Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom-Halit Mustafa

Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault in the War on TerrorAuthor(s): Halit Mustafa TagmaSource: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2009), pp. 407-435Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645284 .

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Alternatives 34 (2009), 407-435

Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault

in the War on Terror

Halit Mustafa Tagma*

In the past decade there have been efforts to understand the war on terror through the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Some analyses reify certain concepts employed by Fou- cault and Agamben. Others do not accurately represent the ac- tual occurrence of violence at ground level. Without claiming to present a sovereign gaze on the literature and the reading of sovereign violence in places such as Guántanamo, this article argues that there are at least three central elements that philosophers and theorists might want to reconsider in connection with sovereignty, biopower, and subjectivity: that there is a Derridean logic at play between sovereignty and biopower; that there is a connection between sovereignty and subjectivity informed by a "dangerous connection" between power and knowledge; and that sovereignty is informed by a classifying and hierarchizing regime characteristic of a regime of truth. Although Agamben claims to correct Foucault, he betrays important methodological and epistemological elements of Foucault's work. Nevertheless, there are elements in Agamben 's work that can shape our understanding of a "biopoli tical reading" of our contemporary era. Key- words: Foucault, Agamben, Biopower, Sovereignty, Guántanamo

After US President Barack Obama signed the symbolically powerful executive order to close the prison camps at Guántanamo Bay by the end of 2009, many hoped that it would signal a brighter future for international politics. However, the fate of the prisoners still held at Guántanamo remains unclear, as do the fates of others held in the many secret CIA detainment facilities that continue to operate rela- tively unnoticed.1 More visible than the secretly detained prisoners in

*School of Politics and Global Studies, Department of Political Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

407


408 Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom

undisclosed locations, some of the prisoners of Guántanamo Bay have been transferred to third countries, and others have been given the opportunity to be tried in US court.2 Despite all the campaign promises for transparency, the Obama administration's continued secrecy on such facilities in the name of "national security" is remi- niscent of the previous administration's policies. This suggests a continuation of state practice that is of interest both for theorists of sovereignty as well as for activists who are concerned with the treatment of such bodies.

At such a juncture, it is timely to reflect on a body of scholarship that contributed to a growing literature on Guántanamo Bay, the "war on terror," and our more general understanding between sovereignty and political violence. This literature has offered various interpreta- tions of the different forms of political violence that have come be known as indefinite detention, torture, and extraordinary rendition. In the growing body of popular and scholarly studies on the "war on terror," the most interesting and popularized analogy used to identify the status of Guántanamo prisoners is the figure of homo sacer. Ad- vanced by Giorgio Agamben, the concept of homo sacer refers to "a body that can be killed but not sacrificed." In most studies of the "war on terror" this analogy is taken as obvious. For example, quoting a US senator, Slavoj Zizek underlines how the prisoners are regarded as ex- pendable biological creatures: 'The inmates at Guántanamo were those that were missed by the bombs."3 Nevertheless, important questions can be raised with respect to this hasty connection between the concept of homo sacer and the prisioners in Guántanamo, and in this article I want to engage in a careful theoretical analysis of aspects of Guántanamo that problematize the association. Moreover, I want to suggest that while Agamben is trying to both correct and build upon Foucault's understanding of biopower, his neglect of the details and nuances of Foucault's work has lead him to betray important compo- nents of Foucault's understanding of biopower.

Foucault's Disdpline and Punish starts with a striking depiction of sovereign punishment on the body of Damien, a prisoner who of- fended the law.4 Foucault follows this vivid story of sovereign violence with a detailed outline of punishment procedures in the modern prison a century later than Damien's torture. By examining these very different modes of punishment, Foucault seeks to illustrate two different modes of power occurring in different eras: archaic sovereignty and modern disciplinary power. In a similar spirit, let me briefly con- sider two other modes of conduct that have been identified in Guán- tanamo Bay.

A leaked logbook of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a high-value prisoner, records the following:


Halit Mustafa Tagma 409

[al-Qahtani] was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days; he was doused with water and kept in a room air-conditioned to induce hypothermia; he was hooded and menaced by a dog; he was injected with fluids and forced to urinate on himself.5

Violence in this sense, reminds one of the opening pages of Dis- dpline and Punish and the classic forms of sovereign violence.6 Let us now read the detailed and nuanced regulations found in the unclassified Standard Operating Procedures for Guántanamo:

Detainees will receive two twenty minute recreation periods a week. . . . Detainees will receive two five minute showers a week. . . . The exception to this policy will be detainees being interrogated. . . . The detainee will receive a water bottle when his reward level is changed to a one or he has completed his discipline for destroying or damaging a water bottle. ... At times, personnel will give out special rewards outside of the normal reward system. For the special reward of a roll of toilet paper, the following procedure will apply: give the detainee the roll of paper, if the detainee tries to force the roll into the toilet or passes it out to other detainees, confiscate the roll of toilet paper. ... If medical says they must be at the appointment, they cannot refuse. If medical says [treatment] can wait another day, allow the detainee to refuse; however; they will be disciplined for failure to obey.7

These two modes of conduct suggest that operations of power are complex and require further scrutiny rather than a straightforward application of the concept of homo sacer. Sovereign power, biopower, and disciplinary power are all deployed in the camp. The prisons in Guántanamo Bay are not like Auschwitz gas chambers, and a Guán- tanamo prisoner is not simply a homo sacer that "can be killed but not sacrificed." This said, however, even if we were to deploy the concept of homo sacer in our thinking of Guántanamo prisoners, this would require looking at the cultural and historical contexts shaping the concept of homo sacer.

In this article I offer three related arguments.8 First, I argue that biopower has always needed sovereign exceptionalism to demarcate between those citizen-subjects who are domestic/domesticized sub- jectivities and those subjects who are to be cast outside. On the basis of an examination of the link between biopower and sovereign power I argue that Agamben's argument on Foucault's understanding of biopower is similar to a logic of supplementari ty. For Agamben, sovereign power, that which has the violent monopoly to produce and exclude bodies, seems to be the "privileged signifier" that makes the "polis," the biopolitical body, possible. In other words, Agamben theoretically privileges the importance of exceptional sovereign power



over the type of power that Foucault theorizes to be operating in and producing the "everyday life" of a normalizing society. Biopower in- volves the entry of the biological life of a given population into the calculations of the state, and of the discourses of science and territo- rialization informing the implementation of the strategies and tactics of power. I reverse the theoretical priority Agamben gives to sovereign power and argue that biopower informs and shapes the violence of sovereign power.

Second, I argue that although Agamben seems to betray important aspects of Foucault's work, his argument should be taken seriously in order to develop a better understanding of the relation between subjectivity and sovereignty. The point of convergence between individualization and totalization is in need of further exploration in light of what international relations theory offers. More specifically, I argue that one can make Agamben's reading more Foucauldian by exploring how subject formation is closely related to sovereign statehood and the violent exclusionary discourses that put it into effect.

Third, I evaluate the popular association of the concept of homo sacer with Guántanamo prisoners. A brief evaluation of the ongoing detainment in Guántanamo suggests that there are serious problems in using the concept of homo sacer in this context. I especially argue that the production of the biopolitical body has long operated in tan- dem with a regime of truth that produces a demarcation of self and other, a process that is marked by culture and history. The sovereign power to put bodies into a zone of indistinction does not follow Agamben's account. Rather, historical relationships, cultural interactions, and racial and gender differences have much to do with the production of a so-called homo sacer. Furthermore, subject formation and sovereign violence is informed by a regime of truth that hier- archizes and classifies bodies. This regime of truth and subject formation is required for Agamben to be able to offer his analysis of sovereign power. In providing such a theoretical analysis, I extrapo- late from the case of Guántanamo and other "episodes" of the "war on terror." The implication of this analysis is that although political violence is conducted in the name of the sovereign state, it is at the micro-level that sovereign subjects come to decide on whom violence is to be inflicted.

