ABSTRACT
At the end of April 2004, over a year into the US occupation of Iraq, an explosive series of images depicting the torture of Iraqi detainees by US personnel at Abu Ghraib prison began circulating.2 When I began writing this essay on confession in June 2004, the news brought daily revelations about how early the Bush administration sought legal arguments for the use of coercive interrogation techniques in its war on terror; the extent to which practices that violate the Geneva Conventions were vetted by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for use in the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the creation of extra-jurisdictional spaces of detention where such methods could be practised outside national and international law. Sharp concerns had also been raised about when the abuse at Abu Ghraib was first reported and to whom; the implications of using multiple, uncoordinated groups to interrogate prisoners, including military police, military intelligence and private contractors with corrections backgrounds; and the connections between abusive techniques at Abu Ghraib and the approved interrogation practices that have been and are currently being employed at Guantánamo Bay and detention centres in Afghanistan. Confession, interrogation, investigation and torture appeared in this crisis in tense, convoluted relations. Draped in secrecy and loaded with violence, events at Abu Ghraib cast the Bush administration’s war on terror in a disturbing light.
