Blog #25: From Battlegrounds to Black Sites: Violence Unmasked
By Brooke
Reynolds
Ibn
al-Shaykh al-Libi was a Libyan man accused of running an Afghan training
camp at the inception
of the US “War on Terror.” Al-Libi
was arrested in 2001 in Afghanistan. He was originally held at Kandahar Airport.
Transferred to USS Bataan, a floating US prison ship. Transferred to CIA
prisons in Europe. Transferred to Egypt, tortured. Transferred to Mauritania,
tortured. Transferred to Morocco, tortured. Transferred to Jordan, tortured.
Transferred to “black sites” in Afghanistan. Five years later,
al-Libi was found dead in his cell in Abu Salim prison in Libya, apparently
of suicide.
We find ourselves today in a circumstance of genuine urgency. As this is
written, huge numbers of Muslim, Arab, Black and Latino communities are being
surveilled, incarcerated, abused and killed in a vast web of carceral techniques
aimed at controlling populations both physically and psychologically. Most
recently, the silence and rhetoric that surround US international involvement
obscure what is in fact the continued development of a global system of confinement
and control, as demonstrated by the ever-growing international network of
black-site, private, and proxy prisons that have been central to counterinsurgency
efforts in the War on Terror.
The urgency
of addressing and challenging this reality can be seen in the case of al-Libi
who spent nearly a decade being shuttled from
one prison
to another at the hands of the US and its allies, only to finally disappear
for good. In her book Time in the Shadows: Confinement and Counterinsurgency,
Laleh Khalili traces the basic relationship between the development of
techniques of mass carceral control—a relatively new phenomenon,
historically speaking—and colonialism. She sees the modern
establishment and use of prisons as fundamentally rooted in the need
to quell anti-colonial struggle;
when some of the first colonial prisons and containment villages began
to fill up, it was with revolutionaries, artists, and social groups
that were
perceived as a challenge to colonial control.
Khalili
identifies a shift away from reliance upon mass slaughter as a means of
control towards
one marked by techniques of confinement—and further,
that confinement was established and developed as an alternative to slaughter.
Battlefields gave way to prisons, war making became reframed as political
intervention, and the spectacle of death was transformed into sophisticated
and sprawling designs of social control and incarceration.
The rhetorical
backbone that has supported counterinsurgency efforts today presents
this shift as a sign of our civility, our commitment to
the principles
of freedom and civilization. We are told that modern forms of warfare
are more humane. That since we have “replaced killing,” we
are advanced. Let us take for instance Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp,
which welcomes its visitors
with a banner that reads: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The spread
of “civilization
and freedom” has indeed proven to be a very effective and lucrative
means of warfare. For the widespread violence that does occur is no
longer recognized as such, as we are convinced that we are simply no
longer
violent.
Khalili
argues that modern counterinsurgency relies heavily on law, using “legality” rather
than humanity as the yardstick of permissibility. The US legal system
has been a trusted ally to counterinsurgency efforts, for it is based
upon precedents
that include US colonial involvement in nearly every corner of the
world. Each of these encounters have been written into its laws,
many of which continue
to be upheld today.
Thus, even
that which is done under the auspices of the law in the modern context
is acting in adherence with laws that
also legalized
domination,
control, and exploitation of indigenous populations.
Where precedents
didn’t already create legal spaces for modern warfare,
language has proven to be a useful weapon in rewriting and underwriting
law to accommodate the perpetually changing needs of counterinsurgency.
By creating
indeterminate personal statuses and abstract titles of personhood,
powers have been able to apply whatever body of law they find most useful.
Unlawful
combatant, prisoner of war, criminal, insurgent, terrorist—the
vagueness of these newly legalized terms has meant that they
may be applied and revoked
at will, paving the way for legally-grounded lawlessness in which
very few personal protections are guaranteed. This has, in part,
made possible the
vast range of abuses carried out both extralegally and legally
against those arrested in the War on Terror.
The shift
that Khalili identifies is not only one of technique, but also of purpose.
She sees modern counterinsurgency as marked
by the
desire
not only
to eliminate “enemy populations,” but to break and
reshape them psychologically as well. Modern power operates so
as to apprehend not body,
heart and mind alike, and its sites have been host to numerous
programs of “reeducation” and “deradicalization.” Practiced
initially on Native Americans and Black people in the US, these
programs work to break and reshape individuals by experimentation
with different physical
and psychological techniques that subject them to a constant
process of detachment and reconstitution until the “perfect
subject”—ie,
a fully broken being—emerges.
In February
2013, inmates at Guantanamo Bay, a site that Khalili sees as the logical
conclusion
of liberal carceral control, undertook
an
indefinite hunger
strike. As of May 2013, more than 100 of the 166 inmates held
there are participating in the strikes, in protest against
the physical,
psychological
and legal
abuses that have characterized the camp since their incarceration
there. They are
resisting the quantification of their lives into bureaucratic
data, the silence that has shrouded their suffering from the
public eye,
the cruelties
endured,
and their denial of legal protections. Many are being force-fed
daily. Is this the face of our newfound humanity?
Laleh Khalili’s
research sheds much-needed light upon the shadowy spaces in
which modern liberal counterinsurgency projects operate, and
demonstrates
the new forms of violence and war making that are constantly
being imagined and practiced. We must recognize that carceral
techniques and mass slaughter
are different versions of similar state projects, and that
absence of the spectacle of bloodshed does not mean an absence
of violence. The modern emphasis on incarceration
and confinement must be conceptualized properly as machines
of modern war-making so that the violence which occurs in them
may emerge from the shadows.
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