Hello, I need someone to help me writing my Chapter review for Muslims in Canada course. I have attached the chapter that you have to read and then write a 5-6 pages review on it. I have also attached

PART ONE ‘Dangerous’ Muslim Men Growing Internationalization and Family Policies 23Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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This page intentionally left blank Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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1‘Your client has a profile’: Race in the Security Hearing Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and judicial protections no longer made any sense.

Giorgio Agamben 1 34(1) A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on secu- rity grounds for (f) being a member of an organization that there are rea- sonable grounds to believe engages, has engaged, orwill engagein acts referred to in paragraphs (a) [espionage or subversion], (b) [subversion by force] or (c) [terrorism]. (Emphasis added) Immigration and Refugee Protection Act 2 At a hearing on 27 November 2003 to determine the validity of the security certificate that declared Hassan Almrei inadmissible to Canada on the grounds that he will engage in acts of terrorism, an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) confi- dently clarified for Almrei’s counsel the heart of the Service’s case against his client:

What I am saying today is that your client has a profilewhich makes him of use to Al Qaeda and his connections to the organization through various individuals is what leads us to conclude that he is a threat to the security of Canada. I am afraid that I can’t get into any more detail than that.

We are not hanging our case on this notion that he was among the cream-of-the-crop recruits in the early 1980s. I never said that. 3(Empha- sis added) Recto Running Head 25Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Not the cream of the crop of recruits, and possibly not even recruited by Al Qaeda, Almrei has the profile of someone of possibleuse to Al Qaeda, and that seals his fate. Almrei’s profile is that of an Arab man who went to Afghanistan as a teenager to fight the Soviets in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When combined with the fact that he seems to know other Arab men, some of whom have similar histories, the profile is enough for CSIS, and ultimately the court, to believe that he is someone who will engage in terrorism.

In the post-9/11 environment, few are surprised that individuals with life histories such as Almrei’s should come to the attention of security services. What is noteworthy, however, is that at his hearing, Hassan Almrei’s life history sufficesto make the case that he is a ter- rorist or will become one. No longer simply about ‘targeting individ- uals who possess identifiable attributes that is [sic] believed to bear positive statistical correlations to particular kinds of misconduct,’ 4in the post-9/11 period the profile now performs an additional function.

It targets andcondemns through launching Hassan Almrei into a state of exception, a place in law where he has limited due-process rights.

Hassan Almrei’s situation arises out of a section of the Immigration Actthat authorizes security certificates, and thus the state of exception into which he is plunged is part of the legal structure in which non-cit- izens have fewer rights than do citizens. Security certificates did not begin with the ‘war on terror,’ but they have become the ‘front-line tools’ used by Canada to fight terrorism, and their usage is now pri- marily directed at Arabs and Muslims. 5A security certificate, issued by the minister of citizenship and immigration and the solicitor general, and authorized under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, permits the detention and expulsion of non-citizens who are consid- ered to be a threat to national security. Detainees have no opportunity to be heard before a certificate is issued, and a designated judge of the federal court reviews most of the government’s case against the detainee in a secret hearing at which neither the detainee nor his counsel is present. The detainee receives only a summary of the evi- dence against him. Detention is mandatory for non-permanent resi- dents held under a security certificate, and there is no possibility of release unless a person leaves Canada, or the certificate is struck down, or if 120 days have elapsed and deportation has still not taken place.

At this point, an application for release can be made. In contrast to non-residents, permanent residents are entitled to a review of the 26 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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detention order after the first forty-eight hours and subsequently at six-month intervals until a final decision is made by a federal court judge concerning the security certificate. For ‘foreign nationals’ and permanent residents alike, however, there is no appeal with respect to the judge’s decision on the security certificate and the test for the finding of the reasonableness of the certificate is a low one, the minis- ters needing only to satisfy the court that there is a possibilitythat the person is a terrorist or a member of a terrorist organization. 6The five men currently detained under security certificates are all Muslim men of Arab origin each of whom has been detained for three to seven years. 7 The detainees – Hassan Almrei, 8 Mohammed Mahjoub, 9 Mohammed Jaballah, 10 Mohamed Harkat, 11 and Adil Charkaoui 12 have served varying periods of time in solitary confinement, and each is detained without charge indefinitely. Adil Charkaoui, the only per- manent resident of the five, was released on strict bail conditions after twenty-one months in prison. Mohammad Harkat was released on even stricter bail conditions after three and a half years in prison, and Mohammed Mahjoub’s bail was finally granted in February 2007, seven years after his initial detention.

On 23 February 2007 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that it is unconstitutional to detain people based on secret evidence. In a unan- imous decision the court ruled that the sections of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Actthat permit secret evidence to be used in the judi- cial confirmation of security certificates unfairly denies detainees their fundamental right to a fair trial. Equally, the section of the act that denies a prompt hearing to foreign nationals violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court also recognized that returning detainees to countries where they might be tortured is not a viable option, although it did not declare such an action unconstitutional. Impor- tantly, the court did not strike down security certificates per se and it gave parliament a year to amend the law in a way that protects detainees’ due-process rights to a greater extent than they are pro- tected now. The court favours the solution of lawyers specially appointed to review secret evidence, a solution that may not in fact protect detainees if such appointees are more likely to keep the gov- ernment’s position in mind than the detainees’, and especially if special advocates are not allowed to share the secret information with the detainees. 13 As law professor Kent Roach has suggested, it would be a mistake to consider the Supreme Court ruling an outright victory.

The court did not condemn indefinite detention of terror suspects ‘Your client has a profile’ 27Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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under immigration law as discriminatory nor did it regard such deten- tion as cruel and unusual punishment. 14 The five detainees are more than simply victims of racial profiling.

Their Arab origins, and the life history that mostly Arab Muslim men have had, operate to mark them as individuals likely to commit ter- rorist acts, people whose propensity for violence is indicated by their origins. When race thinking, the belief in the division of humanity into those prone to violence and those who are not according to descent, is accompanied by the idea that there must be two different, hierarchical legal regimes for each, and when we begin to grow accustomed to places without law and to people to whom the rule of law does not apply, we enter the terrifying world of the colonies and the concentra- tion camp. This chapter examines how a space where law is suspended operates in the ‘war on terror,’ and it attends to the work that ideas about race do in the environment of the exception.

Whether with respect to non-citizens or citizens, at the heart of the state of exception, the place Agamben described as ‘the force of law without law,’ is the idea that only an unfettered state power can prop- erly confront threats to the nation. Race thinking helps us to believe in the necessity of an all-powerful sovereign. If the threat can be con- tained in no other way than through this extraordinary power to suspend fundamental rights, it is surely because ‘they (those who threaten us)’ are not like ‘us’ and can only be stopped with brute force.

As Angelina Snodgrass Godoy perceptively notes, two assumptions remain unchallenged in the culture of exception: we can tell them from us, and the suspensions of the rule of law will not affect those of us who are deemed to be within political community. 15 In this way, the exception instals the idea that the nation is a kin group that must be fortified against outsiders whose disloyalty we will recognize, a disloy- alty that is visible not in what people do but in who they are. As I show below, who people are is formulated in terms of an unchanging essence derived from their histories, associations, and religious prac- tices, a constellation of invariantcharacteristics inherited from a culture, religion, and region. A race fiction thus grounds the nation and inheres in the power of the state to decide who is part of the kin group and who is not.

How does one end up in the place of exception, ‘where judicial pro- tections no longer make sense,’ a world of secret evidence in which there is no right to habeas corpus? Hassan Almrei and the other security- certificate detainees discussed in this chapter are detained on the basis 28 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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that they are ‘Islamic terrorists,’ men who come from a culture in which religion, and not rationality, produces individuals with an inher- entcapacity for violence. A ‘Jihadist,’ as the ‘Islamic terrorist’ is called, is forever unable to escape the marking of his religion, culture and history. If Jihadists exist in a space where judicial protections no longer make any sense, their eviction from the law is argued on the basis that the West must necessarily be vigilant when such monsters are let loose on the world. The terrorist as monster draws on a number of Oriental- ist images, as others have shown. 16 Significantly, monster terrorists lie forever beyond the law, and through them we become accustomed to the idea that there should be places where human beings have no rights. In security-certificate hearings there is a casual, unreflected- upon lawlessness, an abandonment of the rule of law that only race thinking can make defensible. What else can explain the unquestioned absence of evidence, the incoherence of the arguments, and the retreat to the simple logic that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’ and cannot be given the benefit of the rule of law?

Pre-emptive Punishment The domestic philosophy of pre-emptive punishment argues that if there is a possibility that a crime might be committed, it ought to be pre- empted by government action. 17 Shortly after 9/11, men and some children rounded up from the vil- lages and battlefields of Afghanistan were herded into shipping con- tainers by the Northern Alliance (at the behest of the United States).

Many died; it is estimated that only thirty to fifty in each container of three to four hundred apparently survived. 18Those who survived typ- ically were taken to prisons at Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan, and were shipped to third countries (the process known as extraordi- nary rendition) or to the U.S. base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where they were detained on the basis that the president, as the commander-in- chief, possessed the unilateral authority to arrest and detain anyone.

Detainees were declared ‘enemy combatants,’ a designation that left them in a no man’s land of rights, neither prisoners of war nor crimi- nals. 19 In the United States, Canada, and Europe, security programs concentrated on immigrants, utilizing those places of exception long existing in immigration law, as well as new powers to arrest, detain, and deport without due process. Mainly Arab/Muslim men were ‘Your client has a profile’ 29Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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swept up in these terror arrests and deported or detained indefi- nitely. 20 The practices that facilitate the rounding up of Muslims and Arabs and result in their exile to places without law include strength- ened surveillance powers and powers to detain, prosecute, and convict without any procedural protections or oversights by the courts.

In the Canadian context, fewer due-process rights remain in the Immigration Actthan before 9/11, although it is important to note that here, as in the United States, many changes pre-date 9/11 and simply received more widespread support in the ensuing events. The federal government’s allocation of individuals for immigration detention has increased.

