Projecting Our Bad Selves: September 11 and the Legalization of U.S. Torture at Abu Ghraib

• In Event: Modernity, Alterity, Identity

Abstract

This essay critically examines “torture memos” that were written and circulated with the intent to authorize torture techniques used by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib. A close reading of these documents reveals the inadequacy of Burkean understandings of identification and points to the need for rhetorical scholars to reevaluate identification in light of psychoanalytic approaches to transference, which recognize the importance of human desire and allow the rhetorical critic to better demand human accountability.

Author

• Amanda J Davis, Univ of Texas, Austin