Sovereign Power, Disciplinary Power, and Biopower

Whereas liberal and Marxist understandings of power tend to employ an "economism" of power and attribute agency to individuals or col- lectivities, a Foucauldian understanding of power recognizes identity



and agency as already captured and contained in a network of power. For example, discourses about freedom and liberation are already subdued by power and in fact are the energetic mechanisms by which power circulates. For Foucault, the first technology of power that emerges out of classical archaic sovereignty is disciplinary power. Dis- ciplinary power has the individual body under its gaze; it observes the body and produces knowledge about the body, only in order to produce docile bodies. The second technology that Foucault examines centers on the life of the species. Biopower, this second technology, rests upon the articulation of self-government (be it through individ- ualism in democracy or collectivity in authoritarian regimes) . This latter technology uses statistics - in Foucault's terms "science of the state" - and other measures in order to calculate and forecast random or probable events that are expected to happen in a given population. It does so in order to intervene, compensate, or prevent undesired outcomes.9 While the former technology of power is individualizing, or as Foucault puts it, is concerned with "the manufacturing of individuals,"10 the second technology is totalizing in that it brings together and amasses docile bodies, then observes and acts upon this assem- bled body known as the population/species. The beginning of modern medicine and biology as sciences and the entry of the human body into the calculations of politics marks the dawn of biopolitics. Whereas at the micro level individuals are produced through disciplinary networks (prisons, schools, and so on), at a macro level the political body is constituted in the form of population/species.11 Both discipline and biopower, together, take "control of life in general - with the body at one pole and the population at the other."12

Foucault used the term "biopolitics" at the end of his lectures at College de France in 1975-1976.13 However, today the concept is used in varying ways. As Paolo Virno points out: "The concept of biopolitics has recently become fashionable: it is often, and enthusiastically, invoked in every kind of context. We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it."14 Although Foucault avoided giving a clear definition of what he meant by biopower, it is worthwhile to ad- dress Virno' s concern. Matthew Coleman and Kevin Grove, after a lengthy discussion, clarify the concept in line with Foucault's own work. They argue that "Foucault's approach to the term [biopower] sees the life that is the object of power, which is typically referred to as 'population', but, ... [it] is more accurately about a range of forms of individual and collective life implicated by the discipline-biopoli tics- racism triplet as an effect of power/knowledge."15 The reader should keep in mind that throughout this essay, I will be employing "biopower



in this sense": as rationalities of government and regulation that are informed by regimes of truth.

Agamben says that "the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power."16 Sovereign power, by an "inclu- sionary act of exclusion," decides which individual subject is to be ad- mitted into the polis and which subject is to be cast outside. Agamben reminds us of a medieval short story of a "dangerous" medieval were- wolf that is kept at a strategic distance from the political community only to testify to the righteousness of the sovereign. He points out that we can discern the logic of sovereign exceptionalism in a similar way. What Agamben is studying is the conjunction of biopower and law. Agamben argues that although Foucault invented the term "biopolitics," he did not explore the concept to the full extent. What Agam- ben does is to provide what he believes to be the missing link between the individualizing and totalizing aspects of power:

If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively based on juridical models or on institu- tional models, and if he calls for a "liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty" in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction at which technologies of individualization and totalizing procedures converge? And, more generally, is there a unitary center in which the political "double bind" finds its reasons to be? . . . Confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the spectacle that is everywhere trans- forming the political realm today, is it legitimate or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political technologies apart?17

Agamben brings two central criticisms against Foucault. The first is Foucault's apparent periodization of the two forms of power: sovereign power centered upon the territory and biopower centered upon the population. Agamben says that what we read in Foucault is a tran- sition from the former to the latter, and less about how these forms are intertwined.18 Second, Agamben argues that what we don't read in Foucault is the problem of sovereign killing in biopolitics, or thanatopolitics. He stresses Foucault's apparent neglect of "the power to take life" on a mass scale exemplified in the form of the camp.

Agamben privileges sovereign power over the Foucauldian interpretation of biopower. Read through an alternative angle, what Agam- ben is pointing out against Foucault is his "assumption" that there can ever be a domesticated society, a priori a sovereign power, that decides on the exception, which creates the biopolitical body. Agamben argues that the insertion of "biological life" into the calculations of sovereignty dates back to the beginning of politics. The entry of the



biological body, both in the singular sense and the communal sense of the body politic, into the considerations of a political project is as old as Western politics and metaphysics for Agamben. For Agamben, Foucault wrongly assumes that the entry of the biological body of subjects into political calculations is a modern invention. For Agamben, the entry of biological life into political calculations has always been the original activity of sovereignty.19

In fact, however, Foucault never argued that this was something modern. Foucault does acknowledge that even in the medieval age, sovereigns desired the healthy reproduction and efficient governance of their given populations (such as the vast armies that had to be put on the battlefield) . In order to produce vast armies, the cultivation of land and effective policing of the population was required. Biopower, which Foucault sees as emerging in modernity, has always required a sovereign articulation of the boundaries of the population (that is, who counts as a citizen) and at what points sovereign violence suspends the law to resolve crises. These two forms of power, although analyti- cally distinguishable, are not mutually exclusive forms of power operating in different historical periods. Historically, this is most evident in declarations of emergency, where the existing technologies of power cannot regulate and govern a given society. We know from Foucault that wherever there is power, there is resistance to power, and that even in disciplinary institutions such as the barracks, schools, and hospitals there is the possibility of revolts, riots, and alternative means of political resistance.20 It is in such periods of crisis that sovereign power's exceptionalism is clearly seen, for it demarcates domains that are subject to "normal" law and conduct from domains that would be regarded as "foreign" and exceptional. Thus, for example, Mark Neo- cleous argues that historically, sovereign emergency powers were enacted toward those who could not be "governed" in radical times: labor unions on strike, racial equality movements in apartheid South Africa, and so on.21

If biopower is concerned with the regulation and healthy reproduction of a given population, with certain tactics and strategies at its disposal, then the question of the population and its boundaries be- comes one of paramount concern. Where the technologies of power cannot resolve the aporia of the boundaries of the population (who qualifies as a citizen-subject, or when widespread crises prevent the healthy regulation and production of goods and lives) , one observes a sovereign exceptionalism. Sovereign power demarcates between those forms of "norm-abiding" citizens-subjects and those subjects who must be externalized from the body politic. The cases that Neocleous discusses are all periods of significant financial crisis, mass labor strikes that threaten the continuity of production and circulation of goods



and services, or imminent threats of domestic or international war.22 During such crises, where the boundaries of the population are radi- cally questioned and undecidable, and where the healthy and efficient functioning of the economy is at stake, sovereign exceptional power is enacted. Christine Sylvester has similarly argued that postcolonial African states have routinely subjected their populations to sovereign violence in times of political distress, all in the name of eco- nomic development.23

While most visible during such periods of crisis, however, sovereignty, the violent exceptional power to demarcate certain forms of life, is always in operation in a normalizing society. It is during crises that the "norm" of a normalizing society meets its limit. The average "normal" citizen-subject that technologies of power produces, and relies on to operate, is only possible by setting the boundaries of a given population. In domestic (ized) normalizing societies, detention and confinement have been an ongoing process ever since the "birth of the clinic" and the "birth of the prison." In the contemporary articulation of security, sovereign power constructs domains "outside" of law and "normal" society, such as in Guantánamo Bay, which in turn makes possible "normal" law and "normal" society. A normalizing society, which governs itself according to its self-referential norms and standards, is only made possible by an anterior force that, in the first place, makes possible the boundaries of the population.

