The Pornography of Violence: Tales of Truth and Torture at Abu Ghraib

-- Vasuki Nesiah

“People can die from an excessive dose of truth”

Gerardo Escobar, Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman

Paulina Escobar, a survivor of torture, of rape, continues to seek justice fifteen years after the event.   Her country has emerged from a dark period of terror and her husband, Gerardo is tipped to head the truth commission being set up by the new regime in the context of the transition.  Yet, an accidental encounter with the very man who once tortured her gives the possibility of exacting some form of justice for what he did to her.  Yet is he the same man?  Is he her former perpetrator or her new victim?  What is truth here?

Escobar, a protagonist in Ariel Dorfman’s play, Death and the Maiden, refuses her husband’s concerns that her approach to justice is compromising the man’s right to due process - she challenges law’s ability to identify perpetrators – attentive to the ‘truths’ elided in law’s adjudication of the tortured body.   The week after the Abu Ghraib story broke on CBS, President Bush urged that "Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer exist, mass graves are no longer a possibility in Iraq.” [i]   Today even Bush has retracted from this position; thus this is not the terrain of truth and torture that most concerns us at this point.

Rather, like Paulina Escobar we want to dwell on the fraught terrain entailed in the ‘production’ of truth – today, in the wake of ‘Abu Ghraib’, we want to scrutinize the forms of knowledge regarding ‘torture’ that we rely on in speaking of what the law adjudicates or what the photographs reveal.  “The photographs tell it all” says Seymour Hersch, writing in the The New Yorker about torture at Abu Ghraib. [ii]   But what is it that they tell?  What is the truth that they record and reveal?  When the pictures of torture were leaked, was the American media’s shock at the flouting of the Geneva Conventions, the shock at the horrific torture at Abu Ghraib, also evidence of the normalization of empire’s horrors outside its walls? 

Yet - there are no calls for congressional inquiries into the US government’s responsibility for destroying access to water and vaccines.  Photographs of sewage in the Tigris and malnutritioned Iraqis are not front page news day after day.  There are no home videos of destroyed electricity plants and water pipelines.

Does our absorption with the brutalities of torture narrow our gaze to a few of empire’s inhumanities to release space for others to flourish unseen?  Proximate violence eliding collateral violence?  On the one hand, the expose of torture at Abu Ghraib was absolutely critical to mobilizing critical scrutiny on the Defense Department’s interrogation tactics.  On the other, the ‘scene of the crime’ purchase of the torture photographs delimited the truth they revealed; a truth whose gist seems to be - fire rumsfiled, photocopy the genocide convention and raze Abu Ghraib to the ground as the quick fix route to redemption - pressing the point that empire’s ‘truths’ can help mask empire’s lies.

This is not to say that torture is easily disjoined from empire.  Rather, torture is inserted into the logic of empire in complex ways.  As noted above, torture normalizes resource exploitation and structural domination by presenting as hyperbolically ‘abnormal’ – but torture may also enable domination through the spectacle of dehumanization, the performative demonstration as it were of how a subject population is the object of empire’s will and whims.  As many have commented the home porno quality of the photograph of a clean faced white American girl’s amused disdain for Iraqi male genitals seduced and repelled the US media to soon become the iconic representation of what went on at Abu Ghraib.  The racial and gender dynamics in the reversal of the traditional tropes of imperial conquest (i.e. of the white male gaze on a colored female body) may have itself underscored the spectacle of domination - the visual castration of Iraq.

Of course torture is not the only modality for demonstrating and enacting imperial relationships in Iraq – there are also uniforms and flags at checkpoints, the awarding of contracts and the toppling of statutes, the dropping of cluster bombs and the driving of humvees.  As with these performative enactments, rather than an aberration, torture is continuous with the logic of empire – simultaneously, the enabling theater of imperial domination, and its product.  Torture literally inscribes conquest onto the body in ways that are linked in complex ways to the figurative inscription of conquest on to the body politic.

Ironically, of course this is essentially the defense of the soldiers now being charged for their role in events at Abu Ghraib.  The US soldier who smiled for the camera in pic after pic of post-torture revelry in Abu Ghraib, has protested charges against her citing the seamless flow from conquest over the enemy – to hunting them down – softening them up – interrogating them - getting information that will provide ammunition for hunting again – following orders, knitting the system together.  Where liberals are shocked that such depravity could prevail, the soldiers charged with depravity make the more structurally critical and subversive argument that it’s not about a few errant soldiers but about what it takes to serve the ends of empire!

Iraq has of course never been a passive receptacle of domination.  Whether the currency of brutality is capital or cluster bombs, from the folds and creases of a beaten, bullied, brutalized body politic, practices of resistance have emerged – some times protesting domination and asserting dignity – at other times, protesting domination, but itself also presenting the echo of empire’s abuses.  Seldom able to reclaim a sustainable space for justice – at least thus far.  Echoes here of how Geraldo seems to see Paulina’s single minded pursuit of justice as lawless, mad, hysterical – both demonstrating the truth about the reach of torture, and living with the fraught domain of justice beyond her grasp. 

Photography and law have worked as interweaving threads in the discretion of Abu Ghraib in the US – sometimes invoking the language of justice but always stopping short of it.  Photographs of the flouting of law catalyzed protest, but also presented a truncated fast consumed truth about the picture of brutality; as the photographs proliferated and military trials were set up, torture fatigue is setting in and broader truths are crawling under the rule of law.  In establishing the ground for living with our torturers, the law’s adjudication of the ‘truth’ we garner from those photographs delivers more to consolidation of the new regime, than to justice for its victims.  Rumsfield even advances the trials of these soldiers in Iraq as allowing the US to demonstrate the superiority of its system; thus the spectacle of the trial allows even tortures reverberations to be wrapped in a flag. 

George Bush suggests that the US will remedy the abuses of Abu Ghraib by razing it to the ground; removing it from our gaze.  In some future tomorrow there will be no evidence, no reminders – the past is another country; We will create a new landscape.  Did torture really happen?  Was there ever such a place of horror?  What was the system that spawned such evil?  As Paulina Escobar’s husband grills her on how sure she is of the truth - Is that man the perpetrator?  How do you know?  He urges Paulina to turn away from the past, raze it to the ground; curb the preoccupation with justice and focus on establishing civic trust in the new order.   The Escobars are caught between what Geradro calls “excessive truth” (we know so much about torture at Abu Ghraib.) and lack of truth (torture at Abu Ghraib. is not the story).  We have lost our landmarks.  Does torture reach out to trigger a madness that makes it difficult to know the difference between truth – and its other?

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