The Two Faces of Terror

To know where we are, we have to see ourselves from a distance. Otherwise the remarkable becomes commonplace. I see the Military Commissions Act of 2006 from a temporal distance, specifically from the era of state-terror regimes in Latin America during which I served for eight years (1976 -1983) as a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a principal arm of the Organization of American States (OAS). Those were the years in which governments scattered across the South American continent and the Central American isthmus, anticipating the policy views announced by United States Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview on “Meet the Press” in 2001, decided to go to what Cheney called the “dark side,” or, in the case of those who had long made that side their principal area of operations, decided to move a larger proportion of their respective peoples into it. Throughout the period, reports about the hell on earth my six colleagues and I exposed (in the somewhat stilted idiom official agents are driven to adopt) would appear episodically in the American press. Their implicit subtext was that these horrors were perpetrated by brutes as alien to American life as the venues where they operated

Alien · Art · Commission · Human rights · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Principal (computer security · State (computer science · Subtext · History · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification

• Judicial Review and the Military Commissions Act

  Open Access•David Martin, David A Martin•American Journal of International…•2007

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• The Massacre at El Mozote

  Kenneth Maxwell, Mark Danner•Foreign Affairs•1994

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