Presented at Cornell University
‘Logics of the Living’ Conference
October 12-14, 2007
“We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.” – Vice President Dick Cheney [1]
“It is as if investigation and punishment had become mixed.” – Michel Foucault [2]
As exergues, Vice President Cheney and Foucault’s quotes seem like good places to begin. That’s not to say that this confusion will be unraveled or become any more clear; there is still a chance that we will end up right where we began.
As I’m sure many of you are already aware, ghost detainee is a term for the unregistered prisoners held by the United States army at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison and other clandestine prison sites that have sprung up throughout Europe and the Middle East. To me, it is an unappeasable term that, on the one side, conjures the smooth and unforecasted movement of ghosts; or unpresent presences at the edges of perception. On the other, the detainee is an imprisoned and politicized body uniquely separated to become neither person nor convict. Together, these terms create a form of life that exists just outside the boundaries of visibility and prisoner of war status, and has come to exemplify some of the effects of the war on terror’s ability to decide on the state of exception.
The Taguba Report, otherwise known as ‘The Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade’, reported many breakdowns in the processing and accounting of prisoners in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, especially by the soldiers ordered with policing the Abu Ghraib prison. Of those, the report found “The 320th MP Battalion used a self-created ‘change sheet’ to document the transfer of a detainee from one location to another. […] At Abu Ghraib, this process would often take as long as 4 days to complete. The lag-time resulted in inaccurate detainee Internment Serial Number (ISN) counts, gross differences in the detainee manifest and the actual occupants of an individual compound, and significant confusion of the MP soldiers.” [3] Added to this, the report concluded, “the 800th MP Brigade have routinely helped persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees ‘ghost detainees.’ On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of ‘ghost detainees’ (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law (Annex 53).” [4] The precise description of the maneuver that the report refers to, as if it were a set of improvised skills or unpracticed movements, isolates the special circumstances and reverse engineers the process these detainees suffered. Yet it fails, perhaps neglects, to discuss the affects the it creates. Besides being in violation of international law and Army Doctrine, what other lines does this maneuver cross?
While staying with the military’s explanation of how the military police created a space of legal indeterminacy for prisoners, I want to include some thoughts on the ban (that is, being banned, banished, abandoned, or being labeled a bandit) in order to think through what we know about the ghost detainee as a sentence of mobile imprisonment. Closely linked to our idea of exile or political deportation, the ‘banned’ person is removed from one location and placed into another. The banned are removed from any legal protection but continue to be subjected to the legal structure that will not host them. This power to abandon is a penalty that ungrounds the banned person but it is also an admission, an admission that something cannot be digested by a social or national corpus. Forcing a separation of the bandit from a location is to show how the criminal actions as well as the criminal body are pushed out; a pushing to an outside where a presumed border marks an inside and outside, what is possible and not-possible. Said another way, and perhaps more clearly by Agamben, “What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured”. [5] For the detainee, being delivered over to this nebulous location is not just a legal indecision waiting for a resolution or a dispute over national boundaries. This is a unique case in which the punishment becomes the prisoner, literally written on to and ‘disappearing’ him.
The spatial component of the law, where a person is in relation to it, opens up an opportunity to think how the ghost detainee confounds some of our assumptions about haunting. I think we can agree, to a certain extent, with Steve Pile’s statement that “…to haunt is to possess some place.” [6] Easier said than done of course, but in my previous research on ghosts, this is one of the ways I’ve thought through haunting and the ghost’s unique potential: as a smooth, unstriated movement that makes interruptions and demands to be accommodated. To me, haunting has always been a strategy against partitioning. [7] The ghost detainee is a link to our concept of haunting as a kind of inhabitation that isn’t placed but spaced. Here, though, we can see how the ghost detainee is an inversion of the spectral potential to possess and define space. Importantly, this a presence that does not possess the space it haunts; as unregistered detainees that are hidden and shuffled from cell to cell ahead of international human rights organizations, ghost detainees suffer a spectral movement that hides their status as secret prisoners and also alters the partitioned logic of the prison, creating a dislocating localization. [8]
For my purposes here, I’d like to use the following quote from Foucault to describe a prison logic, if there is such a thing,
“Each individual has his own place; each place its individual. […] One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, the diffuse circulation, the unusable and dangerous coagulation. […] Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space.” [9]
The prison is partitioned for interrogation and discipline. It is a hyper-analytic space of supervision and knowing where communication channels between, to, from and amidst prisoners are under complete control. Prisoners are disciplined to behave and do as they are told. And within this disciplining and individualizing space, they are forced to presume that there is only an outside of but not an outside within the prison. […] In spite of the hyper-visibility and threat of punishment, what happens when the bandit or outlaw isn’t partitioned or located ‘properly’ when they are brought into the prison complex? And more importantly, what if the suspension of the normal rule of law within the prison is performed by the policing apparatus?