Take the paradigmatic example of the Panopticon that Foucault uses to illustrate the workings of disciplinary power. It is an architec- tural design that confines subjects into spaces. For disciplinary power to work, there have to be the walls of the prison that segregate the inmates from "normal" society. In other words, there must be, to use a Derridean term, an initial coup de force (the foundation of law by an act of self-referential founding) that makes the walls of the Panopticon possible. It is a founding moment that constitutes the law through an interpretive and performative violence.24 This is the general point with regards to the theoretical privileging of sovereign power over biopower. Sovereign exceptionalism is that which demarcates those subjects who are self-governed by the technologies of power in a biopolitical society from those to be violently cast aside. The tragic events of 9/11, where subjects transformed their bodies into lethal weapons, meant that the individual body that is to be regulated, fostered, and cared for according to the discourses of normalization is always poten- tially problematic and "dangerous." After all, the Bush administration's reason for keeping prisoners in Guantánamo is that the prisoners are "madmen who are willing to kill themselves and other populations."25 Political liberalism understands the subject as a utilitarian rational subject, but the self-transformation of the body into a weapon effectively


Ha'iï Mustafa Tagma 415

problematizes the epistemology of the liberal system of government.26 In this sense, this self-transformation threatens the epistemic foundation of liberal capitalist discourse and its understanding of the utilitarian reasoning subject. Understood in this way, one can better evaluate the exceptional measures taken in the post-9/11 period, and the government apparatuses' biometrie measures to isolate potential "threatening bodies."

What is unique about modernity, for Foucault, is the scale and scope of the multiplication of the disciplines and technologies that center upon the body. Subsequently, modernity is characterized as the transfer of such localized technologies to a macro level, wherein which the species is of concern. Agamben argues that Foucault is unable to provide an explanation of killing in biopoli tics. However, Fou- cault not only goes to some length in describing the sovereign "right to kill" but also maintains that this "right" does not fall by the wayside of history with the dawn of biopolitics.27 Agamben 's correction would thus seem redundant. Foucault says: "From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive, or possibly, the right to be dead."28 According to Foucault, then, the subject of sovereign power has always already been a body that can be killed. Contra Agamben's sweeping generalizations, Foucault would rather focus on discourses of normalization that work to kill, or expose to death, subjects who are deemed inferior based on race, class, and gender.

A Coalition of Killing: The Sovereign Subject and the State

An important question remains unexplored: When and where do the technologies of individualization converge with totalizing technologies? Though I do not intend to provide a full explanation - a task at which Agamben fails - I will hint of a possible direction to travel. In- ternational relations scholars especially have argued that an analysis of sovereignty and subjectivity requires attention to their interaction. 29 Following a discussion of Kant and Foucault, Rick Ashley argues that there is a happy concord between the sovereign reasoning man and the sovereign state: "If medieval statecraft was in part an art of fixing an interpretation of God that the king could mirror and serve . . . then modern statecraft is in significant measure an art of fixing a paradigmatic interpretation of sovereign man that the state can mirror and serve."30

According to Ashley, this pact between sovereign man and the state marks the dawn of modernity. To hint at a possible response to



the question posed above, one might say that "mancraft" is where technologies of individualization and totalization converge. If "modern statecraft is modern mancraft," then sovereign subjectivity would be that form of subjectivity that the state creates and fosters. In return, such subjects go on to produce the state and conduct its violent business. This helps us also understand the work of Judith Butler, who argues that there is a reemergence of sovereignty at the local level where one sees petty bureaucrats having important say on matters of life and death.31 This localized facet of sovereign power, I think, is also a good extension of Foucault's thesis that power works at the local level. Foucault writes:

Sovereignty's old-right to take life or to let live was not replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, em- bedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.32

Although Foucault is hinting at the local nature of disciplinary power compared with archaic centralized sovereignty, I think there is also another possible theoretical point to be developed. The localization of sovereignty is close to what I think William Connolly refers to when he argues that there is an "ethos of sovereignty" that is embedded in society, which makes the state of exception possible.33 Connolly argues that what occurs today is not a simple decision made at the top level, where a sovereign figure gets to decide on who counts as the enemy, in the Schmittian sense. Instead, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, sovereignty is not a force operating at the top level but is supplemented by: "rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism, and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office."34 Fascism works at the micro level in the actions of soccer hooligans, nationalist militias, trigger-happy Blackwater mercenaries, racist bar- tenders, and bigoted party leaders. What goes on in prison camps, understood in this sense, is not just the product of a pure and simple Schmittian decision; instead, prison camps are spaces that are constructed and maintained at the micro level. Prison camps are "legitimated" by a regime of truth and classification intrinsic to biopower, which provides petty bureaucrats, border patrol agents, intelligence interrogators, and so on, with the authority to implement sovereign violence on physical bodies. The local decisions and violence are committed by petty bureaucrats who decide on a case-by-case basis which bodies will be tried in military tribunals.



This is exactly what happened in the hearings of the detainees in Guantánamo Bay by Administrative Review Boards (ARBs) , established on 11 May 2004 by the US Department of Defense. These boards would determine on an individual basis whether a prisoner is to be released, to be extradited to a third country, or to remain detained. Kristine Huskey, as an expert on the subject, indicates the arbitrary nature of the process and how it was up to a petty bureaucrat's interpretation of the law.35 Even if the boards recommended the release of a prisoner, a petty bureaucrat "without ever having met the detainee, to determine whether the detainee was telling the truth or lying during the proceeding . . . can ignore the ARB recommendation."36 It is entirely up to the subjective interpretation of a bureaucrat of concepts like, "enemy combatant," or "threat to the US and its allies," which allows for the continued exceptional detainment of many of these prisoners. Such an interpretation, however, does not occur in a cultural and political vacuum, nor is it external to the play of power/ knowledge. It is not a matter of Schmittian decisionism. Instead, the taking of life and indefinite detainment are themselves products of a regime of truth and a regime of classification. By hierarchizing and classifying certain races and types of people as less worthy of living, racist discourse enables biopower to conduct violence for the continuation and protection of the species. The taking of life by sovereign power is always informed by a regime of identifying, classifying, cate- gorizing, and profiling. It is this hierarchizing and territorializing aspect of biopower that allows certain bodies to be exposed to death. As Paul Patton argues: "In an apparent anticipation of Agamben's thesis concerning the biopolitical character of politics today, Foucault suggests that the modern state 'can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point.'"37

Despite the secrecy and security, the prisoners of Guántanamo Bay have attracted much attention. The more tragic cases of the "war on terror" are not to be found in such prison camps, rather they are to be found in the remote villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We may read about them in the unnoticed article every other week that reports of a drone attack "collaterally damaging" yet another sixty or seventy bodies in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Such deadly airstrikes have also targeted Somalian villages suspected of harboring a few terrorists.38 Rarely is the morality of killing scores of innocent people to "get a few bad guys" questioned. More recently, on 4 September 2009, a German commander in the Kunduz province of Afghanistan called in an airstrike on two fuel tankers that were stolen by the Taliban. The immobilized tankers were surrounded by approx- imately one hundred Afghani villagers trying to get free fuel. When an F-l 5 jet dropped two 500-pound bombs, the crowd was immediately



incinerated.39 Since the inception of the "war on terror" such news has become a weekly standard, meanwhile citizen-subjects look the other way under the assumption that they must have been bad guys. Still no inquiry has been made into the annihilation of (what is widely argued by locals to be) a remote Pakistani school and the school chil- dren in it by a Pakistani/US helicopter raid in 2006.40 What is important to keep in mind for our theoretical purposes is that such violence is not only perpetrated by those who pull a trigger or push a button. Instead, it has a background: actions, decisions, discourses, and practices conducted at the micro level by citizen-subjects. It is these citizen-subjects that state violence is carried out in the name of, and it is their bodies and wealth that is mobilized and put in danger to fight an enemy. It is this form of subjectivity that sovereign power capitalizes on when they conduct killings in remote places.41

My point here is that sovereign violence needs and capitalizes on sovereign subjects in order to produce deadly effects. The killing and violence itself may be conducted and administered by bureaucrats, but it requires citizen-subjects to mobilize the will and resources necessary for the sovereign violence.42 With apologies to Edmund Burke, his popular quotation could be rephrased as: All it takes for sovereign violence to kill is the citizen-subject to either applaud or enlist. Sov- ereign violence capitalizes on the fascistic desire found in the docile bodies of modernity: "For us to survive, those folks far away must die." Of course, "those folks far away" have historically often been the colonial subjects of Europe. Where today smart bombs kill civilians in remote villages, colonial attempts to discipline natives included aerial bombardments of remote villages in faraway lands. In 1920, Winston Churchill, as British secretary of war, wrote a memo on the uncon- trollable villages in Northern Iraq: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum."43 Con- sistently, sovereign violence has been particularly brutal toward "inferior far away people."

