“THE GLOVES ARE COMING OFF”: A MIXED METHOD ANALYSIS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S TORTURE MEMOS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY DANERYL MAY NIER-WEBER DISSERTATION ADVISOR: DR. LINDA HANSON Ball State University Muncie, Indiana April 2011 © Copyright by Daneryl May Nier-Weber All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables v Acknowledgments vi Dear Reader vii Ch. I: The Great Divide 1 Research Questions/Rationale 6 Ch II: Review of the Literature 14 Ch. III: Methods and Methodology 36 Mixed Methods Approach: Grounded Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis 40 Previous Study I: “In Your Face” 42 Previous Study II: “Psycho vs. Sockpuppet” 47 Methods Chosen For This Study 50 Ch. IV: The Scene, The Agents, Their Agency, and Their Purpose: Conceptions of Power and the Torture Debate 62 The Memos 71 Memos as Agency: Authorization for Torture 74 The Actors: The Men Behind the Memos 87 Conceptions of power 95 Ideological Provenance of the Memos 97 To Protect and Defend 102 Linguistic and Semantic Masking 113 Ch. V: Torture and the Law 122 Semantic Shifts and their Material Enactments 131 “Civilization’s fight” 135 An Act of War 143 Ch. VI: Thirty-Nine Documents 148 Exceptionalism and the Rhetoric of Crisis 150 National Security 158 Defense 174 War/Not War 184 iv Ch. VII: The “Semantic Tap-Dance”: Discursive, Rhetorical, and Lexico- Grammatical Strategies in the Torture Memos 187 Authoritarianism and the Torture Memos 191 Framing 199 Argument Structure 201 Conflation 202 Elisions and Substitutions 212 Intertextuality 216 War/Not War, Continued 227 Hyperlexicalization and the Ideological Square 233 Ch. VIII: Constructions of Identity 239 Outcasting 250 Ch. IX: Constructing Torture 290 Semantic Reversal: Extraordinary Renditions 292 Doc 22: The Torture Memo 306 Agent Deletion 333 Ch. X: Analysis and Conclusions 343 Will to Power 346 Rhetoric and the Law 355 Failure to Protect 364 Findings and implications for further research 374 A final comment on authoritarianism 379 Works Cited 390 Appendix I: List of the Key Documents 411 v List of Figures and Tables Table 2.1 Possible differences in liberal versus conservative worldviews 25 Table 3.1 Frames identified in blog study II 49 Table 3.2 Linguistic markers identified in blog study II 49 Table 3.3 Similarities and differences in discursive practices from blog studies I & II 50 Table 3.4 Preliminary results from both studies 50 Table 3.5 Methodology, Methods, and Rationales 51 Table 3.6 Huckin’s two-way four-level method of analysis 51 Table 3.7 Level of granularity IV: Higher level concepts from Huckin 55 Table 3.8 Level of granularity III: Text 56 Table 3.9 Level of granularity II: Sentence/utterance 56 Table 3.10 Level of granularity I: Word/phrase 57 Table 3.11 Key markers of semantic, linguistic, and discursive strategies 59 Table 4.1 List of key documents identified by torturingdemocracy.org 67-71 Table 4.2 Top level officials during the first term of the Bush Administration 87 Table 5.1 Article 18 Section 2340 of the U.S. Code: the definition of torture 126 Table 5.2 Article 18 Section 2340 of the U.S. Code: the crime of torture 127 Table 5.3 The United Nations Convention Against Torture 128 Table 6.1 Collocates for plenary 170 Table 6.2 Frequency of words pertaining to the defense frame 182 Table 7.1 Major frames and language-based strategies 200 Table 7.2 Intertextuality example I 218 Table 7.3 Intertextuality example II 220 Table 7.4 Intertextuality example III 221 Table 7.5 Intertextuality example IV 222 Table 9.1 U.S. Code vs. Yoo 316 Table 9.2 Yoo vs. medical statute 325 Table 9.3 U.S. Code Section 2340 329 Table 10.1 The three research questions 375 Table 10.2 Codes/descriptors with examples for level of granularity IV 376 Table 10.3 Codes/descriptors with examples for level of granularity III 376 Table 10.4 Codes/descriptors with examples for level of granularity II 377 Table 10.5 Codes/descriptors with examples for level of granularity I 377 Table 10.6 Low- versus high-scoring authoritarians, from Hetherington and Weiler 380 Figure 3.1 Burke’s dramatistic pentad 52 Figure 3.2 Domains of analysis 55 Figure 6.1 Screen shot of concordance for plenary 170 Figures 6.2 & 6.3 Word list 1 & 2 sorted by frequency 182 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As my wonderful friend Heidi Skurat Harris has said, all writing occurs in communities of support. This dissertation, too, is no exception. Heidi, I could not have gotten here without you who walked all paths before me and generously led the way. Thanks to Jacob for his support and to Daria, who has filled my life here with laughter, love, and