Researching Democratic Impunity
Perhaps the largest national security scandal of the 1980s was the Iran-Contra affair. This affair arose because members of US President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, the CIA and others worked together to sell weapons to Iran at an inflated price. They did this to fund shipments of weapons to a group of right-wing guerrilla fighters called as The Contras. These fighters were attempting to overthrow a left-wing Nicaraguan government known as The Sandinistas, from the name of Nicaraguan revolutionary leader August Cesar Sandino.
These shipments of arms continued despite a set of US laws known as the Boland amendment that made support for The Contras illegal. Despite widespread evidence of wrongdoing by US government personnel and the widely documented destruction of evidence, no one who worked for the US government was left with a criminal record. Yet, there is a disconnect between the lack of accountability that arose from the Iran-Contra affair and much literature that considers the role of oversight of the foreign intelligence and national security operations of democracies such as the US and the UK.
Photo courtesy of Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
A key argument within such literature is that oversight acts as a break on wrongdoing and should ensure that large scale abuses of power do not occur, that democratic countries do not violate, or help others to violate, human rights and that those who break the law are punished. Among other places, this argument finds a home in academic work, intelligence organisations, and discussions of the media.
This oversight can be broadly broken into two categories; internal and external. Internal oversight includes committees at national parliaments and official inquiries. While external oversight can be carried out by the media, groups like Amnesty International and legal practitioners. Beth Simmons sums up the argument in favour of oversight by claiming that ‘[d]emocracies are the natural allies of human rights’. Classic examples of such oversight in action include the Baha Mousa Inquiry in the UK and the pursuit of the Watergate scandal by the US press.
Yet, as the Iran-Contra affair illustrates, sometimes such oversight has fallen short, leaving wide-spread wrongdoing perpetrated by US and UK personnel unpunished. In the past, the reasons for this have included the destruction of evidence, failures within investigations, official pardons and the extra lawyers of secrecy that apply to the operations of military special forces and intelligence personnel.
In a nutshell, my research is focused on exploring the disconnect between the supposed power of oversight and the failure of accountability that has arisen in instances such as the Iran-Contra affair. Working under the tagline democratic impunity, I am examining the many obstacles that prevent oversight from playing the positive role it should in preventing democratic states from breaking the law. I am currently focused on US and UK detention operations during the Iraq War