21An important change introduced into the Immigration and Refugee Protection Actmandates security checks before asylum processes even begin, a front-end screening that has deeply concerned refugee advocates. 22 Those marked as security risks now become inel- igible for a refugee hearing and are immediately deported. Small openings that once existed – for example, the seeking of ministerial relief after showing a record of stable residency in Canada – have mostly closed. Bureaucrats now understand the relief provisions as rel- evant only in exceptional cases, and there is little expectation that anyone marked as a security risk will be able to clear himself through demonstrating ‘good behaviour.’ 23 It is now the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness who grants ministerial relief, a decision so enmeshed in post-9/11 security considerations that it is an option that appears to be rarely granted. 24 Those who are found inadmissible for reasons of national security have now lost all appeal rights. The Immigration and Refugee Actpassed in 2002 greatly expanded the powers of immigration officers. It is no longer possible to complain about the practices of CSIS. Those subject to security certificates need not pose any actual security risk, but merely have to be shown to have possibly been a member of a terror- ist organization, and to have the potential to engage in terrorist acts. It is the notion of prevention, the detaining and deporting of individuals beforethey have committed a crime, that best sums up the post-9/11 changes and the increasing logic that law must be suspended in the interests of national security.

The justifications offered for the considerable expansion of state powers and the suspension of fundamental rights rest on the notion that it is necessary to strike at the enemy before he strikes at us. Mir- zoeff notes that the wall built by Israel in the Occupied Territories, the physical barriers built by the United States at its Mexico border, and 30 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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the detention camps established through the Western world that keep asylum seekers incarcerated indefinitely are all pre-9/11 examples of pre-emptive punishment, an abandonment of law, and the creation of categories of people without rights, all justified on the basis that they may pose a threat to the nation. While globalized pre-emptive punish- ment means invading and occupying countries on the basis that they willpose a threat, as happened in Iraq, domestically it entails an aggressive use of immigration law. Importantly, the goal of detention is ‘to keep its inmates invisible with the goal of having them forgot- ten.’ 25 ‘Their location is meant to emphasize that they are not part of the nation state and that their inmates will not achieve asylum, let alone citizenship.’ 26 The logic of detention, Mirzoeff comments, is that ‘there is no such thing as society but only people who belong to the nation and those who do not.’ 27 For Zygmunt Bauman, the refugee is placed in the category of the unthinkable and the camps to which they are confined are ‘artifices made permanent through blocking the exits.’ We refuse to imagine the camp’s inmates as members of political com- munity. 28 The very physical location and anonymity of the camp – in the case of Canada’s security detainees, a special wing of a maximum- security prison – is meant to convey this eviction from humanity.

Race is crucial to pre-emptive punishment. Mirzoeff notes that pre- emptive punishment has depended heavily on the racial notion that ‘they’ are not like ‘us’ and owing to their natures/cultures are likely to erupt into violence against us. 29 The logic is once again a colonial one, whereby states of exception are justified because the colonized cannot be governed through the rule of law as can Europeans. Prevention based on the irrationality and unpredictability of their natures and cul- tures justifies the camp as well as the practices associated with it. For example, as Nancy Baker and others show, the United States govern- ment has defended its practices of limiting press and public access to information, refusing to disclose the names and locations of, and charges against, those detained, conducting immigration hearings in secret, and denying bail even to minor violators on the grounds that anything and anyone can potentially be of use to terrorists. 30 Follow- ing what the CIA has described as the mosaic theory, the government has argued that small pieces of information might later fit into the larger terrorist picture. The mosaic theory hinges, however, a great deal on ideas about the natures of those who threaten us.

Risk is read on the body. If it is true that the profile is one way to sort out who goes to the camp and who does not, then those marked ‘Your client has a profile’ 31Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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as bearing an inherent capacity for disloyalty are not simply being profiled, but are in fact exiled from political community. This process, whereby to be profiled is to be denied due-process rights and to be detained indefinitely, shifts radically what racial profiling now means. The very concept of racial profiling seems inadequate to describe what actually happens to those whose race, read as origins, life histories, and religious practices, marks them as potential terror- ists. As Reem Badhi has shown for Canada, public debate over racial profiling has shifted from being about whether racial profiling has happened at all to being about its necessity in this time of emergency. 31 Although some argued that detaining Muslim or Arab men was not race discrimination most commentators have acknowledged that post- 9/11 profiling used ‘race as a proxy for risk, either in whole or in part’ 32 and accepted that brown skin, ‘Middle Eastern looks,’ beards, and Muslim or Arab names provided good reasons to detain. In the United States, much of this thinking was overt and legally authorized, while in Canada such practices have been for the most part informal. For example, shortly after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Justice sought to interview male non-citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty- three from Middle Eastern or ‘Islamic’ countries or countries with some suspected tie to Al Qaeda. 33In a less direct fashion, the Canadian government has not officially endorsed racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, but its practices, particularly in much publicized ‘terror sweeps,’ suggest that profiling takes place regularly on much the same basis. 34 The argument for racial profiling is risk management and gains are considered to outweigh losses (for instance, the humiliation and stigmatization of Arab and Muslim communities). For example, Professor Stephen Legomsky argues: Certainly, I agree that only a minuscule percentage of noncitizens who appear to be Arab or Muslim are involved in any way with terrorism. But that is not the point. The more relevant figure, I maintain, is the converse – the percentage of those noncitizens involved in terrorism who are Arab and Muslim. If there is credible evidence that this percentage is higher in this subgroup than in the general population, then, it seems rational for the government to focus particular attention on that group. It is simply a matter of channeling inspection resources to places where they are statis- tically most likely to detect real terrorists. 35 32 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Legomsky’s view is one that is gaining in popularity as the fear of a terrorist attack increases. After uncovering what it declared to be a ter- rorist plot to bomb U.S.-bound passenger jets leaving Britain, the former head of London’s metropolitan police expressed the view that it made sense to concentrate searches on young Muslim men travelling by themselves, and to leave those who do not fit this profile alone. 36 Certainly everyone could not be searched, an option suggested by Canadian legal scholar Sujit Choudrhry. 37 When racial profiling becomes so thoroughly recast as bureaucracy, it becomes easy to miss the inclining rather than declining significance of race. U.S. authorities did not go around detaining white men simply because Timothy McVeigh, a white man, had blown up the Oklahoma City buildings, legal scholar Leti Volpp comments, since whites remain individuals while Arabs and Muslims are understood only as a group with the group characteristic of violence. 38Historically, it is not hard to trace the racial basis to the profiling practised in the ‘war on terror.’ Before the Gulf War, Canadian and American Arabs and Muslims were the subjects, both in the media and in scholarship, of what Edward Said described as ‘a trafficking in expert Middle East lore’: ‘All roads lead to the bazaar; Arabs only understand force; brutality and violence are part of Arab civilization; Islam is an intolerant, segregationist, ‘medieval,’ fanatic, cruel, anti-woman religion.’ 39 Scholars such as Edward Said long ago documented a consistent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias in the media. In the Canadian context, Karim Karim examined the media for the period 1980 to 2000, and showed how Islam became ‘the new red scare.’ The Muslim Other replaced the cold war script in the Canadian media, starting primarily with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Muslim political vio- lence was nearly always described as terrorism, Karim shows, and the media prepared the public to think of all Muslims and Arabs as irra- tional, terrorist fanatics. 40 During the Gulf War, in 1991, many of these Hollywood-inspired stereotypes were marshalled in Canada, as jour- nalist Zuhair Kashmeri showed in The Gulf Within. 41 Scholars in the United States have similarly documented a consistent racialization of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the United States and have noted that the basis for racial animus facing these groups is not always the same. 42 Gott suggests that scholars have described the racism directed at Arab, Muslims, and South Asians as originating in specific political contexts, for example, hostility towards the Palestinian cause, nativis- ‘Your client has a profile’ 33Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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tic racism that affects all Asian Americans, and white racism spawned by a hyper-ethnocentrism. 43 The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon escalated the hostility and racism coming from all these directions. Anti-Muslim racism, often described as ‘Islamapho- bia,’ has resulted in the ‘Arabification’ of Muslims and the ‘Muslimifi- cation’ of Arabs, even though approximately 60 per cent of Canadian Arabs are Christian. 44 What remains significant about the contemporary racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, however, is not this well-established history but the fact that anti-Muslim racism now operates in a culture of excep- tion, where to be profiled as a terrorist is to have a high chance of being taken to a place of law without law. Those who are profiled soon find themselves on lists, under surveillance and under suspicion, and in detention – states from which they cannot easily emerge. Diken and Lausten suggest that if ‘power is to be total, it must defy regularity and rationality.’ 45 Power must become terror, arbitrary and unpredictable.

If, in the security-certificate hearings discussed below, we do not yet glimpse the full outlines of a regime of terror, we can see the arbitrary character of the law whereby stereotypes hold sway and arguments, in the absence of evidence of wrong-doing, rests primarily on the idea that they are not like us and they will pose a threat to us.

The Case of Hassan Almrei Courts called upon to determine the presence of the potential to commit a terrorist act, as opposed to determining whether illegal acts have been committed, must operate in ways that are strikingly similar to those of the Spanish Inquisition, a creation of another state of exception. As Irene Silverblatt has shown, the Spanish Inquisition was one of the most modern bureaucracies of its time, ‘established to meet a perceived threat to national security from Jews, Muslims, and ‘all manner of Heretics.’’ 46 The Inquisition ran according to proce- dures and rules and was overseen by bureaucrats. Its function was to clarify publicly and powerfully who ‘held beliefs or engaged in life practices that were considered threats to the colony’s moral and civic well-being.’ 47 Spanish citizens learned from the Inquisition what citi- zenship was, and who would be forever beyond it. In a similar manner, security-certificate cases establish whose beliefs and life practices are a threat to the state and who must therefore be cast out of political community. 34 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Inquisitors dominated a special kind of knowledge, for they could deter- mine the most profound of societal truths – membership in a human community. Inquisitors were charged with certifying Spanish ‘purity of blood’ (i.e. the absence of Jewish or Moorish ancestry); and they oversaw religious orthodoxy – a determination often attached to purity of blood – that in its modern form, was linked to a budding spirit of Spanish nationalism. 48 In security-certificate cases, CSIS establishes who possesses ‘Islamic extremist’ ideology. Once marked as bearing the stain of disloyalty and violence associated with this ideology, a detainee can hardly challenge the determination owing not only to secret evidence but also to the very amorphousness of a charge built on latent qualities. The ‘crime’ in security cases is not a crime but something born in the blood or the psyche, a hidden indicator of a latent capacity to be violent. Because the capacity to be violent is an internal quality, people are condemned for what they might do (based on who they are) and not for what they have done. In the same way, the Inquisition did not concern itself with crime but with those who ‘could not erase the stains of a heretical reli- gious past.’ Individuals with ‘stained blood’ might well have been Christian for centuries, but evidence of a connection to Judaism, whether centuries old or not, and however tenuous, predicted an inherent capacity for disloyalty that could someday emerge. Since heresy and treason were latent, however, proof could not be expected to be at the standard expected for crimes.

