State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitcal Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones

242 Pages·2013·3.691 MB·English

by  Joseph Pugliese

State Violence and the Execution
of Law
State Violence and the Execution of Law stages a provocative analysis of how the
biopolitical divide between human and animal has played a fundamental role in
enabling state violence, including torture, secret imprisonment and killing- at-a-
distance via drones. Analyzing the complex ways in which the United States
government deploys law in order to consolidate and further imperial relations of
power, Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalization of
the state’s monopoly of violence both in the US and in an international context.
He demonstrates how networks of state violence are embedded within key legal
institutions, military apparatuses, civilian sites, corporations, carceral architec-
tures, and advanced technologies. The author argues that the exercise of state
violence, as unleashed by the war on terror, has enmeshed the subjects of the
Global South within institutional and discursive structures that position them as
non- human animals that can be tortured, killed and disappeared with impunity.
Drawing on poststructuralist, critical race and whiteness, and critical legal theo-
ries, the book is transdisciplinary in its approach and value. It will be invaluable to
university students and scholars in Critical Legal and Socio-Legal Studies, Cultural
Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, International Politics, and Postcolonial
Studies.
Joseph Pugliese is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie
University, Sydney. Recent publications include the edited collection
Transmediterranean: Diasporas, Histories, Geopolitical Spaces and the monograph
Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics which was short- listed for the Surveillance
Studies Book Prize 2010.
Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, & Economy
Series edited by
Prof Denise Ferreira da Silva
Queen Mary University of London
Dr Mark A. Harris
La Trobe University
Dr Brenna Bhandar
University of Kent
Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, & Economy seeks to expand the critical scope of racial,
postcolonial, and global theory and analysis, focusing on how the global juridico-e conomic
apparatus has been, and continues to be, shaped by the Colonial and the Racial structur-
ings of power. It includes works that seek to move beyond the previous privileging of culture
in considerations of racial and postcolonial subjectivity to offer a more comprehensive
engagement with the legal, economic and moral issues of the global present.
Titles in this series include:
State Violence and the Execution of Law
Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones
Joseph Pugliese
State Violence and the
Execution of Law
Biopolitical caesurae of torture,
black sites, drones
Joseph Pugliese
First published 2013
by Routledge
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A GlassHouse Book
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Joseph Pugliese
The right of Joseph Pugliese to be identifi ed as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
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Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Pugliese, Joseph, 1959–
State violence and the execution of law : torture, black sites,
drones / Joseph Pugliese.
p. cm.
1. Rule of law. 2. Violence (Law) 3. Implied powers
(Constitutional law) 4. Biopolitics. 5. War (International
law) 6. Torture (International law) 7. Violence—United
States. 8. Drone aircraft. 9. Biological warfare. 10. United
States—Military policy. I. Title.
K3171.P84 2013
303.6—dc23
2012032649
ISBN 978–0–415–52974–7 (hbk)
ISBN 978–0–203–59774–3 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville
by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Biopolitical caesurae of state violence 32
2 Shadow archives of torture 56
3 Biopolitical hierarchies of life 89
4 Epidemiologies of state bioterror 127
5 Black sites, redacted bodies 161
6 Prosthetics of empire and the anomic violence of drones 184
Afterword 221
Index 227
Acknowledgements
I ’m profoundly grateful to Denise Ferreira da Silva and her fellow editors, Brenna
Bhandar and Mark Harris, for encouraging me to bring together a body of work
on state violence and to shape it into a book. Denise’s revolutionary work on law,
race and state violence has been inspirational to the production of this book.
Penny Pether has, over the space of two decades, supported my work with a
passionate commitment that has always translated into practice. My thanks to her
and to David Caudill, Peter Goodrich and Bill McNeil for all their support.
In the early stages of the book, Constance Owen, a US citizen, offered her
services as a research assistant because of her deep level of critical engagement
with issues of social justice in the context of the war on terror. I am greatly indebted
to her phenomenal energy, discerning eye and brilliant research assistance.
