Frédéric Gersdorff :« D’autres questions nous ont semblé plus pertinentes »

Afromedia.be : Pourquoi avoir mis en doute le témoignage d’Aimé Bolua ?

Frédéric Gersdorff : Je ne l’ai pas du tout mis en doute. J’ai mis ses propos au conditionnel parce que je n’avais aucune confirmation venant de sources officielles de ce qu’il disait. C’était juste ses propos. Aucun enquêteur, aucun porte-parole de la police ne m’a confirmé à ce moment-là ses dires. Ce n’était pas une mise en doute mais une précaution de ma part. Par ailleurs, ce n’est pas moi qui aie réalisé l’interview de ce monsieur mais des collègues de Télé-Matonge. Je n’ai donc pas pu avoir de contact direct avec lui et il s’agissait de prendre certaines assurances par rapport à son témoignage, en l’absence de confirmations ou d’infirmations tant de la justice que de la police.

A.be : Vous n’avez pas non plus interviewé Ramsès Ramazani …
F.G : Non, car sur place, ce monsieur ne s’est pas présenté à moi ou, moi, je n’ai pas pu le rencontrer.

A.be : Vous n’avez pas non plus jugé crédible le fait que des collègues de Télé-Matonge vous fournissent l’interview d’Aimé Bolua en tant qu’élément d’information marquant ?
F.G : J’aurais fait l’interview moi-même que je l’aurais également présenté au conditionnel puisque je n’avais, à ce moment-là, aucune source de police me confirmant ces éléments-là. N’importe qui aurait pu me dire cela, pour moi, c’était une précaution journalistique importante : quand une personne vous dit quelque chose, on le dit, on le met en avant, mais au conditionnel tant qu’il n’y a pas de sources officielles qui confirment ses propos.

A.be : Les jours qui ont suivi, plusieurs médias, dont RTL-TVI, ont interviewé Ramsès Ramazani et confirmé son intervention. Pas la RTBF. N’était-il pas opportun de revenir sur cet aspect peu banal du fait divers ?

F.G : Oui, cela pouvait être une possibilité de reportage et, comme on a pu le voir, cela s’est fait dans les jours qui ont suivi. C’est une idée qui se défend et c’est vrai que nous ne l’avons pas fait. Mais cette affaire a soulevé de nombreuses questions qui nous ont semblé plus pertinentes à développer.

A.be : Certes, mais plusieurs médias ont aussi traité des aspects prioritaires de l’affaire (le braquage, les auteurs venus d’Estonie, les questions de violence) tout en médiatisant l’acte héroïque des deux belgo-congolais…

F.G : Oui, mais, heu … Ce n’est pas un choix qui a été fait contre … On aurait pu le faire, on a décidé de ne pas le faire et puis voilà ! Ce n’était pas une volonté de ne pas le faire, mais plutôt une volonté de faire autre chose.

A.be : Ce choix de la RTBF a été très mal perçu par plusieurs habitants de Matonge. La télé de Service public serait-elle plus intéressée par relayer les aspects négatifs frappant ce quartier africain plutôt qu’un aspect positif tel que deux de ses habitants qui - au péril de leurs vies - ont permis l’arrestation d’un malfrat ?

F.G : Franchement, je pense que c’est un procès d’intention qui n’a aucune raison d’être. Il n’y a aucun choix qui a été posé avec cette réflexion visant à accuser précisément le quartier de Matonge. D’ailleurs, si vous regardez la conclusion de mon reportage : alors qu’on a aucune certitude sur l’identité des braqueurs, je dis que la seule chose dont on est sûr, c’est que ce n’était pas des habitants de Matonge.

A.be : Ramsès Ramazani a été invité ce dimanche sur le plateau de Controverse (RTL-TVI) pour livrer son témoignage dans le cadre d’un débat sur les violences urbaines. Qu’en pensez-vous ?
F.G : (soupir). Je n’en pense rien et n’ai aucun commentaire à faire là-dessus.

A.be : Etant donné les questions autour de la recrudescence de ce type de violences, le débat dominical de la RTBF devrait aussi y être consacré, non ?

F.G : Je vous avoue que je ne m’occupe absolument pas de ça. Pour cela, il faut vous adresser à mes collègues de Mise au point.

Propos recueillis par Olivier Mukuna

Ramsès Ramazani : « La RTBF est devenue une référence de salons »

Afromedia.be : Avec le recul, comment expliquez-vous votre décision de poursuivre, sans arme, des gangsters armés ?

Ramsès Ramazani : Je ne me l’explique toujours pas. J’ai démarré au quart de tour. Pourtant, je suis marié et père de 4 enfants mais je n’ai pas pensé un instant à cet aspect primordial. D’ailleurs, après les faits, mon épouse et certains de mes proches m’ont engueulé pour avoir pris un tel risque. En réalité dès que j’ai entendu les coups de feu, il n’y a pas eu de réflexion : je me suis mis à leur poursuite. Animé par une irrépressible volonté de justice. Cette agression venait de se passer dans ma collectivité, sous mes yeux, j’étais directement concerné ! Je tiens d’ailleurs à souligner l’élément suivant : La personne qui est décédée et celle qui se trouve aux soins intensifs appartiennent à la communauté juive. Ce sont des juifs géorgiens. Pourquoi dire cela ? Pour montrer qu’au-delà des différences de couleurs de peau ou de confessions religieuses, ici à Matonge, nous sommes et travaillons en symbiose. Ces personnes qui ont été attaquées et sont en deuil ne sont pas des étrangers : ils sont miens. Pour moi, pour Aimé et beaucoup d’autres, il s’agit de la famille élargie.

A.be : Les malfrats avaient-ils une mallette en leur possession ?

