as a PROTECTOR against crimes rather than a PERPETRATOR of crimes.
- But states also kill, injure, destroy, plunder, with far more serious widespread consequences than those associated with widespread crime.
- STATE CRIME - Can take various forms, i.e corruption, intimidation, violation of health and safety regulations, institutional racism, torture, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war crimes.
- STATE CRIME - might be considered the most serious form of criminality because of the monopoly of violence and legal regulation enjoyed by sovereign states to inflict violations of human rights with impunity on foreign nationals and their own people.
- KEY CHARACTERISTIC OF NATION STATES - They have claimed a monopoly of ‘LEGITIMATE’ USE OF PHYSICAL FORCE/VIOLENCE within their own territory (TILLY, 1992)
- HOWEVER - They are also in a position to perpetrate/instigate the worlds most serious violence/pain/injury/death in contravention of international or national legal or moral norms - This is ILLEGITIMATE STATE VIOLENCE (Green and Ward, 2004).
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FORMS OF CRIMINAL STATE PRACTICE.
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FORMS OF CRIMINAL STATE PRACTICE INCLUDE:
a) Political corruption
b) forms of organised crime
c) state corporate offending
d) death and suffering attributed to national disasters
e) torture
f) terror
g) war crimes
h) genocide
3
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TORTURE AND TERROR as ‘CRIMES OF HUMANITY’
DEHUMANISATION
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- Torture and Terror are illustrative of ‘CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY’
- Concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ was introduced into international law through the the international tribunal at Nuremberg following WW11. It has now been given further LEGAL STATUS since.
- TORTURE - Refers to inhumane acts against civilian populations.
- It is broader than war crime as it is not restricted to state practices that are just aimed at eradicating national, ethnic and religious groups through mass murder.
- GLOBAL REACH of state crime is secured by practices of
a) imperial domination
b) colonialism
c) spreading of torture technology and training
- STATE VIOLENCE - involved dehumanisation (stripping people of their human dignity) (GLOVER 1999)
- DEHUMANISATION is usually practised before events such as GENOCIDE, i.e, Jews and gypsies were dehumanised by Nazi’s, and Kurd’s in Iraq.
- GLOBAL PATTERN OF DEHUMANISATION - is driven by international war on terror and rise of Islamophobia.
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DEFINING STATE CRIME
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- This is complex.
- Reported cases in the media often refer to war crimes, crimes against humanity, human rights violations, and genocide etc, but rarely if ever to ‘STATE CRIME’.
- This is because behaviours are often individualised as symptomatic of deranged leaders, corrupt politicians, rather than systematic of state practices.
- DEFINITION OF STATE CRIME - Violations of human rights perpetrated by agents of the state in a deviant pursuit of ‘organisational goals’ (GREEN AND WARD, 2004).
- However - states rarely criminalise their own activities or their own agents.
- AS A RESULT - the deviance of state crime needs to be understood as the pursuit of organisational goals driven by organisational demands. Not, simply those actions of state agents operating for personal gain.
7, Dominant institutions in society constitute a POWER ELITE (i.e military, government, and corporations) (WRIGHT-MILLS, 1990).
- SANCTIONS - that follow identification of state organisational or elite deviance include:
a) legal punishment
b) rebellion
c) censure
d) political/economic sanctions.
- THE STATE - has a monopoly over the LEGITIMATE USE of violence, through coercion in armies, police forces, prisons.
- AND - counter development takes place at the level of the individual as individuals surrender interpersonal violence to the state (ELIAS, 2000). This means, that the assumption that violence will be carried out by specialised state agencies is enough to reduce interpersonal violence that occurs in civilised society.
- HOWEVER - THE PARADOX IS; while the state monopolises the exercise of legitimate violence, and thus promotes civilised interpersonal behaviour in society, it also perpetrates widespread extreme violence towards certain categories of its citizens, i.e Muslims (suspected terrorists etc)
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THE PATRIOT ACT 2001 (USA)
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- THE PATRIOT ACT 2001 enabled the the US government to arrest and detain people in conditions of secrecy for indefinite periods if there were reasonable grounds that may constitute a threat to national security
- This new security measure was was put in place after the 2001 AL-QAEDA attacks in New York and the pentagon by George Bush.
- Those captured in the ‘war on terror ‘ have been labelled ‘ENEMY NON-COMBATANTS’ and are held in Guantanamo bay in degrading conditions without charge or access to legal representation.
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THE NATURE OF TORTURE
TORTURE - Pain and suffering, physical and mental, inflicted on a person to obtain information or a confession by someone, or for a third party, punishing him for an act he has or is suspected of committing.
This does not include pain and suffering from lawful sanctions.
