An essay surveying justifications for torture found in contemporary popular culture.

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From the introduction:

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The assault on human rights that was committed in Guantánamo and the many other sites in the torture archipelago of the G.W. Bush Administration’s brutal interrogation program was accompanied by a public relations assault on domestic publics which stressed that torture, though a dirty and unpleasant business, was justified in the pursuit of the aims of the war on terror. Of course, many people still continue to oppose the torture regime and advocate against the continued incarceration of many of its victims; but these voices of righteous outrage have been confronted by a potent, multi-faceted discourse, as adaptive and flexible as it is malevolent, which distorts the issue of torture with casuistic justifications, obfuscatory half-truths, and outright racism.

This chapter provides a summary overview of this discourse as it is articulated through popular cultural and filmic representations. The ways in which cultural productions are complicit in the moral laundering and discursive normalization of counterterrorist violence are nuanced, ever-shifting, and fluid, but in general there are three major coordinates that are found across them. Firstly, they appeal to the idea of necessity, positing situations in which torture clearly contributes to the solving of urgent problems. Secondly, they deal with the ethical and moral problem of torture in the abstract, obscuring the real-world conditions in which torture is perpetrated. Thirdly, the victims of torture are dehumanized; specifically, the Muslim prisoners in Guantánamo are made the objects of a racist discourse which is designed to make their suffering seem legitimate and deserved.

These discourses are by no means omnipotent. The history of these discourses is always – even co-constitutively – the history of the widespread and multivocal challenges and resistance they meet. Nevertheless, the volume and frequency with which these discourses and representations are broadcast gives them the ability to define a sort of hegemonic ‘common sense’ in which torturers are positioned as doing the right thing for the greater good. This ‘common sense’ is always contingent, never natural, and crucially, it is always vulnerable to disruption.​

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