R.R : Non, je suis formel. Les faits ont eu lieu à une quarantaine de mètres de ma personne. J’entends des coups de feu, me retourne vers l’endroit des détonations et je vois deux personnes de type européen surgir de la bijouterie et traverser la rue en courant. Je réalise qu’il s’agit de malfaiteurs et les poursuit immédiatement. Aimé Bolua fait de même et m’emboîte le pas. Lorsque les voleurs s’engouffrent dans la galerie de la Porte de Namur, je ne les vois pas se débarrasser de quoi que ce soit. Par contre, je m’aperçois qu’ils sont armés, je vois leurs mains, leurs pistolets, mais aucune mallette. Tout cela n’a pas duré une minute. Ils tournent dans la rotonde de la galerie pour ressortir au niveau du Quick et du métro. Ils redescendent ensuite à droite pour se retrouver sur le Champs de mars. A ce niveau-là, un des malfaiteurs prend un vélo. J’ignore s’il lui appartenait ou s’il l’a volé. Il nous a tenu en respect avec son arme et a pris la fuite. Nous avons continué à poursuivre celui qui était à pieds. Plus d’une fois, il nous a aussi menacés avec son pistolet. J’ignore encore pourquoi je n’ai ressenti aucune peur. Mon avantage, c’est que j’ai croisé son regard plusieurs fois lorsqu’il se retournait : cet homme était véritablement pris de panique ! J’avais l’ascendant. Dans sa course, je vois qu’il manipule une sorte de sac en tissu. Nous avons encore longé la statue équestre de Léopold II, puis le fuyard s’est réfugié dans un parc derrière des bâtiments. Lorsque j’y arrive, je vois qu’il cherche à se cacher dans les fourrés. Il n’avait plus son arme ni son sac de tissu. J’ai foncé sur lui et l’ai maîtrisé.

A.be : Vous étiez seul ?

R.R : A ce moment-là, oui. Je suis un peu plus sportif et courrais en tête. Aimé est arrivé quelques minutes plus tard et m’a aidé à le maintenir. Nous l’avons présenté aux gardes en faction du Palais Royal. Ceux-ci avaient vu la scène et sorti leurs armes, ne comprenant pas ce qui se passait. J’ai expliqué que l’homme que nous détenions venait de commettre un hold-up et que nous le poursuivions depuis la porte de Namur. Les gardes ont emmené le malfrat. Je suis retourné vers la chaussée de Wavre. A mon arrivée, je trouve les policiers sur les lieux et une victime étendue sur le trottoir. A ce moment-là, j’ignore qu’il y a décès et des blessés. J’informe directement un policier que nous avons appréhendé un des gangsters et que nous l’avons remis aux gardes du Palais Royal. Un autre officier me prend dans son véhicule et, toutes sirènes hurlantes, nous retournons au Palais Royal. Après une discussion entre les gardes et le policier et sur mes indications, l’officier appelle du renfort pour effectuer une battue. Ils ont retrouvé l’arme et le sac en tissu du gangster. Jusqu’à présent, j’en ignore le contenu.

A.be : A votre retour sur les lieux, vous avez été auditionné par la police. Combien de temps ?

R.R : Plus d’une heure. Avec une quinzaine d’autres personnes, j’ai été entendu dans le restaurant Cosi Cosi qui était devenu une sorte de commissariat. Il y avait des policiers assis un peu partout en train d’interroger des gens. Pour ma part, j’ai été auditionné avec Aimé et un jeune camerounais qui nous avait suivis durant la poursuite, armé d’un bâton.

A.be : Le soir du drame, avez-vous regardé les reportages diffusés par les JT de RTL-TVI et de la RTBF ?

R.R : Oui. J’estime que RTL est resté assez en phase avec ce que j’avais vu. Par contre, le compte-rendu de la RTBF contenait beaucoup d’inexactitudes.

A.be : Avez-vous noté que le journaliste de la RTBF a mis en doute le témoignage d’Aimé Bolua ?

R.R : Oui et j’ignore pour quelle raison il l’a fait. A mon second retour sur les lieux, je n’ai vu aucun journaliste de la RTBF sur place. Leur arrivée tardive a certainement dû jouer dans cette sorte de sous-traitance aléatoire qu’ils ont diffusée au JT. En tout cas, je vous confirme que, ce jour-là, j’ai été interviewé par plusieurs journalistes de presse écrite et celui de RTL m’a questionné plus d’une fois. Mais je n’ai jamais vu ou été contacté par celui de la RTBF.

A.be : Comment l’expliquez-vous ?

R.R : Je n’en sais rien. En dehors de l’audition où j’étais inaccessible, je suis resté longtemps sur place, avec une amie commerçante et avec les fils du bijoutier qui m’ont vivement remercié. Si les policiers m’ont interrogé, si plusieurs témoins m’ont vu poursuivre les malfrats, je pense que ce journaliste de la RTBF aurait pu s’interroger et me retrouver pour recouper le témoignage d’Aimé et recueillir le mien…

A.be : Que pensez-vous de ce contraste de traitement entre télé de service public et télé privée ?

R.R : Vous savez, j’habite à Matonge depuis dix ans. A chaque évènement grave, les journalistes débarquent en alerte. Régulièrement, ce sont ceux de RTL-TVI qui arrivent les premiers. La RTBF couvre évidemment les faits, mais ce sont des gens qu’on ne voit pas très rapidement sur le terrain ...

A.be : Vous avez le sentiment que le journaliste de la RTBF s’est strictement contenté de la parole officielle ?

R.R : C’est manifestement une personne qui pratique le journalisme en allant voir les officiels plutôt que les personnes de terrain. A ses yeux, ces dernières sont sans doute peu crédibles. Or, le porte-parole de la police a reconnu qu’au moment où nous avions réalisé l’essentiel de notre action la police n’était pas encore là. Je pense donc que ce journaliste aurait pu faire son travail et chercher plus loin. D’autant que je suis connu dans le quartier, comme l’agence de voyage pour laquelle je travaille et je fais aussi partie du Comité des commerçants de Matonge. Depuis lundi, beaucoup de journalistes m’ont contacté. Je suis également invité à débattre ce dimanche dans l’émission Controverse (RTL-TVI). L’ensemble de ces journalistes se sont simplement posé des questions et, eux, sont parvenus à me trouver …

A.be : Quatre jours après le drame, la RTBF n’a jamais mentionné votre action héroïque ni rectifier sa mise en doute de départ. Qu’en pensez-vous ?

R.R : Je ne sais pas comment ils travaillent. S’ils disposent de quelques « entrées », comme certains journalistes le prétendent parfois, je peux vous dire que mon numéro de téléphone figure sur le P-V d’audition de police ... D’autre part, pendant ces 4 jours, je n’ai reçu aucun appel de la RTBF. Ni de la radio, ni de la télé. Dans le même temps, j’ai été contacté par VTM, VRT, RTL-TVI, Radio Contact, La Capitale, Métro et d’autres journaux. Or, si je ne m’abuse, cela fait aussi partie du métier des journalistes que de s’informer sur ce que font les autres médias concurrents ...

