In his book \u2018Discipline and Punish\u2019 Michel Foucault placed the relation of physical torture to subsequent non-violent strategies of social coercion, \u2018scientific\u2019 social control like Jeremy Bentham\u2019s \u2018reformist\u2019 prison and highly structured schooling. In Foucault\u2019s telling sovereign \/ state torture developed as a mode of social suasion, as the relation of particular acts to state \/ sovereign prerogative. As expression of political power social coercion, including torture, defines the relation of sovereign to subjects, state to citizens, torturer to the tortured and controller to the controlled. \u2018Official\u2019 torture is one aspect of the physical expression of the state\u2019s relation to those in its realm of control. This view relates police repression and mass incarceration in the U.S. to treatment of those tortured and murdered at U.S. direction overseas.<\/p>\n
By invoking the attacks of September 11, 2001 to justify the tiny fraction<\/a>of torture at U.S. hands \u2018disclosed\u2019 in the Senate torture report<\/a> the American leadership continues to frame the relation of state power to its expression as one of mutual interest, as protector to the protected. As a self-identified defender of democracy George W. Bush demonstrated his contempt for democratic rule by lying his way into a war that he had determined to launch within days of taking office. The use value of 9\/11 for his administration was in creating a nebulous \u2018enemy\u2019 that was used opportunistically to promote elite interests. And for context, 3,000 people died tragically on 9\/11 and between 210,000 and 440,000 die<\/a>every year from preventable medical errors. The \u2018protective\u2019 response to these wildly asymmetrical outcomes would be to defund the NSA and CIA and redirect the funds to healthcare.<\/p>\n Torture as a mode of operational expediency, the \u2018ticking time bomb\u2019 scenario of American fantasy, isn\u2019t judicial, the state\u2019s claimed right to punish proscribed acts, because no crime has been committed until the hypothesized bomb has gone off. This logic of torture as \u2018prevention\u2019 is simple restatement of the Cold War frame of U.S. military aggression as defense against this or that manufactured threat. And in fact, as with theNSA\u2019s empty claims<\/a> that its domestic surveillance programs prevented attacks, when invited to defend torture as \u2018prevention\u2019 no credible threats were found<\/a>, even within the thin purview of the Senate torture report. And the genesis and persistence of conspiracy theories around 9\/11 are in part attributable to the overwhelming volume of actionable warnings<\/a> that preceded the attacks that the Bush administration failed to act on.<\/p>\n