Constance dedicates her work on this project to the memory of her late grand-
father, Donald F. Jones, the illustrious scientist whose own research was oriented
by a commitment to social good.
T his book is founded on the experiences and testimonies of the detainees.
From the inception, their harrowing testimonies and calls for justice have
driven my writing of this book. The writing of this book has also been critically
dependent on the work of a number of individuals and organizations that have
collectively contested the prerogative of the state to keep many of its dubious
practices from public scrutiny and accountability. My thanks to Andy Worthington
for his invaluable Guantánamo Files; Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks; the
American Civil Liberties Union; Democracy Now!; and the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism.
T he thinking and writing of this book was enabled by a community of scholars
and activists that I am privileged to know. My thanks to: Goldie Osuri, for her
political solidarity; Lara Palombo for her many acts of generosity; and Rustom
Bharucha for his affi rmation of my textual politics. Thanks also to: Uncle Ray
Jackson, my colleagues in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and
Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, James Brown and Pat Sant, Susan
Stryker, Nikki Sullivan and the Somatechnics research group, Maria
Giannacopoulos, Holly Randall-Moon, Sherene Razack, Juliet Rogers, Sue
Saltmarsh, Nan Seuffert, Kieran Tranter and Dinesh Wadiwel.
Acknowledgements vii
S pecial thanks to Suvendrini Perera: for her sustaining generosity; for the gift
of our dialogues over the years; and for a body of work that has been a
constant point of reference for me.
I ’m grateful to Raffaella and Larry Johnson for their unconditional support. My
mother and late father taught me the inestimable value of ’nu core sciancatu .
Sebastian transcends his own trauma and rails passionately against the violence of
anthropocentrism. In the face of a litany of tribulations, Trish has been there for
me at every turn; her care and support has seen me through: this book would not
have been possible without her.
A number of sections in this book were previously published and have
been reproduced with permission: ‘Abu Ghraib’s Shadow Archives,’ L aw and
Literature , 2007, vol. 9; ‘Geocorpographies of Torture,’ Critical Race and Whiteness
Studies, 2007, vol. 3; ‘Apostrophe of Empire: Guantánamo Bay, Disneyland,’
Borderlands , 2009, vol. 8; ‘Prosthetics of Law and the Anomic Violence of Drones’
Griffi th Law Review , 2011, vol. 20; and ‘Spectres of the M uselmann : Guantánamo
Bay “Theme Park” and the Torture of Omar Khadr,’ in S. Biswassa and Z.
Zalloua (eds), Torture: Power, Democracy and the Human Body, Seattle and Walla Walla:
University of Washington Press in association with Whitman College, 2012. A
version of Chapter 5 was presented as a keynote address, ‘Anatomies of Torture:
CIA Black Sites and Redacted Bodies,’ at the Association of Law, Culture and the
Humanities annual conference, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA, March
2011; a version of Chapter 1 was presented as a keynote address, ‘Biopolitical
Caesura of Citizenship and Hierarchies of Life,’ at the Postcolonial Studies
Research Network annual conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, New
Zealand, 28 November 2011.
Introduction
Useless suffering
A cross the corpus of offi cial texts – memos, legal briefs and doctrines – produced
post-9/11 by the United States government in order to legitimate and justify the
torture it infl icted on its various victims, torture is invariably situated as produc-
tive: of truth, knowledge and the prevention of prospective violence and terror.
Torture emerges in these texts as redeemable by what one could perversely term
its ‘exchange’ value: situated in an economy of violently unequal relations of
power, the state imposes a price on its withholding of pain from the detainee in
exchange for ‘high value’ information. This coding of torture in terms of its
exchange value is predicated on the insertion of torture within a calculative
economy in which the pain of the other is commodifi ed and, as transpired at
Guantánamo, duly quantifi ed in terms of its equivalence to a range of quotidian
commodities, including a toothbrush, a McDonald’s Happy Meal or a Twinkie.
