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Now we finally learned what we all suspected: the numerous reports and testimonies [[about ]] the [[Guantanamo ]] and [[Abu Ghraib ]] prisons were a trap to distract the attention of the [[public ]] from the [[true ]] [[secret]]: in the last days, big [[media ]] reported that the CIA operates secret detention facilities beyond the reach of the law and [[outside ]] [[official ]] oversight at bases in two eastern European countries and some [[other ]] Asian countries. The CIA has not even acknowledged the [[existence ]] of these "black sites" with "[[ghost ]] prisoners": to do so could open the U.S. [[government ]] to [[legal ]] challenges, since the prisoners are there submitted to "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (the US newspeak for [[torture]]). The original [[idea ]] was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be [[responsible ]] for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent [[threat]]; but as the CIA began apprehending more [[people ]] whose intelligence [[value ]] and [[links ]] to [[terrorism ]] were less certain, the original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible [[universe ]] was lowered or ignored.

What is effectively going on here? In a debate about the fate of Guantanamo prisoners on NBC about a year ago, one of the weird arguments for the ethico-legal acceptability of their status was that "they are those who were missed by the bombs": since they were the target of the US bombing and accidentally survived it, and since this bombing was part of a legitimate military operation, one cannot condemn their fate when they were taken prisoners after the combat - whatever their [[situation]], it is better, less severe, than [[being ]] [[dead]]... This reasoning tells more than it intends to say: it puts the prisoner almost literally into the [[position ]] of [[living ]] dead, those who are in a way already dead (their [[right ]] to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of murderous bombings), so that they are now cases of what Giorgio [[Agamben ]] calls <i>[[homo sacer]]</i>, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, his [[life ]] no longer counts.

There is a vague similarity between their situation and the - legally problematic - premise of the movie <i>[[Double ]] Jeopardy</i>: if you were condemned for killing A and you later, after serving your term and being released, discover that A is still alive, you can now kill him with impunity since you cannot be condemned two [[times ]] for the same act. In [[psychoanalytic ]] term, this killing would clearly display the [[temporal ]] [[structure ]] of [[masochist ]] [[perversion]]: the succession is inverted, you are first punished and thus gain the right to commit the crime. If the Guantanamo prisoners are located in the [[space ]] "[[between the two deaths]]," occupying the position of <i>homo sacer</i>, legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while [[biologically ]] still alive, the US authorities which treat [[them ]] in this way are also in a kind of in-between legal status which forms the [[counterpart ]] to homo sacer: acting as a legal [[power]], their [[acts ]] are no longer covered and constrained by the law - they operate in an empty space that is still within the [[domain ]] of the law.

However, the two procedures can also co-[[exist]]: US government [[agencies ]] running the "war on [[terror]]" follow a secret program known as "extraordinary rendition": the policy of seizing suspicious individuals without even the [[semblance ]] of due [[process ]] and sending them off to be interrogated by allied regimes known to [[practice ]] torture.<ref>Bob Herbert, "[[Outsourcing ]] torture," <i>International Herald Tribune</i>, February 12-13 2005, p. 4.</ref> [[Another ]] mode of co-existence are also the CIA "black sites," located in foreign countries, but operated by CIA.

So what about the "realistic" counter-argument: the [[war on terror ]] IS dirty, one is put in situations where life of thousands depends on informations we can get from our prisoners; consequently, as Alan Dershowitz put it: “I'm not in favor of torture, but if you're going to have it, it should damn well have court approval." The underlying [[logic ]] - "Since we are in any [[case ]] doing it, better to legalize it and thus prevent excesses!" - is extremely dangerous: it gives legitimacy to torture and thus opens up the space for MORE illicit torture. Against the [[liberal ]] "honesty" of Derschowitz, one should therefore paradoxically stick to the [[apparent ]] "[[hypocrisy]]": OK, one can well imagine that, in a [[singular ]] situation, confronted with the proverbial "prisoner who [[knows]]" and whose [[words ]] can save thousands, one would recourse to torture - however, even (or, rather, precisely) in such a case, it is absolutely crucial that one does NOT elevate this desperate [[choice ]] into a [[universal ]] [[principle]]; following the unavoidable brutal urgency of the [[moment]], one should simply DO IT. Only in this way, in the very inability or [[prohibition ]] to elevate what we had to do into a universal principle, one retains the [[sense ]] of [[guilt]], the [[awareness ]] of the inadmissibility of what we did.