Homines Sacri

The controversy surrounding the prison camps in Guántanamo Bay has attracted much attention. Numerous articles, books, and docu- mentaries have been published on the topic. Those who have written on the subject include lawyers,44 international legal experts,45 jour- nalists,46 philosophers of ethics,47 human right activists,48 medical doc- tors,49 international relations theorists,50 military interrogators and servicemen who served at the base,51 and former prisoners.52 They


HoXii Mustafa Tagma 419

have published detailed documentation of daily life, diaries, assess- ments of the legal status of prisoners, accounts of interrogation techniques, and even a documentary movie based on the personal accounts of former prisoners known as the Tipton Three.53

The prison camps in Guántanamo have accommodated over 800 prisoners from at least 33 countries. The first prisoners were brought to the island on 11 January 2002. Of these 800 prisoners only 80 are awaiting trial, while 420 prisoners have been released.54 An indepen- dent analysis based on Department of Defense data shows that 55 per- cent of the prisoners have not committed any offense against the United States or its allies.55 Those who were fortunate to be released after years of detention owed their luck to having lived in a Western country whose intelligence agencies were able to provide clear recorded evidence of their innocence.56 However, even their Western citizen- ship did not save them from being apprehended and thrown into Guantánamo Bay. There were other marks of difference inscribed on their bodies that were noticed by an exceptional gaze and logic.

Following Agamben, several studies have suggested that the prisons in Guantánamo Bay exemplify the logic of sovereign exceptionalism. The body of a prisoner is likened to a body abandoned by the law that can be killed but not sacrificed - homo sacer.57 The infamous images of shackled prisoners in orange jump suits show how the prisoners have been deprived of their senses that make them human. The pictures showed muffs strapped to the prisoners' ears, goggles that block their sights and masks that cover their mouths. Stripping subjects from their human senses, results in the blurring of the line between human and animal. We can also discern from the prisoners' statements that they were reduced to something lower than an animal; after an extensive stay in the camp, the prisoners began to ask the rights that per- tained to animals: "My cage was right next to a kennel housing of an Alsatian dog. He had a wooden house with air conditioning and green grass to exercise on. I said to the guards, 'I want his rights,' and they replied: 'That dog is a member of the US army.'"58 Furthermore, acci- dentally "killing an iguana in Guantánamo Bay would mean a $10,000 fine because it goes against the protection of certain species in line with US environmental laws, whereas hitting a prisoner is referred to as 'mild non-injurious contact' and there are no consequences."59

Thus in some respects, prisoners of the "war on terror" might be understood as homo sacer. However, there are also particularities in the way the prisoners are handled that call for a critical réévaluation of the (non) space of Guántanamo. If in the classical Foucauldian terminology sovereign power is about "taking or granting life," and biopower is about "letting live and making life," then what can be said about the power operating in Guántanamo that "forces to live" when



prisoners are carefully controlled to prevent them from committing suicide. Indeed, the prisoners of Guántanamo are force fed and even given mandatory health checks so as to insure they are kept, barely, alive. Unlike the homo sacer who may be killed but not sacrificed, the prisoners in Guantánamo may not be killed or sacrificed. In fact, extensive efforts are spent to keep the prisoners at Guantánamo alive, such as the creation of operating rooms for major health emergencies as well as facilities for dentistry. The prisoners are given health treatment similar to that provided to the troops at the base.60 No doubt the display of such "health benefits" could be read as window dressing conducted by the camp administrators. However, it is important to note that there are indeed serious efforts to keep the prisoners (often barely, but nevertheless) alive. Furthermore, punishment and interrogation are orchestrated so that the use of violence does not result in death. Extensive efforts are made to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide. In other cases, hunger-striking inmates have met with brutal forced feeding.61 Thus, in a striking unclassified army document that outlines procedures in Guántanamo Bay, guards are ordered to "defend detainees as you would yourself against a hostile act or intent, death, or serious bodily harm."62 Therefore it is correct to say that what goes in Guantánamo Bay is neither "letting live" nor "taking life," but instead "making live," or even "forcing to live."

Agamben argues that camps are places where sovereign "power confronts nothing but pure life."63 Guantánamo Bay, declared as being beyond the reach of law, is, in fact, regulated by many petty regulations that are characteristic of disciplinary power. Reading the reports of the Joint Task Force and prisoner testimonies, one comes to the conclusion that there is a plethora of rules and procedures that govern the treatment of Guántanamo prisoners.64 Whereas Agamben's statement on "zones of indistinction" would lead us to think that any- thing goes in the camp, this is far from the reality of Guántanamo. Every minuscule element of the lives of Guántanamo prisoners been planned and is, for the most part, regulated by a written a code of conduct. Many foreseeable and probable occurrences that would be expected in a prison population have been forethought and written into a manual. Titled Standard Operating Procedures this 250-page manual outlines the rules, regulations, and procedures for treatment of prisoners in many probable circumstances.65 The manual outlines, for example, what to do if there is a petty riot, when and how to spray pepper spray on rioters, religious burials rituals for prisoners, and so on.66 This clearly hints that it is not just an exceptional sovereign power at work in Guántanamo, as exemplified in Rumsfeldian rhetor- ical salvos on "exceptional times requiring exceptional measures." In- stead, there are multiple technologies of power that are at work in the day-to-day administration of this space.67


Halli Mustafa Tagma 421

Culture, Identity, and Colonialism

The production of a homo sacer is not accomplished by a roguish sovereign decision. Instead, such decisions are supplemented by a regime of truth that identifies certain marks of difference (and carriers of those marks) as inferior and dangerous. Though in this way the prisoners of Guantánamo Bay are not just victims of a rationally crafted logic of security, or a sovereign decision. Instead, their captivity is a result of a regime of truth produced through cultural and colonial norms. In order to argue so, however, I first show how an Agambenian reading of Guántanamo prisoners neglects cultural and historical dimensions. Al- though Agamben would argue that today everyone is a homo sacer, it is hard to imagine a flag-waving suburban soccer mom in the United States being thrown into a prison camp along with the Tipton Three.

