The paranoid thriller, Enemy of the State (now showing at your local movie theater), has a villain who bears an uncanny resemblance to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, architect of the 1960s military build-up in South Vietnam. Though opponents called McNamara a "war criminal," he may be surprised to find himself three decades later a dark icon in a conspiracy movie that features a rogue national security official carrying out his own policy against "enemies of the state."
The paranoid links Enemy of the State conjures up between the lies and secrets of Vietnam and current anxieties about the technology of spying and government invasion of privacy will seem comical to those old enough to remember McNamara’s overblown confidence in technology. Still, the links to criminal acts committed in the name of the state are evocative, especially in light of General Augusto Pinochet’s extended stay in England under threat of extradition to Spain for "crimes against humanity." In their ruling detaining Pinochet, Britain’s Law Lords eloquently reiterated a traditional moral understanding: "certain types of conduct, including torture and hostage-taking, are not acceptable conduct on the part of anyone. This applies as much to heads of state-as it does to everyone else." In other words, tyrants, dictators, kings, and presidents cannot get away with murder.
Whatever Pinochet’s ultimate fate, the fact that he has been charged at all signals that his "amnesty" carries no warrant beyond the borders of Chile. International opinion and law may be reaching a turning point. Are we in the course of concluding that (1) national sovereignty can no longer protect agents of the state who commit criminal acts that would bring individuals before a court of law, and (2) national sovereignty can no longer protect from international prosecution officials and agents who commit such crimes?
Elsewhere in this issue, William Pfaff writes: "There are worse men than the benighted and reactionary Augusto Pinochet who enjoy tranquil retirements today" (see page 8). There are also men not so directly responsible as Pinochet for crimes against humanity who are, nonetheless, complicit in them. Government officials, military men, and intelligence agents in the United States, and elsewhere, should feel uneasy, not necessarily because wholesale indictments are on the horizon, but because international law and practice may no longer allow inhuman acts to be defended in the name of the state.
Such is the consequence for Bosnian war criminals (mostly Serbs, but Croats, and Bosnians as well), who are slowly being arrested and judged by the international court in The Hague. But what about other less directly egregious cases? Brian Brown writes on page 10 of continuing efforts to close down the School of the Americas, a U.S. cold-war counterinsurgency training center for the military of Latin America. Many of its graduates are now known to have been responsible for the worst atrocities in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. What responsibility does the U.S. military bear, or the politicians who can’t quite bring themselves to vote the SOA out of business, or citizen-taxpayers who don’t rise up and say, "enough"?
The list of such crimes is very long. The French in Algeria, the Iraqis toward the Kurds and Kuwaitis, the Israelis in Lebanon, the U.S. in Vietnam, the Indonesians in East Timor, the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya-the list is so long that a wholesale effort at indictment would soon end in the collapse of this modest turn in international law.
Perhaps there can only be, as with Pinochet, small steps that gradually build up case law and symbolic efforts that will serve as a deterrent against such crimes. Governments and their citizens are put on notice that some acts are a crime, and that a crime is a crime is a crime no matter who does it and no matter what their justification. As the century begins to turn, acknowledgment of that fact alone would be a millennial achievement.
