This chapter is the first of two which deal with representations of political torture in the context of the post-9/11 Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Originally known as Operation Infinite Justice and later officially renamed Operation Enduring Freedom, the GWOT is most clearly manifested in the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003;
however, it is also an inclusive umbrella term for counterterrorism operations carried out by the US and its allies against al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups in many locations worldwide.1 As I established in the Introduction to this thesis, due to the allegations of prisoner abuse and torture by the US military and their allies, this set of military operations sparked a debate about whether it was ever appropriate for a liberal democracy to torture.
The texts read in this chapter engage significantly with this debate, embodying what can be schematically summarised as both the pro-torture and the anti-torture positions.
Through its adoption of the ticking bomb scenario as the narrative frame for its televisual counterterrorism drama, I argue, 24 normalises and justifies torture. The series adds to the construction of a field of intelligibility in which the panoptic and violent military discourse of counterterrorism dictates the terms in which the global interactions represented by the GWOT are understood; a utilitarian justification of torture is readily legible in this text. On the other hand, my reading of Rendition both demonstrates the ways that anti-torture politics have been mobilised culturally and demonstrates the limitations that are built into certain discourses; I argue that many anti-torture texts fail to argue their points convincingly in important respects – particularly with regard to an insufficient engagement with utilitarianism – and that Rendition is an important example of these limitations because it fails adequately to reframe the field of intelligibility through which torture is discussed. Whereas 24 and Rendition to some extent represent the two adversarial positions in the torture debate, Standard Operating Procedure broadens the frame through which it is possible to critique torture through its emphasis both on the concentrationary nature of GWOT torture and its emphasis on
1 For a comprehensive new account of the full extent of the GWOT, which includes – in addition to the more or less conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – targeted assassinations, torture, drone strikes, the financial support of warlords, and other clandestine operations across the world, see Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013).
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compassion for the participants in torture. Although the discourse of GWOT counterterrorism projects an image of global justice, its underlying reality is of a biopolitical policing paradigm at once colonial and concentrationary. Accordingly, this chapter discusses the relationship that these texts have with the notion of the political exception: the way they invoke, naturalise, critique, challenge or expose it. Central again are the notions of truth and realism: 24 naturalises its politics through its aesthetic-political truth-claims, Rendition aims to expose the “truth” of GWOT torture policy, in part through its realist aesthetic strategies, and Standard Operating Procedure performs a sustained critique of the notion of visual authenticity as part of its critique of the field of intelligibility in which the post-9/11 torture debate is discursively framed.
4.1: The Post-9/11 Centurion: 24 Day Two (2002-3)
This section of the chapter discusses the second season of Fox TV’s counterterrorism drama 24. As I establish in the Introduction, this chapter focuses on this particular season because it was the first written and produced after 9/11, and as such is a particularly rich resource of representations, rhetorics and ideas that were current in the initial stages of the GWOT. The plot, which is very elaborate, can be schematically summarised as follows: an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group called Second Wave smuggles a nuclear weapon into the US, and although the bomb is discovered by the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) it cannot be defused, so it is detonated over desert in order that fewer people will suffer. In the second half of the season, the characters attempt to uncover who is ultimately responsible for the bomb, and it emerges that a secret cabal of US oil interests has masterminded the terrorist plot in order to precipitate a retaliatory war in the Middle East; through the investigatory work of CTU and Jack Bauer, such a war is averted. My readings of this text focus on three key areas. Firstly, I argue that its representation of torture as a utilitarian emergency tactic can be understood as a new iteration of the normalisation and justification of political torture seen in my reading of Lartéguy’s The Centurions in the previous chapter: torture is represented as an invaluable tool in the counterterrorist policing process. Secondly, I argue that its framing of Islam as the source of terrorist violence is a reiteration of the colonial racisms discussed previously in this thesis: as well as echoing and amplifying more general Islamophobic attitudes, the representation of Muslim characters as ungrievable enemy ciphers or as suspicious double agents echoes and amplifies their cultural representation as such in texts such as Lost Command. Finally, I read the reception of the text in broader political
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discourse; I argue that much like The Centurions became embedded in military thinking and education, 24 has a significant afterlife in the self-perception of military and intelligence services operating in real counterterrorism work, the effects of which contribute to the normalisation of torture.