light. You are my family away from home. To my committee, thank you for your willingness to put up with hundreds of pages of reading and for your feedback and advice. To Dr. Linda Hanson especially, for all your help, encouragement, and the friendship that will last far beyond this degree. To Gunther, too, for your humor and humanity and for showing me what it looks like to never know a stranger. To Casey McArdle, the best buddy a grad student could have. I am in awe of your work ethic, your energy, your humor, and your commitment to integrity. You are a true friend and I couldn’t have done it without your help. To all my Ball State friends, thank you for the support and encouragement during our years of exploration and fun. Special thanks also to Shawna Sewell; without you, our small world would not turn. To the wonderful English Department at Butler as well, who started me on this journey and who remain the best cheerleaders I could have wished for. To the triumvirate of girlfriends, Alicia Rasley, Tasha Buttler, and Mariam van Wesenbeeck, each of whom helped me through the hard times and reminded me what it’s all for. Especially to Alicia, who did the heavy lifting through twenty pages of MLA citations and made the impossible possible with effortless grace. To the students, faculty, and staff at EOU, too numerous to name, who have made this a year of continuing discovery and delight. To Marge and Charlie, Jim and Beth, and Ari, I love you. Thank you for being so supportive and proud, and for all your encouragement and love. To Mom, who gave me music and joy: I miss you every day. To my beloved German family: Klaus and Ingrid, Juergen, and to Baerbel, the finest mother I could have wished for. I will love you all, always. To Ty, who has been my steadfast support, my partner, my best friend, my patient and abiding love. Thank you, too, for looking after the babies: Juno, Calli, and Nick. To LeeAnna and Doyle, Hanna and Elliott, Jerry and Connie, and Annette, the best family a girl could have. I love you all. Most of all to my sons, Sascha Alexander and Nicholas Jakob, who have given me riches beyond measure. I love you two more than I could ever say, and I am prouder of both of you than you will ever know. May you both fulfill your greatest dreams. vii “As Orwell predicted, the English language had to disappear first.” –Andrew Sullivan Dear Reader: The subject of this dissertation is a set of 39 key documents from the website Torturing Democracy. Most of these documents were authored by a small group of attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel, principally John Yoo. In order to avoid forcing readers to differentiate between over two dozen citations by the same author, I devised a system that I hope will facilitate the reading. The 39 Documents, therefore, appear in the text as “Doc 1,” “Doc 2,” and so on. Page numbers are cited in parentheses after the Doc number, separated by a comma. Thus page 18 in Document 22 would appear as follows: (Doc 22, 18). A footnote is marked as FN with the number used in the document. When necessary, I have also provided the name of the author. A full list of the documents, including their number, author(s), title, date, and a brief summary of their content can be found near the beginning of Chapter IV. For easy reference, I have also included the full list in Appendix I. The summaries are taken largely from the summaries provided by Torturing Democracy, where the documents have been posted for easy access by Washington Media Associates in association with the National Security Archive based at George Washington University’s Gelman Library. They are part of a much larger collection called The Torture Archive. The full page count of the these 39 documents alone numbers 675; it was, therefore, simply not feasible to include the complete texts of the documents themselves as an appendix. The entire archive will nonetheless remain, I hope, easily accessible at torturingdemocracy.org. A last note: I have come to view the 39 legal documents that are the focus of this study as a kind of “ground zero” (to use the battered term) of political discourse, representative of many of the extreme and polarized assumptions of right versus left that define the divisions between worldviews. In that sense, the discourse of the war on terror, of which the rhetoric of torture is a key part, is an ideal object of study. The discourse of 9/11 and the subsequent response (and indeed, much of what preceded it) throw disparate views on morality, good and evil, what it means to protect and defend, human rights, and the nature of legitimate authority—to name just a few of the core issues—into sharp relief.