Description
In spring 2003, following the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, thought to be the “mastermind” behind Al Qaeda’s September 11th attacks, official discourse on the treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror” underwent a peculiar shift. Since late 2001, the question of whether the U.S. would, or should, use torture on suspected terrorists had been a consistent undercurrent of public debate. Yet while the official line was consistently one of denial, from spring 2003 we begin to see a rather curious intermixing of acknowledgements of torture-like practices, including sleep deprivation, light deprivation, and the temporary withholding of food, water, and medical attention, even as these practices were painted as “legal” and even “humane”, and certainly not “torture”. This paper thus analyzes the overlap and coexistence of two seemingly contradictory threads of discourse: one in which “harsh” and “aggressive” techniques are openly acknowledged, alongside another in which the U.S. insists that it is respectful of human rights and certainly would never engage in “torture”, aiming to explain how “denial” and “acknowledgement” may not be mutually exclusive, and may even co-construct one another.