Discovering ‘the stains of a heretical religious past’ required that Spaniards accused of practising Jewish or Muslim rituals be interro- gated on more than questions of faith. The questions of the Inquisitors ‘were used to reconstruct a certain kind of life history, one built on a predefined set of variables’ that would reveal the hidden stain. Inquisi- tors tried to fit the accused’s life into a pattern ‘from birth to present, including all places of residence, travel, and major life events.’ 49 Sil- verblatt considers that the Spaniards were ‘participating in a vision of the world reminiscent of what we today call “racial profiling.”’ 50 Cru- cially, here racial profiling has two components. First, it is the practice of attributing disloyalty, treason, or criminality to an identified group on the basis of race, religion, and life history. Second, it is a practice that determines who shall have fundamental rights and who shall not.

Seen as such, racism lies both in the practice of profiling (e.g., all Jews are disloyal) and in the processes of law and bureaucracy that support ‘Your client has a profile’ 35Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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the profile as a reason to evict specific groups from law itself. It is in the profile’s connection to the place of law without law that we find race doing the work of making this exile from political community permanent.

Signs of Disloyalty In certificate hearings, a number of markers indicate who holds the ideology of an Islamic extremist. First, an Islamic extremist is someone who has participated in ‘Jihad,’ understood principally as participa- tion in anti-Soviet activities in Afghanistan during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He (no women have the label) has had either a direct or indirect association with Osama bin Laden or others who associated with him. These associations need not be close, and sometimes merely agreeing with some of Bin Laden’s criticisms of the West will suffice to raise a red flag. Anyone who is involved, however peripherally, in activities that are likely to be of some use to terrorist organizations, for example, passport forgery, is suspect. Finally, any associations with Muslim countries or people are red flags. Terrorists have these histo- ries. Any individual with this history must be a terrorist.

In the first summary 51of secret evidence held against him, prepared by CSIS, Hassan Almrei’s story begins when he applied for a visitor ’s visa in April 1998 in order to visit Hoshem Al Taha. He applied for asylum. CSIS alleges that Almrei behaved in a clandestine manner and that he visited a number of Arab Afghans, individuals whom CSIS defines in a footnote as ‘mujahedin’ and ‘Islamic fighters in a jihad.’ 52 The footnote further explains that ‘Jihad’ is ‘a religious war of Muslims against unbelievers in Islam, inculcated as a duty by the Koran and traditions.’ The Service reiterates its belief that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Almrei, a participant in anti-Soviet activities in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, has engaged in or will engage in ter- rorism and that he is a member of Osama bin Laden’s network, an organization ‘that there are reasonable grounds to believe will engage in terrorism or was engaged in terrorism.’ 53 The case against Almrei rests on the interpretation of a past history as a predictor of future behaviour and its construction depends on spe- cific characterizations of Bin Laden’s network Al Qaeda, notably its ideology of jihad, bonds between members, and its ‘sleeper-cell’ struc- ture. The sleeper cell theory is not a new one, as Volpp reminds us. It was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during the 36 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Second World War; in this instance too it turned on the logic that as inscrutable ‘Orientals,’ Japanese Americans were ‘patiently waiting to strike’ at America and therefore must be interned. 54 Indeed, all three characteristics (jihad, bonds between members, and the sleeper cell) become believable, as I show below, largely through unspoken but nonetheless invoked racial images of Muslim and Arab irrationality, tribalism, and, finally, disease or pathology. These ideas position non- Arabs and non-Muslims, in contrast, as belonging to a society of indi- viduals who are rational and secular. As CSIS reiterates time and time again through the hearings, Arabs and Muslims are not like us. The power of this narrative structure is such that it is virtually impossible to question its coherency by asking, for example, how we come to know about these characteristics. The force of law without law, where questions need not be answered, only entrenches further the narrative of a potentially deadly clash of civilizations.

The Osama bin Laden network is described as an organization set up by Bin Laden after the Soviet pull-out from Afghanistan. Bin Laden created training camps in Afghanistan with the goal of waging a ‘jihad’ against the United States and Israel. Bin Ladin’s ‘jihad’ is not distin- guished in the text from ‘jihad’ in general as described earlier in the statement as a duty of all Muslims. Importantly, ‘Membership in the Bin Ladin network is defined by an adherence to a shared ideology.’ It is ‘an association of individuals linked by a common past,’ a past of anti-Soviet ‘jihad.’ As the Service elaborates in its summary of the evi- dence against Hassan Almrei, the backbone of the network is the ideological and personal bond among the Arab volunteers who were recruited by Bin Laden in the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–1989). As a result, this variety of terrorism transcends national and organizational boundaries which may or may not take the form of a structured, hierarchical organization of militants with pre-determined roles. 55 Unconventional and unpredictable, Bin Laden’s network employs the tactic of ‘sleeper cells,’ where ‘operatives are often established in foreign countries for extended periods of time, up to several years, prior to a given operation being executed. Preceding the activation of the operation, they may live as regular citizens, leading respectable lives, avoiding official attention.’ 56The concept of the sleeper cell, with its biological associations, is one that is central to the state’s case, ‘Your client has a profile’ 37Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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invoking as it has historically, the ‘bodily degeneracy’ of the marked group as well as the threat of contamination. A ‘sleeper cell’ provides the possibility of being pathological, yet appearing ‘normal’: disease deceptively hidden in an otherwise respectable body. 57 Relying on the conceptual tools of Sander Gilman and others, Carmela Murdocca has shown that the notion of a degenerate, disease-ridden body of colour against a healthy bourgeois citizenry has long structured the ideologi- cal production of the Canadian nation: ‘The use of the discourse of contamination and disease is used to reaffirm colonial ideas about the inferiority and bodily degeneracy of colonized peoples.’ The presence of disease, Murdocca points out, requires regulation wherein ‘the dis- eased is represented both as a moral danger and as a bodily danger to otherwise law-abiding, legitimate citizens.’ 58 Historically we might recall, as Karen Engle has pointed out, that one further advantage of the sleeper cell as a construct invoking biology is the potential it has to enable us to make the claim that the disease has spread, even to citizen bodies, a logic in operation during the McCarthy period in the United States, when white citizens were considered to have caught the disease of foreignness (communism). 59 Hassan Almrei is considered to fit the profile of an Al Qaeda sleeper-cell operative to a T. At seventeen, Almrei went to Afghan- istan to support the Afghanis in their fight to oppose the Russian invasion. He returned several times over five years, staying in guest houses that the Service alleges were bases for Al Qaeda. While in Saudi Arabia, Hassan Almrei had a small honey business that gave him the opportunity to travel to Pakistan in the 1990s. Citing a New York Timesarticle by journalist Judith Miller, the Service maintained that the honey business was a favourite way for Bin Laden’s network to acquire money. While his past associations are critical to the case against him, for CSIS Almrei’s behaviour in Canada strengthens their belief that he is a member of a terrorist network. Almrei appears to be connected to Nabil Almarabh (he visited him in jail and lent his uncle money), a man the United States once suspected of terrorism but whom it has since cleared. Almrei is said to have behaved ‘in a clan- destine fashion,’ displaying a security consciousness that the Service maintains is ‘an important characteristic of the Bin Laden Network.’ 60 Almrei also used false passports to come to Canada, and while this is a practice of the vast majority of refugees unable to obtain legal doc- uments, 61 Almrei’s culpability becomes more evident when it is dis- covered that he once gave advice to someone on where to obtain a 38 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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false passport, information for which he charged a fee. Additional evi- dence of Almrei’s connection to Bin Laden included computer photos that Almrei is said to have accessed from certain websites, including pictures of airplane cockpits, of Bin Laden, and of Ibn Khattab, a now dead Arab man who is thought to have been involved in anti-Russian terrorist activities in Chechnya and with whom Almrei stayed in Afghanistan and Tajikastan.

They Are Who They Are; We Are Who We Are Signs that Almrei carries the seeds of terrorism within him must tell the whole story of his disloyalty, since no direct evidence of his culpa- bility is available. The first empty space that the signs must fill is the departure of the right to face one’s accuser. At the hearing Almrei’s lawyer, Barbara Jackman, began by attempting to secure the right to cross-examine CSIS or the RCMP agents who were the authors of the case against Almrei. Denied access to the specific agents involved, in the interests of national security, instead she is only allowed to cross- examine an intelligence analyst, J.P. Since J.P. discusses generalities more than he is able to discuss the specifics of Almrei’s case, this deci- sion secures for the profile its privileged place as truth. In cross-exam- ination, J.P. acknowledged that the file of evidence against Almrei included items that may not be directly connected to him, for example, email in which Almrei’s name does not appear. He agreed that the Service does not always collect its own evidence, relying instead on media reports. On the issue of the meaning of Almrei’s attendance in a training camp in Afghanistan, something Almrei denied on his appli- cation for asylum but later admitted, the Service is clear that while everybody who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets did not become Al Qaeda operatives, the fact that Almrei went still makes him of interest. The possibility that Almrei was in a training camp run by a group that later became part of the Northern Alliance with whom the West is now allied does not take away the stain of his having been in Afghanistan. Asked about the possibility that Almrei’s training was in fact affiliated to factions that ultimately became the Northern Alliance and not Al Qaeda, the CSIS agent replies:

That doesn’t really make a difference, simply because I can’t speak to his allegiance to the Northern Alliance today. All I know is that he has had train- ing as a mujahedin. I am not aware of the information in the classified SIR. ‘Your client has a profile’ 39Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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The classified SIR may be more specific as to where he was training ... The fact is that there is a lot of people who trained in various groups. The essentials are the knowledge that they have acquired and their contacts and activities today and their allegiances today. We have had evidence in the open document that Mr. Almrei has expressed allegiance to Al Qaeda or has expressed support for Osama Bin Ladin and that obviously would negate any support of the Northern Alliance and its fairly secular outlook. It is more of a political and ethnic group. It is largely a Tajik organization. It is not of the same Islamic bent as the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

For all I know, Mr. Almrei could have changed his mind and become more reli- gious. Adhered to a stricter interpretation of Islam. A lot of time has gone by since he last claims to have been in Afghanistan and his world outlook may have changed dramatically. I can’t say that Mr. Almrei’s training in a Northern Alliance camp, if that occurred would prevent him from being a supporter of Al Qaeda today.’ 62(Emphasis added) While Almrei’s ideological leanings could have been just as easily towards the Northern Alliance as towards Al Qaeda, and he could have just as easily changed his mind and become less religious, it is only the possibility that he may have become more so, a possibility inferred by his presence in Afghanistan, that serves to indict him.

