Between Two Deaths: The Culture of Torture Slavoj Zizek
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The contrast between what happened latterly at Abu Ghraib and the 'standard' way prisoners were tortured during Saddam's regime is striking. Instead of the direct, brutal infliction of pain, the US soldiers focused on psychological humiliation. And instead of the secrecy practised by Saddam, the US soldiers recorded the humiliation they inflicted, even including their own faces smiling stupidly as they posed behind the twisted naked bodies of the prisoners. When I first saw the notorious photograph of a prisoner wearing a black hood, electric wires attached to his limbs as he stood on a box in a ridiculous theatrical pose, my reaction was that this must be a piece of performance art. The positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a tableau vivant, which cannot but call to mind the 'theatre of cruelty', Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, scenes from David Lynch movies.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar photographs in the US press whenever an initiation rite goes wrong in an army unit or on a high school campus and soldiers or students die or get injured in the course of performing a stunt, assuming a humiliating pose or undergoing sexual humiliation.
This, then, was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people. The Iraqi prisoners were effectively being initiated into American culture: they were getting a taste of the obscenity that counterpoints the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, that on 6 May, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that these particular photographs were just the 'tip of the iceberg', that there are stronger things to come, including videos of rape and murder. In early 2003, the US government, in a secret memo, approved a set of procedures to put prisoners in the 'war on terror' under physical and psychological pressure in order to secure their 'co-operation'. The 'excess' at Abu Ghraib is the reality behind Rumsfeld's statement, a couple of months ago, that the Geneva Convention is 'out of date'.
In a recent NBC debate about the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, one of the arguments used in ethico-legal justification of their status was that 'they are those who were missed by the bombs.' Since they were the target of legitimate US bombings in Afghanistan and accidentally survived, no one can complain about what happens to them afterwards as prisoners: whatever their situation, it is better than being dead.
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http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/23/8774033