In his attempt to account for the structure of government that has embodied the entire Western political tradition, Agamben could be listed along with those thinkers who anchor the foundations of the West in ancient Greece and Rome. In locating the foundations of sovereignty in ancient Greece, Agamben reifies a particular narrative of the West that is constitutive of itself, without interaction with or ref- erence to the world "outside" of itself. Such a move forecloses the possibility of showing how the West was a cultural and historical construct that came out of various interactions of different cultures.68 This is striking, given that Agamben, who wants to build on Foucault, forgets that Foucault himself favored an "anti-Roman history" of sovereignty, a reading of history that focuses on local circuits of power and interactions of discourses. Whereas power for Foucault is always relative and operates locally in circuits, Agamben 's work reveals a structure to the operation of sovereign power. Agamben understands contemporary politics as a continuation of the fundamental biopolitical structure: a binary opposition of bare-life/political existence. To take Agamben's fundamental structure of politics seriously means to forego contingency, historicity, and chance in the play of politics, whereas Foucault, as a genealogist, sought to trace power and subjectivity in its transformation, conditions of possibility, and radical ruptures throughout history in order "to introduce discontinuity and the constraints of system into the history of the mind."69 In this sense, Agamben betrays Fou- cault's understanding of power both methodologically and epistemo- logically. Furthermore, as Mark Mazower points out, Agamben "is not interested in historical change but in what he sees as the deeper mean- ing, the potentiality that interpretation may glean from certain historical occurrences."70 Nor does Agamben seem to take the international order into consideration, even though we learn from the captives in Guántanamo Bay that some states' citizens are put in indefinite detention, whereas other bodies are given some form of judicial process.



What is the role of culture and history that goes into the making of the homo sacer? What is the role of culture and identity in the making of homo sacer? These are questions that Agamben would have to keep at an arm's length as a result of his neglect of the international dimension that goes into making of the homo sacer .

If one brings into consideration the intercultural and international factors, then we get a more nuanced understanding of what goes on in settings like Guántanamo Bay. Practices of exclusion are informed by a cultural background, and those who get excluded from the body politic are those deemed dangerous by a regime of truth in a society. The details of these practices become invisible in Agam- ben 's analysis, which relies on vast generalizations from a broad analysis of Western metaphysics. Moreover, as various postcolonial literatures point out, neither Agamben, nor even Foucault, talk much about the intersubjective construction of the identity of the West vis- à-vis its other (s). The disciplinary techniques and regime of modernity did not emerge from Europe itself but from the interactions in the periphery during Europe's imperial adventures. Gayatri Spivak, for example, has argued that Foucault's understanding of power is eth- nocentric and his subject of power is distinctly Western, made possible "by a certain stage in exploitation, for the vision of geographical discontinuity is geopolitically specific to the First World."71 Methods of discipline in sugarcane fields, schooling in Calcutta, the emergence of nationalism as a source of the (in) secure identity of hybrid Spaniards in the Caribbean: These and many other examples suggest that modern disciplinary societies did not spring sui generis from Eu- rope. They sprang from the interactions of subjects in different settings that resulted in the construction of identities such as "Western" and the "peripheral other."72

I do not wish to contend that the West grasps what happens in the periphery and brings it back to the metropolis; such an argument would reify the "West-non-West," "center-periphery," and so on. Rather, the very interaction of the imperialist discourse with its other has constructed the identity of the involved parties (that is, the Euro- pean and the subaltern) . Today, racism and remnants of colonialist thought that played a pivotal role in the construction of nation-states are still at work in determining who gets to be counted as a govern- able subject in a liberal capitalist global order. Homo sacer is not a simple byproduct of a roguish sovereign decision. Homo sacer is the product of historical and cultural forces at play in the formation of what counts as a rational citizen of the polis.73 Postcolonial literature has pointed that the discourse of liberalism, during the emergence of European colonialism, made possible the distinction between au- tonomous liberal subjects and immature subjects. This liberal discourse



created the grounds for the violent subjection of non-Europeans to colonial rule.74 This is especially clear with respect to what forms of life are thrown into zones of indistinction. I should note that although I point out the racial and colonial legacies' effect on who gets to be regarded as a homo sacer, Ewa Ziarek reminds us that the biopoli tics of gender also plays an important role.75

Violence and Biopolitics

The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to "make" live and to "let" die.76

Excluded bodies, for Agamben, are made possible by sovereign power that produces bare life. For Foucault, sovereign power is associated with the taking of life, whereas biopower is associated with the reproduction of life. This puts Foucault in a difficult spot as the power to kill and make live in the age of modernity has seen its extremes:

If the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and disciplinary power is on the advance, how is it possible to kill? How can murder function in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective? Given that this power's objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon bio-power?77

Foucault' s response is that racism is the "precondition to the exercise of such a power: the right to kill."78 State racism is introduced in order to separate livable life from life that can be killed. Wars of the early twentieth century have employed such reasoning, where a statist discourse externalizes and racializes the danger to society that ought to be defeated for the sake of the community. Foucault, in Society Must be Defended, had in mind the biological variant of racist discourse that was portrayed in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, the theme is alive and well in today's racism, which can be loosely labeled here as "cultural" racism.79 Cultural racism understood in this sense is articulated today through a discourse of "civilizations": "our values," "our mode of living," and "proper" human governance. Cultural racism ex- hibits itself in Samuel Huntington 's binary framing of a civilized world (the West) facing an uncivilized world. Orientalist discourse fostered European imperialism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe through the representation of Middle Eastern peoples as an inferior race. Similarly today, the contemporary representations of Iraqis and



Afghanis as threatening subjects, unable to govern themselves, help le- gitimize external military interventions in those societies.80 In launch- ing a war against internal and external threats, one therefore not only betters the "inferior people's lives" but also ensures "the regeneration of one's race" through heroic rituals and nationalist ceremonies that parade the good Western nation and its values.81

None of this is a recent invention. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, the European colonization of Egypt rested on the ability to produce not just a neatly organized society modeled after the military barracks, but the ability of the European to imagine and disseminate a form of representation and identity that was colonizing by nature.82 The articulation of the Egyptian as the racially and culturally inferior other to the Western rational scientific man through an Orientalist discourse, both in Europe and Egypt, was at the core of Egyptian colonization. The Orient was thought to lack technological and military superiority and was seen as a culture that lacked the ability to produce a rational, orderly society. The imperial encounter with Europe's other was not just to keep the "natives in their huts," but also to "win their hearts and minds." A French military officer after suppressing a rebellion in 1845-1846 in Egypt said: "When we have them in our hands, we will then be able to do many things which are quite im- possible for us today and which will perhaps allow us to capture their minds after we have captured their bodies."83 This logic echoes recent news when a US commander in Iraq who works with social scientists says, "We're looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist's perspective. We're not focused on the enemy. We're focused on bringing governance down to the people."84

The regime of truth of a given society, and the marks of difference on a subject's body, has long informed sovereign power about what forms of life are to be excluded. The US Army's recruitment of social scientists in Afghanistan and Iraq under a program titled "Human Terrain System" (HTS) exemplifies the way in which localized sovereign decisions are informed by a scientific discourse. Under this program, teams of social scientists, most notably anthropologists, are embedded in combat brigades to help the commanders make better decisions with respect to the population in which they are operating.85 The following statement of the overseer of this program serves as an excellent example of the relation between the production of knowledge in the human sciences and its utilization by a bureaucratic apparatus: "Cultural anthropologists are focused on understanding how societies make decisions and how attitudes are formed. They give us the best vision to see the problems through the eyes of the target population."86 David Price's comment on this relation serves my point on this power/knowledge nexus:



In observing that "cultural understanding is an endless endeavor that must be overcome leveraging whatever assets are available," the military's choice of "leveraging" beautifully clarifies how the military conceptualizes anthropologists and others providing occupying troops in Iraq with cultural information: they are seen as priers of knowledge; tools to be used for the extraction and use of knowledge "assets" in ways that military commanders see fit.87

As Mitchell points out, the use of the scientific gaze to discipline, classify, and control the local population goes back to the colonial period. Today we see the use of scientific discourse in the the US Army's Professional Writing Collection. In an article detailing the HTS, the administrators of the system draw from the lessons of the French and British experience in colonizing the local population: "Conclusions logically demand that past experience guide our understanding of how best to meet, in a manner that supports our own military objec- tives, the expectations and desires of the people at the heart of such struggles."88 What this means is that the colonial lessons of the past are used today to bring "governance down to the population."