4.1.1: The Exception
My tripartite reading of the state of exception, elaborated in Chapter Two, serves as a structuring principle for this first section. Firstly, as Anne Caldwell & Samuel Chambers note, a state of terrorism-induced emergency persists throughout 24; they write that the second series “begins in a state of exception” which “never disappears”.2 This state of exception is used to justify the use of extralegal violence, including torture, in the emergency situations that the focalising counterterrorist characters encounter. This state of legal exception does not correspond to any real-world exceptionality and is never explicitly theoretically elaborated: it is merely established (and consistently reiterated) that extreme violences and infringements of human rights and civil liberties can be justified through simple reference to necessity and emergency. As well as its concerns with sovereignty and exceptionality, 24 also inherits the most important of Lartéguy’s specific narrative devices:
the ticking bomb scenario is the central dramatic device that animates 24. The first scene of 24’s second season is a graphic representation of torture which produces information later described as of “extremely high credibility” and which provides the premise for the remainder of the series: the bomb will be detonated “today”.3 As well as suggesting that torture provides unambiguous and reliably actionable evidence, this scene provides the catalyst for the series’ ticking bomb situation – the Americans now know that there is a nuclear device in Los Angeles the detonation of which, a worst case analysis forecasts, could result in two and a half million fatalities, with a probability of detonation calculated to be 89-93%. This is clearly a national security emergency, and for the characters of 24, it constitutes a state of exception. Much as Boisfeuras draws on Koestler’s quotation of Pastor’s paraphrase of Nieheim to argue that a crisis over the sovereignty of the colonial territory “sanctifies all means”, the characters in 24 constantly refer to this established state of exceptional necessity
2 Anne Caldwell & Samuel A Chambers, “24 After 9/11: The American State of Exception” in Reading 24: TV Against the Clock, ed. by Steven Peacock (London: I. B. Taurus, 2007), pp. 102-103.
3 24, Season Two, Episode One, dir. Jon Cassar (Fox TV, 2002).
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in order to justify their actions.4 For example, in episode eight, Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) and his boss George Mason (Xander Berkely) briefly discuss the parameters of permissible force. “Just tell me how hard I can push him,” begins Almeida, to which George replies, “As hard as you have to. Stick bamboo shoots under their fingernails. Get what they got. Time’s running out.”5 Although in this instance torture does not eventuate, the principle that George establishes is that in urgent situations where the stakes are high, time is limited, and information is crucial, violence against prisoners is the least worst option. In my readings below, I will address the ways that this is connected in the show both to utilitarian decisions about the necessity of torture and to the role of the unitary executive – that is, to the right of the sovereign to the absolute decision.
Secondly, in terms of the spatial exception, two aspects of the show’s narrative conceit are significant. Almost all of the action takes place in city situations: Los Angeles is the main metropolitan centre, although other cities (Visalia, for example) are involved at various moments in the show. Torture is conceptualised as a battlefield policing decision that can occur at any place and time, and this framing of torture situations, which has significant inheritances from Counterrevolutionary War Theory, returns us to the definition of the police elaborated in the previous chapter as the agency in which sovereign violence is most visible.
The second aspect of this non-specific spatial location is that it masks the reality of the American counterterrorism torture that was actually occurring at the time: by removing torture from its institutional context and framing it as a battlefield expedient, it masks the nature of the concentrationary archipelago in which much US torture takes place. As Athey remarks, in the early years of the torture debate, “[h]ypothetical torture became a big story when actual violations went unreported.”6 The transfer of torture from realistic political contexts and into depoliticised and dramatically rewarding contexts, I argue, is one of the most effective strategies through which torture is made to seem morally permissible and militarily necessary.