The significance of where and with whom Almrei stayed in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and what he did there are hard to establish.

His counsel suggests that one of the guest houses at which Almrei stayed in Afghanistan was run by a man who is now a minister in the government of Afghanistan and who is clearly of the Northern Alli- ance; she shows that CSIS relied uncritically on right-wing think tanks for some of its information; 63 Almrei’s ‘military training’ consisted in learning how to shoot a rifle; and his ‘scouting mission’ with the well- known Ibn Khattab amounted to little else than checking out the con- ditions for establishing a camp. While there is clearly disagreement on these details, they do not form the heart of the case that Almrei presents a security risk to Canada today. Of more concern is his characterization as having been associated with forged passports and with other Arabs.

As the CSIS agent insists, it is the fact that Almrei has a profile, the profile of a man of potential use to Al Qaeda, that counts the most. 64 On cross-examination, the CSIS agent admitted that Almrei was a ‘document procurer ’ and not a passport forger himself, but this fact in and of itself cannot compete with the idea of Almrei’s potential use to Al Qaeda. As J.P. contends: 40 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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He has access to individuals who can provide the false documents and who are useful resources. I personally don’t know anybody I would go to if I needed a false document. An individual like him would go a long way to facilitating anybody’s request for such documentation. He has the means of tapping into a local network to obtain false documents, which is not a given skill that one can pick up in an afternoon, especially if you are coming to a country like Canada. You have to have the knowledge of who to go to, where the quality documents are available, how much you should pay for them, and that sort of thing. 65 If Almrei’s knowledge of where to get a false passport indicates he is linked to an international forgery ring, it still needs to be established that this specific ring is connected to Al Qaeda. Where the profile is both the method of establishing the link and the proof itself that a link exists, that connection need not be a direct link but instead an ideo- logical one. In Almrei’s case, his father ’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and that organization’s ideological connections to Al Qaeda suffice. When questioned about the Service’s knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood, J.P. acknowledges that the Brotherhood may not itself practise violence, but he offers the following assessment of its links to Al Qaeda: ‘It [the Brotherhood] supports the notion of the use of violence for obtaining its objectives, yes. Because it doesn’t practice it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its ideological repertoire. To my knowledge, it has never denounced the use of violence for their objec- tives or for the pursuit of an Islamic extremist agenda.’ 66 One difficulty with offering as evidence an ‘ideological repertoire,’ failure to denounce violence, and profiling based on presence in Af- ghanistan is that thousands of young Arab men went to Afghanistan, as Almrei did, and possess the signs of ideology that interests CSIS.

J.P. is unfazed by the challenge of establishing who of the 30,000 Arab men who went to Afghanistan are terrorists in the making. The problem of generalizing and stereotyping becomes more intractable, but is still of little interest to J.P. when Almrei’s lawyer suggests that many people agree with Bin Laden’s critique of America, as Almrei does, without believing in his methods of violence. Confidently declaring himself as someone ‘probably using a wide-angled sense of male world view’ in asserting that few people could dissociate Bin Laden’s views from his violent means, J.P. proudly asserts that his opinion is that of a ‘White, anglo-saxon Canadian.’ And that, it is implied, is the end of the story. We need know no more about J.P.’s ‘Your client has a profile’ 41Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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credibility. Just as Almrei’s origins and life history indicate his charac- ter, so too does J.P.’s. Ideology remains the key marker of Almrei’s des- ignation as a security risk. Madame Justice Tremblay-Lamer found the security certificate to be reasonable and declared that the evidence, both openly disclosed and secret, supported ‘the view that Mr. Almrei is a member of an international network of extremist individuals who support the Islamic extremist ideals espoused by Osama Bin Laden and that Mr. Almrei is involved in a forgery ring with international connections that produces false documents.’ 67 Al Qaeda–Inspired When Hassan Almrei had a chance to seek bail in 2005, 68 Madame Justice Layden-Stevenson, in deciding against his bail, focused once again on ideology and specifically on the evidence heard from another senior Middle East analyst of CSIS, named P.G. As he had done in other security cases, P.G. described Al Qaeda as including ‘Al Qaeda proper,’ ‘Al Qaeda associates,’ and ‘Al Qaeda inspired.’ 69 It is the last category that is of most relevance for the court, since ‘Al Qaeda inspired’ ‘refers to individuals or small groups that share the same ide- ology as Al Qaeda and are as committed to acts of violence and acts of terrorism as are the core and affiliated groups.’ 70 Individuals in this group cannot be specifically tied to Al Qaeda, but they are no less con- taminated by their association with its ideology. Under this logic, Almrei is diseased by his association with Ibn Khattab, whom the Service now believes is notpart of the Al Qaeda core (a change from early claims), but who is ‘affiliated.’ P.G. offers this conclusion, although he admits that he himself cannot claim a knowledge of Chechen affairs.

Still faced with the problem of connecting Almrei’s procurement of false documentation to Al Qaeda, P.G. can only maintain, as did J.P.

earlier, that Al Qaeda needs false documentation and thus Mr Almrei is useful. By way of evidence, P.G. pointed to Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian Canadian extremist caught at the U.S. border (allegedly on his way to committing a terrorist attack) with a false Quebec birth cer- tificate. Confronted with the possibility that Al Qaeda would have little use for someone as high profile as Hassan Almrei now was, P.G.was adamant: When someone is committed ideologically to Al Qaeda, they remain so no matter what the obstacles.

71 Recalling P.G.’s testimony, Madame Justice Layden-Stevenson accepts that those com- 42 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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mitted to the cause ‘remain committed as long as they live.’ 72 In her decision she offers a portrait of individuals who are devoted for life to Al Qaeda. Such individuals travelled to Afghanistan, where they learned the ideology. Some returned from Afghanistan seeking to spread the ideology. Most frightening of all, their continuing ideologi- cal activity can be evident in something ‘as simple as going onto the internet and reading sources, reading statements, reading papers that explain the ideology, its goals and its intent. It is not possible to define a linear process through which a given individual will commit himself or herself to a movement of Islamic extremism.’ 73 Given his travel to Afghanistan and his perusal of websites such as Al Jazeera’s, Almrei’s fate is sealed. Almrei continues to pose a threat simply because, once infected with this ideology, there is no cure. It is P.G.’s position, Layden-Stevenson writes, that it ‘is highly improbable that individuals who have embraced this ideology so fervently would choose at one point to renege or to abandon that philosophy.’ 74Ideology is so crucial that without it neither participation in jihad in Afghanistan nor the document forgery ring would take on the significance it has. 75 Given his infection, Almrei’s case cannot be helped by the high-profile support he has attracted to guarantee that he would abide by his bail conditions if released, nor is it helped by testimony that his conditions in detention (segregation) are deplorable.

Jihad It is the concept of jihad that locks in place the judgment of ideology.

Invoking the stereotype of the irrational Arab, the concept jihad is given a composite of details designed to invoke the clash of civiliza- tions. J.P., the CSIS intelligence officer of Almrei’s first hearing, had by 2005 become the deputy chief of counterterrorism and counterprolif- eration in Ottawa. As an analyst intelligence officer his responsibilities included ‘processing, corroborating, and packaging information that allows the Government of Canada to be advised on issues of threats to security. ‘ (In contrast, an investigator intelligence officer is responsible for ‘interviewing subjects of interest or members of the public, for recruiting human sources and for running those human sources against mandated targets’) 76 J.P.’s testimony in 2005 sheds more light on the key concepts the Service has used to come to establish Almrei’s ‘stained blood’ as a predictor of violence. The first of these is ‘jihad,’ which J.P. admits (in contrast to the confidence of the 2001 testimony) ‘Your client has a profile’ 43Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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is a subjective term ‘ranging from defining a personal struggle to make one a better individual and a better Muslim and to follow the tenets of Islam all the way to an offensive use of violence in defence of Islam, a holy war in other words.’ 77 Having established the context for their activities through his notion of jihad, J.P. is then able to characterize the activities of Osama bin Laden, and others such as Ibn Khattab with whom Almrei was associ- ated, not solely as part of an anti-Soviet rebellion in Afghanistan, Tajik- istan, and Chechnya, but as something much more. These activities indicate a global network of terrorists who, although severely dis- rupted due to anti-terrorism efforts, have nonetheless reconstituted themselves and adapted, as indeed carcinogenic cells do. Al Qaeda survived, Layden-Stevenson writes, depending on J.P.’s testimony, ‘by adopting secretive practices and operational security (operating with individuals in whom it had confidence).’ 78 Here ‘Al Qaeda-inspired groups are perhaps the most sinister manifestation of Islamic extrem- ism today because they usually consist of small cells of individuals who have no set group affiliation and who come together for a very short period of time in order to mount an operation.’ For Madame Justice Stevenson, the London bombings are the most recent example of this pattern of activity. 79 The journey from jihad to sleeper cells requires heavy reliance on the concept of ideology, an ideology that then has to be emplaced and embodied. The training camps thus become ‘a major front in the global jihad at the time that the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan. It is quite significant for an individual to have gone to Afghansitan, to have trained, and to have returned a number of times.’ 80 Since going to Afghanistan to a training camp is now the mark of a terrorist, how Mr Almrei fits this profile as an individual hardly matters. Almrei is simply likely to engage in terrorist activities because of his past reli- gious affiliations and geographical history. Unlike the IRA (whose members are characterized as motivated by a political objective), Al Qaeda is a ‘religious and ideological movement,’ in Layden-Steven- son’s words. ‘The ultimate goal is the takeover of the world by Islam.

While that may sound a little fantastic and hyperbolic, essentially, it does come down to the eradication of the infidel and the creation of a puritan form of Islam for the world.’ 81 In the wake of powerful images of an Islamic takeover, the facts that don’t add up hardly matter. Madame Justice Layden-Stevenson 44 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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accepts that the Service had no specifics connecting Almrei’s honey business to Al Qaeda, and that they had relied on a single media article by Judith Miller, a journalist whose ‘record of accuracy’ has been called into question, a situation of which J.P. was unaware. She also observes that J.P. could offer no direct evidence of Almrei’s link to remaining insurgents in Chechnya, especially given Ibn Khattab’s death. Simi- larly, J.P. could not offer proof that Almrei had supplied false docu- ments to Nabil Al Marabh, whom the Service conceded was released by the United States. Clearly short on specifics, the Service is only able to maintain that its basis for the allegation that Almrei supported Islamic extremist ideals is the fact that he lived at a guest house of Ibn Khattab and that there was ‘ideological consistency between Khattab and Bin Laden.’ 82 J.P. also insists that Almrei’s repeated trips to Afghanistan indicate ‘a certain level of dedication which is not typical of an individual who is a peaceful member of society.’ 83A notion such as ‘ideological consistency’ can only assume the weight that it does here if the framework is one of disease spreading.