A.be : Ce désintérêt assumé de la RTBF vous semble entrer en contradiction avec une éthique de service public ?

R.R : Absolument. Dans le domaine de l’éthique, la télévision de service public se doit d’être encore plus présente que la chaîne privée. Notamment parce que la RTBF est souvent perçue comme une référence. Mais aujourd’hui, il s’agit davantage d’une « référence de salons » qui hésite à descendre sur le terrain. Le cas d’espèce sur lequel vous m’interrogez l’indique de manière claire.

Propos recueillis par Olivier Mukuna

Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2)

 Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law & Politics
By Sherene H.Razack , University of Toronto Press

http://www.utppublishing.com/
http://www.utppublishing.com/product.php?productid=2337&cat=0&page=1

"I divide the book into two parts. Part one, composed of chapters 1 and 2, focuses on the figure of the 'dangerous' Muslim man and examines the camp as a place in which are incarcerated 'terror suspects' and those marked as outside political community. Part two, composed of chapters 3 to 5, focuses on imperilled Muslim women, exploring in detail feminism's connection to race thinking and the legal projects that regulate Muslim communities in the post-9/11 era. Given the two arguments I advance, that race thinking undergids the making of empire, and that the world is increasingly governed by the logic of the exception, each chapter is an example of a camp – that is, a place where law is suspended (the force of law without law) and Muslims are evicted from the national community. The camps I discuss range from literal prison camps, where terror suspects do not have the right to habeas corpus, to Muslim immigrant communities, for whom the rights and privileges of citizenship, such as the right to marry once the age of consent has been reached to the right to practice their faith as do others, do not apply. Ultimately, all Muslims become marked as outside political community when they are assumed to carry within them the possibility of threat to the nation.

In chapter 1, on the incarceration of Muslim men in Canada and the restriction of their rights to due process, I show the micro-processes through which the camp is legally authorized. In examining closely how suspensions in rights are justified in security certificate hearings, I show that the 'dangerous' Muslim man who threatens the West is depicted as a 'monster terrorist' who is an Islamic extremist. The danger is made believable largely through appeal to racist narratives about intrinsically savage, pre-modern Muslims. Under this logic, it is possible to defend the idea that Muslim men must be detained indefinitely and denied due process on the grounds that they may carry within them the seeds of terrorism.

In chapter 2, I turn my attention to the sexualized torture enacted on Arab men at Abu Ghraib. Here I argue that sexualized torture, or what has euphemistically come to be called 'prisoner abuse', is more appropriately named racial terror. Terror is how colonizers come to know their own power as well as how they come to make it known. In showing that what when on at Abu Ghraib convinced the American men and women who engaged in torture that they were themselves members of a racially superior race and nation, I emphasize, drawing on Michael Taussig, that terror is a mythology, a narrative meant to teach us who must be kept in line through force and who are the enforcers. Acts of terror make the nation and the empire, and as such they will continue to happen. The practices of torture at Abu Ghraib were sexualized and recorded in photos and videotapes. These two aspects suggest the psychic underpinnings of empire, whereby the boundary between self and Other must be policed through violence, lest it collapse. At Abu Ghraib, the acts of violence afforded American soldiers an intimacy that would otherwise be forbidden as well as a chance to establish forever who is in control. In attending to the ambivalence at the heart of the fantasy of Orientalism, the multiple ways in which individuals participate in empire through desire and fear, I suggest that if we pay attention to how empire is embodied, to the deep, psychically structured ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality shape the encounter between the West and its Others, we can begin to understand how casting out takes place and how it must be resisted.

In chapter 3, I turn to gender as a technology of the 'war on terror' exploring how the violence that is unleashed on Muslim communities is transformed into a civilizing narrative about saving Muslim women. I begin with popular culture, exploring three books – by an American, European, and Canadian author respectively. What marks these popular books as emblematic of the post-9/11 era is their authors' positioning as feminist and their common insistence that the violence Muslim women endure at the hands of Muslim men is not only an indicator of barbarism but, more importantly, a reason to invade, occupy, and civilize Muslim communities. In tracing the role that gender plays in the ideological justifications underpinning the American bid for empire, I show how white nations are invited into the project of empire as members of a superior race, a race distinguished by a commitment to gender equality, democracy, and human rights. Here Muslims are imagined as camp inmates by virtue of being insufficiently modern, a condition that is assumed to be innate.

The policing of Muslim communities in the name of gender equality is now a globally organized phenomenon, an argument I make in chapter 4 through an examination of Norwegian laws on forced marriages. Several European states have sought to regulate the conduct of Muslim populations in Europe in the name of protecting Muslim women from their violent communities. Typically, these initiatives are understood as necessary in order to forcibly 'deculturalize' feudal and hyper-patriarchal migrants in Europe who are Muslim. In exploring the tension between meaningful anti-violence initiatives and those that simply reinstall Europeans as normative citizens and Muslims as outside the nation (literally and figuratively), I show how an unequal structure of citizenship is achieved in Europe through the deployment of the idea of the imperilled Muslim woman. Through such moves as regulating the age of consent and family reunification, European states create a category of citizen whose private life choices are controlled. For Muslims, public space is literally shrinking as they encounter constraints on their social and cultural practices that do not apply to other citizens.

In chapter 5, I explore how gender as a technology of empire operates in Canada, a white settler context that is without colonial history in the Muslim world, and thus without the large Muslim migrant populations such histories usually produce. As in Europe, laws that stigmatize Muslim populations and regulate their conduct usually begin in a media spectacle. In Canada, the idea advanced by a small group of Muslim men that faith-based arbitration could be utilized to implement Sharia law in Canada quickly became the basis for a moral panic that feudal Muslims who are likely to be terrorists had now successfully contaminated Canadian civilization. Attending to the risks posed to women if conservative Muslims were to have their way, I thread my way through feminist opposition to faith-based arbitration and conclude that Muslim women were stranded between the rock of a rising conservatism in their communities and the hard place of an even more vigorous policing by the state. The latter, I conclude, poses the greater threat at this moment. In this chapter I focus on one salient aspect of the clash-of-civilizations thesis, the notion that the West is secular and thus modern, while the non-West is religious and pre-modern. I show how the idea of secularism operates as a governmentality, Foucault's concept referring to the ways in which individual subjects are governed through various institutions and processes that organize modern life. Muslims are produced in this framework as underserving of full citizenship, including the right to practice their faith as they see fit, a restriction that both marks them as not yet ready for citizenship even as it insists that the public sphere is a universal one where citizens have equal rights.

