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Black Sites: Torture's Hidden Infrastructure

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Black Sites: Torture's Hidden Infrastructure Catherine Slessor A new book gives a glimpse of the hidden infrastructure of torture operated by the CIA in its war on terror EDMUND CLARK Against my better judgement, I once visited the transferred without legal process. No public records Museum of Torture in Amsterdam. An early pioneer were kept as prisoners were shuttled all over the in the field of medieval barbarity tourism, it proudly world, from sites as disparate as Lithuania and ‘showcases’ a grotesquely impressive array of Afghanistan. Many remain unaccounted for. torture and punishment devices, from the Inquisition In its bureaucratic proscriptions for the treatment chair (studded with spikes, naturally) to the of detainees, the system of extraordinary rendition guillotine, France’s preferred method of despatching is beyond anything Kafka could have devised. And, miscreants until 1981. as Kafka knew, horror is all the more horrific when One obvious aim of such luridly titillating cloaked in ordinariness, effectively hidden in plain museological tableaux is to make us feel a bit better sight. Most black sites were unremarkable, with about ourselves. The average barbarity tourist buildings adapted as required. Interrogations could emerges from their murky odyssey confident in the be (and were) carried out in hotel bedrooms. In belief that state-sponsored torture, in its classic one instance, a riding school in a Lithuanian forest sense of medieval racking and whipping, belongs to (pictured) was extended with mysterious rapidity. a more primitive era of ignorance and superstition. Locals had suspicions, but none knew for sure it was Moreover, the concept of a torture chamber is no a detention centre managed on behalf of the CIA. longer a gruesome reality awaiting those who have Filtered through the super-realist gaze of been judged transgressors, but now part of popular Clark’s photographs, everyday architecture culture, de-fanged and osmosed into the colourfully assumes a profoundly unheimlich quality. ‘This permissive terrain of consenting BDSM fantasists. is a matrix of mundanity,’ writes Eyal Weizman in Yet our medieval ancestors would still recognise his accompanying essay. ‘Yet the minute we know in us the potential for unspeakable cruelty in the secret things are happening around the corner, so-called national interest. Minutely codified by terror amplifies.’ The photographs are accompanied politicians, apparatchiks, the military and their by a paper trail of apparently innocuous documents: willing subcontractors, this contemporary barbarity invoices, articles of incorporation, flight manifests, is much less obviously Grand Guignol and would the business accountability of torture. A largely thus make for a poor tourist attraction. Nonetheless, redacted CIA handbook of interrogation techniques it does not escape scrutiny in a compelling new book is more explicit, with subsections that include ‘stiff documenting the global network of ‘black sites’ brush and shackles’ and ‘waterboard techniques’. instigated and operated by the CIA at the height of Raising fundamental questions about the its crusading post-9/11 war on terror. complicity of governments in the erosion of human Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary rights, Negative Publicity makes for uncomfortable Rendition is a collaboration between photographer reading. Through its admirably laconic account of Edmund Clark and counter-terrorism investigator what is done in our name, it carefully peels away Crofton Black. Sifting through the paper trails the veneer of civilised behaviour, giving powerful surrounding the process of conveying detainees expression to the appearance of disappearance. around secret prisons, Clark and Black shed light on Insidiously infiltrating the everyday, torture is no what was essentially a US government-sponsored longer a museum piece. campaign of kidnapping and torture. Between 2001 Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary and 2008 an unknown number of people disappeared Rendition by Crofton Black and Edmund Clark with into this shadowy infrastructure, detained and an essay by Eyal Weizman is published by Aperture..
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