Torture in the National Security Imagination

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Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism

At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the PhilippineAmerican War of 18991902 and on the other by post9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of national security torture, one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society.

Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration.

Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empireincluding its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

Reviews

"Now that the spectacular images of U.S. torture under the auspices of the war on terror have faded, mainstream media and, indeed, scholarly debates have turned to other manifestations of U.S. state violence: against Black Lives Matter protestors, climate activists, First Nations peoples, and in the multiple theaters of global war. By widening the lens on torture within the post9/11 U.S. regime to illuminate the imaginaries that animated it, Stephanie Athey insists that we recognize it as a moment in a larger narrative of ongoing and multidimensional imperialist violence."Danielle Celermajer, author of The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach

"Offering a highly original discussion of the role of torture in the historical development of American national security, Stephanie Athey provides a new approach to a subject that has seen more than a decade of sustained popular and critical commentary. With innovative claims, Athey traces the evolution of torture lore as a long-standing justification for the making of American empire."Benjamin Meiches, author of The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide

Author Bio

Stephanie Athey is professor of cultural studies at Lasell University in Greater Boston and editor of Sharpened Edge: Women of Color, Resistance, and Writing.