In bringing together case studies that explore the eviction of Muslims from political community, I hope to stress the various paths through which we are drawn into the project of empire. Feminist activists, no less than soldiers at Abu Ghraib, are invited to defend country and civilization and to join in the creation of a world that requires camps. What these chapters show is that no one stands outside of empire. As in my other books, I have sought to give some content to the notion of complicity, exploring the multiple ways in which we come to know ourselves as modern, democratic, and feminist and the actual practices of violence underwritten by this knowledge.

This books is written with the conviction that we can reorient ourselves in this age of the 'war on terror', unlearning ourselves as modern and coming instead to understand ourselves as responsible. Suspending the rule of law and engaging in violence with impunity are practices undertaken in the name of civility. Violence as civility suggests a critical pedagogy and radical politics. If we are to stop the violence unleashed by camp thinking , we will need to confront ideas of a clash of civilizations, torture for the sake of keeping the natives in line, occupation as a means of improvement of savage peoples and savage lands, secularism as simply about freedom from tradition and the triumph of free will, and the primacy of the market, contract, and choice. We will also have to confront the unconscious processes that structure how individuals come to participate in empire. This book approaches this task by arguing that race thinking structures the conceptual arsenal of the 'war on terror' and its reliance on the logic of the concentration camp. What I have tried to do is document what at times has been an intensely personal, that is to say, bodily awareness of the world as camp. “

PART ONE 'Dangerous' Muslim Men

1 'Your client has a profile' Race in the Security Hearing
Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and judicial protections no longer made any sense.
Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press)

34 (1) A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on security grounds for (f) being a member of an organization that there are reasonable grounds to believe engages, has engaged , or will engage in acts referred to in paragraphs (a) [espionage or subversion], (b) [subversion by force] or (c) [terrorism]. (Emphasis added)
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (Canada)

At a hearing on 27 november 2003 to determine the validity of the security certificate that declared Hassan Almrei inadmissible to Canada on the grounds that he will engage in acts of terrorism, an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) confidently clarified for Almrei's counsel the heart of the Services's case against his client:

What I am saying today is that your client has a profile which makes him of use to Al Qaeda and his connections to the organization through various individuals is what leads us to conclude that he is a threat to the security of Canada. I am afraid that I can't get into any more detail than that.
We are not hanging our case on this notion that he was among the cream-of-the-crop in the early 1980s. I never said that. (Emphasis added)

[…]

The five detainees are more than simply victims of racial profiling. Their Arab origins, and the life history that mostly Arab Muslim men have had, operate to mark them as individuals likely to commit terrorist acts, people whose propensity for violence is indicated by their origins. When race thinking, the belief in the division of humanity into those prone to violence and those who are not according to descent, is accompanied by the idea that there must be two different, hierarchical legal regimes for each, and when we begin to grow accustomed to places without law and to people to whom the rule of law does not apply, we enter the terrifying world of the colonies and the concentration camp. This chapter examines how a space where law is suspended operates in the 'war on terror' and it attends to the work that ideas about race do in the environment of the exception.
Whether with respect to non-citizens or citizens, at the heart of the state of exception, the place Agamben described as 'the force of law without law', is the idea that only an unfettered state power can properly confront threats to the nation. Race thinking helps us to believe in the necessity of an all-powerful sovereign. If the threat can be contained in no other way than through this extraordinary power to suspend fundamental rights, it is surely because 'they (those who threaten us)' are not like 'us' and can only be stopped with brute force. As Angelina Snodgrass Godoy perceptively notes, two assumptions remain unchallenged in the culture of exception: we can tell them from us, and the suspensions of the rule of law will not affect those of us who are deemed to be within political community. In this way, the exception instils the idea that the nation is a kin group that must be fortified against outsiders whose disloyalty we will recognize, a disloyalty that is visible not in what people do but in who they are. As I show below, who people are is formulated in terms of an unchanging essence derived from their histories, associations, and religious practices, a constellation of invariant characteristics inherited from a culture, religion, and region. A race fiction thus grounds the nation and inheres in the power of the state to decide who is part of the kin group and who is not.
How does one end up in the place of exception, 'where judicial protections no longer make sense,' a world of secret evidence in which there is no right to habeas corpus? Hassan Almrei and the other security-certificate detainees discussed in this chapter are detained on the basis that they are 'Islamic terrorists,' men who come from a culture in which religion, and not rationality, produces individuals with an inherent capacity for violence. A 'Jihadist', as the 'Islamic terrorist' is called, is forever unable to escape the marking of his religion, culture and history. If Jihadists exist in a space where judicial protections no longer make any sense, their eviction from the law is argued on the basis that the West must necessarily be vigilant when such monsters are let loose on the world. The terrorist as monster draws on a number of Orientalist images, as others have shown16. Significantly, monster terrorists lie forever beyond the law, and through them we become accustomed to the idea that there should be places where human beings have no rights. In security-certificate hearings there is a casual, unreflected-upon lawlessness, an abandonment of the rule of law that only race thinking can make defensible. What else can explain the unquestioned absence of evidence, the incoherence of the arguments, and the retreat to the simple logic that 'they' are not like 'us' and cannot be given the benefit of the rule of law?

Pre-emptive Punishment

The domestic philosophy of pre-emptive punishment argues that if there is a possibility that a
crime might be committed, it ought to be preempted by government action.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: the War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 2005), 119.