Thirdly, the biopolitical dimension of the exception is the victim of torture, the person who is placed outside of the law in order that torture may be performed upon them. In 24, the biopolitical decision on who qualifies for this treatment is determined by whether they can be identified as a terrorist or as associated with terrorism. Once anyone is identified as a
4 Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes From The Close of the Middle Ages, ed. by Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, Sixth Edition, Volume One (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company, 1938 [1906]), p.
194.
5 24, Season Two, Episode Eight, dir. James Whitmore, Jr. (Fox TV, 2002).
6 Stephanie Athey, “Rethinking Torture’s Dark Chamber”, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 20 (2008), p. 13.
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terrorist, they are identified as a person against whom violence is not only legitimate but required; read in Agamben’s terms, thus terrorist is “included in the community in the form of being able to be killed.”7 Any violent intervention is authorised against this person: their actions have to be prevented, and if surveillance and capture are not enough, then killing and torture are logical and permitted steps.
Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, discussed above, is also relevant here. Her argument is that pro-war media discourses dehumanise enemy populations, with the result that they are often not conceived of as fully human. They are, consequently, not seen as
“grievable”, which means that their deaths do not register as significant deaths. The ideological and representational mechanisms through which populations become understood as ungrievable facilitate the popular acceptance of the political mechanisms through which people are removed from the legal protections associated with citizenship. Many of the terrorists in 24 are Muslims, so there is clearly a connection to the media apparatus that seeks to make distant Muslim populations suspicious and ungrievable and to make American Muslims seem a source of threat. Peter Morey writes that in 24, “‘Americanness’ and American values are distinguished from those of the villains via a process of racialisation wherein all threatening elements become, in a sense, ‘Muslimised’ – expelled from the bosom of the nation which is here conceived as an extension of the white, blond, Protestant family.”8 Although Morey is right, antagonists come in a multiplicity of forms in 24, and are not reducible to Islamic terrorism; the category of “terrorist” is more inclusive than this suggests, as non-Muslim characters are also subjected to torture for their roles in the terrorist plot of season two of 24. In what follows I will read the way that Islam is represented as a source of threat and the way that a certain conception of motiveless and irrational terrorism is made to dovetail with it, but I will also argue that the mechanisms through which characters are made available to torture are not limited to this racialised suspicion. Compassion for torture victims does not appear in 24 – the text is resistant to any Levinasian reading, because a central logic on which it relies is that terrorists deserve torture.
7 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998 [1995]), p. 82.
8 Peter Morey, “Terrorvision: Race, Nation and Muslimness in Fox’s 24”, Interventions, 12: 2 (2010), p. 255.
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There are many torture scenarios in this season of 24; here I discuss three of them. In the first, 24’s American President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) directly orders the torture of a senior member of his staff – the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), Roger Stanton (Harris Yulin) – in order to make him reveal details of a conspiracy to usurp the Presidency.
Across three episodes, an ex-CIA operative conducts electrotorture using a medical defibrillator, and once the resistance of the NSA chief is broken through force the President conducts a verbal interrogation which reveals details of this conspiracy.9 Significantly, this later becomes one of the grounds on which his cabinet attempt to remove him from office, but he is ultimately vindicated for his use of torture through a utilitarian demonstration of its positive results.10 Stanton reveals information that allows the narrative to proceed – including corroboration of the location of the bomb – and which is demonstrated through the progression of the plot to be true.11
The importance of decisive leadership is a major theme in 24. The nature of Presidential authority in particular is thoroughly addressed, and torture by direct Presidential command is a clear example of this theme. Sovereignty is again what is at stake: the President directly orders violence as a strategy for retaining his hold on his position of power.
This also clearly invokes the discourse of the untouchable unitary executive. After 9/11, central members of the Bush Administration such as Vice President Dick Cheney and his aide David Addington significantly expanded presidential authority and modified the extent to which the President could make unilateral security decisions. Scahill writes that Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted the American presidency to operate as “a national security dictatorship, accountable only to its own concepts of what was best for the country.”12 As observed above, the Bush White House took significant influence from Carl Schmitt’s theories of decisionistic sovereignty and sovereign violence, and in 24 we can observe a similar – although never explicitly theorised – model of sovereignty. The show takes the principle of the unitary executive to an extreme and shows the President directly ordering the application of sovereign violence in the form of torture. It is also significant that the victim of torture here is a middle-aged white man, and not a Muslim terrorist – the show
9 24, Season Two, Episodes Eleven, dir Frederick K. Keller, Twelve, dir. Frederick K. Keller, and Thirteen, dir.
