Securing the Homeland: Torture, Preparedness, and the Right to Let Die

MODERN SECURITY REGIMES ARE DEFINED BY EXTREMES. PRACTICES OF SPYING, torture, indefinite detention, and preemptive war represent favored responses by the United States to the threats of insecurity introduced by terrorism. But insecurity as a unifying concept has expanded vitally since September 11, spreading into domains of public health and disaster management, among others. Interestingly, whether for the mitigation of potential terrorist threats, avian flu pandemics, or hurricanes, executive privilege and individual responsibility prevail as dominant framing mechanisms for necessary response. In addition, responses to insecurity are increasingly technologized and militarized, whether in the form of technological surveillance, command-and-control organizational structures, or pervasive cultures of secrecy. These are not simply discrete actions played out on the level of nation-state policy. Instead, the field for social practice and conceptions of appropriate governance are transforming rapidly in this climate of absolute threats. It is appropriate and necessary, therefore, to assess the implications of security regimes upon public institutions, modes of governance, and forms of life. This article begins this project by analyzing the discourses surrounding torture and disaster preparedness in the United States. Logics of Torture In the U.S.'s protracted "war on terror," politicians and the media have mobilized fear of devastating, indiscriminate attack upon civilian populations to justify extreme police actions and security operations, both within and beyond the country's borders. The suspension of law--or technically the movement of ethically ambiguous or morally reprehensible activities to zones outside legal jurisdiction--enables a false semblance of social order predicated upon universal rights, which still exist in principle, while obliterated in practice. The most disturbing incarnations of such extralegal zones are seen in the (almost invisible) practices of extraordinary rendition, or transfer of "enemy combatants" to prisons in countries where they are tortured in "black sites" (Cole, 2005). These are concentration "camps" in the deepest sense of the word: they strip away rights, knowledge, and humanity, reducing people to a state of "bare life" (Agamben, 1998), whereupon language, consciousness, and civilization cease to exist (Scarry, 1985). This should not be altogether surprising given the more-or-less visible legal and military strategies leading to such camps. The discourses surrounding the treatment of enemies in the "war on terror" reveal a great deal about the contemporary culture of control. The questions facing policymakers and security personnel include the messy particulars of sordid exceptions: What kinds of torture techniques are permissible, when, where, and applied to whom? Under what circumstances can we assassinate enemies, even if they are not in combat zones? Under what conditions can we detain individuals, perhaps indefinitely, without due process? These are some dominant questions in what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) would call the "universe of discourse." Such questions beg a set of meta-questions, however, that lie outside public debate: What does it mean that these are seen as the questions of today? What do they say about our values, the state of democracy, or our system of governance? What do they indicate about how we perceive and valuate others? How do they serve to rationalize historical and ongoing complicity in terrorist practices by nation-states? Unfortunately, root questions of this sort remain on the periphery of the universe of discourse when policymakers instead concern themselves with rationalizations for torture. The contours of the policy problems concerning the treatment of enemies in the "war on terror" are well defined in policy reports like Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror (Heymann and Kayyem, 2005). The content for this policy report was cultivated through "closed-door" conversations with notable advisors under the aegis of Harvard University's "Long-Term Legal Strategy Project for Preserving Security and Democratic Freedoms in the War on Terror. …