Shortly after 9/11, men and some children rounded up from the villages and battlefields of Afghanistan were herded into shipping containers by the Northern Alliance (at the behest of the United States). Many died; it is estimated that only thirty to fifty in each container of three to four hundred apparently survived.18 Those who survived typically were taken to prisons at Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan, and were shipped to third countries (the process known as extraordinary rendition) or to the US base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where they were detained on the basis that the president, as the commander-in-chief, possessed the unilateral authority to arrest and detain anyone. Detainees were declared 'enemy combatants,' a designation that left them in a no man's land of rights, neither prisoners of war nor criminals. 19 In the United States, Canada, and Europe, security programs concentrated on immigrants, utilizing those places of exception long existing in immigration law, as well as new powers to arrest, detain, and deport without due process. Mainly Arab/Muslim men were swept up in these terror arrests and deported or detained indefinitely.20 The practices that facilitate the rounding up of Muslims and Arabs and result in their exile to places without law include strengthened surveillance powers and powers to detain, prosecute, and convict without any procedural protections or oversights by the courts.
In the Canadian context, fewer due-process rights remain in the Immigration Act than before 9/11, although it is important to note that here, as in the United States, many changes pre-date 9/11 and simply received more widespread support in the ensuing events. The federal government's allocation of individuals for immigration detention has increased. 21 An important change introduced into the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act mandates security checks before asylum processes even begin, a front-end screening that has deeply concerned refugee advocates. 22 Those marked as security risks now become ineligible for a refugee hearing and are immediately deported. Small openings that once existed – for example, the seeking of ministerial relief after showing a record of stable residency in Canada – have mostly closed. Bureaucrats now understand the relief provisions as relevant only in exceptional cases, and there is little expectation that anyone marked as a security risk will be able to clear himself through demonstrating 'good behaviour' 23 It is now the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness who grants ministerial relief, a decision so enmeshed in post-9/11 security considerations that it is an option that appears to be rarely granted. 24
Those who are found inadmissible for reasons of national security have now lost all appeal rights. The Immigration and Refugee Act passed in 2002 greatly expanded the powers of immigration officers. It is no longer possible to complain about the practices of CSIS. Those subject to security certificates need not pose any actual security risk, but merely have to be shown to have possibly been a member of a terrorist organization, and to have the potential to engage in terrorist acts. It is the notion of prevention, the detaining and deporting of individuals before they have committed a crime, that best sums up the post-9/11 changes and the increasing logic that law must be suspended in the interests of national security.
The justifications offered for the considerable expansion of state powers ant the suspension of fundamental rights rest on the notion that it is necessary to strike at the enemy before he strikes at us. Mirzoeff notes that the wall built by Israel in the Occupied Territories, the physical barriers built by the United States at its Mexico border, and the detention camps established through the Western world that keep asylum seekers incarcerated indefinitely are all pre-9/11 examples of pre-emptive punishment, an abandonment of law, and the creation of categories of people without rights, all justified on the basis that they may pose a threat to the nation. While globalized pre-emptive punishment means invading and occupying countries on the basis that they will pose a threat, as happened in Iraq, domestically, it entails an aggressive use of immigration law. Importantly, the goal of detention is 'to keep its inmates invisible with the goal of having them forgotten.'25 'Their location is meant to emphasize that they are not part of the nation state and that their inmates will not achieve asylum, let alone citizenship.'26 The logic of detention, Mirzoeff comments, is that “there is no such thing as society but only people who belong to the nation and those who do not.'27 For Zygmunt Bauman, the refugee is placed in the category of the unthinkable and the camps to which they are confined are 'artifices made permanent through blocking the exits.'
We refuse to imagine the camp's inmates as members of political community. 28 The very physical location and anonymity of the camp – in the case of Canada's security detainees, a special wing of a maximum security prison – is meant to convey this eviction from humanity.
Race is crucial to pre-emptive punishment. Mirzoeff notes that pre-emptive punishment has depended heavily on the racial notion that 'they' are not like 'us' and owing to their natures/cultures are likely to erupt into violence against us. 29 The logic is once again a colonial one, whereby states of exception are justified because the colonized cannot be governed through the rule of law as can Europeans. Prevention based on the irrationality and unpredictability of their natures and cultures justifies the camp as well as the practices associated with it. For example, as Nancy Baker and others show, the United States government has defended its practices of limiting press and public access to information, refusing to disclose the names and locations of, and charges against, those detained, conducting immigration hearings in secret, and denying bail even to minor violators on the grounds that anything and anyone can potentially be of use to terrorists.30 Following what the CIA has described as the mosaic theory, the government has argued that small pieces of information might later fit into the larger terrorist picture. The mosaic theory hinges, however, a great deal on ideas about the natures of those who threaten us.
Risk is read on the body. If it is true that the profile is one way to sort out who goes to the camp and who does not, then those marked as bearing an inherent capacity for disloyalty are not simply being profiled, but are in fact exiled from political community. This process, whereby to be profiled is to be denied due-process rights and to be detained indefinitely, shifts radically what racial profiling now means. The very concept of racial profiling seems inadequate to describe what actually happens to those whose race, read as origins, life histories, and religious practices, marks them as potential terrorists. As Reem Badhi has shown for Canada, public debate over racial profiling has shifted from being about whether racial profiling has happened at all to being about its necessity in this time of emergency. 31
Although some argued that detaining Muslim or Arab men was not race discrimination most commentators have acknowledges that post-9/11 profiling used 'race as a proxy for risk, either in whole or in part'32 and accepted that brown skin, 'Middle Eastern looks,' beards, and Muslim or Arab names provided good reasons to detain. In the United States, much of this thinking was overt and legally authorized, while in Canada such practices have been for the most part informal. For example, shortly after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Justice sought to interview male non-citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three from Middle Eastern or 'Islamic' countries or countries with some suspected tie to Al Qaeda. 33 In a less direct fashion, the Canadian government has not officially endorsed racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, but its practices, particularly in much publicized 'terror sweeps,' suggest that profiling takes places regularly on much the same basis. 34 The argument for racial profiling is risk management and gains are considered to outweigh losses (for instance, the humiliation and stigmatization or Arab and Muslim communities).
[…]
When racial profiling becomes so thoroughly recast as bureaucracy, it becomes easy to miss the inclining rather than declining significance of race. U.S. authorities did not go around detaining white men simply because Timothy McVeigh, a white man, had blown up the Oklahoma City buildings, legal scholar Leti Volpp comments, since whites remain individuals while Arabs and Muslims are understood only as a group with the group characteristic of violence.38 Historically, it is not hard to trace the racial basis to the profiling practiced in the 'War on terror.'
Before the Gulf War, Canadian and American Arabs and Muslims were the subjects, both in the media and in scholarship, of what Edward Said described as 'a trafficking in expert Middle East lore': 'All roads lead to the bazaar; Arabs only understand force; brutality and violence are part of Arab civilization; Islam is an intolerant, segregationist, 'medieval,' fanatic, cruel, anti-woman religion.'39
Scholars such as Edward Said long ago documented a consistent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias in the media. In the Canadian context, Karim Karim examined the media for the period 1980 to 2000, and showed how Islam became 'the new red scare.' The Muslim Other replaced the cold war script in the Canadian media, starting primarily with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Muslim political violence was nearly always described as terrorism, Karim shows, and the media prepared the public to think of all Muslims and Arabs as irrational, terrorist fanatics.40 During the Gulf War, in 1991, many of these Hollywood-inspired stereotypes were marshalled in Canada, as journalist Zuhair Kashmeri showed in The Gulf Within. 41 Scholars in the United States have similarly documented a consistent racialization of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the United States and have noted that the basis for racial animus facing these groups is not always the same. 42 Gott suggests that scholars have described racism directed on Arab, Muslims, and South Asians as originating in specific political contexts, for example, hostility towards the Palestinian cause, nativistic racism that affects all Asia Americans, and white racism spawned by a hyper-ethnocentrism. 43 The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon escalated the hostility and racism coming from all these directions. Anti-Muslim racism, often described as 'Islamophobia' has resulted in the 'Arabification' of Muslims and the 'Muslimification' of Arabs, even though approximately 60 per cent of Canadian Arabs are Christian.44
What remains significant about the contemporary racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, however , is not this well-established history but the fact that anti-Muslim racism now operates in a culture of exception, where to be profiled as a terrorist is to have a high chance of being taken to a place of law without law. Those who are profiled soon find themselves on lists, under surveillance and under suspicion, and in detention – states from which they cannot easily emerge. Diken and Lausten suggest that if 'power is to be total, it must defy regularity and rationality.'45 Power must become terror, arbitrary, and unpredictable. If, in the security-certificate hearings discussed below, we do not yet glimpse the full outlines of a regime of terror, we can see the arbitrary character of the law whereby stereotypes hold sway and arguments, in the absence of evidence of wrong-doing, rests primarily on the idea that they are not like us and they will pose a threat to us.

