This thoughtful, challenging and deeply depressing book takes as its launch pad the Nuremberg Trials, in which the author’s father played so prominent a part. Churchill would have executed the Nazi leaders out of hand. Eisenhower wanted to exterminate all the German General Staff as well as all of the Gestapo and all Nazi Party members above the rank of Major. Wiser counsels prevailed. The Nazi leadership must be put on trial, it was agreed, and not in such a way as would rubber-stamp a verdict that had already been tacitly agreed. ‘You must put no man on trial under the forms of judicial proceeding,’ said the distinguished jurist Robert Jackson, ‘if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty.’
The scale and nature of the threats are different, Shawcross argues, but ‘the ideology of al-Qa’eda and its Islamist associates shares attributes with Nazism; it, too, is totalitarian, and it, too, has anti-Semitism at its core.’ He paints a terrifying picture of fanatical and unreasoning hatred, of an unwavering determination to destroy the West, and in particular the United States, regardless of the cost in innocent lives and even though innumerable Muslims as well as Westerners must perish in the conflict.
This is war, but a war waged by those who do not obey the rules of war, to whom the Geneva Convention seems totally irrelevant. Nothing is so awful that it will deter them. Perhaps the most chilling passage in this book is the boast of Osama bin Laden that, at one of the Islamic centres in Holland, the number of those who converted to Islam immediately after 9/11 was greater than all those who had converted in the previous 11 years.
So what is to be done? Are the lessons of Nuremberg relevant to the problems of today? Are the members of al-Qa’eda soldiers or civilians? Should they be tried in military or civil courts? Should they be detained in civil prisons or detention centres like Bagram or Guantánamo Bay? Can water-boarding or other forms of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ be condoned if they patently save the lives of innocent people? These are the questions which Shawcross poses.
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