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- PETERS (1996) provides a harrowing historical record of torture practices.
- These include: (PETERS, 1996).
a) beatings
b) beating the soles of the feet
c) clapping palms of hands over the ears and rupturing the ear membrane
d) use of electricity
e) burning
f) submersion under water
g) rape and forced sexual assault
h) deprivation of food and water
i) fake executions, and witnessing the torture of own family
j) forced injection of drugs or faeces
- HISTORICALLY - Torture has been a tool of repressive governance, not an instrument of investigation or intelligence gathering
- Torture - is a method by which terror is instilled into a subject population, a strategy to silence oppositional and dissenting voices, to silence communities.
- Torture is a means of terrorising communities, and is universally condemned, and there is an international prohibition, but is still practised widely nowadays.
- by 2006 - 144 states had ratified the ‘convention against torture, and other cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatments of punishment’
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VICTIMS OF TORTURE
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- According to Amnesty International (2000) - Victims of torture tend to be of two kinds.
a) They are either perceived to be in social, political, cultural opposition to the ruling regime
b) or tend to come from a marginalised, criminalised, and impoverished sections of society - Example of victim - Following 9/11 British Muslim BEGG who was working as an aid worker/education in Afghanistan was abducted by CIA, labelled an enemy non-combatant, and and spent 3 years in Guantanamo bay without being charged. Here he was tortured.
- DEVASTATING EFFECTS OF TORTURE - inflicts profound damage in individuals, family, and communities, as well as damaging those that carry out
the torture. - Survivors suffer medical, psychological, social, political, and economic traumas after torture.
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PERPETRATORS OF TORTURE
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- There are those torturers that physically carry out acts of torture.
- Torturers physically and psychologically inflict torture, i.e police officers and military personnel (HUGGINS, 2002).
- But - there are also those who train and trade in TORTURE TECHNOLOGIES.
- STRUCTURAL VARIABLES/PRECONDITIONS FOR TORTURE include: (GREEN AND WARD, 2004)
a) a historical devaluation of a population
b) strong respect for authority
c) monolithic culture (slow to change, doesn’t have much variation in it) that has popular identification, i.e Nazi Germany
d) clear designation of the enemy.
e) being comfortable with strict working arrangements
f) unquestioning obedience of authority
g) high levels of respect
h) deference
- However - research reveals individual personality and background information cant tell us who will commit torture and who wont. Indeed studies of Nazi doctors say they are relatively normal.
- Certain institutional settings have the capacity to produce great cruelty (LIFTON, 1986). This is illustrated in studies such as the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s studies of obedience and authority.
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TORTURER TRAINING METHODS - TORTURE TRAINERS AND TRADERS.
TORTURE TECHNOLOGIES
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- Engagement in torture requires training, and there are well documented accounts of trainees being brutalised and humiliated using various techniques.
- Training forms an important initiation rite (GIBSON, 1990).
- It schools them in techniques that require scientific knowledge about peoples psychological and physical capacities ( i.e pain thresholds and pain areas).
- Training implies STRUCTURAL RESOURCES and requires:
a) a network of state officials
b) facilitators
c) perpetrators - i.e police, military, prison personnel
d) medical professionals
e) judges, magistrates
f) psychologists (ALL COHEN, 2001).
- EXAMPLE - 2004 - 9 american soldiers were court- martialled for responding to orders to torture Iraqi men by highest level military government command (HERSH, 2004).
- Western involvement in torture training and torture trading has a long history. Germany, UK, South Africa, France, Spain are also places where companies manufacture and deal in ‘torture technologies’. (AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL).
- USA identified as having greatest number of distributors, suppliers, manufacturers of leg irons, shackles, thumb cuffs, gang chains etc.
- WHINSEC (formerly SOA) - is a US department of defence that is a Spanish language training establishment. It has a long history of training military and police leaders of brutal Latin regimes to become torturers, i.e Argentina, Chile, Peru, etc.
- WHINSEC (SOA) training manuals advocate blackmail, beatings, execution, torture, as central to counter-insurgency. These were distributed to Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, etc. (KEPNER, 2001).
- these ‘TORTURE TRAINING MANUALS’ were propagated by the west, and used by states from developing countries to learn how to govern through violence.
- Torture training in technologies is not just a local phenomenon, it is is a powerful global one of dominance.
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EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
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- EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION - is when ‘non-torturing states’ outsource their torture requirements to ‘torturing states’
- EXAMPLE 1 - Following 9/11 President bush gave authority to CIA to export terrorist suspects to TORTURING REGIMES for interrogation in Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Poland, and Romania.
- EXAMPLE 2 - A Human rights NGO legal building support for prisoners and Guantanamo bay detainees documented the role of SCOTLAND in assisting the CIA’s torture transfers to some of the worlds cruellest regimes, by using Glasgow airport for refuelling.