The case of Hassan Almrei

Courts called upon to determine the presence of the potential to commit a terrorist act, as opposed to determining whether illegal acts have been committed, must operate in ways that are strikingly similar to those of the Spanish Inquisition, a creation of another state of exception. As Irene Silverblatt has shown, the Spanish Inquisition was one of the most modern bureaucracies of its time, “established to meet a perceived threat to national security from Jews, Muslims, and 'all maners of Heretics'”46 The Inquisition ran according to procedures and rules and was overseen by bureaucrats. Its function was to clarify publicly and powerfully who 'helds beliefs or engaged in life practices that were considered threats to the colony's moral and civic well-being.' 47 Spanish citizens learned from the Inquisition what citizenship was, and who would be forever beyond it. In a similar manner, security-certificates cases establish whose beliefs and life practices are a threat to the state and who must therefore be cast out of political community.
[…]

Indeed all three characteristics (jihad, bonds between members, and the sleeper cell) become believable, as I show below, largely through unspoken but nonetheless invoked racial images of Muslim and Arab irrationality, tribalism, and, finally, disease or pathology. These ideas position non-Arabs and non-Muslims, in contrast, as belonging to a society of individuals who are rational and secular. As CSIS reiterates time and time again through the hearings, Arabs and Muslims are not like us. The power of this narrative structure is such that it is virtually impossible to question its coherency by asking, for example, how we come to know about these characteristics. The force of law without law, where questions need not to be answered, only entrenches further the narrative of a potentially deadly clash of civilizations.
[…]
The concept of the sleeper cell, with its biological associations, is one that is central to the state's case, invoking as it has historically, the 'bodily degeneracy' of the marked group as well as the threat of contamination. A 'sleeper cell' provides the possibility of being pathological, yet appearing 'normal': disease deceptively hidden in an otherwise respectable body. 57 Relying on the conceptual tools of Sander Gilman and others, Carmela Murdocca has shown that the notion of a degenerate, disease-ridden body of colour against a healthy bourgeois citizenry has long structured the ideological production of the Canadian nation: 'The use of the discourse of contamination and disease is used to reaffirm colonial ideas about the inferiority and bodily degeneracy of colonized peoples.'

They are who they are, we are who we are

Signs that Almrei carries the seeds of terrorism within him must tell the whole story of his disloyalty, since no direct evidence of his culpability is available. The first empty space that the signs must fill is the departure of the right to face one's accuser. At the hearing Almrei's lawyer, Barbara Jackman, began by attempting to secure the right to cross-examine CSIS or the RCMP agents who were the authors of the case against Almrei. Denied access to the specific agents involved, in the interests of national security, instead she is only allowed to cross-examine an intelligence analyst, J.P. Since J.P. Discusses generalities more than he is able to discuss the specifics of Almrei's case, this decision secures for the profile its privileged place as truth. In cross-examination, J.P. Acknowledged that the file of evidence against Almrei included items that may not be directly connected to him, for example, email in which Almei's name does no appear. He agreed that the Service does not always collect its own evidence, relying instead on media reports.
[…]

