ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some changes in official, legal, and public discourses about torture over the past five years; that is, following the Ur-date of '9/11', 11 September 2001. It focuses on the internal negotiations within the United States about justifying the use of torture to combat the terrorist threat against national security. Legal truths (the 'findings' of 'guilty' or 'not guilty') are seen as partial and misleading; deep political conflicts are converted into a series of discrete legal events, the legal dialect and testimonies of individual moral culpability. Most observers evaded questions of legal and moral responsibility, advancing instead some imaginative (and alas, plausible) theories (of the 'cultural studies' type) about causes or precedents: reality television, lynch-mob racism; violent internet pornography. The guiding objective of legal talk was to secure some advance indemnity for ordinary working interrogators and their immediate superiors.
