1. See in particular the memos of Alberto Gonzales to President Bush (“Decision Re: Application of the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War to the Conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” 25 Jan. 2000), George W. Bush (“On the Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees,” 7 Feb. 2002), and Jay S. Bybee to Alberto Gonzales (“Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340–2340A,” 1 Aug. 2002). These and other memos can be found in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), a collection of essays, documents, and photographs.
2. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 65.
3. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977; New York: Vintage, 1979), especially ch. 2.
4. For an overview of such analyses, see Stephen F. Eisenman’s The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion, 2007).
5. Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan; Henry Holt, 2006), 10, my emphasis. McCoy describes the development of the CIA paradigm of psychological torture in ch. 2, “Mind Control.”