Jihad

It is the concept of jihad that locks in place the judgment of ideology. Invoking the stereotype of the irrational Arab, the concept jihad is given a composite of details designed to invoke the clash of civilizations. J.P., the CSIS intelligence officer of Almrei's first hearing, had by 2005 become the deputy chief of counterterrorism and counterproliferation in Ottawa. […] J.P's testimony in 2005 sheds more light on the key concepts the Service has used to come to establish Almrei's 'stained blood' as a predictor of violence. The first of these is 'jihad', which J.P. admits (in contrasts to the confidence of the 2001 testimony) is as subjective term 'ranging from defining a personal struggle to make one a better individual and a better Muslim and to follow the tenets of Islam all the way to an offensive use of violence in defence of Islam, a holy war in other words.' 77
Having established the context for their activities through his notion of jihad, J.P. Is then able to characterize the activities of Osama bin Laden, and others such as Ibn Khattab with whom Almrei was associated, not solely as part of an anti-Soviet rebellion in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Chechnya, but as something much more.
[…]
The journey from Jihad to sleeper cells requires heavy reliance on the concept of ideology, an ideology that then has to be emplaced and embodied.[...] Unlike the IRA (whose members are characterized as motivated by a political objective), Al Qaeda is a 'religious and ideological movement,' in Layden-Stevenson's words. 'The ultimate goal is the takeover of the world by Islam. While that may sound a little fantastic and hyperbolic, essentially, it does come down to the eradication of the infidel and the creation of a puritan form of Islam for the world.'
In the wake of powerful images of an Islamic takeover, the facts that don't add up hardly matter. Madame Justice Layder-Stevenson accepts that the Service had no specifics connecting Almeir's honey business to Al Qaeda, and that they had relied on a single media article by Judith Miller, a journalist whose 'record of accuracy' has been called into question, a situation of which J.P. was unaware.”
[…]
As Amit Rai discusses, ideas about Muslim irrationality drawn from older Orientalist and colonial discourses now undergid an entire field of knowledge production known as terrorism studies. In terrorism studies, the focus is on the motivations and belief systems of individual terrorists. The psyche is thus the privileged site of investigation and terrorism is explained as a compulsion or psycho-pathology. That is to say, the terrorist is driven to commit acts of violence as a consequence of psychological forces. The terrorist psyche is born in abnormal family dynamics, with the West's own heterosexual family as its point of contrast. Bin Laden, for example, is represented as someone abandoned by a polygamous father whose interests were with his other wives. He was drawn to find substitute father figures in fundamentalist men. Terrorists are depicted as failed heterosexuals who need the promise of virgins in heaven to commit to the cause. Such portraits not only draw on older discourses about the effeminate or sexually dysfunctional Muslim man and the Oriental despot, but they preclude any examination of the socio-political causes of terrorism. Importantly, they are the figures that enable the West to feel its own civilizational superiority and to make the case that exceptional violence is required to keep in line those whose uncivilized natures are so much in evidence. 94
In terrorism studies, particularly scholarship supported by organizations such as the Rand Corporation, Rai shows, the Oriental despot cum terrorist is presented as someone prepared to die for his struggles, someone whose conviction and mindset are described as 'incomprehensible and frightening' and irrevocably pre-modern. For the Canadian context, we can trace the same discourses in popular books such as National Post journalist Stewart Bell's The Martyr's Oath 96 (assigned as a text in a political science course at the University of Toronto) and the circulation of such narratives about the psyche of terrorists and 'jihad' as his obligation, by web-based, right-wing research institutes such as the Mackenzie Institute, a source cited by CSIS in its testimony.97
When complexity is ruled out, racism can do all the work of providing an interpretive framework. Orientalist notions of monster terrorists also emerge out of what François Debrix describes as 'tabloid realism', wherein complex geopolitical realities are written about and presented in the media and in scholarship relying on the conventions of tabloid literature. The tabloid medium is one in which 'reality must be described and truth must be revealed in a flashy, surprising, gripping, shocking, often moralizing, and sometimes anxiety producing manner.' 98 Focusing on those who write about foreign affairs in the United States, Debrix argues that several influential books have been written in the style of tabloid realism, notably Samuel huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and Robert Kaplan's The coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of Post Cold War . Such writings are 'made up of short, lapidary sentences, riddled with metaphors that call for the audience to maintain a mostly visual, figurative and imaginary apprenhension of the intellectual arguments.' 99 Maps and images (for example, Bell's The Martyr's Oath includes several pictures of Canadian 'terrorists' from adolescence to manhood) offer a simplified version of reality, proof, as it were, of a civilized world menaced by a barbarian Other. We might consider here how websites and computer images fulfil the same function in security certificate cases. As Mosse reminds us, one of the main strengths of racism is that it is 'a visual ideology based on stereotypes.' 100 It is not surprising, then, that tabloid realism achieves its coherence through an appeal to the visual.
The tabloid medium 'deploys relatively ahistorical discourses in “contexts” that do not have to abide by rules of temporal and spatial contingency (the realities they describe are at once past, present or future),' 101 The discourses about Islami extremists and terrorists in security cases are very much in the style of tabloid realism, and the secrecy provisions that this simplified profile cannot be easily challenged. The portrait of the jihadist on which CSIS relies in the hearings has clearly recognizable origins in Orientalist scholarship such as that of Bernard Lewis. Mahmood Mamdani suggests that we locate an earlier and more refined version of the clash of civilizations thesis in Huntington (the West is law and rationality, the East is culture and religion) in the work of Bernard Lewis, for whom the West's distinctive attribute is freedom, in contrast to the Islamic's world fidelity to a world of culture, religion and community. In the Islamic world, 'an explosive mixture of rage and hatred' lies dormant, ready to erupt at various moments in history. 102 Thus, for Lewis and other Orientalists, the West must constantly protect itself from irrational, pre-modern peoples. Of course, even Lewis argued that there are different versions of Islam and that not all Muslims possess this rage and hatred. This argument, Mamdani observes, anticipates the good Muslim/bad Muslim frame that has so marked discourses of the 'War on Terror'.
Good Muslim/Bad Muslim simply set the state for the West, as unified, homogeneous, and modern, to sort out good Muslims from bad Muslims. A good Muslim, paradoxically, is a secular Muslim who is influenced by the West, while a bad Muslim remains locked in the pre-modern. […]
While good muslims can be assisted into modernity, bad Muslims, figured as 'anti-modern' and as having 'a profound ability to be destructive,' require incarceration and military action. 104 Complex histories are thus rendered simple by Orientalist scholars' reliance on the idea of good Muslims and bad Muslims.
[…]
