Blackwell Reference Online

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When one hears about another person's physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person's body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the WorldThe “vanishing points” that I seek to identify in this essay can be brought into preliminary view through three figures and two sites. The three figures are a hooded man, a masked philosopher, and an outlaw president, none of whom is quite what he seems. The two sites are the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: and neither of these is quite what it seems either.In the middle of October 2003 Haj Ali al-Qaisi, the former Mukhtar – community leader – of al Madifai, a district west of Baghdad, was arrested by US troops on his way to work. He was hooded, handcuffed, and taken to Abu Ghraib prison, where he was asked about Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and the insurgency. “They wanted me to become their eyes in the region,” he said. But he protested that he knew nothing, and he was left to kick his heels in a large tent compound. Ten days later he was taken to Cage 49 in Cell-block 1. There he was interrogated daily, and frequently made to spend the ... log in or subscribe to read full text