Faced with the allegation that it is his ideology that primarily counts against him, Hassan Almrei denied his commitment to Osama bin Laden or to his jihad. Clarifying that he believed in the jihad against the Russians for their invasion of Afghanistan, and not in the Bin Laden jihad, Almrei also acknowledges that he respected Ibn Khattab and did not believe that he was connected to Osama bin Laden. He continued to feel that those who died fighting the Russians are martyrs and he kept pictures on his computer of such individuals. His credi- bility is strained when it is noted that he lied on his first encounters with CSIS, that he received money for passing on a tip about where to get a false passport, and when the Court learned that he assisted one of his restaurant employees to find a husband who could sponsor her, an act for which he was paid.

Madame Justice Layden-Stevenson acknowledges in her decision that Hassan Almrei has been held under conditions that are ‘unaccept- able and fall far short of what one would accept for Canada.’ 84Since he was held in solitary confinement ‘for his own good’ for the past four years, it is reasonable to assume that his detention will continue as Canadian courts wrestle with the idea that deportation to face torture is still something that a Canadian court and ‘the Canadian conscience’ would find unacceptable and contrary to section 1 of the Charter. 85 Notwithstanding this situation, the judge is called upon to assess ‘Your client has a profile’ 45Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Almrei as a danger to national security, and it is this issue on which she rules, his jail conditions notwithstanding. As Layden-Stevenson sums up, however, ‘Islamic extremist ideology, as noted earlier, is the force that drives the Ministers’ case. When reduced to its bare bones, the Ministers’ position is founded largely on Mr. Almrei’s participation in jihad.’ 86 Thus constructed, the primary task is to explore the meaning of Mr. Almrei’s participation in jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets, an assessment that Layden-Stevenson feels must begin with who the commanders of the camps were. Relying on the government’s evidence available from a number of websites, she concludes that Abdul Sayyaf and Ibn Khattab ‘were hard-line Islamic fundamentalists and were acknowledged as such during the time frame when Mr. Almrei was in attendance at jihad.’ 87 Agreeing with J.P. that Mr. Almrei’s ‘scouting’ activities in Tajikstan indicate his military involvement, the judge finds most significant, ultimately, that Almrei returned regularly and consis- tently to ‘jihad’ for five years. 88 Further, he must have shared Ibn Khattab’s commitment to violence, since Khattab maintained contact with Almrei after returning from Tajikistan, and Almrei continues to think of Khattab as a good man.

89 While these facts do not constitute hard proof, they at least offer evidence that there are reasonable grounds to believe in Almrei’s ‘Islamic extremism,’ an impression that is strengthened by the secret evidence. This, coupled with the ‘reason- able suspicion that Mr. Almrei participated in a network involved in forged documentation,’ 90leads the judge to the inescapable conclusion:

‘The combination of the factors leads to a situation whereby Mr. Almrei, even if he personally has no intention of committing a direct act of vio- lence in Canada, has the potential to facilitate the movement of others who also harbour such beliefs and ideals and to position them to per- petrate violence on foreign and Canadian soil. This threat is substantial and it is serious.’ 91 That Almrei failed to disclose information because he feared the con- sequences is not, in the judge’s view, credible. Put against P.G.’s testi- mony that the Service believes that extremists are unlikely to give up their beliefs and practices, something Madame Justice Layden-Steven- son notes ‘appears not to have been subjected to empirical analysis,’ Almrei nevertheless remains without credibility. He ‘exhibits patience, strength, determination, endurance and self-discipline and is not easily diverted from his objectives,’ qualities evident in his pursuit of hunger strikes to draw attention to his prison conditions. 92 From her enumeration of these qualities as negatives, we may infer that Layden- 46 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Stevenson is proposing that Almrei’s profile might correspond to that of the extremist depicted by the Service. What confirms this assess- ment, however, is that Mr Almrei has not repented, a finding reached in spite of Almrei’s clear denunciation of Osama bin Laden and his indication that he does not support his ideology. As the judge asserts:

‘I consider the absence of any expression of renunciation of the funda- mentalist ideology from Mr. Almrei to be significant.’ 93 We can only speculate that Almrei’s failure to renounce refers to his support for a jihad against the Russians in the early 1990s and for his continuing admiration for Ibn Khattab.

Monster Terrorists When the task is to pin down belief and to extrapolate that beliefs are an indicator of a latent commitment to violence that can never fade, race is an important pivot on which the story must turn. Race makes it possible to accept the outlines of the state’s story about ide- ology because it helps us to believe readily in Muslim irrationality and the monsters it spawns. As Amit Rai discusses, ideas about Muslim irrationality drawn from older Orientalist and colonial dis- courses now undergird an entire field of knowledge production known as terrorism studies. In terrorism studies, the focus is on the motivations and belief systems of individual terrorists. The psyche is thus the privileged site of investigation and terrorism is explained as a compulsion or psycho-pathology. That is to say, the terrorist is driven to commit acts of violence as a consequence of psychological forces. The terrorist psyche is born in abnormal family dynamics, with the West’s own heterosexual family as its point of contrast. Bin Laden, for example, is represented as someone abandoned by a polygamous father whose interests were with his other wives. He was drawn to find substitute father figures in fundamentalist men.

Terrorists are depicted as failed heterosexuals who need the promise of virgins in heaven to commit to the cause. Such portraits not only draw on older discourses about the effeminate or sexually dysfunc- tional Muslim man and the Oriental despot, but they preclude any examination of the socio-political causes of terrorism. Importantly, they are figures that enable the West to feel its own civilizational superiority and to make the case that exceptional violence is required to keep in line those whose uncivilized natures are so much in evidence. 94 ‘Your client has a profile’ 47Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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In terrorism studies, particularly scholarship supported by organi- zations such as the Rand Corporation, Rai shows, the Oriental despot cum terrorist is presented as someone prepared to die for his strug- gles, someone whose conviction and mindset are described as ‘incom- prehensible and frightening’ and irrevocably pre-modern. 95 For the Canadian context, we can trace the same discourses in popular books such as National Postjournalist Stewart Bell’s The Martyr’s Oath 96 (assigned as a text in a political science course at the University of Toronto) and the circulation of such narratives about the psyche of terrorists and ‘jihad’ as his obligation, by web-based, right-wing research institutes such as the Mackenzie Institute, a source cited by CSIS in its testimony. 97 Where complexity is ruled out, racism can do all the work of pro- viding an interpretive framework. Orientalist notions of monster ter- rorists also emerge out of what François Debrix describes as ‘tabloid realism,’ wherein complex geopolitical realities are written about and presented in the media and in scholarship relying on the conventions of tabloid literature. The tabloid medium is one in which ‘reality must be described and truth must be revealed in a flashy, surprising, grip- ping, shocking, often moralising, and sometimes anxiety producing manner.’ 98 Focusing on those who write about foreign affairs in the United States, Debrix argues that several influential books have been written in the style of tabloid realism, notably Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizationsand Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy: Shat- tering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. Such writings are ‘made up of short, lapidary sentences, riddled with metaphors that call for the audience to maintain a mostly visual, figurative and imaginary appre- hension of the intellectual arguments.’ 99 Maps and images (for ex- ample, Bell’s The Martyr’s Oathincludes several pictures of Canadian ‘terrorists’ from adolescence to manhood) offer a simplified version of reality, proof, as it were, of a civilized world menaced by a barbarian Other. We might consider here how websites and computer images fulfil the same function in security certificate cases. As Mosse reminds us, one of the main strengths of racism is that it is ‘a visual ideology based on stereotypes.’ 100 It is not surprising, then, that tabloid realism achieves its coherence through an appeal to the visual.

The tabloid medium ‘deploys relatively ahistorical discourses in “contexts” that do not have to abide by rules of temporal and spatial contingency (the realities they describe are at once past, present or future).’ 101 The discourses about Islamic extremists and terrorists in 48 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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security cases are very much in the style of tabloid realism, and the secrecy provisions ensure that this simplified profile cannot be easily challenged. The portrait of the jihadist on which CSIS relies in the hearings has clearly recognizable origins in Orientalist scholarship such as that of Bernard Lewis. Mahmood Mamdani suggests that we locate an earlier and more refined version of the clash of civilizations thesis of Huntington (the West is law and rationality, the East is culture and religion) in the work of Bernard Lewis, for whom the West’s dis- tinctive attribute is freedom, in contrast to the Islamic’s world fidelity to a world of culture, religion, and community. In the Islamic world, ‘an explosive mixture of rage and hatred’ lies dormant, ready to erupt at various moments in history. 102 Thus, for Lewis and other Oriental- ists, the West must constantly protect itself from irrational, pre-modern peoples. Of course, even Lewis argued that there are different versions of Islam and that not all Muslims possess this rage and hatred. This argument, Mamdani observes, anticipates the good Muslim / b ad Muslim frame that has so marked discourses of the ‘War on Terror.’ Good Muslim / B ad Muslim simply sets the stage for the West, as unified, homogeneous, and modern, to sort out good Muslims from bad Muslims. A good Muslim, paradoxically, is a secular Muslim who is influenced by the West, while a bad Muslim remains locked in the pre-modern. The Wahhabi sect of Islam is typically described as the latter, and CSIS agents reportedly spend time looking for its devo- tees. 103 While good Muslims can be assisted into modernity, bad Muslims, figured as ‘anti-modern’ and as having ‘a profound ability to be destructive,’ require incarceration and military action. 104 Complex histories are thus rendered simple by Orientalist scholars’ reliance on the idea of good Muslims and bad Muslims. As Ileana Porras has com- mented, in literature on terrorism, ‘religious fanaticism serves the heuristic function of explaining terrorism.’ 105 Where the explanation for violence lies in culture, political details are irrelevant. Hassan Almrei’s ‘jihad’ cannot differ from Bin Laden’s if the phenomenon being described is very simply the bad Muslim who possesses a deep rage and hatred towards the West. In the same vein, we need not consider Islamic extremism as anything but an unchanging essence likely to erupt at any moment into violence. Karen Engle has suggested, of the framework good alien/bad alien, that such dichotomies help the United States to make the case for its own tolerance. Profiling confirms the West’s civility, since it provides an initial opportunity to sort good from bad aliens. Although Engle ‘Your client has a profile’ 49Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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acknowledges, relying on Irene Porras, that the ‘the trick is to locate [the terrorist] in the category of the most terrifying and traditional enemy, that which the public is accustomed to thinking of as the bar- barous and primitive outsider,’ she maintains that a number of prac- tices remain in place that are intended to confirm that good Muslims can escape the net. 106 For example, those Muslims who are able to demonstrate their patriotism, and who are careful not to engage in crit- icism of the state, can escape unscathed. As I show throughout, however, this is not the case. The exits are increasingly closed off for those who are Muslim. If the state is able to preserve an appearance of tolerance at all, it is only able to do so because the collective punish- ment of all Muslims is understood as reasonable, a necessary move to preserve Western civilization. It is useful to bear in mind both Rai’s and Debrix’s point that monster terrorists enable us to believe in ‘‘democracy in the time of monsters,’ 107 a time when we need states of exception and the authority to suspend fundamental rights, invade, and drop bombs on their heads for their own good. Monster figures legitimize new regimes of citizenship and security where we become accustomed to state violence as a warranted part of the social order, the transformation Agamben described as that from the state of excep- tion to the camp. Without monster terrorists, states of exception would not be justified and states would confront the threat of terrorism within the law.

