On Torture: Abu Ghraib
Jasbir K. Puar
The torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is neither exceptional nor singular, as
many—Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration, the U.S. military establishment, and even good liberals—would have us believe. We need think only of the fact
that so many soldiers facing prosecution for the Iraqi prisoner situation came from
prison guard backgrounds, reminding us of incarceration practices within the prison
industrial complex, not to mention the treatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli
army guards, or even the brutal sodomizing of Abner Louima by police officers in
New York City. Neither has it been possible to normalize the incidents at Abu Ghraib
as business as usual even within the torture industry. As public and governmental
rage alike made clear, a line had been crossed. Why that line is so demarcated at
the place of so-called sexual torture—specifically, violence that purports to mimic
sexual acts closely associated with deviant sexuality or sexual excess such as sodomy
and oral sex, as well as S/M practices of bondage, leashing, and hooding—and not,
for example, at the slow starvation of millions due to U.S. sanctions against Iraq, the
deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians since the U.S. invasion in April 2003, or the
plundering and carnage in Falluja, is indeed a spectacular question. The reaction
of rage, while to some extent laudable, misses the point entirely—or, perhaps more
generously, upstages a denial of culpability. The violence performed at Abu Ghraib
is not an exception to, nor an extension of, imperialist occupation. Rather, it works in
concert with proliferating modalities of force, an indispensable part of the so-called
shock-and-awe campaign blueprinted by Israelis on the backs of Palestinian corpses.
Bodily torture is but one element in a repertoire of techniques of occupation and
subjugation that include assassinations of top leaders, house-to-house roundups
Radical History Review
Issue 93 (Fall 2005): 13–38
Copyright 2005 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.
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