British Torture in the 'War on Terror'

Despite longstanding allegations of UK involvement in prisoner abuse during counterterrorism operations as part of the US-led ‘war on terror’, a consistent narrative emanating from British government officials is that Britain neither uses, condones nor facilitates torture or other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment and punishment. We argue that such denials are untenable. We have established beyond reasonable doubt that Britain has been deeply involved in post-9/11 prisoner abuse, and we can now provide the most detailed account to date of the depth of this involvement. We argue that it is possible to identify a peculiarly British approach to torture in the ‘war on terror’, which is particularly well-suited to sustaining a narrative of denial. To explain the nature of UK involvement, we argue that it can be best understood within the context of how law and sovereign power have come to operate during the ‘war on terror’. We turn here to the work of Judith Butler, and explore the role of Britain as a ‘petty sovereign’, operating under the state of exception established by the US Executive. UK authorities have not themselves suspended the rule of law so overtly, and indeed have repeatedly insisted on their commitment to it. They have nevertheless been able to construct a rhetorical, legal and policy ‘scaffold’ that has enabled them to demonstrate at least procedural adherence to human rights norms, while at the same time allowing UK officials to acquiesce in the arbitrary exercise of sovereignty over individuals who are denied any access to appropriate representation or redress in compliance with the rule of law

Violence and creation: the recovery of the body in the work of Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain justly deserves it place as one the pivotal works that opened up the field of ‘body studies’. The text needs to be evaluated in the retrospective terms of the field it established, and also with respect to the changing status of both ‘torture’ and ‘war’ in contemporary state politics. Scarry’s analysis of the relationship between making and unmaking, tools and weapons, under-estimates the reversibility and the situated relational character of these processes and artefacts. The changing nature of modern conflict, and the rising concern with global terrorism rather than ‘conventional’ and ‘nuclear’ war, makes the ‘referential instability’ of the body difficult to recuperate in post-conflict discourse. At the same, the normalisation of the logic of torture in the contemporary governance of the bodies of the most vulnerable in society makes Scarry’s analysis all the more prescient