Interrogations will be conducted continuously during this 72 hour period. Detainee will be put on the adjusted sleep schedule…for 72 hours. Here, I agree with Foucault that there is no system of punishment, no judicial process, no legal institution, and no form of torture that can or has ever stood independent of the many political, socio-cultural, and historical structures that give epochs their peculiar individuality.The real issue of the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq is not only the photographs then, but what they reveal about contemporary U.S. culture. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.31I am conscious that one has to be very careful with sources that remain unnamed, especially when they are cited by journalists. The “subject” in this particular case was a Syrian male and an “admitted foreign fighter who came to commit Jihad against Coalition Forces in Iraq” and who was “captured in an attempted IED [improvised explosive device] attack in Baghdad.” The detainee is thought to be “at the point where he is resigned to the hope that Allah will see him through this episode in his life, therefore he feels no need to speak with interrogators.” He thus has to be “put in a position where he will feel that the only option to get out of jail is to speak with interrogators.”33 To that end,interrogators will reinforce the fact that we have attempted to help him time and time again and that they are now putting it in Allah’s hands. Rather, I wanted to show how a particular cultural current, which has gained impetus in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, made possible the torture at Abu Ghraib and how the events there cannot be detached from a new variant of anti-Semitic reasoning that continues to have a presence in the imagined “Western consciousness.” It is in this sense that I believe that Western anti-Semitism has come full cycle: from the annihilation of the Jews to the dehumanization of the Muslims.I am conscious that some may say that such a grand statement is “pretentious” at best, “ideological” at worst. In such a strategy, Iraqis are posited by American super-masculine fighter-bomber pilots as women and feminised men to be penetrated by the missiles and bombs ejected from American warplanes. And raise the question as can it be that Arab Muslim boys turned rapists have been “neotenized,” that is raised to stay immature for their entire lives?41 Suddenly, now that we have delved into the narratives constituting it, it is that much easier to place Abu Ghraib within the cultural current that I have tried to explain in this article. I am arguing that Abu Ghraib could not have happened without a particular racist current in the United States, that the individuals who committed the atrocities against the detainees were not isolated, and that they were part of a larger constellation with its own signifying ideational attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs. Like “Well it’s OK.” [They] just came and said whatever they had to say to patch it up and continue with the war.23 Thus, the torture at Abu Ghraib could only happen within a constellation where power was distributed in an extremely irregular fashion. Many will say that at the end of the process, punishment always terrorizes its subject, frightens her, and intimidates her psychologically and, in most countries of West Asia, quite legally even physically. But I find it much harder to establish a strict ideological boundary between the racism intrinsic to Nazism and the kind of nihilistic racism permeating the mindset of some segments of the political elites governing the United States.I found it hard not to link these attitudes to the Pride and Ego–Down Approach“legitimately” employed by U.S. interrogators in order to “break” their detainees which I have sketched above: The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. If educated “experts,” invited by a prominent U.S. think tank that hosts influential neoconservative “strategists” such as Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen, and Patrick Clawson, quite “rationally” dehumanize “Arab-Muslims,” what can we expect from U.S. soldiers, many of whom are convicted criminals who see the army as the last option to earn a living?I fail to establish a firm boundary between the “scientific racism” displayed at conferences like the one mentioned above, and the jingoistic racism of Sergeant Smith, a MP dog handler at Abu Ghraib, who seriously stated that “the dogs came not to like Iraqi detainees. The approaches which will be used during this phase will include, fear up harsh, pride and ego down, silence and loud music. It is also what happened to Che Guevara, Aung Sun Tsu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, and others who were deemed terrorists and traitors only to be celebrated by the masses. The torture at Abu Ghraib did not only, and rather dramatically, accentuate the fundamental difference between bashariyat and insaniyat, it also showed the perverse excesses that licentious power can generate. The purpose of this article is not ideological mobilization.
Ultimately, the purpose of this type of critique is narrowing the gap between Subscribe to the Monthly Review e-newsletter (max of 1-3 per month).Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Indeed, one of the reasons why there is so much published material available on the torture at Abu Ghraib is because U.S. society has empowered itself to guarantee a certain degree of transparency in the political process of the country (in the face of the most resourceful state in the world). Any source who shows any real or imagined inferiority or weakness about himself, loyalty to his organization, or [who was] captured under embarrassing circumstances,” it is explained, “can be easily broken with this approach technique.”15 Having set the legal boundaries between “torture,” “abuse,” and legitimate “interrogation techniques,” the report comes to the conclusion thatdespite the demands of the current operating environment against an enemy who does not abide by the Geneva Conventions, our commanders have adjusted to the reality of the battlefield and, are effectively conducting detainee operations while ensuring the humane treatment of detainees.16I am not concerned here with explaining legally why what happened in Iraq amounts to systematic torture.
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