{"id":1630754,"date":"2024-04-26T05:55:34","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T05:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=319934"},"modified":"2024-04-26T05:55:34","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T05:55:34","slug":"carceral-imperialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/04\/26\/carceral-imperialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Carceral Imperialism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by Justin Norman.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cTo this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me\u2026 The time I spent in Abu Ghraib \u2014 it ended my life. I\u2019m only half a human now.\u201d\u00a0That\u2019s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli\u00a0had to say<\/a>\u00a0about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003.\u00a0In the wake of his release, al-Majli has\u00a0continued to suffer\u00a0<\/a>a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.<\/p>\n

He was never even charged with a crime \u2014 not exactly surprising, given the\u00a0Red Cross\u2019s estimate<\/a>\u00a0that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country\u2019s War on Terror.<\/p>\n

The Abu Ghraib \u201cScandal\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

On April 28th, 2004, CBS News\u2019s\u00a060 Minutes<\/em>\u00a0aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a\u00a0black-hooded prisoner<\/a>\u00a0being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a\u00a0pyramid-like structure<\/a>; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being\u00a0threatened with a dog<\/a>. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.<\/p>\n

Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word \u201cscandal\u201d still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government\u00a0provide any compensation<\/a>\u00a0or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon\u00a0released a plan<\/a>\u00a0to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 \u2014\u00a0Al Shimari v. CACI \u2014<\/em>\u00a0brought\u00a0on behalf of<\/a>\u00a0three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI\u2019s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial \u2014 the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees \u2014\u00a0finally began<\/a>\u00a0in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.<\/p>\n

The Road to Abu Ghraib<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201dMy impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture\u2026 And therefore, I\u2019m not going to address the \u2018torture\u2019 word.\u201d So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush\u2019s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their \u201cGlobal War on Terror,\u201d but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.<\/p>\n

As Vian Bakir argued in her book\u00a0Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles<\/em><\/a>, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing \u201cevidence\u201d of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.<\/p>\n

Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, \u201cThe Road to Abu Ghraib<\/a>,\u201d noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to \u201csoften up\u201d detainees, and took a \u201csee no evil, hear no evil,\u201d approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A\u00a0memorandum<\/a>\u00a0from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn\u2019t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo,\u00a0argued that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cphysical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.\u201d Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a\u00a0television interview<\/a>, they \u201cdid not apply precisely\u201d in Iraq.<\/p>\n

In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: \u201cBetween October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had\u00a0issued multiple warnings<\/a>\u00a0that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Simulating Atonement<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and \u201cequally sorry that people who\u2019ve been seeing those pictures didn\u2019t understand the true nature and heart of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

As scholar Ryan Shepard\u00a0pointed out<\/a>, Bush\u2019s behavior was a classic case of \u201csimulated atonement,\u201d aimed at offering an \u201cappearance of genuine confession\u201d while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an \u201capologia\u201d for what happened \u2014 two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.<\/p>\n

In each case, the president\u00a0also responsible<\/a>\u00a0for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guant\u00e1namo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.<\/p>\n

In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib \u2014 investigations and justice \u2014 would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein\u2019s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard\u00a0put it<\/a>, \u201caccept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush\u2019s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America\u2019s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.<\/p>\n

Weapons of American Imperialism<\/strong><\/p>\n

On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his \u201cfellow citizens.\u201d He opened by\u00a0saying that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cAmerican and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.\u201d The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would \u201cwitness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had\u00a0spent months building support<\/a>. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an \u201caxis of evil\u201d and a country that \u201ccontinues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.\u201d Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam\u2019s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn\u2019t and he knew it.) If that wasn\u2019t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0that it \u201caids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d\u00a017 times in his speech<\/a>, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had \u201cno ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.<\/p>\n

When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein\u2019s portrait with a sign that said, \u201cAmerica is the friend of all Iraqis.\u201d To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0his essay<\/a>\u00a0\u201cAbu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,\u201d Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that \u201cthe Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a project of American post-9\/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism \u2014 an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I\u2019m discussing as \u201cprison imperialism<\/a>.\u201d) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison<\/a>\u00a0in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)<\/p>\n

Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice<\/strong><\/p>\n

What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it\u2019s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.<\/p>\n

One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben\u2019s\u00a0Homo Sacer<\/em><\/a>, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life:\u00a0zoe<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0bios<\/em>.\u00a0Zoe<\/em>\u00a0refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while\u00a0bios<\/em>\u00a0refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to\u00a0bios<\/em>, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.<\/p>\n

Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has\u00a0not<\/a>\u00a0ended. They continue to haunt me \u2014 and other Muslims and Arabs \u2014 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.<\/p>\n

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib\u2019s survivors, as witnesses \u2013 even distant ones \u2014 to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It\u2019s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture \u2014 extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.<\/p>\n

Two decades after those photos were released, what\u2019s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make \u2014 whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.<\/p>\n

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The post Carceral Imperialism<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me\u2026 The time I spent in Abu Ghraib \u2014 it ended my life. I\u2019m only half a human now.\u201d\u00a0That\u2019s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli\u00a0had to say\u00a0about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Carceral Imperialism<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4819,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4819"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1630754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1630755,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630754\/revisions\/1630755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1630754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1630754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1630754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}