Labeling prisoners illegal enemy combatants created a rights vacuum enabling torture

Evidence

Sidestepping the basic provisions of the Geneva Conventions, the United States and some of its allies created after 9/11 a legal black hole in which abuses of basic human rights could take place. They did so by declaring their Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners “illegal enemy combatants,” thereby denying them the status of prisoners of war, with its attendant rights. At the same time, the ethics of torture were openly debated by North American public intellectuals such as Alan Dershowitz and Michael Ignatieff, who employed the same kinds of apocalyptic, “ticking time bomb” scenarios as the popular thriller to argue for the regulated use of enhanced interrogation as “a grim necessity in an age of wars fought by virtuous ‘lesser evils.’ ” In Le Carré’s novel, the expedient contrivance of the “nation in danger” is seen to have global consequences, especially for minorities such as Issa. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 328

Categorization

• XREF: Gibney’s ‘torture debates’ material; also connects to the reader’s scaffold on how fiction both spreads and contests fear — the thriller’s ticking-bomb trope migrating into actual policy argument is a hinge between genre fiction and state practice.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how the thriller’s ‘ticking time bomb’ device crossed from entertainment into actual law-review and policy argument, and what that says about fiction’s power to authorize state violence.