Besides the manual Standard Operating Procedures that dictates the minute-to-minute details on disciplining prisoners and Human Ter- rain Systems to classify and discipline populations, there is also a mushrooming psychiatric discipline that has the prisoners as its object. Allison Howell argues that the psychiatric discourse, as a regime of truth, has pathologized the Guantánamo prisoners such that it "play[ed] a part in the conditions of possibility for indefinite detention."89 Howell shows how the scientific discourse on the mental health of the prisoners has constructed them as "crazy, fanatical madmen" who are dangerous to themselves and society.90 She argues that this regime of truth has legitimated the indefinite detention of the prisoners. This supports my central argument that the "regime of truth" of biopower supplements sovereign power. This means that tactics of power create the conditions of possibility for the justifica- tion of exceptional sovereign practices. In other words, techniques of power that attempt to individualize, divide, and discipline bodies feed back into and justify the conditions of possibility for the exceptional logic in the articulation of emergency powers - a logic of supplemen- tarity par excellence. All this is not to say that there is a simple chronol- ogy to this logic, and that such affairs occur in abstraction, external to chance, contingency, historicity, interpretation, and the regime of truth of a given society. Instead, the techniques of power go hand in hand with the regime of truth in a given space and time. Exclusion- ary practices and the production of bare life do not operate, as Agam- ben would have us believe, in a uniform and universal manner that gets replicated across time and space, be it in the Greek city-state or



Nazi Germany. Agamben declares that thanks to sovereign power Ve are all Homo Sacer" Historically and theoretically, however, the articulation of the Ve" is at the core of the problem.

The prisoners of the war on terror are also subject to standards of classification, categorization, and profiling. In the case of John Phillip Walker Lindh, the son of a white suburban US family, who was captured in the opening of the war in Afghanistan, "justice" was meted out swiftly, and he was given a twenty-year sentence. On the other hand, Jose Padilla, "an American citizen of color," and in the case of thousands of other subjects put on indefinite detention, normal law is put on hold.91 What accounts for this difference are the marks of difference on a subject's body (race, religion, national background, and ideology) that all come in to play at the ground level when petty bureaucrats get to decide who is to be treated according to what standard of operation. The workings of racism can be identified in the speeches of petty bureaucrats at the local level, as in this statement from one of the Tipton Three:

I recall that one of them said "you killed my family in the towers and now it's time to get you back." They kept calling us mother fuckers and I think over the three or four hours that I was sitting there, I must have been punched, kicked, slapped or struck with a rifle butt at least 30 or 40 times. It came to a point that I was simply too numb from the cold and from exhaustion to respond to the pain.92

Although the Three were British citizens and had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they were quickly associated with terrorism because of their racial background and apprehension in Af- ghanistan. Despite the fact that they had nothing to do with terrorism, as their release from Guantánamo Bay suggests, their treatment stands as an indication not of senseless sovereign vengeance but of a vengeance informed by a certain racist bias. Their capture, torture, and treatment was all made possible by a prior initial racial profiling that resulted in innocent men being held in captivity. Sovereign violence does not operate in the absence of a regime of truth that identifies those whose bodies could be subjected to violence. As developed in particular, there was an unmistakable racist disposition toward the "different" bodies of the prisoners. As Reid-Henry points out, the flesh of the Oriental, both as an exotic and an inferior subject, probably had something to do with the stripping and beating of Middle Eastern prisoners.93

It may be argued that the decision not to apply the Geneva Con- vention and other standards of legal treatment to the prisoners captured in Afghanistan is representative of an exceptional decision. However, in line with what I have been arguing, such a resolution is



not a simple act of deciding on the part of the leading politicomili- tary cadres of a state. This is not to deny the importance of subjects in key positions; however, such decisions do not take place in a space external to interpretation, culture, and history. Furthermore, much of the sovereign decisions, such as "who is to be detained indefinitely," are made at the local level based on interpretation of petty bureaucrats.

Sovereign decisions are always already informed by historical and cultural understandings as to who counts as a member of the "good species." The "good species," "the inside," and the body politic have been constructed by colonial discourse. As Roxanne Doty has pointed out, colonial discourse has had a vital role in the construction of Western nations. She further points out that race, religion, and other marks of difference have played an important role in national classification.94 The treatment of faraway people as inferior and exotic has played an important role in nation building in its classic sense. There- fore, who counts as a citizen, a "legitimate" member of a "legitimate" nation, is the product and effect of centuries of interaction of the West with its others. Understood in this sense, sovereign decisions (whether made at the top or bottom level) are informed and shaped by a cultural and colonial history. This is neglected in Agamben's grand analysis of Western politics. Therefore, sovereign power needs the classification, hierarchization, and othering provided by a regime of truth in order to conduct its violent power. Only certain types of people could be rendered as bare life and thrown into a zone of indistinction. Understood this way, it is easier to comprehend the "smooth" production of homines sacri out of Middle Eastern subjects.

In the early stages of the war in Afghanistan, as Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray point out, tens of thousands of people were collected by the Northern Alliance.95 Among the collected were ordinary foreign aid workers, refugees, and probable fighters of the Taliban regime. They were sold from $50 to $5,000 per head to Coalition Forces.96 Even though there was no real investigation based on tangible and concrete evidence, some these captives were flown to Guantánamo. As Fox points out, if the prisoners were wearing a Casio brand watch, this meant an higher prize in the eyes of the interrogators, as it sig- naled that the prisoner was a probable AI Qaeda bombmaker.97 The small difference between wearing a Casio watch in some parts of the world, as opposed to others, is at the ground level what makes it possible for a body to be become a homo sacer. They can then be flown off to an unknown place to face an unknown future.

At the local level it is a petty bureaucrat or members of a military tribunal that decide on who gets to be detained indefinitely. However, their decisions are informed by traces of identity on the body. National origin, skin color, religious belief, ideology, are marks of difference



that get read and interpreted by petty sovereigns. Such differences in- form the decisions that render bodies as homo sacer, which are thrown into a zone of indistinction. In the modern age, no doubt, Agamben would argue that even the body of a soccer mom - an obe- dient national flag-waving subject - has entered into political and strategic calculations. However, the soccer mom is not exposed to the violence of homo sacer. Regimes of truth and disciplines produce hi- erarchically ordered subject positions, and this is an aspect of biopower. The theoretical priority that Agamben gives to sovereign power is reversed when it is shown that biopower makes it possible for the petty agents of the state to conduct sovereign violence. Sovereign power is informed and shaped by biopower.

Conclusion

In his analysis of security checks at the border, Mark Salter argues that "contemporary political subjectivity is expressed primarily in relation to sovereignty. With all of the attendant limits and exclusions that en- tails."98 Similarly, Roxanne Doty, focusing on vigilante groups on the US-Mexican border, hints at the significance of petty sovereign decisions having life-and-death consequences for the undocumented mi- grants." In keeping with such analyses, I have argued that biopower, which administers, regulates, and governs the relations of production, exchange, and life of a given society, is the necessary supplement to sovereign power. Agamben' s arguments should not be disregarded. He has made important contributions to our understanding of power. We should, however, be careful in applying his concepts and language. The prisoners of Guántanamo Bay are not equivalent to what Agam- ben portrays in his work, and they are certainly not the subjects who experienced the violence of Nazi concentration camps. This said, however, there are lessons to be learned from Agamben's work. Such prisoners are not to be taken as evidence of a mystical paradox to be found in Western metaphysics and law. Guántanamo prisoners could neither be explained by an Agambenian paradoxicality nor through a Foucauldian panopticism alone. Such occurrences could be better understood as an effect of a culture saturated by history and racism. It is this culture that informs the decisions of petty bureaucrats.

