The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States

9. Torture, War, and Capital Punishment: Linkages and Missed Connections

281 9 Torture, War, and Capital Punishment Linkages and Missed Connections Robin Wagner-Pacifici May 2008. The presidential primary campaigns are in full swing in the United States. Mortgage foreclosures, high gas prices, the war in Iraq, and health care dominate the campaign debates and policy pronouncements. Meanwhile, crucial decisions are made by current incumbents of the three branches of government and its administrative and military agencies about the constitutionality of forms of state execution, specifically lethal injections , and forms of “unlawful enemy combatant” interrogation, specifically waterboarding. The Supreme Court has recently released its decision on the lethal injection protocol challenge (Baze v. Rees); another death-row inmate (three in the past several months) in North Carolina is released because of prosecutorial withholding of evidence potentially favorable to the defendant, a new study is released finding racial disparities in capital sentencing, the Justice Department finally releases the previously classified March 2003 John Yoo memorandum on “Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held outside the United States,” seven alien enemy detainees at Guantanamo have been officially charged with war crimes and, with the prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty, are set to be tried after many years of detention and after some of them had been subject to harsh interrogation methods (deemed by many to be torture). On the campaign trail, precious little is said about these consequential actions and decisions. Yet they raise critical issues about the self-understanding of the United States, the limits of state violence, the rule of law (including international law), and human rights—all topics a public might legitimately expect its candidates for office to engage. In their totality, they present a picture of where this country now stands on the road to abolition. 282 Robin Wagner-Pacifici Confounding Cultural Formations of State Violence On January 3, 2008, readers of the New York Times may have been particularly puzzled by two articles on the first page that touched on issues of state violence and its limits in the United States. One article, “U.S. Announces Criminal Inquiry into C.I.A. Tapes,” announced that the Justice Department had launched a formal criminal investigation of the 2005 destruction of videotapes of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda operatives carried out in 2002. While obstruction of justice was the anticipated focus of any possible charges, the potent backstory involved the probable use of “waterboarding ” on those suspected al-Qaeda operatives during the taped interrogation sessions. Waterboarding, an interrogation technique many have acknowledged to be torture, had become in 2007, and would continue to be into 2008, a symbolic fetish of the torture approach-avoidance public discourse on the “war on terror.” Further down was another article about state violence. This one was titled “States Hesitate to Lead Change on Executions.” The piece addressed the political and legal contexts surrounding the upcoming Supreme Court case, Baze v. Rees. The story reported that various states had decided not to follow recommendations about revising the lethal injection method of execution, recommendations that aimed to eliminate the possibility of excruciating physical pain during executions.1 Excruciating pain caused and carried out by agents of the state floated on the surfaces of both of these articles. And both articles suggested that certain limits in state violence have either been reached or breached—in both instances, leading to nothing short of torture. But the two front-page articles, and the worlds of law, politics, policy, war, and strategy in which they lived, remained hermetically insulated from one another. A week later, on January 11, 2008, several articles appeared in the New York Times’ first section that also touched on current issues of state violence in the world. One article, “General Clears Army Officer of Crime in Abu Ghraib Case,” reported that the only U.S. officer to face a courtmartial over the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, had been cleared of the crime of disobeying an order not to discuss the abuse investigation. Another article, “Administration Is Rebuffed in a Ruling on Deportation,” reported on the decision of a federal judge in Pennsylvania to block the government’s attempts to deport an Egyptian Torture, War, and Capital Punishment 283 Coptic Christian man, Sameh Khouzam, back to Egypt to face a murder conviction there (a conviction carried out in absentia). Khouzam had claimed that he had already been subject to...