- EXAMPLE 3 - US aircraft used BRITISH FACILITIES on the British Indian ocean territory in 2002 to transport rendered terrorist suspects.
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STATE TERROR AND TERRORISM
UN DEFINITION OF TERROR.
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- United Nations definition - terrorism is understood as clandestine use of violence against civilian targets for purposes of intimidation, or to create fear in pursuit of
political goals. - However - covert death squads carry out forms of terror that fall outside this definition as:
a) civilian targets are intimidated by state-actors in a non-clandestine manner
b) assassinations and executions of specific targets are carried out rather than the primary purpose being to just intimidate.
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ANALYSING TERROR
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- Terrorism first emerged as a political idea during the French revolution.
- Non-state actors are mostly associated with terrorism according to media and government representations of public enemies.
- However - It is argued that most brutal purveyors of terror are GOVERNMENTS (GREEN AND WARD, 2004).
- States around the world have engaged in clandestine, illegal, violent activities to to induce fear in populations, and to advance political goals. This is done both overtly and covertly.
- Modern states will conceal and deny torture and murder, but at the same time must make it known to the targeted communities that they hit that this is an effective form of terror on their part (CAMPBELL, 2000).
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STATES MOTIVATIONS FOR TERROR AND RESPONSES.
and
‘RATIONALITY’ OF STATE TERROR.
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- STATES are motivated to resort to terror and repression for a variety of reasons, not least by the availability or not of other means of CONFLICT RESOLUTION.
- GREEN AND WARD, (2004) explored a ‘rationality’ for state terror by using 3 concepts:
a) motivation
b) opportunity stricture
c) social control.
MOTIVATING FACTORS ARE:
a) the opposition are considered to use violence themselves
b) opposition has strong community support
c) opposition threat is deemed significant
d opposition communities strong commitment to ideological goals (i.e communism, or Islam)
- TERROR - is also underpinned by IRRATIONALITY’ as well:
a) terror regimes are energised by ideologies that distort the reality of their political experience
b) they are driven by unrealistic aspirations for social and economic control
c) murder and torture is justified as a natural response to a great threat (this might not really exist in reality). - EXAMPLES OF SO-CALLED RATIONAL RESPONSES TO THREAT
a) Argentina ‘DIRTY WAR (1976-83), 30.000 dead, they were convinced by the legitimacy of the war against the evil of communism (OSIEL, 1999)
b) CAMBODIA, POL POT, KHYMER ROUGE REGIME - killed 800, 000 - 2 million, genocide was considered a rational response, but in fact was obviously irrational (CHANDLER, 1999). - Authoritarian and western democratic states have adopted terrorist techniques as a ‘RATIONAL RESPONSE’ to political threats
- In authoritarian regimes (usually those in the developing world) - state violence tends to be targeted against local populations.
- However - Western powers extend beyond the local in facilitating global repression.
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GOVERNANCE THROUGH POLITICAL VIOLENCE
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- TERROR is a form of governance that is less of a strategy of punishment and more a form of brutal political control (CHUMSKY AND HERMAN, 1979)
- Governance through terror requires physical and economic resources, and a monopoly of violence that only states are capable of.
- TWO EXAMPLES:
a) CAMBODIA - Khymer rouge regime - POL POT.
b) ARGENTINA - Dirty war
- States outsource exercise of terror for public relations reasons. They dole it out to and hire PARAMILITARIES.
- This way they can condemn the brutality of the acys by the paramilitaries, bur also offer plausible denials of being involved. This is a process of ‘CONCEALMENT AND DENIAL’.
- EXAMPLES OF THIS :
a) COLUMBIA - Colombian government used PARAMILITARIES to do the torture and terror (HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH).
b) INDONESIA - Indonesian paramilitary terrorised the EAT TIMORESE, decapitating, murdering, and torturing them (CAVR, 2005).
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GLOBALISATION AND STATE VIOLENCE
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- AUTHORITARIAN STATES in the third world usually conduct the most brutal forms of state violence and terror.
- HOWEVER - Western democratic states have played a crucial role in the globalisation and legitimisation of this STATE VIOLENCE and TERROR.
- EXAMPLE - US MILITARY DOCTRINE of COUNTER-INSURGENCY has legitimised state terror globally to confront DISSENT and SUBVERSION.
- ORGANISATIONAL FORMS OF STATE TERROR Include: (McCLINTOCK, 1992)
a) paramilitary irregulars
b) special forces
c) military intelligence
- EXAMPLE - US and France were the main sources of counterinsurgency training for Argentina, training and teaching them techniques by sending out instructors and training manuals.
