According to Scott, a deep political system or process is one in which institutional, non-institutional and para-political bodies, criminal syndicates, politicians, judges, media, corporations and leading government employees, resort to
“... decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures ‘deep’ is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside public awareness as well as outside sanctioned political processes.” [1]
Deep political analysis is concerned with revealing the tendency of the state, which is the locus of law, to enter into criminal activity that conventionally would be viewed as anathema to the state’s professed laws. As Scott observes, from the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the criminal underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. However:
“A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of ‘organized crime’ arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals.” [2]
In time, this can lead to a form of police-crime symbiosis, where the defining parameters of which side controls the other are no longer clear. The present condition of western state practices in relation to the ‘War on Terror’ suggests that we are facing a serious state-crisis, challenging the legitimacy of the state as the harbinger of law, order and security. The comprehensive nature of the criminalization of the state, its penetration of both domestic and foreign arenas of policy, can only be explained in the context of the state’s increasing subservience to powerful vested interests that are unlikely to meet public approval, and that therefore must be secured without public consent. So what are these interests?
The Deep Politics of Terror in Algeria: A Case Study
The case of Algeria provides a powerful example of the overlap of these criminal western state practices which converge on a very precise set of strategic and economic interests:
1. Individuals identified as “terrorist suspects” have been transferred to, among many other states, Algeria. Algeria is a regime with a notorious record of human rights abuses including the systematic practice of torture which was detailed by the British Home Office in an April 2004 report prepared by the Country Information and Policy Unit used in assessing asylum claims. After its visit to Algeria in June 2005, Human Rights Watch concluded that the regime continues to practice torture, especially during interrogation of security suspects.
The interrogation of “suspects” using torture was responsible for the production of the false ricin-plot narrative. Algerian security services alerted the British in January 2003 to the plot after interrogating and torturing a “terrorist suspect” and former British resident Mohammed Meguerba. We now know there was no plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned. Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted after he murdered Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Rendition attempts to institutionalize and legitimize torture as a means of the production of fundamentally compromised information used by western states to manipulate domestic public opinion. [3]
2. Algeria plays a crucial role in relation to the west’s ‘War on Terror’, and cooperates closely with the US, UK and France in particular on regional anti-terrorist initiatives. US and Algerian joint operations in the last few years for instance have involved the construction of a ‘terror zone’ across southern Algeria, northern Nigeria, Mauritania, Northern Mali, Northern Niger and Chad. In July 2003, under US auspices, Algeria, Chad, Niger and Nigeria ‘signed a cooperation agreement on counter-terrorism that effectively joined the two oil-rich sides of the Sahara together in a complex of security arrangements whose architecture is American.’ [4]
The agreement was quickly followed up with what has become the principal vehicle of American involvement, the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7.75 million military programme providing training and equipment to Algeria, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania to ‘improve their border security and deny the use of their sovereign territory to terrorists and criminals.’ [5] One thousand US Special forces, marines and contractors were sent to these countries in January 2004 to supply extensive military counter-terrorist assistance and coordination. The US is expanding the programme to include Nigeria, Morocco and Tunisia, with a new budget of $500 million for the period until 2011, now with a new name, the ‘Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative’.[6] A major US military base operates from Tamanrasset in the south of Algeria, with 400 Special Forces. Algeria is viewed as pivotal to US plans for future military deployment in the region.[7]
3. Thirdly, Algeria is complicit in the facilitation of radical Islamist terrorist activity - with Western knowledge and support. Former Algerian government and security officials have independently confirmed that Algerian military-intelligence services had infiltrated and controlled almost all radical Islamist terrorist groups in the country, including the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). [8]
Foreign Office documents released to the Honourable Court in 2000 relating to the trial of three alleged Algerian terrorists, who were all acquitted, revealed extensive evidence to this effect. Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee cited evidence of Algerian ‘government manipulation or involvement in [Islamist] terrorist violence’. One document stated, ‘Sources had privately said some of the killings of civilians [blamed on Islamist terrorist groups] were the responsibility of the Algerian security services’. Multiple documents ‘referred to the ‘manipulation’ of the GIA [the Armed Islamic Group, one of the principal Islamist terrorist groups in Algeria] being used as a cover to carry out their own operations’. A US intelligence report confirmed that ‘there was no evidence to link 1995 Paris bombings to Algerian militants’. On the contrary, ‘one killing at the time could have been ordered by the Algerian government.’ [9]
According to social anthropologist Jeremy Keenan - Senior Research Fellow and Director of Sahara Studies at the University of East Anglia - ‘contradictory Algerian intelligence reports and eyewitness testimonies suggest collusion between agents of Algeria’s military intelligence services and the Salafist Group.’ Not surprisingly, the State Department has ‘declined to comment on the matter.’ Indeed, the United States needs the GSPC terrorist threat to justify the extension of US hegemony to northwest Africa. ‘Without the GSPC,’ observes Keenan, ‘the US has no legitimacy for its presence in the region.’[10]
In several extraordinary analyses published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Review of African Political Economy, Keenan documents ‘an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that the alleged spread of terrorist activities across much of the Sahelian Sahara, has indeed been an elaborate deception on the part of US and Algerian military intelligence services.’ Keenan thus finds that the expansion of the GSPC presence in the Sahara was jointly facilitated by US and Algerian security services.[11]
4. Algeria is the subject of crucial strategic and economic interests on the part of the US, UK and several EU states, especially with regard to its oil and natural gas reserves. Northwest African oil reserves currently meet 17 per cent of US needs. An Algerian company, Sonatrach, plays a major role in US oil exploration as the largest company in Africa, with an estimated turnover of $32 billion in 2004.[12] Experts agree that by 2015, ‘Africa will become the US’s second-most important supplier of oil, and possibly natural gas, after the Middle East.’[13]
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