karen Engle has suggested, of the framework good alien/bad alien, that such dichotomies help the United States to make the case for its own tolerance. Profiling confirms the West's civility, since it provides an initial opportunity to sort good from bad aliens. Although Engle acknowledges, relying on Irene Porras, that 'the trick is to locate [the terrorist] in the category of the most terrifying and traditional enemy, that which the public is accustomed to thinking of as the barbarous and primitive outsider,' she maintains that a number of practices remain in place that are intended to confirm that good Muslims can escape the net. 106 For example, those Muslims who are able to demonstrate their patriotism, and who are careful not to engage in criticism of the state, can escape unscathed. As I show throughout, however, this is not the case. The exits are increasingly closed off for those who are Muslim. If the state is able to preserve an appearance of tolerance at all, it is only able to do so because the collective punishment of all Muslims is understood as reasonable, a necessary move to preserve Western civilization. It is useful to bear in mind both Rai's and Debrix's point that monster terrorists enable us to believe in 'democracy in the time of monsters,' 107 a time when we need states of exception and the authority to suspend fundamental rights, invade, and drop bombs on their heads for their own good. Monster figures legitimize new regimes of citizenship and security where we become accustomed to state violence as a warranted part of the social order, the transformation Agamben described as that from the state of exception to the camp. Without monster terrorists, states of exception would not be justified and states would confront the threat of terrorism within the law.
[…]
Mahjoub maintained that the Egyptian conviction began with his wrongful arrest and torture. Similar hearings in absentia have been declared to be fraudulent by Amnesty International, and Britain has recently released a terror suspect with the same profile as Mahjoub who was also sentenced to fifteen years in absentia. Mahjoub's lawyer noted that while CSIS declares Mahjoub to be a high-ranking member of Al Jihad, his name does not appear on a list of its leading members. Once again, it is not possible on the stand to probe the source of CSIS's allegations. J.P. did not seem to be aware of the British cases, 126 of the news reports that the FBI acknowledges that it does not know of any sleeper cells, 127 and of the problems that arise with 'Jane's information service,' a website on which the Canadian Border Service Agency relies in the preparation of its reports on refoulement. 124 Mahjoub's lawyer also raised the issue that J.P took a course on Islamic terrorism that was coordinated by the Egyptian government. There is just enough showing through these points to suggest that Mahjoub's profile as a high-ranking member of Al Jihad is not something that survives even a cursory questioning on the stand. J.P does not appear to be a particularly well-informed expert, and if we are to believe that secret evidence would make clear that the Service's allegations are borne out, his limited knowledge of public information limits our trust.
[…]
Adil Charkaoui is perhaps the best illustration of what it means to be caught in a profile. Charkaoui has four characteristics that bring him to the state's attention. First, he appears to be normal. That is to say, he is married with two children and he was pursuing graduate studies in Montreal. As CSIS testified at his hearing, this very normalcy is what suggested that he was a part of a sleeper cell. The agent clarified at length that a sleeper agent is instructed as follows: 'Go back to your usual life, act as if nothing is happening... And then one of these days...you will get a message...and that's the time to do what you want to do.' 136 On cross-examination, the CSIS officer in question acknowledged that he did not know whether Adil Charkaoui was an Al Qaeda member. 137 To make matters worse, Charkaoui has taken martial arts training, as did one of the September 11 hijackers. 138 Paradoxically, although he is normal, Charkaoui has several of the other elements of the terrorist profile, primarily the geographical profile of an Islamic extremist. First, he is from Morocco and CSIS alleged that he was in fact a member of a radical Islam group. Second, he is religious, and through going to the mosques in the Montreal area he came into contact with a number of suspicious individuals. Third, Charkaoui travelled to Pakistan in February of 1998 and stayed until July. He maintains that he was undertaking Islamic studies in order to write a book, while CSIS alleges that he attended a training camp in Afghanistan. A key piece of evidence against him are the statements of Abu Zubaida and Ahmed Ressam (which are part of the summary of the evidence previously given to Mr Charkaoui on 26 may, 17 july, and 14 august 2003) identifying Mr Charkaoui, upon presentation of photographs, under the name of Al-Maghrebi and stating that he had been seen by them in Afghanistan in a camp. 139 (Charkaoui argued that the information obtained from Ressam and Abu Zubaida were not credible since they were obtained under torture or, in the case of Mr Ressam, under the pressure of an agreement for clemency or a reduced sentence in connection with his hearing in the United States. Abdurahman Khadr, whose father knew Bin Ladin and was as part of his network, testified that he never saw Mr Charkaoui in Afghanistan.)
[..]
In their book The Culture of Exception , Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten take care to clarify that their argument that today the exception is the rule is not an argument that 'contemporary society is characterized by the cruelty of the concentration camps, although camp-like structures are spreading quickly.' Instead, they argue that 'the logic of the camps tends to be generalized.' 143 It is this logic that we see first in the immigrant and refugee as exceptions in immigration law, and second, as homo sacer, in security-certificate hearings since the 'war on terror' began. It is a logic that is first and foremost about the power of the sovereign. The zone of non-law into which refugees are plunged is a legally authorized place in which rights are suspended. Simultaneously in the legal order and outside of it, the refugee confirms the terrible power of the state to determine every aspect of his life. 144 When this terrible power unfolds as bureaucracy, when the life of the refugee can depend on a few whispered words about jihad or training camps, then we too must accept the power of the state.
Race soothes any worries we have about the display of raw power. It invests the proceedings with a kind of coherency that belies the arbitrary nature of what is unfolding. There are monster terrorists, we believe , and the things we must do in order to contain them, things we would note ordinarily accept, become justified. It is through the powerful evocations of jihad and pitiless, misogynist men in beards that we come to accept that we do not need due process, that proof does not matter. We become inured to lawlessness, as long as it remains in the camps, as long, that is, that it is applied only to certain bodies who live outside of reason.
The position that all Muslims and Arabs live outside of reason, and should therefore be cast outside of the law, is not one that is made once and for all. The story of race in the law is one that is full of internal contradictions: they are secretive and duplicitous yet it is we who rely on secret evidence; they are irrational yet it is we who depend on wild assertions about the Muslim fanatic and his counterpart in security hearings, the Anglo-Saxon man. The story of monster terrorists does not make sense yet is common sense. As I suggest in chapter 2, it is useful, as Meyda Yegenoglu suggests, to think of race as 'a historically specific fantasy,' one in which Western subjects learn to imagine themselves as sovereign only through marking the other as different and outside reason. 145 The other will not stay fixed ant the claim of universality that the Western subject must make requires a continued engagement with difference, an engagement that the law reveals to be fraught with desire, fear and anxiety. “

Sherene H.Razack