Alternative Sites of Accountability for Torture: The Publication of War on Terror Books as 'Memory-Justice'

Abstract

This article examines alternative sites of accountability for torture carried out in the war on terror, where the Obama Administration refused to engage in official account¬ability. It is concerned with a less examined feature of civil society’s efforts at seek¬ing accountability: the publication of key documents from the war on terror as books. I focus on two, one based on a congressional report on torture and the other on the diary of a current Guantánamo Bay detainee. I argue that through publishing these already existing texts as books, civil society actors helped amplify, circulate, and make more permanent evidence of post-9.11 torture. In doing so they contributed to the creation of a ‘counterpublic’, reforming what is publicly thinkable about the torture policies of the Bush Administration, and achieved a form of ‘memory-justice’, morally grounding past crimes in the present and taking responsibility as a political commu¬nity for righting past wrongs. Show more