Sleeper Cell Logic instead of Law:

Harkat, Mahjoub, Jaballah, and Charkaoui In each of the security-certificate cases considered here, the profiling of the terrorist as a person with the stain of Islamic extremist ideology and his immediate eviction from political community stands in place of solid evidence, knitting together strands of the evidence into a story of the monster terrorist. In the absence of law, an absence indicated by the low threshold of proof that operates throughout the security-cer- tificate hearing and the difficulty of assessing the merits of the avail- able evidence, the profile must do most of the work to convince us that the men are a profound and self-evidentthreat.

This is not to say that their cases contain little that warrants investi- gation or that they are all innocent. It is clear, however, that in the absence of full legal scrutiny, we can only err on the side of our own ideological leanings. Race, always waiting in the wings, provides the 50 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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most accessible meaning to events, helping us to find the men not credible and their stories merely confirmations of their associations with terrorism. We do not need proof when we have a racial configu- ration of signs. The patterns discernable in Almreiare evident in the cases of the other four detainees, often with the same testimony from CSIS lending force to the state’s case of the profile as fact.

Mohamed Harkat, like Hassan Almrei, has in his profile the three biggest indicators of Islamic extremism. 108 First, Harkat worked in Peshawar, Pakistan, with a Saudi-funded Islamic charity known as the Muslim World League, a charity that is alleged to have links to Osama bin Laden. 109 Second, he had associations with men who themselves have a high profile – for example, he accepted a ride from Toronto to Ottawa with Ahmad Khadr; 11 0 he was allegedly identified by Abu Zubaida (reportedly Bin Laden’s second in command) as a member of Al Qaeda; 111 one of his friends in Peshawar, a banker, may have been involved in financial dealings with Al Qaeda; 11 2 he is alleged (and he denies) knowing Ibn Khattab; 11 3 he is alleged to have been a member of a radical Islamic group in Algeria. 11 4 Finally, Harkat exhibited behaviour that was suspicious: he used a false passport, and while this is common for refugees, he used a fake Saudi passport that CSIS noted was the passport of choice for Al Qaeda members; 11 5 he used aliases in Pakistan; 11 6 he did not keep his money in a bank and appeared to have been paid an overly high salary. 11 7 The credibility of each detainee is of course always strained by any evidence that he has been untruthful. In Harkat’s case, he lied to Canadian officials about working for an Islamic relief agency in Pakistan and about using an alias. He also lied about associating with individuals known to be involved with extrem- ist movements. 11 8 While there is little doubt that lying profoundly affected his credibility, 11 9 it is also the case that to have admitted any of these facts would have surely altered the success of his asylum claim, and would have ensured that he would become a figure of sus- picion. His position, like that of the other detainees, was very much a catch-22. If, for example, travel to Afghanistan virtually guarantees that a man of Middle Eastern origin will come to the attention of the state and a chain of events will be set in motion that has a strong like- lihood of leading to a security certificate, lying appears to be a gamble that it might be well worth taking. In a world where a profile is proof, it is unlikely that the context required to understand why someone might use an alias in Peshawar for reasons unconnected to wishing to hide any Al Qaeda connections will easily enter a hearing. In effect, ‘Your client has a profile’ 51Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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through the operation of a zone of law that contains no law, those who fit the profile are damned if they lie, and damned if they don’t.

Each of Harkat’s three red flags can be interrogated, but in the inter- ests of national security it became difficult to do so. For example, the first of these flags, the information that Harkat was identified by Abu Zubaida, came from an unnamed source whose identity cannot be revealed in the interests of national security. In the absence of assess- ments of the merits of each piece of evidence, the case must rest on a thread. Harkat stated that he did not talk much during the van ride to Ottawa with the notorious Khadr, something the court found incredi- ble since it is a five-hour journey from Toronto to Ottawa by car. 120 The allegation that he belonged to a radical Islamic group in Algeria requires considerable history and context, since it is not clear what a radical group committed to violence is and which point in history the assessment considers. Yet CSIS confidently asserted Harkat’s member- ship and there was little to go on besides Harkat’s story that when a legal party to which he belonged split into two, with one wing becom- ing radical, he fled Algeria. 121 If the places (Algeria, Peshawar, and the training camps), the associations he had, and his behaviour cannot entirely bear the weight of the case against him, two contentions enter to take up the slack and to seal his fate. The contention is that Harkat is a member of a sleeper cell, assigned to wait until he is called upon. 122 The second is that those with terrorist associations will never renounce their beliefs and will, if freed, immediately re-establish them- selves with their former terrorist connections. 123 As we saw with Almrei, both these contentions cannot be proved (and in fact there is evidence to the contrary), but both invoke and rely on the idea of an irrational figure, defined by culture and religion, a man willing to die for his religious beliefs.

The case of Mohammed Zeki Mahjoub illustrates another way that race steps in to provide ballast to what might be an otherwise weak case. In 2001 Mr Justice Nadon found the security certificate issued for Mahjoub to be reasonable on the grounds that he was a member of the Vanguards of Conquest and/or Al Jihad and was therefore likely to engage in terrorism in the future. As in Almrei’s case, Mahjoub’s case is particularly marked by the fact that he initially lied at this first certificate hearing about his conviction in Egypt in absentia for his involvement in ‘Sunni Islamic terrorism including his role in connec- tion with the U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi, Kenya.’ 124 Although he ‘came clean’ before the end of the proceedings, his credibility was 52 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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certainly not helped by the initial denial. As well, he lied to CSIS about having met Marjouk, a terrorism suspect who is serving a fifteen-year sentence in Egypt for his involvement in the embassy bombings, and about having met Ahmad Said Khadr, whose in-laws he stayed with when he first arrived in Canada. Particularly damning is the fact that Mahjoub worked for Bin Laden in Sudan, where he was supervised by Mubarak Al-Duri, a factor CSIS argued showed that his relationship with Bin Laden was significant. 125 Mahjoub maintained that the Egyptian conviction began with his wrongful arrest and torture. Similar hearings in absentia have been declared to be fraudulent by Amnesty International, and Britain has recently released a terror suspect with the same profile as Mahjoub who was also sentenced to fifteen years in absentia. Mahjoub’s lawyer noted that while CSIS declares Mahjoub to be a high-ranking member of Al Jihad, his name does not appear on a list of its leading members.

Once again, it is not possible on the stand to probe the source of CSIS’s allegations. J.P. did not seem to be aware of the British cases, 126 of the news reports that the FBI acknowledges that it does not know of any sleeper cells, 127 and of the problems that arise with ‘Jane’s information service,’ a website on which the Canadian Border Service Agency relies in the preparation of its reports on refoulement. 124 Mahjoub’s lawyer also raised the issue that J.P. took a course on Islamic terrorism that was coordinated by the Egyptian government. There is just enough showing through these points to suggest that Mahjoub’s profile as a high-ranking member of Al Jihad is not something that sur- vives even a cursory questioning on the stand. J.P. does not appear to be a particularly well-informed expert, and if we are to believe that secret evidence would make clear that the Service’s allegations are borne out, his limited knowledge of publicinformation limits our trust. Jaballah’s case also rests on the allegation that he is a senior member of Al Jihad, an organization ‘inspired’ by Al Qaeda. He was also indicted based on sleeper-cell logic. As P.G. of CSIS elaborated for the Court, readily invoking the devious, endlessly patient Oriental, Al Qaeda ‘has a different sense of time than we do. They will wait for years before they attack.’ 129 As in Almrei, while not everyone involved in Al Qaeda can be said to be ‘personally violent or personally engaged,’ those who are are unlikely to give up their dedication to the cause. As P.G. emphasized, ‘Violent beliefs of Islamic extremists will not fade with time, rendering these individuals threats to public safety for years to come.’ 130 Pressed by defence counsel to explain the risks ‘Your client has a profile’ 53Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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that someone like Mr Jaballah posed, P.G. relied on the example of Guantanamo Bay. According to a news article, ten people released from Guantanamo re-engaged in terrorist activity. When it was pointed out to him that only 10 of the 250 released re-offended, P.G.

was undeterred. Since there is no way to predict which 10 will re- offend, and as long as the risk is not zero, no one should be released. 131 His position was made even clearer when Jaballah’s lawyer, John Norris, cited an article from ABC News noting that the United States believes that there are no sleeper cells. 132 Norris also suggested that the Service seems to rely on right wing think tanks. P.G. simply repeated that he had not noticed any political slant to the information the Service relied on and, in any event, a risk is a risk. 133 Again we are more likely to be convinced by the suggestion that detainees invari- ably pose a security risk if we keep in our heads the idea of irrational men who are always prepared to die for their religion, viewing it all as a sacred duty.

Like Majoub, Mohammed Jaballah was tried in absentia and con- demned as a member of Al Jihad, something that CSIS learned on 29 November 1999, after the first security-certificate hearing was quashed. 134 At the second security-certificate hearing, Mr Justice Mackay indicated that new information had been offered, including the evidence of the Egyptian hearing. The Service indicated that it had since learned that Jaballah had spent some time in Afghanistan in 1993–4, although he said that he had never been there. Finally, ‘new’ related evidence included that Majoub had Jaballah’s phone number on his person when he was arrested. The mailbox Jaballah rented, but said he never used to communicate with his brother, was in fact used.