Jon Cassar (Fox TV, 2002).
10 24, Season Two, Episode Twenty-one, dir. Ian Toynton (Fox TV, 2002).
11 24, Season Two, Episode Thirteen.
12 Schahill, Dirty Wars, p. 9.
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is inclusive with regard to who it will make available to torture violence, and whilst this may function to obscure that this violence often functions in a very racialised way, it actually reveals a more authoritarian and indiscriminate logic of violent securitisation: anybody can deserve torture.
The second scene occurs in episode twelve, which dramatises the use of torture to address a ticking bomb scenario. Syed Ali (Francesco Quinn), the member of Second Wave responsible for detonating the bomb, is apprehended during a raid on a mosque. Ali proves resistant to physical force; as a last resort Jack stages the mock execution of one of Ali’s sons. This mixture of physical and psychological torture makes Ali relinquish the information, which leads other CTU agents to uncover the bomb. The procedural logic demonstrates the ticking bomb argument stage by stage: CTU apprehend the terrorist, and through the controlled application of force, they avert the destruction of Los Angeles. 24 uses a clear narrativisation of the ticking timebomb scenario to make the argument that torture works as a counterterrorism tool. The notion of necessity that fuels the ticking bomb scenario also fuels 24: the choices of CTU and Jack in particular are, as Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan write, “inevitably justified by results”.13 As necessity is frequently invoked as a foundation to the state of exception, it is used in 24 as a short-circuit argument to justify acts of exceptional violence.
Attempting to defuse criticism for the show’s representation of torture, from writers such as Jane Mayer, for example, executive producer and writer Evan Katz describes the use of torture in 24 as “a narrative device” rather than an ethical engagement with or an exploration of any related politics.14 Katz claims that he doesn’t believe that the show condones torture because when deploying it as narrative strategy the writers “deal in very clear cut black and white decision points that don’t exist in real life.”15 However, it is not the specific content of 24’s torture scenes that is problematic, it is the underlying functional logic: torture is represented as an unpleasant yet effective tool, so it is exactly this utilisation of torture as a narrative device that constitutes the ethical failure in 24. Much like the scenes in The Centurions in which torture plays an abhorrent yet necessary investigative role, there
13 Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan, “‘Tell me where the bomb is or I will kill your son’: Situational Morality on 24” in Reading 24: TV Against the Clock, ed. by Steven Peacock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 120.
14 Jane Mayer, critiqued the show’s representation of torture in “Letter From Hollywood: Whatever it Takes:
The Politics of the Man Behind 24”, The New Yorker (19/02/2007), available at
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all (accessed 22/12/2008). Evan Katz responded obliquely to it in 24 Season Six: Inside the Writers’ Room prod. Jill Hoppenheim [no director credited] (Sparkhill Productions, 2007).
15 Katz, speaking in 24 Season Six: Inside the Writers’ Room.
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is in 24 a demonstrated evidential trail in which torture provides decisive information that could not be gleaned any other way. It may be unpleasant – for example, Kate Warner (Sarah Wynter), a civilian aiding the investigation, is visibly disgusted by the mock executions – but the clear message is that its use-value overrides such considerations. Here we also see the way that 24 attempts to defuse deontological objections to torture: nobody claims that it is a good thing, merely that it is the least worst option in a lose-lose situation.
The third scenario I address is one in which Jack Bauer himself undergoes torture.16 He is tortured with a Taser, with an ammonia-soaked scalpel, a soldering iron, and a fictional
The third scenario I address is one in which Jack Bauer himself undergoes torture.16 He is tortured with a Taser, with an ammonia-soaked scalpel, a soldering iron, and a fictional