The virulent reach of the instrumentalizing logic of the market into every recess of
life is perhaps best exemplifi ed by this ultimate commodifi cation of the other’s
pain. Here the corrosive logic of capital coolly inserts the detainee’s quotient of
pain into an exchange economy that holds the promise for the transubstantiation
of their suffering into the generic product of a multinational hamburger chain if
the prisoner agrees to ‘co-o perate.’ In the context of this market-o riented economy
of torture, the term ‘interrogation’ is dropped, as was ordered by a former CIA
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and replaced by the term ‘Human
Resource Exploitation.’ 1 The body of the detainee becomes, in this economy of
torture, yet another resource that can be mined and exploited for ‘high value’
information or data.
I n keeping with the logic of the market, the US government also outsourced
torture to private contractors in its waging of the war on terror. As I discuss
1 Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General, ‘Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and
Interrogation Activities (September 2001–October 2003) (2003-7123-IG),’ 7 May 2004, p. 9, fi le://
Users/Joseph/Downloads/The%20CIA%201&20Report%20on%20Torture_%20What%20
were%20they%20%hiding.webarchive.
2 State Violence and the Execution of Law
in some detail in the chapters that follow, this resulted in a number of homicides.
In the system of equivalences that holds in this market economy, torture forfeits at
every turn the possibility of an ethical relation with the target of state violence;
rather, it installs itself on the very absence of the ethical, on the reduction of the
other to a mere resource that can be exploited, and on the purchase of state secu-
rity through the exercise of instrumentalized violence. In the face of the social,
legal and ethical prohibitions against torture, to declare its production as ‘useful’
works to recode it as somehow necessary to the protection of what was putatively
at risk and that will now be surely safeguarded: the nation’s security, liberty and
sovereignty. As such, torture and other forms of state violence function to fulfi ll a
set of biopolitical operations. In my use of the Foucauldian term ‘biopolitics,’ I
refer to the state’s political power ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.’ 2
The regimes of torture and state violence that I examine in the chapters that
follow pivot on this critical biopolitical matrix of power, bodies, life and death.
In contradistinction to the revalorization and legitimation of torture as ‘useful,’
as occurred under the regime of the US government’s Torture Memos, throughout
the course of this book I view torture as a form of u seless suffering. ‘Useless suffering,’
writes Emmanuel Levinas, ‘results from an excess, a “too much”.’ 3 This excess is
marked by the unassumability of the ‘too much’: excess to what can be humanly
borne, the pain of the torture victim breaches the borders and limits of what can
possibly be synthesized and even minimally recuperated. As suffering experienced
at the very limits of the assumable, it collapses the captive body into submission,
‘even a submission to the submitting, since the “content” of which the aching
consciousness is conscious is precisely this adversity of suffering, its hurt.’ 4 Levinas
writes that this moment of submission to the submitting is marked by ‘the i mpasse
of life and being, where pain does not come somehow innocently, “to color”
consciousness with affectivity.’ 5 Rather, its excess affectivity overrides conscious-
ness and the possibility of integrating this unbearable pain into the semblance of a
conscious, unitary subject: ‘Thus the least one can say about suffering is that in its
own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless, “for nothing”.’ 6 Levinas’ under-
scoring of the useless, ‘for nothing’ of suffering is emphatically reiterated by the
father of one of the tortured detainees who died at Guantánamo: ‘They practiced
every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result?
What facts did they fi nd? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They
accomplished nothing.’ 7
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction , London: Penguin, 1990, p. 138.
3 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering,’ in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), T he Provocation
of Levinas: Rethinking the Other , New York and London: Routledge, 1988, p. 156.
4 Ibid., p. 157.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 157–8.
7 Quoted in Scott Horton, ‘The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the
Whistle,’ Harpers , March 2010, http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-9000638.