Empire’s Babel: US Military Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War

Abstract

The US military interrogation room has often been the site of controversy, but it has seldom been the object of scrutiny. Faced with photos from Abu Ghraib and reports from Gitmo, the public has primarily honed its outrage on the practice of torture within these interrogation rooms. While the debate about torture escalated over the White House paper trail that provided a legal framework for coercive techniques, the interrogation room itself remained relatively untouched. It was the excessive behavior within the interrogation room that received all the attention. I want to argue that the interrogation room has, in fact, played a pivotal—if little noticed—role in the mainstream discourse of war, law, and violence. Both critics and defenders of torture practices have relied upon a surprisingly similar assumption: that the interrogation room itself can be a rational space for the production of information. For liberal critics, torture is a behavior that exceeds the rational—and thus, moral—bounds of the interrogation room. It is an argument that relies upon the idealized potential of the US military interrogation room as a site of regulated and willing exchange between the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner. In other words, the idea that the interrogation room can be a site for an encounter that is objective, rational, and compassionate in producing information provides the moral horizon for much of the current debate over the use of torture during interrogation. The supporters of coercive techniques frame their arguments along much the same lines, either casting torture techniques as an extension of the objective interrogation process or bracketing the regulated interrogation room as a sort of liberal privilege, one that must be denied to undeserving “enemy combatants” who have already placed themselves outside the bounds of international humanitarian law. For critics and supporters alike, information itself is an unquestioned, self-evident good, and it is a product whose quality reflects