Introduction: Law, text, terror

Summary

On 11 September 2001, two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York killing three thousand. A terrorist organisation, hitherto largely unknown outside security circles, claimed responsibility. Nineteen ‘martyrs’ of Al-Qaeda had carried out the attack. It was designed to bring nihilistic violence to the forefront of the American psyche, and that of its allies. It was designed to terrify, to obsess us, to lead us, perhaps, into abandoning centuries of jurisprudence, to abandoning our faith in the powers of reason, and the political ideas of liberty, tolerance and justice. It succeeded. And it was designed to hurt. It hurt, most obviously, those who suffered loss, the families and friends of victims of the initial strike. But it was also designed to hurt a potentially infinite number of others; all those who would become victims of the counter-terrorist response which, or so it was fervently hoped by those who planned the events of 9/11, would be launched.

And, once again, it has. Seduced by our political leaders, betrayed by our own deeper insecurities, we have developed a peculiar ‘tolerance of nonsense’. And so, in pursuit of something termed a ‘war on terror’, and with scant regard to any associated provisions of international law, US and British forces have invaded two far-away Islamic countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, laying waste to both. Anarchy has ensued. Collateral violence has been spawned in much of the rest of the region, most obviously Pakistan, Lebanon and various former Soviet republics. Thousands of allied military personnel have died, tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis, Pakistanis and Palestinians, Chechens and Kurds.