InterviewTorture, degrading treatment, extrajudicial executions … The philosopher Michel Terestchenko and the journalist Auberi Edler explain, in an interview to the "World", how the jihadist attacks opened a sequence of state violence and serious democratic regressions.
Michel Terestchenko is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reims and IEP Aix-en-Provence, he is the author of several books including The good use of torture (The discovery, 2008) and The Darkness Era (The Waterfront, 2015). He responds here to Auberi Edler, who, after four years of investigation, signs the documentary Executioners with clean hands, available on Arte, and whose philosopher was the "historical adviser".
The fate of the jihadists captured as part of the "war on terror" seems to float in the legal limbo. Has the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 on Prisoners of War and the UN Convention Against Torture been violated?
Michel Terestchenko: After the 9/11 attacks, George Bush's administration implemented two strategies: one of defining jihadists as "Illegal fighters" not falling under the Geneva Conventions; the other to establish that so-called coercive interrogation techniques are not torture, with the intention of avoiding any legal prosecution against those who would practice it. Lawyers as brilliant as John Choon Yoo, counsel at the Justice Department between 2001 and 2003 in the United States, have built a sophisticated rationale for "clean torture," the use of psychological practices that are as devastating as torture physical.
France did not need such precautions. In the evening of the attacks of Bataclan, November 13, 2015, François Hollande decreed the state of emergency, assuring wanting " eradicate " the Islamic State (IS) organization. In his tribute to the 130 victims, on November 27, he promised to " destroy the army of fanatics " responsible. If we accept this logic of eradication, questions of legal or moral justification no longer arise. The talk of eradication is not safe, it is hygienic. Repeated by senior representatives of the state, it is symptomatic of serious democratic regressions.
Should these regressions be considered in the light of the trauma caused by deadly attacks?
Auberi Edler: The United States did not react at short notice. The arsenal used since 2001 has been studied and compiled for decades. During the Cold War, Soviet trials had convinced Washington that communists held the ultimate weapon of brain control. To obtain it, the American government embarked on unsuccessful research, which uncovered the foundations of "clean" torture.
