Attached is an interested piece by A. Serwer at the Atlantic comparing Al-Qaeda's twisting of jurisprudence to justify the slaughter of civilians to the US torture memos justifying the torture of "enemy combatants" under the Bush Administration.
The link can be found here.
Excerpts:
"The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge," that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.
The legal memos justifying torture aren't very different in terms of reasoning--it's clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism.
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