Guest Post: Cameron on “A Response to a Most Remarkable Conversation”

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

Response to a most remarkable conversation

by Charles Cameron

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Some time back, I posted here about the conversation between Leah Farrall, until recently a senior analyst with the Australian Federal Police and their subject specialist for al-Qaida, and Abu Walid al-Masri, long time mujahid, writer and strategist, friend and frequent critic of bin Laden, and the first foreigner to give bayat to Mullah Omar. Leah is presently writer her doctoral dissertation on al-Qaida, Abu Walid is under house arrest in Iran. Their online conversation continues, as Leah has described in an article for The Australian, and I believe this in itself is a significant even in online discourse, as I suggest in a post on Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs blog.

Leah has been posting Abu Walid’s responses to her questions on her blog, first in Arabic and then as time permits in English, for some time now. Most recently, she posted her own detailed responses alongside Abu Walid’s questions to her — and the topic of their conversation accordingly shifted from issues of the structure and history of Al-Qaida and the Taliban (Leah’s academic interests) to issues of the morality of warfare, and of the jihad and war on terror in particular (Abu Walid’s concerns).

Leah has graciously invited me to respond to this new phase of the discussion, which cuts very close to my own heart.

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Abu Walid’s questions, as Adam Serwer has noted at The American Prospect, are largely focused on issues of due process:

Al Masri asks why the U.S. imprisons people based on secret evidence, why all detainees don’t get fair trials, and why the U.S. has tortured detainees. He brings up secret prisons and bounty hunters. He also alludes to America allowing “security departments in the underdeveloped world to do their dirty work, such as severe torture,” which I assume refers to extraordinary rendition.

Leah, who knows a great deal about these things, has responded to each of these points in detail. And Abu Walid and Leah are not alone in reproving such things — they have many critics, not least in the United States, some of whom have tracked these issues with a far closer eye than I have. Scott Horton, writing in Harper’s and elsewhere, knows far more about these practices, their justifications under recent Presidents, and their relation to US and international law than I do, and one of the reasons I find the western democratic tradition powerfully appealing is the fact that he can openly criticize his Presidents in the public media on such topics.

The topic of our behavior in time of war concerns me deeply, because it is fundamentally a topic about the gift of human life, how we should use it and how we should respect it. Islam, and before it Judaism, both declare that to take one human life is to extinguish a world, and that somewhat poetic statement is a brilliant summary of why the means of peace should be preferred to those of war.

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