The ability to make secrets and secreting, of turning known information unknown and shielding it from public knowledge, is dependant on, among other things, rigid and enforced levels of access. And in the case of prisoners, going back to Foucault for a moment “…the entire criminal procedure, right up to the sentence, remained secret: that is to say, opaque […] It took place without him, or at least without his having any knowledge either of the charges or of the evidence. In the order of criminal justice, knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution.” [10] What’s especially germane to this discussion is how the charges, evidence and details are kept hidden while at the same the prisoner suffers under this status and becomes a sort of living secret. Secret charges in secret locations, for secret amounts of time, these detainees are not just hidden from NGOs by CIA agents. While the details of their punishment, what laws they have broken, and how they were treated during interrogation will always be disputed, all of these, in addition to their exceptional isolation, turn them into absent testimonies to the state’s power to make people disappear. This state of being makes clear how the punishment, as it is written on the prisoner, is not done to reaffirm a law that has been broken. It is done to both hide and preserve the absence of regulations, making it impossible to determine what line, if any, has been crossed.
In this case of spatial and legal exceptions, where ghost detainees are admitted into the prison without going through standard registration procedures, a general state of exception rules the prison and makes it possible to counter the desire to know by claiming not to know. Or as Donald Rumsfield made quite clear, “We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.” [11] Or for my purposes here, use unknown-knowns. Regardless, under the circumstances which permit these sorts of punishments, what is inside and outside of the prison, in terms of what constitutes legal discipline is, at best, confused. In its ability to create what we call ghost detainees, these micro-sites of exception have reemphasized one of the primary problems of discussing the state of exception, that is, deciding on where it is located; what as well as whereabouts it is. [12]
To quote Agamben again, “Whoever entered the camp moved into a zone of indistinction between outsides and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit…” [13] In the terms given us by ghost detainees, it isn’t simply a matter of mapping the camp’s zone of indistinction onto the industrial prison complex. The decision to practice a counter-incarceration, having both legal and political tools at hand to create micro-zones of indistinction creates an overlap between the space of the prison and the prisoner’s body. Where previously the outlaw’s body was a container from which confessions were to be extracted, now it is marked by the sovereign-police’s ability to mark the limit and decide on what is known and what is unknown: the ability to decide between knowing where prisoners are located and willfully keeping them lost. In both nature and duration, the punishment turns the detainee into a living, breathing form of this indefinability, an ‘unclassifiable being’ outside of the law but subject to it; like a ghost on, the threshold of perception but quickly forced to disappear.
The camp, as Agamben situates it, is both the physical localization where the state of exception is practiced and where it is suffered: a spatial inside and outside. And while modes of disciplining the prisoner have changed but are still designed to register prisoners, being able to account for each and every one at all times is unconditional. Yet while the camp is the precedent from which the present discussion on military prisons proceeds, I also appreciate the dangerous elasticity built into the concept. Zones of indistinction have begun to shrink as well as multiply. It is becoming harder and harder to locate these micro-zones as the State experiments with new political and legal technologies of locating them outside of sovereign territory. “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule. In it, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the state of law, acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that, as such, remains constantly outside the normal state of law.” [14] The same spatial considerations that specify the camp can be used to think about the prison, or more specifically, the military prison.
Before concluding, I should take a moment to acknowledge how these thoughts provide an opportunity to listen to those who have suffered this punishment. And this is where I see the future of my project going… I’ve become more and more interested in the ways that prisoners talk about their experiences, how they speak to us about what has happened in order to reconstitute a self identity against, or counter to, the lack of identity that has been imposed upon them. Following some of Irit Rogoff’s thoughts on this topic, how does the testimony of what has happened to the ghost detainee at the margins of society reconstitute an identity that is brought back to the center?
ENDNOTES
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[1] Transcript of Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 16, 2001, available at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/attacked/transcripts/cheney090601.html
[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977: 41.
[3] Major General Antonio M. Taguba, ‘Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade,’ published in Mark Danner, ed. Torture & Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2004: 299.
[4] Ibid., 303.
[5] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998: 110.
[6] Steve Pile, “Ghosts and the City of Hope” in The Emancipatory City? ed. Loretta Lees. London: Sage, 2004: 210-28.
[7] See Christopher Atkins ‘Sketches – Ghosts & Haunting,’ available at: http://blogspot.eyesears.com. See also Bülent Diken & Carsten Bagge Lausten, ‘Zones of Indistinction – Security, Terror, and Bare Life,’ in Territories: Islands, Camps, & Other States of Utopia. Curated by Anselm Franke, et al. Berlin: KW – Institute of Contemporary Art, 2003: p. 42-50.
[8] Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binette & Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000: 44.
[9] Foucault, 143.
[10] Ibid., 35.
[11] Quoted by Hart Seely in “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld: Recent Works by the Secretary of Defense,” available at: www.slate.com/id/2081042/
[12] “In any case, to understand the problem of the state of exception, one must first correctly determine its localization (or illocalization). As we will see, the conflict over the state of exception presents itself essentially as a dispute over its proper locus.” Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2005: 23-24.
[13] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 171.
[14] Agamben, Means Without End, 39.