Abu Ghraib and the Temporal Logic of Interruption

Abstract

On April 28, 2004, CBS News broadcasted the first photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib Detention Centre. These photos, a censored fraction of more than two hundred photographs and nineteen videos taken at the detention centre, render in colour all manner of abuse at the hands of US Army military police. Taken the previous fall, the photographs were anonymously shared with Army criminal investigators by Sgt. Joseph Darby, a soldier stationed at Abu Ghraib. At the behest of the Bush Administration, the story was kept sealed for months and “amnesty” was declared by the military. But in the spring of 2004, the story broke. The documentation of abuses at Abu Ghraib
quickly travelled, their digitality facilitating local and global circulation. This essay argues that the Abu Ghraib scandal is a form of “what crops up,” (3) in Paul Virilio’s terms, what is invented by the War on Terror and the United States willingness to treat human bodies as a means to an end. I propose that the Abu Ghraib scandal illustrates a key temporal logic structuring the contemporary relationship between rhetoric and torture: the rhetorical interruption. The narrative of violence produced by the photographs and their release demonstrates how such visual representations of violence can disrupt and displace attention from the system that created them; and this interruption serves as a manifestation of one of several complex connections between time, rhetoric, and violence.

Keywords: Torture, Rhetoric, Temporality, Abu Ghraib, Interruption, Paul Virilio