Torture and American Sovereignty: Ideology and Imagination in Executive Expansion, 1947-2005

Abstract

The phrase “Americans don’t torture” has never been true, but uttering it is a specific political act. This study integrates institutional, legal, cultural, religious, and military histories in order to more fully analyze the expansion of American executive power since WWII, and argues that American torture is constitutive of, not exceptional to, executive expansion. American disavowal of torture during the War on Terror represents a peculiar convergence of American rhetoric of national innocence, bureaucratic innovations in the executive branch, and an imagined Islamic global foe superimposed upon old anti-communist tropes. Fears of Communist brainwashing technologies prompted both CIA and Department of Defense research and programs that became the basis for War on Terror torture methodology, but the brainwashing panic also stirred profound anxieties about the vulnerability of the human will. Free will itself became the battlefield of American anti-communist efforts, and national initiatives employed Christian concepts to describe and defend against the dangers of communism. As fighting communism abroad necessitated increasingly unconventional methods of warfare in the Cold War nuclear stalemate, Americans fused “psychological operations” with guerrilla tactics in a counterinsurgency framework that battled for free markets as much as for free wills. Caught in a bind between denouncing the enemy for its guerrilla tactics while simultaneously employing those tactics, Americans forged a counter-logic that allowed them to assert American moral superiority even while engaged in atrocity. To carry out the covert operations of counterinsurgency, later rebranded as counterterror, American presidents expanded the operational scope of the intelligence and paramilitary functions of the American national security apparatus. The National Security Act and subsequent presidential orders governing executive secrecy formed a covert aperture within the law, an alegal realm within which normally prohibited activities like torture could be carried out. When secrets leaked from within the aperture, Congressional attempts to increase oversight of the covert sector produced a series of cat-and-mouse reforms and executive evasions that ultimately shored up the borders of the covert aperture but did not shrink it. The dubious activities carried out within the aperture – like extraordinary renditions and the installation of puppet regimes abroad – were “special things” only elite operatives could carry out. “Special things” required Special Operations Forces, and this arrangement accustomed an entire defense and intelligence sector to operating with impunity. After 9/11, the Bush White House picked up the discourse and apparatus of counterterrorism in an opportunistic expansion of presidential power and formed a new legal character to which no domestic or international legal protections applied: the detainee.