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Working the Dark Side on the United States Torture Regime After 9/11 Bjering, Jens Christian Borrebye

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Working the Dark Side on the United States Torture Regime After 9/11 Bjering, Jens Christian Borrebye Working the Dark Side On the United States Torture Regime after 9/11 Bjering, Jens Christian Borrebye Publication date: 2016 Document version Other version Document license: CC BY-NC-ND Citation for published version (APA): Bjering, J. C. B. (2016). Working the Dark Side: On the United States Torture Regime after 9/11. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 Working the Dark Side On the United States Torture Regime after 9/11 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first of all like to think all my colleagues at the Ph.D. school at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, especially Torsten Andreasen, Mikkel Frantzen, Runa Johannessen and Professor Frederik Tygstrup, for great conversations, a myriad of both stimulating and obscure theoretical detours, and for all the pleasurable moments spent together. Warm thanks also to my family and to friends who have remained supportive and interested to the very end: Andreas Immanuel Graae for rhetorical expertise, Lise Steen Nielsen for lending her ears to enumerable frustrations, Marie Lohmann for supernatural patience, and Dr. Julia Cohen for being who she is. Special thanks to my dad, Hans Bjering, for his willingness to read through and discuss page after page of this dissertation; his help has been invaluable even though I suspect he still doesn’t realize it. Lastly, the biggest thank you possible to my supervisor, Professor Isak Winkel Holm, for his willingness to engage himself as much as he has with my work and subject, and for knowing precisely when to use the carrot and when to use the stick. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: In the Archive of American Torture 4 Chapter 1: Destructions 23 Chapter 2: A Lack of Potential Constraints 54 Chapter 3: Thinking About Torture 66 Chapter 4: Unitary Executive(s) 82 Chapter 5: Endless Information 103 Chapter 6: Bodies As Factories 125 Chapter 7: In the Laboratory 150 Chapter 8: The End of the River: Remembering Kurtz 185 Epilogue: Worldmaking 200 Bibliography: 209 Websites: 221 Abstract 225 Resumé 226 3 INTRODUCTION: IN THE ARCHIVE OF AMERICAN TORTURE While the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions, the internal government memos . demonstrate that the path to the purgatory that is Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, has been paved with decidedly bad intentions. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib In 2014, an important text became public: the Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.1 This text is the result of an investigation by the Senate Oversight Committee on Intelligence to map actions by the Central Intelligence Agency in the first seven or so years after 9/11 – roughly coinciding with George W. Bush´s tenure as President – and comprises the declassified parts of a much larger report which remain classified at the time of the writing of this text. I write became public instead of came out or were published to stress the unusual precariousness that characterizes the road from its production to it becoming publicly accessible of not only this specific text, but also of many others available texts on the U.S. torture regime. Between the writing of these texts—be they legal memos, personal testimonies, or direct orders—the attempts to control and direct how they are read, their circulation, and the timing of their becoming public, publication has 1 The declassified parts of the report are accessible at the Federation of American Scientists’ website at http://fas.org/irp/congress/2014_rpt/ssci-rdi.pdf 4 never just been a routine matter of proofing and editing, and many of the texts have changed to such a degree that any ordinary notion of authorship seems to have lost its meaning. The numerous black boxes spread over many of the pages to block out names, dates, and even gender tell their own tale – a tale of all that information that the public, after all, was still not supposed to know. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the long embryonic life that many of these texts have lived in the secret womb of government as a series of countdowns to a sudden explosion of hitherto unavailable or unacknowledged truths. Much of the information they relate has been public knowledge for years, spread out between journalistic investigation, scholarly studies, a steady drip of declassified government documents, pictures of prisoner abuse, and reports from the ICCR. Attempting to synthesize all these scattered pieces of the puzzle into one coherent picture would be a gargantuan task, but as much as the material is overwhelming due to its size and complexity, only a brief investigation of what has been accessible for years would be enough to reach the same basic conclusion as that reached by the relatively recently published Committee Study: the US army and intelligence community ran a systematic torture regime in the first years of the war on terror, and this regime was supported by convoluted legalism, a policy of secrecy both between branches of government and between the government and the public, and an unfounded claim to, and an almost absurd faith in, the efficacy of various techniques of torture in gathering intelligence. Even people with no special interest in the intricacies of American torture, people who have gone about their daily business without trying to synthesize or conceptualize the bits and pieces available on the internet and in the press into an overall conclusion about the (wrong)doings of their government or any ally of their country, have on several occasions been forced into a confrontation with the torture that presumably kept them safe while keeping them in the dark. The most salient example of such a confrontation was of course the dreadful pictures from Abu-Ghraib prison that surfaced in spring 2004, but also more lateral confrontations have occurred, for instance when Barack Obama publicly “bemoaned the 'dark and painful chapter in our history,” when he came into office,2 thereby acknowledging—and forcing the public to acknowledge through the ever so frayed relation of political representation—that things had been painful (But painful for whom? The victims of torture? The torturers? The American public? These are decisive questions and they are decisively left out of Obama´s phrasing.) 2. The Washington Post. “New Interrogation Details Emerge as Administration Releases Justice Department Memos.” April 17, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/04/16/AR2009041602768_3.html?sid=ST2009041602877 5 Because much of the information was already available—if not in the exact same words or detail, then definitely in enough detail to reach the overall conclusions about the existence and the brutality of a veritable U.S. torture program—the most pressing question should not be any more if a torture regime was created and if this regime was global in its reach and barbaric in its nature. Any insistence on such a line of questioning would only mean engaging in a game of definitions that has been one of the go-to obfuscations of the U.S. government in its attempts to hide what was going on, and while this dissertation does go into questions of what constitutes torture when prompted by the material at hand, it will not be the main problem, and nor should it be. Instead of focusing on the if question of U.S. torture, this dissertation therefore represents an attempt to zoom in on what made the U.S. torture regime unique, what made it run, and what legal, political, and conceptual nodal points came to structure it. Such an attempt surely presents no easy task, first of all because the politico-military-legal machinery about which these questions should be asked is so vast and multi-faceted that any exhaustive answer is practically impossible, and, second, because such an investigation necessarily hinges upon a basic, and highly disputable claim, namely that any one (or two, or three) answer(s) can in fact meaningfully describe what happened. The dissertation's basic claim is that with the U.S. torture regime a new idea about torture—its legality, its efficacy, and its justification—was created, and that this new idea about torture was the consequence of a new legal-political ontology characterized by the creation of a “dark side”—a term introduced by Vice President Dick Cheney in a TV interview immediately after the terror attacks of 9/11—of total chaos, presumably ushered in by the terrorists on that clear September morning fifteen years ago. I use the term “ontology” to denote a most basic level of meaning in and about the world. Speaking about ontology is speaking about the way we meet the world in both the humdrum of daily life and in more contemplative moments. Ontology is about what world we see when we see, and about which opportunities for being and acting we see in this world. Studying a specific ontology is, in short, studying what makes a specific world a meaningful world, and analyzing the creation of a new ontology, then, is to analyze how a new world—with all its values, its possibilities, and dangers— comes into being. When the dissertation analyzes the U.S. torture regime and the “new legal-political ontology” upon which it was based, it therefore does so by identifying and analyzing how a selection of decisive texts from the first years after 9/11 created a world where torture was not just an option or a suggestion, but a meaningful—maybe the only meaningful—thing to turn to. 6 That a certain legal-political ontology creates a world in which torture seems possible, reasonable, and perhaps even ethically imperative means that a critique of torture has to happen by way of a more general critique of the ontology which has made it so.
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