A look at "normal" "domestic (ized)" society hints at the supple- mentary relation between biopower and sovereign power. Sovereign exceptionalism, to some degree, is about the creation of extralegal spaces that are the other of "normal" society. Four years before the 9/11 attacks, and the exceptional powers used by the president, the US Army was already planning to construct certain camps inside the



United States. Such camps are specified as "civilian inmate labor pro- grams and civilian prison camps on Army installations," terminology unambiguously suggestive of concentration camps.100 More recently the Department of Homeland Security has agreed to a $385 million contract with the Halliburton company. On contract for this sum, Halliburton would construct emergency detainment facilities on US soil.101 Although these concentration camps are not yet occupied, this development is important for the theoretical point developed here. Such installations show that Guantánamo Bay is not an exception to the everyday articulation of exceptional sovereign powers. Sovereign exceptional powers have always been ongoing and constructing exceptional spaces to domestic society, even within the bor- ders of the United States, where the normal rule of law reigns over the land. Sovereignty is always already exceptional. I think Agamben would agree. A normalizing society is always exceptional, as the spread of exceptional places "inside" and "outside" domesticized society suggests. A normalizing society needs its dangerous others against whom to mobilize. When today camps are constructed inside the territory, it is due to a regime of calculation for an unknown to- morrow haunting today's biopolitics. The exceptional spaces and the homines sacri produced in such spaces, however, do not operate in a vacuum. The "normal" citizen-subject has always been historically and culturally shaped, and accordingly, sovereign power has always been informed by a colonial and Orientalist discourse.

Notes

I am indebted to my discussion with Andrew Neal, Tim Ruback, Bill Wolfgram, and Richard K. Ashley. Any shortcoming of this article is mine alone.

1. While particular attention is drawn to the prisoners in Guántanamo Bay, I should note that that there are tens of thousands of subjects who are violently mutilated and cast into shadowy dungeons and cells, all in the name of exceptional measures. Guántanamo, while an exception to the norm of prisons, is not an exception to the mushrooming spaces "beyond the law." Modern prison camps under consideration would include many of the undisclosed secret CIA prisons, as well as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which previously housed the "dangerous others" to Saddam Hussein's regime.

2. As Judith Butler points out, military bureaucrats at the US Depart- ment of Defense (DoD) notoriously apply strategies in their use of language, referring to captives as "detainees" and not "prisoners." If the designation of "prisoner" were to be accepted by the DoD this could theoretically legitimate the prisoners' argument of their having been detained, in fact imprisoned, without due legal rights. I argue that a textual resistance to such violence may be advanced by avoiding this tactically crafted term of "detainee" rather than



"prisoner." Judith Butler (Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso, 2003).

3. See back cover of Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 2005).

4. Michel Foucault, Disäpline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

5. Andrew Sullivan, "Inside Guántanamo," The Atlantic (January-February 2008), online at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/Guantanamo-photos.

6. For a different Foucauldian take on Guantanamo see Andrew Neal, "National, Sovereign, Disciplinary Exceptionalism," 2005, online at http:// www.libertysecurity.org/articlel99.html; Andrew Neal, "Foucault in Guántan- amo: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception," Security Dialogue, 37 (2006): 31-46.

7. Joint Task Force -GITMO, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Proce- dures," 28 March, (2003): 27. Online.

8. Some of the ideas I develop here have also been developed in a chap- ter written for a forthcoming edited book.

9. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at College de France 1977-1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 101.

10. Foucault, Disátoline and Punish, note 4, p. 172. 11. Michel Foucault, Soäety Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de

France, 1975-76, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003) , p. 243. 12. Ibid., p. 253. 13. Ibid. 14. Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e),

2004), p. 81. 15. Mathew Coleman and Kevin Grove, Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Re-

turn of Sovereignty," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 489-507.

16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 6.

17. Ibid., pp. 5-6. 18. Ibid., pp. 82-83. 19. Ibid., p. 6. 20. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1991), p. 171. 21. It is important to point out that Neocleous argues that "emergency"

constitutes the structure of colonial rule as well. Mark Neocleous, 'The Prob- lem with Normality: Taking Exception to 'Permanent Emergency,'" Alterna- tives 31 (2006): 191-213.

22. Ibid. 23. Christine Sylvester, "Bare Life as a Development/Postcolonial Prob-

lematic," Geographical Journal 172 (2006): 66-77. 24. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Au-

thority,'" translated by Mary Quaintance, in Gil Anidjar, ed., Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002).

25. Allison Howell, "Victims or Madmen? The Diagnostic Competition Over 'Terrorist' Detainees at Guantanamo Bay," International Political Sodology 1 (2007): 29-47.

26. For more on suicide bombings and biopolitics see Stuart Murray, "Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Associa- tion, 1-4 September 2005.


Hallt Mustafa Tagma 431

27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, note 4, p. 240. 28. Ibid. 29. Richard K. Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, "Reading Dissidence, Writing

the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty," International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990), pp. 367-416. Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, eds., Sovereignty and Subjectivity (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

30. Richard EL Ashley "Living on Borderlines: Man Poststructuralism and War," in James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., International/Intertex- tual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 1989), p. 303.

31. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Lon- don and New York: Verso, 2003).

32. Foucault, Disäpline and Punish, note 4, pp. 241-242. 33. William Connolly 'The Complexity of Sovereignty," in Jenny Edkins

and Véronique Pin-Fat, eds. Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 33.

34. Gules Deleuze and Felix Guattan, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), p. 214.

35. Kristine Huskey, "Standards and Procedures for Classifying 'Enemy Combatants': Congress, What Have You Done?" Texas International Law Jour- nal 43 (2007): 41-54.

36. Ibid. 37. Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population, note 9, p. 208. Original

quote in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, note 4, p. 254. 38. See for example a strike carried out by a heavily armed AC-130 US

gunship, online at http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/africa/6243459.stm. 39. Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8237287.stm. For

the video of this strike, see online at http://www.bild.de/BILD/politik/2009/ 11/26/bomben-video-kunduz-in-afghanistan/verschwieg-minister-jung-die- wahrheit-ueber-die_20bombardierung.html.

40, Such "unnoticed news could be kept at arm s length under the assumption that those who died in the attack were "possibly" associated with the "bad guys." See online at http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/ south_asia/ 6099946 .stm.

41. This form of subjectivity is not confined to citizens of the countries par- ticipating in the "coalition of the willing." The "intellectual bureaucratic elite" of target countries sometimes welcomes and helps in the killing of their own population, even if it the violence is committed by a foreign country. In a striking quote about towns getting wiped out due to airstrikes, we are told by the executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad that "surveys have shown that the people under attack, those in Waziristan, wel- come the drones because they are attacking the right guys," said Farrukh Saleem, online at http://news.yahoo.eom/s/mcclatchy/3268368. Similarly, the Somalian interim president Abdullahi Yusuf, in response to the killing of a So- malian town's sizable population, says: 'The US has a right to bombard suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania," online at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6243459.stm#Somalia.

42. The elimination of bodies by gunships and drones, and the jingoist spectators who openly celebrate this violence, are viewable on you tube. Such videos are officially taken from the "kill-cam" of the military bureaucrat that pushes the button. For such an example see http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=UsA9VtQ__uLg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkODv9wzgDg& feature=related.



Also as an example, see une spectator comments on a viaeo mat nas naa more than one million views, showing trigger-happy Blackwater snipers execut- ing scores of, presumably, "bad Iraqis" from a safe distance, online at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpbEjdwLQgo&feature=related.

43. Winston Churchill, "Winston Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo," Centre for Research on Globalization, online at http://globalresearch.ca/ articles/CHU407A.html.

