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Visibility and Torture: on the Appropriation of Surveillance Footage in YOU DON’T LIKE the TRUTH 2019 Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Sebastian Köthe Visibility and Torture: On the Appropriation of Surveillance Footage in YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH 2019 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14800 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Köthe, Sebastian: Visibility and Torture: On the Appropriation of Surveillance Footage in YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH. In: Research in Film and History. Research, Debates and Projects 2.0 (2019), Nr. 2, S. 1– 9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14800. Erstmalig hier erschienen / Initial publication here: https://film-history.org/issues/text/visibility-and-torture-appropriation-surveillance-footage-you-dont-truth Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0/ Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives 4.0/ License. For Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz more information see: finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 1 Visibility and Torture: On the Appropriation of Surveillance Footage in YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH Sebastian Köthe Published: November 25, 2019 Figure 1. YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH, Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez, AU/CA/UK 2010 YOU DON'T LIKE THE TRUTH, DVD KinoSmith © original copyright holders “Clean”Torture: Invisibility and Strategic Visibility So-called “clean” or “white” torture causes suffering to defenseless people, employing a style that aims to evade reconstructions, reimaginations, and acknowledgment. In the “global war on terror” waged at Guantánamo Bay and the CIA black sites, torture is neither a state of exception nor a sudden rupture of civilization, but is based on twentieth-century practices of democratic torture. Due to democracy’s constitutive need of legitimization, a growing critique of state violence, and new means of state monitoring, leading democracies invented ways to enforce false confessions and to terrorize even their own populations without leaving traces on their victims’ 1 1. Darius Rejali, Torture and bodies. Paradigmatic examples of these techniques are isolation, sensory Democracy (Princeton and deprivation by exposure to bright light or darkness, sensory overload using Oxford: Princeton University white noise, “stress positions” in which bodies are forced to harm themselves Press, 2007), 1–33. Research in Film and History ‣ Issue 2 2019 ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Research in Film and History. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons BY–NC–ND 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). 2 (e.g. by being forced to stand for prolonged periods), and 2. For a broad study of “clean” 2 torture from the perspective of “waterboarding.” These techniques could be quickly adapted to the “war on phenomenology and theater terror,” as they are used in US national territory in migrant detention centers, studies, see Carola Hilbrand, in supermax prisons, and—to a certain degree—in the t raining of US troops. Saubere Folter: Auf den Spuren They turn the constitutive openness of human perception, sensitivity, and unsichtbarer Gewalt (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015). sociality against itself: in “clean” torture, the relationality to the world, to others, and to one’s own body does not enable the constitution of personhood, 3. Lisa Guenther develops this intersubjectivity, or worldliness, but inverts them painfully.3 This annihilation is argument further in her excellent …. study on solitary confinement: deniable and strategically visible. The iconic photographs of the sensory- “Persons who are structured as deprived prisoners kneeling on Guantánamo’s soil in Jnuary 2002 were not intentional consciousness but are leaked by investigative journalists but rather publicized by the Department of deprived of a diverse, open- ended perceptual experience of Defense itself. Their goal is to terrorize and exert power over whole the world, or who are structured populations by claiming infinite sovereignty over surrogate victims. as transcendental intersubjectivity but are deprived of concrete relations to others, have the very In this article, I ask about the relationship between visib ility and violence. Even structure of their Being-in-the- though visibilization is legitimized as a technology of surveillance, where world turned against them and security is gained through knowledge, its decisive function is not used to exploit their fundamental relationality.” Lisa Guenther, epistemological, but as a mode of torture. How can visibility be violent? If this Solitary Confinement: Social violence consists in making human beings excessively visible, and if critical Death and Its Afterlives filmic research usually involves enhancing visibility, how can it avoid (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, reproducing violence? Are there modes of filmic counterhistoriography that do 2013), xv. produce visibility differently, appropriating and reframing ambiguous source materials? These questions are raised by the documentary YOU DON'T LIKE THE TRUTH (AU/CA/UK 2010), which was the first and only film to show surveillance camera videos from an interrogation in Gu antánamo. The film does reproduce perpetrator images that violate the rights of the depicted subject, teenage interrogatee Omar Khadr, but it also strives to reframe the depicted violence, becoming an important source in the campaign for Khadr’s liberation. How are critical aesthetic, epistemic, or for ensic appropriations of these surveillance images—that not only depict violence, but manifest it themselves—possible? Visibility as Torture in Guantánamo Bay Being detained in Guantánamo means to be incessantly visible to others. This is ensured by a technological and architectural dispositif as well as body techniques of surveillance (including totalitarian regimes of command and obedience; the immobilization of prisoners through sha ckles, cages, or wounds; sensory deprivation, for example by hoodings that disable the reciprocity of gazes; or withholding protective property such as blankets or clothing) and surveillance of the most intimate self-relations (showering, defecation, 4. This regime of discipline also masturbation, self-harm, suicide). It was not for nothi ng that “Camp X-Ray,” demands excessive obedience the name of a now-abandoned camp, alluded to a visualization of the inside of from its own guards, who are 4 regulated by a 240-page Standard the body. Operating Procedure, covering body and cell searches, counting The ubiquitous use of surveillance cameras not only heightens the intensity of systems, record keeping, and the visibility, but also constitutes archives. Between 2002 and 2005, all 24,000 surveillance of daily procedures such as shaving, prayers, and interrogations in Guantánamo were recorded. Until 2008, all “activities” in the recreational breaks. camps were recorded, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Detainees have reported Research in Film and History 2 2019 ‣ Sebastian Köthe ‣ Visibility and Torture 3 that there were cameras in their cells, which they found behind clocks in 5. Mark Denbeaux et al., “Spying on Attorneys at GTMO: Guantanamo interrogation rooms or disguised in pens. In 2013, lawyers discovered that Bay Military Commissions and the confidential talks with clients were being illegally bugged and that low-resolution Destruction of the Attorney–Client 5 Relationship,” 3, 7, 16, https:// cameras could decipher even the smallest notes. law.shu.edu/ProgramsCenters/ PublicIntGovServ/policyresearch/ upload/ While the digital photographs of torture in Abu Ghraib have been excessively spying_on_attorneys_at_GTMO.pdf disseminated, it is important to understand photography and video as everyday means of exerting control. For example, the CIA produced some 14,000 6. Adam Goldman, “CIA photos of ‘black sites’ could complicate photographs at their black sites. Supposedly, they contain images that Guantánamo trials,” Miami Herald, “document how money was being spent”: mugshots as well as nude pictures June 29, 2015, https:// www.miamiherald.com/news/ 6 of prisoners during their rendition and arrival at the camp. All prisoners nation-world/world/americas/ went through this procedure, which was legitimized as “documentation” of guantanamo/article25749451.html 7 their health conditions. 7. “In most cases, the detainee was stripped of his clothes, photographed naked, and administered a body In Moazzam Begg’s 2004 open letter from Guantánamo, he demands a “logical cavity search (rectal examination). and reasonable answer” to the question of “[w]hy I was physically abused, and Some detainees described the insertion of a suppository at that time degradingly stripped by force, then paraded in front of several cameras toted […] Mehdi said in his interview that by U.S. personnel.”8 “Stripped by force” means that the prisoners’ clothes he remains concerned about the existence of these photos.” Human were cut from their bodies with scissors, which articulates an ambivalent Rights Watch, Delivered into Enemy proximity to the overpowered body: on the one hand, the abducted Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya, 36, person loses autonomy even over the process of undressing himself. On the 89, https://www.hrw.org/ other hand, the scissors enable perpetrators
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