Finally, a person arrested in Pakistan and deported to Jordan had a computer disk with Jaballah’s mailbox address on it. These three ‘new’ pieces of evidence were combined with old evidence that, as a member of Al Jihad, Jaballah poses a permanent risk. Jaballah’s dangerousness based on this marking is enhanced by these details and furthered con- firmed when it is alleged that in the summer of 1998 Jaballah made several calls to the International Office for the Defense of the Egyptian Peoples, an office that CSIS alleged was a cover for Al Jihad and a front for those planning the embassy bombings in Kenya. Jaballah main- tained that he was advised by his lawyer to pursue evidence of his refugee claim and that was his reason for calling the office. Finally, the Service made a case that Jaballah had contacts with senior Al Qaeda operatives (Al-Zawaheri in Yemen and Pakistan and Thirwat Salah 54 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Sihata in Yemen). His ‘guilt’ in this respect appeared sealed when it was revealed that Jaballah made several phone calls to Yemen from Canada, which he initially denied but then said they were made by his wife. Without the full evidence or a chance to determine its value, the Jaballah case must be carried by the logic that the meaning of these actions lie with the idea that once a suspect is stained by terrorist asso- ciations (in this case the Egyptian conviction), we need look no further. 135 Adil Charkaoui is perhaps the best illustration of what it means to be caught in a profile. Charkaoui has four characteristics that bring him to the state’s attention. First, he appears to be normal. That is to say, he is married with two children and he was pursuing graduate studies in Montreal. As CSIS testified at his hearing, this very nor- malcy is what suggested that he was a part of a sleeper cell. The agent clarified at length that a sleeper agent is instructed as follows: ‘Go back to your usual life, act as if nothing is happening ... And then one of these days ... you will get a message ... and that’s the time to do what you want to do.’ 136 On cross-examination, the CSIS officer in question acknowledged that he did not know whether Adil Charkaoui was an Al Qaeda member.

137 To make matters worse, Charkaoui has taken martial arts training, as did one of the September 11 hijackers. 138 Para- doxically, although he is normal, Charkaoui has several of the other elements of the terrorist profile, primarily the geographical profile of an Islamic extremist. First, he is from Morocco and CSIS alleged that he was in fact a member of a radical Islamic group. Second, he is religious, and through going to the mosques in the Montreal area he came into contact with a number of suspicious individuals. Third, Charkaoui travelled to Pakistan in February of 1998 and stayed until July. He maintains that he was undertaking Islamic studies in order to write a book, while CSIS alleges that he attended a training camp in Af- ghanistan. A key piece of evidence against him are the statements of Abu Zubaida and Ahmed Ressam (which are part of the summary of the evidence previously given to Mr Charkaoui on 26 May, 17 July, and 14 August 2003) identifying Mr Charkaoui, upon presentation of pho- tographs, under the name of Al-Maghrebi and stating that he had been seen by them in Afghanistan in a camp. 139 (Charkaoui argued that the information obtained from Ressam and Abu Zubaida were not credi- ble since they were obtained under torture or, in the case of Mr Ressam, under the pressure of an agreement for clemency or a reduced sentence in connection with his hearing in the United States. Abdu- ‘Your client has a profile’ 55Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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rahman Khadr, whose father knew Bin Ladin and was a part of his network, testified that he never saw Mr Charkaoui in Afghanistan.) There are few details to confirm the allegations. Refusing to testify at his first three hearings since he believed that his testimony would be used to conclude that he was not credible and, in addition, would lend credibility to a legal process that Mr Charkaoui wished to protest, Charkaoui relied on the testimonials of his Montreal university teach- ers that he is an open minded individual who, while critical of the treatment meted out to Arabs and Muslims in Canada, was neverthe- less of the opinion that Muslims could live peacefully with other groups in Quebec. 140 Denying all the allegations, Charkaoui took a polygraph test answering questions concerning whether or not he has been or still was a member of a terrorist group. Although he passed the test, at his bail hearing in 2005 Mr Justice Noel rejected its results on the grounds that the question of travel to Afghanistan was not asked and there were irregularities in how the test was administered. 141 In the absence in these cases of support for either the state’s case or the detainee’s, courts – for all the careful legal reasoning of decisions – come ultimately to rely on notions of sleeper cells and indicators of a detainee’s commitment to Islamic ideology. When he agreed to testify at his fourth detention review, Adil Charkaoui did not hide his views of 9/11. In his decision to release Charkaoui on bail and to the custody of his family under stringent bail conditions, Mr Justice Noël dis- cussed at length his testimony as to his views on terrorism. He noted that Charkaoui found it deplorable that a ‘terrorist’ [translation] prototype had devel- oped over the years, that of a young Arab Muslim male who traveled a lot, and studied languages and martial arts. He said he knew many inno- cent people who had been suspected of being terrorists, often on account of this prototype. He also told the Court that he found it difficult to understand how anyone ‘who was in a medieval country in a cave’ [translation] (namely, Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan) could have perpetrated an attack on the scale of September 11, 2001 in the U.S.

Charkaoui noted that in December 2000 he was searched by the F.B.I. at JFK airport when he was accompanied by his pregnant wife, while nine- teen young Arab men were able to board aircraft on September 11, 2001 without difficulty. He found it strange that the 19 passports of these men had been found but the black boxes of the four aircraft were still missing.

From his reading, his study on the Internet and the newspapers, Mr.

56 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Charkaoui is not convinced that the attacks were committed by Muslims; he says it is equally likely they were carried out by neo-conservatives and religious authorities in the U.S. 142 It is difficult to say to what extent Charkaoui’s challenge of profiling and of the official story of 9/11 might have influenced the outcome of his case. If it seems unlikely that a devious terrorist would take such a chance, it is of course possible to read his pronouncements as those of a ‘fanatic’ who is so deeply committed to his cause that he would risk his own freedom to say what he has to say. Race thinking does not have to make sense, since its coherence derives from the force of the narrative line that they are not like us. As in all the detainees’ cases, when evidence cannot be corroborated, we can only conclude that the final decision rests on the court’s own belief that a religious Arab man who has travelled to the Middle East and who may have associations, albeit distant ones, with other suspects suffices as proof of a threat to national security.

Conclusion In their book The Culture of Exception, Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten take care to clarify that their argument that today the excep- tion is the rule is not an argument that ‘contemporary society is char- acterized by the cruelty of the concentration camps, although camp- like structures are spreading quickly.’ Instead, they argue that ‘the logic of the camps tends to be generalized.’ 143 It is this logic that we see first in the immigrant and refugee as exceptions in immigration law, and second, as homo sacer, in security-certificate hearings since the ‘war on terror ’ began. It is a logic that is first and foremost about the power of the sovereign. The zone of non-law into which refugees are plunged is a legally authorized place in which rights are suspended. Simultane- ously in the legal order and outside of it, the refugee confirms the ter- rible power of the state to determine every aspect of his life. 144 When this terrible power unfolds as bureaucracy, when the life of the refugee can depend on a few whispered words about jihad or training camps, then we too must accept the power of the state.

Race soothes any worries we have about the display of raw power.

It invests the proceedings with a kind of coherency that belies the arbi- trary nature of what is unfolding. There are monster terrorists, we believe, and the things we must do in order to contain them, things we ‘Your client has a profile’ 57Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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would not ordinarily accept, become justified. It is through the power- ful evocations of jihad and pitiless, misogynist men in beards that we come to accept that we do not need due process, that proof does not matter. We become inured to lawlessness, as long as it remains in the camps, as long, that is, that it is applied only to certain bodies who live outside of reason.

The position that all Muslims and Arabs live outside of reason, and should therefore be cast outside of the law, is not one that is made once and for all. The story of race in the law is one that is full of internal con- tradictions: they are secretive and duplicitous yet it is we who rely on secret evidence; they are irrational yet it is we who depend on wild assertions about the Muslim fanatic and his counterpart in security hearings, the Anglo-Saxon man. The story of monster terrorists does not make sense yet is common sense. As I suggest in chapter 2, it is useful, as Meyda Yegenoglu suggests, to think of race as ‘a historically specific fantasy,’ one in which Western subjects learn to imagine them- selves as sovereign only through marking the other as different and outside reason. 145 The other will not stay fixed and the claim of uni- versality that the Western subject must make requires a continual engagement with difference, an engagement that the law reveals to be fraught with desire, fear and anxiety. 58 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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2If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos: The Torture of Prisoners at Abu Ghraib This phenomenon of feeling superior through a sexually reified racism is always sadistic; its purpose is always to hurt.

Andrea Dworkin 1 The violence inflicted on prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by both male and female American soldiers was both widespread and very clearly sexualized. A pyramid of naked male prisoners forced to simulate sodomy conveyed graphically that the project of empire – the West’s domination of the non-West – required strong infusions of a violent heterosexuality and patriarchy. The image of Private Lyndie England grinning and pointing her finger to the genitals of naked Iraqi prisoners confirmed that participation in sexualized racial violence and humiliation crossed gender lines. The photos, reportedly number- ing in the thousands, shocked the white Western public, if not the non- white and non-Western one, the latter having had the advantage of recent and ongoing colonial experience.