44. Joseph Marguilles, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York : Simon and Schuster, 2006).

45. James Silkenat and Mark Shulman, The Imperial Presidency and the Con- sequences of 9/11: Lawyers React to the Global War on Terrorism Vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Praeger/Security International, 2007); Fleur Johns, "Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception," The European Journal of International Law 16 (2005): 613-635;

46. David Rose, Guantánamo: America's War on Human Rights (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).

47. Clark Butler, ed., Guantánamo Bay and the Judicial-Moral Ireatment oj the Other (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007).

48. Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004).

49. Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Compliäty, and the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2006).

50. Andrew Neal, "National, Sovereign, Disciplinary Exceptionalism," 2005, online at httpy/www.libertysecurity.org/artícle^.html; Andrew Neal, "Foucault in Guantánamo: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception" Secu- rity Dialogue 37 (2006): 31-46; Howell, note 25; Claudia Aradau, "Law Trans- formed: Guantánamo and the 'Other' Exception," Third World Quarterly 28 (2007): 489-501.

51. Chris Mackey and Greg Miller, The Interrogators : Inside the Secret War Against Al-Qaeda (New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2004); James Yee, For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).

52. In a composite statement, three British citizens of Pakistani background have outlined their treatment in the hands of coalition forces. 'This statement [115 pages] jointly made by them constitutes an attempt to set out details of their treatment at the hands of U.K. and U.S. military personnel and civilian authorities during the time of their detention in Kandahar in Afghanistan in late December 2001 and throughout their time in American custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This statement is a composite of the expe- riences of all three." The Tipton Three: Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, and Rhuhel Ahmed, Composite Statement: Detention in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay 2004, online at http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/docs/Gitmo-compositestatement FINAL23julyO4.pdf.

53. For the documentary movie that appears to closely represent the occurrences see The Road to Guántanamo, online at http://www.imdb.com/ tide/tt0468094/.

54. The classic argument that has been articulated in the administration's logic has been repeated over and over again. To remind the reader of the argument to use military commissions in non-US soil is best captured in the following passage: "The military commissions were established on the basis of a November 13, 2001 Presidential Military Order. The basic aim was to place prisoners captured in the 'war on terrorism' outside the American criminal court system, with all of the due process rights and protections for


HaMi Mustafa Tagma 433

the accused provided for within that system by the US Constitution and US and international laws. The order expressly stated that prisoners would have no recourse to any US, foreign or international court, with the final decision on the sentence or conviction lying with the president or the secretary of defense." Online at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jul2005/guan- jl9.shtml

55. Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux, Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data," in Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper, 46 (2006), online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=885659.

56. Of the detainees that were released by the time of this writing, Murat Kurnaz - a Turkish citizen - lived in Germany, whereas the Tipton Three lived in the UK. All of them were released after cooperation between US and European intelligence institutions. As I explore later in the article, this hints at the issue of different levels of vulnerability subjects may have. There are ongoing debates whether other mistakenly incarcerated prisoners such as a group of Uyghurs should be released in the United States.

57. Christine Sylvester, "Bare Life as a Development/Postcolonial Prob- lematic," Geographical Journal 172 (2006): 66-77; Claudio Minea, 'The Return of the Camp," Progress in Human Geography 29 (2005) : 405-412; Howell, note 25.

58. Jess Whyte, "The Human Is a Battleground," online at http://stateof emergency.nomasters.org/ reader/human.html.

59. Clive Smith, "Inside Guantanamo," New Statesman, November 21, 2005, online at http://www.newstatesman.com/200511210007.

60. Online at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/Guantanamo- bay_x-ray.htm.

61. Force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners by sovereign intervention is not a new idea. King Edward VII also ordered hunger-striking suffragettes to be brutally force fed in August 1909. For a discussion of resistance, gender, and homo sacer, see Ewa Ziarek, "Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopoli- tics of Race and Gender," South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2009): 89-105.

62. Joint Task Force-GITMO, note 7. 63. Agamben, note 16, p. 171. 64. The Tipton Three, note 52. 65. Josh White, "Now Online, a Guide to Detainee Treatment," Washing-

ton Post, 4 December 2007, A19. 66. Reuters reports how this detailed Guantanamo "Operating Manual"

was leaked to the Internet by a whistleblower, online at http://www.reuters .com/article/internetNews/idUSN142420702007lll4?pageNumber=l&virtual BrandChannel=O.

67. In an unclassified action memo, Rumsfeld himself discusses the scope of these petty techniques of detainment and interrogation. Arguing that he stands 8-10 hours a day, he suggests that the length of interrogations could be properly lengthened. Online at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2004/ d20040622doc5.pdf.

68. Edward Said's study of Orientalist discourse is a reminder of this particular point; see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

69. Michel Foucault, "Politics and the Study of Discourse," in Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmental- ity (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 53.

70. Mark Mazower, "Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis," Bound- ary 2, no. 35 (2008): 23-34, at p. 32.

71. Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Car y Nelson and



Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1988Ì. n. 289.

72. Timothy Mitchell, "The Stage of Modernity," in Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000).

73. Another reading of bare life is to argue that bare life is the "constitutive outside" of the body politic, which determines the extent to which power relations extend in the polis.

74. Barry Hindess, "Metropolitan Liberalism and Colonial Autocracy," in Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby, eds., Habitus: A Sense of Place (Burlington, VT:Ashgate, 2005).

75. Ziarek, note 61. 76. Foucault, Disäpline and Punish, note 4, p. 241. 77. Ibid., p. 256. 78. Ibid. 79. Etienne Balibar, "Is There a 'Neo-Racism?" in Etienne Balibar, eds.,

Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 80. There is also an initial discursive violence where all ethnic and reli-

gious differences within those societies are erased, such that an imagined national identity is ascribed to all subjects living in those areas of the world.

81. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, note 4, p. 257. 82. Mitchell, note 20. 83. Ibid., p. 95. 84. Online at http://ww.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/asia/05afghan

.html?incamp=article popular_4&pagewanted=print. 85. Paraphrased from Montgomery McFate, senior social science adviser

with the US Army's Human Terrain System. "Academic Embeds: Scholars Ad- vise Troops Abroad" aired on National Public Radio on Talk of the Nation, 9 October 2007.

86. Online at http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/low/americas/7042090.stm. 87. Online at http://www.counterpunch.orff/price03182008.html. 88. Online at http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/vol-

ume4/december_2006/ 12_06_2.html. 89. Howell, note 25, at p. 44. 90. Ibid. 91. For a peculiar racist bias of the law see Natsu Sai to, From Chinese Ex-

clusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2007) , p. 7.

92. The Tipton Three, note 52. 93. Simon Reid-Henry, "Exceptional Sovereignty? Guantánamo Bay and

the Re-Colonial Present," Antipode 39 (2007): 627-648. 94. Roxanne Doty, "Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructing the

Boundaries of National Identity," in Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

95. Ratner and Ray, note 48, p. 9. 96. Ibid. 97. Ben Fox, "Casio Watch is Terror 'Evidence' at Guantánamo," Seattle P-

1, 10 March 2006, online at http://seattlepl.nwsource.com/national/262432_ gitmol0.html.

98. Mark Salter, "Imagining Numbers: Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security," Security Dialogue, 39 (2008): 243-266.

99. Roxanne Doty, "Fronteras Compasivas and the Ethics of Uncondi- tional Hospitality,

" Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35 (2006) : 53-74.



100. This is a phrase used in US Army Regulation 21-35, Unclassified Document, online at http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/r2 10_35.pdf. This was originally written in 1997, but was later revised in 2005. This suggests that sovereign exceptionalism was already at work before the September 1 1 attacks.

101. Katherine Hunt, "KBR Awarded Homeland Security Contract Worth up to $385M," Market Watch, 24 January 2006, online at http://www .marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B62C8724D%2DAE8A %2D4B5C%2D94C7%2D70171315C0A0%7D&dist=SignInArchive&param =archive&siteid=mktw&dateid=38741%2E5136277662%2D858254656.


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