In March 2005, the US were in the grip of the [[Terri Schiavo ]] case: she suffered brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped briefly from a chemical imbalance believed to have been brought on by an eating disorder; court-appointed doctors claimed she is in a persistent vegetative [[state ]] with no hope of recovery. While her husband wanted her [[disconnected ]] to die in peace, her [[parents ]] argued that she could get better and that she would never have wanted to be cut off from food and water. The case reached the top level of the US government and judicial bodies, with the Supreme Court and President involved, the Congress passing fast-track resolutions, etc. The absurdity of the situation, when put in the wider context, is breath-taking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and hunger all around the [[world]], the public opinion in the US focused on a single case of prolonging the run of NAKED LIFE, of a persistent vegetative state reduced of all specifically [[human ]] characteristics. THIS is the [[truth ]] of what the [[Catholic ]] [[Church ]] means what its representatives talk about the "[[culture ]] of life" as opposed to the "culture of [[death]]" of contemporary nihilistic hedonism. What we [[encounter ]] here is effectively a kind of [[Hegelian ]] [[infinite judgment ]] which asserts the speculative [[identity ]] of the highest and the lowest: the Life of the Spirit, divine spiritual [[dimension ]] and the life reduced to inert vegetation... These are the two extremes we find ourselves today with [[regard ]] to [[human rights]]: one the one hand those "missed by the bombs" (mentally and physically [[full ]] human beings, but deprived of rights), on the other hand a human being reduced to bare vegetative life, but this [[bare life ]] protected by the entire state [[apparatus]].What legitimizes such [[biopolitics ]] is the mobilization of the [[fantasmatic ]] dimension of the potential/invisible threat: it is the invisible (and for that very [[reason ]] all-powerful and omni-[[present]]) threat of the [[Enemy ]] that legitimizes the permanent [[state of emergency ]] of the existing Power (Fascists invoked the threat of the [[Jewish ]] conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the [[class ]] enemy - up to today's "war on terror," of course). This [[invisible threat ]] of the Enemy legitimizes the logic of the [[preemptive strike]]: precisely because the threat is [[virtual]], it is too late to wait for its actualization, one has to strike in advance, before it will be too late... In other words, the omni-present invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too [[visible ]] protective measures of [[defense ]] (which pose the only TRUE threat to [[democracy ]] and [[Human Rights|human rights]], of course). If the classic power functioned as the threat which was operative precisely by way of never actualizing itself, by way of remaining a threatening GESTURE (and this functioning reached its climax in the [[Cold War]], with the threat of the mutual nuclear [[destruction ]] which HAD to remain a threat), with the war on terror, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization - not of itself, but - of the measures against itself. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of strikes against potential terrorists... The power which presents itself as being all the [[time ]] under threat, living in mortal [[danger]], and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power, the very [[model ]] of the Nietzschean [[ressentiment ]] and [[moralistic ]] hypocrisy - and, effectively, was it not [[Nietzsche ]] himself who, more than a century ago, provided the best [[analysis ]] of the [[false ]] [[moral ]] premises of today's "war on [[terror"]]?

"No government admits any more that it keeps an [[army ]] to [[satisfy ]] occasionally the [[desire ]] for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to server for defense, and one invokes the [[morality ]] that approves of [[self]]-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the [[neighbor]]'s [[immorality]]; for the neighbor must be [[thought ]] of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must [[think ]] of means of [[self-defense]]. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like [[nothing ]] better than to overpower a harmless and awkward [[victim ]] without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own [[good ]] disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the [[cause ]] of wars, because as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the [[doctrine ]] of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests."<ref>[[Friedrich Nietzsche]], <i>Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe</i>, Vol. 2, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1980, p. 678.</ref>