Abu Ghraib and The American Empire

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Iraq War, -- Mass media and the war. Iraq War, -- Prisoners and prisons, American.

E. Michael Jones: Abu Ghraib and the American Empire — The Opperman Report

View all subjects More like this User lists Similar Items. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Haunting the new millennium, the legacy of loss bequeathed by modernity makes an uncanny claim upon the present. At the same time, that edgy horizon possesses us, paradoxically enough, as something strangely familiar from the past: Yet the rule of Empire, as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt have argued, always already rests on a relation of exception whose authority suspends the internal juridical order of common law from a position outside the legal status quo.

While no one would compare the scale of torture of Abu Ghraib to the genocidal novum of the Holocaust, the persistent iconicity of atrocity that otherwise links Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib nevertheless makes for an uncanny repetition of the traumatic past.

Abu Ghraib prison, in particular, discloses an analogous locale at the heart of Empire: That attempt to manage trauma in the public sphere involves not just repression and censorship but also the artful screening of images that buffer horror through propaganda, spectacle, and entertainment. And more to the point, how does the psychic life of the digitally mediated photograph exceed the conscious communicative intent of its ideological production to engage and disseminate the more overdetermined political unconscious of Empire as such?

Curiously enough, the American interrogation center at Abu Ghraib served as a military special-access program SAP not just for gathering valued intelligence information. Well, I mean, they [the photos] were for psy-op reasons […]. Psy-ops, or psychological operations, have constituted a typical weapon in the arsenal of psychological warfare whose institutional base reaches back as far as World War I when in , President Woodrow Wilson appointed George Creel to lead the Committee of Public Information made up of the U.

Secretaries of War, Navy, and State. The rubric of psychological warfare actually derives from the German coinage of Weltanshauungskrieg literally, worldview warfare referring to new techniques of propaganda and covert acts of terror employed to secure ideological consensus during the Second World War. Photography, of course, has a long history of mass persuasion reaching back to the Constructivist era of the former Soviet Union, and psy-ops that rely on the photographic image had tactical pertinence in the Iraq war.

Tactically, on the first stage, we target the military by dropping leaflets stating the inevitability of their defeat, telling them they will not be destroyed if they play our game and exactly how they can surrender. On the second wave we show them pictures of Iraqi officers who complied.

Certainly, the conventions of posing that belong to the family photo and tourist shot underwrite Spc. Graner and England oddly enough became lovers and even parents together at Abu Ghraib. If photography is spectral in its arrest of time and its punctuation of the referent, then the images produced at Abu Ghraib are doubly possessed by the punctum of the Real. Charles Graner and Spc. Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, the prison of Abu Ghraib the Father of the Raven was a place of ill omen, notorious for horrific suffering and torture and mass executions.

Table of Contents

After the invasion of Iraq, the U. The revelations since April of systematic torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib have not easily been assimilated into the mythology of the U. The Language of Empire focuses on the response to these revelations in the U. Its focus on the media is a prelude to showing how the language of multiculturalism, humanitarianism, and even feminism have been hijacked in the cause of an illegal and brutal imperialist war.

The media have colluded with the Bush administration in manipulating images of the U. The circuitous logic through which U. Her writings on politics and the media have been published on www.

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E. Michael Jones: Abu Ghraib and the American Empire

Here's how restrictions apply. Monthly Review Press November 1, Language: I'd like to read this book on Kindle Don't have a Kindle? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Showing of 5 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. When the US government decided to invade Iraq, I assumed that even if it was not directly related to WMDs or , Iraq would be rid of a vicious dictator and be grateful to our kind and heroic troops who liberated them.

In the first few days of war, my heart was pounding with pride as our brave troops rolled across Iraq. But then I noticed an odd thing. Our troops were putting hoods over the heads of POWs. Where did that come?

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