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The Reality of Torture: Congress and the Construction of a Political Fact

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The Reality of Torture: Congress and the Construction of a Political Fact The Reality of Torture: Congress and the Construction of a Political Fact Author: Jared Del Rosso Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104402 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2012 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Sociology THE REALITY OF TORTURE: CONGRESS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A POLITICAL FACT A dissertation by JARED DEL ROSSO submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 © copyright by JARED BENJAMIN DEL ROSSO 2012 The Reality of Torture: Congress and the Construction of a Political Fact Jared Del Rosso Stephen Pfohl, Advisor Abstract. Existing studies of governmental responses to human rights allegations emphasize the rhetorical forms that official claims take at the expense of demonstrating how contextual factors influence discourse. Analytically, this dissertation accounts for these factors by theorizing and analyzing how knowledge and culture operate in American political discourse of torture. Drawing on a qualitative content and discourse analysis of 40 congressional hearings, held between 2003 and 2008, this dissertation documents a transition in American politics from a discourse of denial, which downplayed allegations of abuse and torture, to a discourse of acknowledgment, which criticized the Bush administration’s interrogation policies on the grounds that the policies permitted torture and undermined U.S. interests. By situating this transition within its institutional and political context, this study examines the influence of documentary evidence of torture, interpretive frames in which American officials situated that evidence, and political power as expressed in control over congressional committees on political discourse. Between 2003 and 2008, a significant volume of documentary evidence of violence against detainees in U.S. custody entered public discourse. Typically, shifts in congressional discourse followed the release of official, documentary evidence produced by government sources, such as military police or FBI agents, that provided first-hand or localized portrayals of abuse and torture at U.S. detention facilities. Such documents, including the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison and FBI emails documenting torture at Guantánamo, secured a “reality” of violence that members of Congress found difficult to rationalize as legitimate state violence. This difficulty stems, in part, from the fact that localized portrayals of interpersonal violence frequently capture the excesses of that violence—the irrationality, sadism, and innovations in cruelty of torturers and the vulnerabilities of sufferers of torture. Significantly, though, the political meaning of documentary evidence derives from the interpretive frames in which it is situated. Between 2003 and 2008, “human rights” and the “rule of law” became increasingly available as interpretive frames for the political debate over detention and interrogation. This development resulted from several changes in the political environment, including the Bush administration’s mobilization of human rights to legitimize the Iraq war and the Supreme Court’s rulings on cases involving detainees. The Democrat’s mid-term victory in 2006, which won Democrats control over both the House of Representatives and Senate, also profoundly influenced political discourse. Democrats used congressional committees to pursue broad, reflective hearings on the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies. By inviting legal scholars and representatives of human rights organizations to speak about the policies, the Committees further elevated human rights and the rule of law in the debate about torture. Given these developments, a critical discourse of torture gradually emerged and solidified. This discourse labeled American interrogation practices—known to their supporters as “enhanced interrogation”—as torture and linked their use to significant and negative global consequences for the U.S. Table of Contents Preface..................................................................................................................... ii Introduction............................................................................................................. 1 1. To Give an Account of Torture......................................................................... 27 2. The Heartbreak of Acknowledgment: Abu Ghraib, MDC, and the Context of Crisis ..................................................................................................................... 59 3. Isolating Incidents........................................................................................... 103 4. Agency, Accountability and Abu Ghraib........................................................ 127 5. Guantánamo: From “Honor Bound” to a Global Stain................................... 158 6. Waterboarding and the Liberal Ideology of Torture....................................... 192 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 244 References........................................................................................................... 265 i Preface In the early years of the U.S.’s war in Iraq, the Department of Defense provided no official counts of Iraqi casualties. It would take something else to bring American violence in Iraq back home. In late-April 2004, a report on detainee abuse, aired by CBS’ now-defunct Sixty Minutes II, included digital photographs of Americans torturing detainees and posing with the corpse of an Iraqi at Abu Ghraib prison. For many Americans, the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison have come to stand-in for the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program more generally. The photographs also provided an opportunity for American political culture to reckon with, to co-opt Vice President Dick Cheney’s well-worn phrase, the dark side of the U.S.’s war in Iraq. The acts of violence photographed at Abu Ghraib are, in many ways, unrepresentative of contemporary violence and, in particular, contemporary U.S. violence. They do not depict the technologies of “shock and awe” that re-introduced the people of Iraq to American force. Nor do they depict the trajectory of U.S. counter- terrorism—missile strikes from unmanned “drones” and targeted assassinations. Such forms of violence appear, at least culturally, highly instrumental and precise. They tend to spark outrage only when there is a breach in that image, as when a video recording of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing on unarmed Iraqis revealed that even technologically sophisticated violence could be committed with ferocity, pursued as an end in itself. The photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison, however, show violence that appears atavistic— and, more importantly, exceptional. Some viewers saw in the photographs other, older ii images of sadism—the Crucifixion of Jesus or the lynching of African-Americans. Others observed “isolated incidents.” This dissertation is a study of the political reckoning with Abu Ghraib and of the subsequent debate about the treatment of detainees and interrogation policy. It is, in other words, a study of forms of cruelty that appear, at first glance, anachronistic and out- moded. And yet, the political reckoning with torture reveals the contours of contemporary discourses of violence, the ways that certain expressions of cruelty become palatable to a democracy while others become indigestible. As will become clear over the course of this dissertation, American interrogation practices remained politically defensible so long as they could be credibly described as clinical, instrumental, and callous. It is possible that the political reckoning with Abu Ghraib and with torture more generally will stand, for many Americans, as the country’s only sustained encounter with the other side of American violence in Afghanistan and Iraq (and now Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan). As such, the debates analyzed in this dissertation provide a window, albeit an opaque one, on the meanings of “us,” the meanings of “them,” and the relations between. * * * * This dissertation originates in a proposed paper, initially abandoned, for Stephen Pfohl’s course on visual culture, “Images and Power.” Over the past eight years, I have been the beneficiary of Stephen’s generous feedback and guidance. This dissertation bares the traces of Stephen’s mentorship and of the intellectual concerns born in his classes. I am also grateful to Sarah Babb and C. Shawn McGuffey for their sustained engagement with iii this work and, in particular, for teaching me how to practice and write as a qualitative sociologist. As a dissertation committee, Stephen, Sarah, and Shawn have been dogged advocates and supporters of my work, and I am indebted to them for the time, teaching opportunities, and financial support that have made this dissertation possible. Darius Rejali has, through his scholarship and through bursts of email exchanges, also guided this dissertation. I owe the conclusion of this study, which seeks to “speak frankly” about torture, to him. I have further benefitted from the scholarship of, feedback from, and conversations with Stephanie Athey, Jonathan Markowitz, and Liza McCoy. I am also grateful to Sarah Hogan, who introduced me to government
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