Description
This talk is based upon a chapter from a book project, which analyses how torture became “speakable” in the post-9/11 U.S. “war on terror.” The chapter investigates how torture “survived” its “disclosure” both as a set of practices, and as something that could be publicly acknowledged and defended. It analyses three “cases” of attempts to produce accountability for torture through truth-telling in the years following the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal: the (2005) nomination hearings of Alberto Gonzales; the (2007-8) debates over whether waterboarding is torture; and the (2014) publication of the Senate Subcommittee Report on Torture (the “Feinstein report”). Its analysis focuses upon the limits of truth-production as a strategy for the production of accountability, arguing that the “liberal opposition” were operating according to an outdated set of “rules of the game,” which presumed that telling the “truth” about torture would enable them to produce accountability. However, insofar as the Bush administration had already, before the Abu Ghraib scandal, acknowledged and defended many of the key components of the torture program, the power of truth-telling and exposure was undercut by torture’s status as a ‘public secret.’ Liberal torture opponents in the Senate and the media acted as if they were still playing a ritualized game in which state hypocrisy could be countered by valiant exposure of shameful secrets. Yet the Bush administration had moved on to a new game, in which they reshaped the epistemic terrain via strategic acknowledgement of “forbidden” practices. My argument is therefore not just that liberals continued to centre truth-production, but that they centred a particular practice and understanding of truth and how it functions, and thus failed to “reset” the permissibility of torture due to a failure to adapt to shifts in the “epistemic field” and the “rules of the game.”