As a Canadian, my own response to the violence at Abu Ghraib was one of recognition. Canadians had seen similar photos of grinning sol- diers posing behind the tortured bodies of Somalis more than a decade earlier in incidents of peacekeeper violence. The racial and sexualized dimensions of the ‘Somalia Affair,’ although evident in the photos and videotapes of the soldiers themselves, were nevertheless transformed (in military tribunals and in the press) into the story of war: stressed troops and unscrupulous leaders resorted to violence when confronted by savage, ungrateful Somalis bent on the destruction of those whose civilization they did not appreciate or understand. Peacekeeper vio- Recto Running Head 59Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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lence by Western troops towards the populations they assist shares four characteristics: the violence is collective (many participate, watch, and know of these practices), recorded in photos, videos, and diaries, sexualized (with rape and sodomy occurring), and often committed against defenceless populations, including women and children and prisoners. Notwithstanding these telling features, there is always an attempt to transform military violence into something the troops could not help but commit. Unwittingly revealing the colonial logic that ‘they are not like us,’ and that the colonies are not like the home country, Canadians largely accepted the official story that the heat and dust of Somalia and the duplicity of the Somalis drove the soldiers to violence. Somalia, it was claimed, was a lawless land, a place where extreme measures were called for. As I have argued, the violence com- mitted by Canadian peacekeepers against Somalis must be understood as a colonial violence, born of the conviction that it is the white man’s burden to civilize and keep in line through force racial others awaiting assistance into modernity. The acts of violence committed against Somalis convinced the soldiers of their own masculine, racial, and national superiority. 2 The parallels between the Somalia Affair and Abu Ghraib are star- tling. If Somalia was a place where law had to be abandoned in the interest of confronting lawlessness, however, Abu Ghraib was more formally constituted as a state of exception. As several scholars have pointed out, Abu Ghraib was not so much a prison as a concentration camp, where the rule of law simply did not apply. 3A ‘floating colony,’ in Amy Kaplan’s words, a prison of indeterminate status between domestic and international law, and above all, a camp where nothing had to be justified, Abu Ghraib could be little else than a place of terror. 4As Avery Gordon observes, prisons where law is suspended have come to be such an everyday feature of the ‘war on terror ’ that we now have an ability to name the locations of what would once have been secretive military prisons. 5Gordon notes, too, that there is a con- tinuum between U.S. military prisons abroad and territorial U.S.

prisons, even to the point of shared personnel (two of the convicted soldiers at Abu Ghraib were former prison guards considered experts in practices of brutality). Today’s prisons are sites where an excep- tional brutality is normalized. Drawing on Agamben’s notion of bare life and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s characterization of the contemporary prison as a ‘regime of abandonment’ in which surplus and unwanted 60 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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populations who are mostly of colour are permanently imprisoned and evicted from law, Gordon reminds us that the prisoners of empire are the socially dead. Both the military prison and the domestic prison industrial complex now share the ‘organized oblivion’ of the concen- tration camp first identified by Arendt of totalitarian regimes. 6 If it seems obvious that Abu Ghraib is a camp, a place where the rule of law no longer applies and where, as Agamben observed, nothing committed against the camp’s inmates can be considered a crime, it is nevertheless important to examine closely the ‘normalcy of excep- tional brutality’ that Gordon and others associate with both the mili- tary prison and the prison industrial complex. As Arendt noted of the Nazi concentration camps, brutality was not simply born of guards who were unusually sadistic or resentful of prisoners who had once been their social superiors. Instead, ‘the old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely.’ 7Systematic destruction and systematic aban- donment of surplus or unwanted populations is productive. When we come face to face with utterly normalized practices of terror, practices that turn prisoners into homo sacer, the being who may be killed not sacrificed, it is here that we see the logic of the exception as it is under- girded by race thinking. Racism, Gordon insightfully notes, deter- mines not only who becomes a prisoner but also what the prisoner becomes – ‘an inferior race in and of themselves.’ 8By the same token, the guards, and all those who are drawn to participate in their prac- tices, become the superior race. It is these psychic underpinnings of the exception that I suggest are revealed when we consider sexualized racial violence.

The photos from Abu Ghraib depict acts of intimacy, acts requiring a psychic closeness that endangers the barrier between the human and the subhuman even as it creates and affirms it. Totalitarian regimes turn hatred into fantasy, Jacobo Timerman wrote in an account of his own torture in an Argentinian prison, knowing that torture is much more than a physical method of getting prisoners to talk. 9This chapter explores what we can learn from Abu Ghraib about some of the psychic processes of empire, the terror that moves empire forward, and the individual performance of violence on which empire relies. It charts the realm of fantasy that we can just barely glimpse from the photos, where gleeful torturers seek to emasculate, to turn their pris- If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 61Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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oners into sexually violated men, and to keep their moment of inti- macy and triumph alive through thousands of trophy photos. Empire, it must be hypothesized, comes into existence through multiple systems of domination. In the first section, I discuss visual practices such as photos and their role in the making of racial subjects who understand themselves as members of a superior civilization. In the second section, I consider the violence as a ritual that enables white men to achieve a sense of mastery over the racial other at the same time that it provides a sexualized intimacy forbidden in white supremacy and patriarchy. In the third section, I consider how white women participate in these processes. I argue that it is as members of their race that we can best grasp white women’s participation in the violence – a participation that provides the same mastery and gen- dered intimacy afforded to white men who engage in violence. In the conclusion I consider the regime of racial terror in evidence at Abu Ghraib and other places, focusing on terror as a ‘trade in mythologies’ that organizes the way that bodies come to express the racial arrange- ments of empire.

If what we saw at Abu Ghraib was neither the aberrant behaviour of a few soldiers nor an overly aggressive approach to terrorism gone awry, explanations much favoured in the media and by the current American administration, then it is the public participation of ordinary people in racial violence that requires the most explanation. How do race, class, gender, and sexuality underwrite each other in these moments of public racial violence and how do these practices of vio- lence enable men and women to achieve a profound sense of (gen- dered) racial superiority? These are questions that require an inter- locking approach for understanding the violence at Abu Ghraib – an approach that tracks how multiple systems of oppression come into existence through each other.

I use the word interlocking rather than intersecting to describe how the systems of oppression are connected. 10 Intersecting remains a word that describes discrete systems whose paths cross. I suggest that the systems areeach other and that they give content to each other.

While one system (here it is white supremacy) provides the entry point for the discussion (language is, after all, successive), what is immedi- ately evident as one pursues how white supremacy is embodied and enacted in the everyday is that individuals come to know themselves within masculinity and femininity. Put another way, the sense of self that is simultaneously required and produced by empire is a self that 62 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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is experienced in relation to the subordinate other – a relationship that is deeply gendered and sexualized. An interlocking approach requires that we keep several balls in the air at once, striving to overcome the successive process forced upon us by language and focusing on the ways in which bodies express social hierarchies of power.

The problem of language (interlocking versus intersecting) is not simply an academic one. If we view the acts as evidence of the oper- ation of one system that is merely complicated by another, we will end up missing something about the violence and its psychic origins.

Jasbir Paur offers an example that illustrates the outcome of ana- lysing one system at the expense of another. Those who viewed the Abu Ghraib photos of Iraqi men forced to simulate having sex with each other as evidence of rampant homophobia (the photos show homosexuality as degradation) missed the bodies of the tortured Iraqis themselves. 11 Paur insists that both gender (Iraqi men are be- ing made to feel like women) and race (Iraqi bodies are the ones marked as degenerate) are effaced if we concentrate on sexuality as a discrete system. In this respect, Paur ’s argument is in line with schol- ars of colonialism who trace how colonizers sought to establish their claim to ownership of the land and conquest of its occupants, not only through the rape of women but also through the feminizing of colonial men. As Revathi Krishnaswamy has shown in her study of colonial rule in India, ‘the real goal of feminization is effeminization – a process in which colonizing men use women/ womanhood to delegitimize, discredit, and disempower colonized men.’ 12 Several systems are in operation in the process of empire and they give content to each other. It is in order to overcome the problem of the discreteness of systems, and the obscuring of the full tangle of oppressive relations, that I propose a focus on the bodies of the tor- turers rather than those of the tortured – a focus that requires an interlocking, historicized approach. The torturers can surely be seen as seeking to delegitimize and to disempower, processes communi- cated in the language of patriarchy, but how did those acts produce their own racial sense of identity?

My question concerning how ordinary people come to participate in racial violence is one that has concerned others, among them edu- cators working in critical pedagogy. The question we all have, of course, is what kind of education would it take to interrupt the pro- duction of subjects who so easily answer the call to participate in what Robert Fisk ironically called ‘the great war for civilization.’ 13 In If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 63Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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2004 Henry Giroux published an article entitled ‘What Might Educa- tion Mean after Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno’s Politics of Educa- tion.’ 14As I do, Giroux rejects the argument that what went on at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few bad apples, although he still considers that special conditions prevailing in Iraq pushed soldiers to the brink and he believes that the torture is simply culturally specific torture.

Recognizing that the photos reveal something about collective will, however, Giroux explores where soldiers learned the identities they enacted at Abu Ghraib. The ‘pedagogical conditions’ that produced Abu Ghraib have something to do with ‘discourses of privatization, particularly the contracting of military labor, the intersection of mili- tarism and the crisis of masculinity, the war on terrorism, and the racism that makes it so despicable.’ 15 Specifically, the media’s cele- bration of violence, hegemonic masculinity with its insistence on ‘masculine hardness’ against feminine softness, and market funda- mentalism all combined in a ‘furious jingoistic patriotism’ that is evident in these acts of torture. 16 Race is present here as one of many factors, among them gender and class, but how they come together to produce subjects who engage in acts of racial violence (which Giroux does not consider Abu Ghraib to be enacting) remains unclear. This becomes a major failing when Giroux must consider what kind of education would enable students to be critical of the ideologies that led to Abu Ghraib. Turning to Adorno for help (in view of Adorno’s identification of the aggressive nationalism that led to Auschwitz), Giroux proposes a self-reflective critical education. He remains vague as to what the specific educa- tional practices are that would interrupt the aggressive nationalism that surrounds us today, remarking only that there is the possibility that ‘inhuman acts of abuse under incredibly nerve-wracking condi- tions represent a rare outlet for pleasure.’ 17I believe that what an inter- locking approach has to offer is an understanding of just such a possi- bility of race pleasure in violence. If one considers that what happened at Abu Ghraib had little to do with especially stressful circumstances and more to do with deeply historical processes through which Amer- icans understand themselves as white, then we can better confront the educational and political challenges we face in this new world order by understanding the complex ways in which systems of oppression (white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy) operate on a psychic level through sexual desire and fear. 64 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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1. ‘Why Record Evil?’ The photographs did not lie. 18 ‘The photographs did not lie’ is the line that introduces a book con- taining the official reports of what has come to be known as the ‘shock- ing prisoner abuse in Iraq.’ If the images of American men and women gleefully posing beside a pyramid of naked Iraqi men or giving the thumbs up beside hooded and naked prisoners did not lie, what truth did they tell? There has been remarkable consensus around the answer to this question in the media and in the official reports. As the Fay Inquiry summed up, the soldiers who abused detainees were ‘a small group of morally corrupt and unsupervised soldiers and civilians.’ 19 Circumstances, however, pushed many of them to the brink: ‘The occupiers were overwhelmed.’ 20 Inadequately trained, demoralized, fearful, and pressured ‘to obtain information that could help save American lives,’ they fell into torture and the sexual humiliation of prisoners. 21 Perhaps the only disagreement over this version of events has been over whether or not morally weak, low-ranking soldiers were in fact encouraged by their leaders to ‘mistreat’ prisoners.

The attempt to contain the violence to a few weak and stressed indi- viduals could not easily stand by itself. The explanation required rein- forcement. There were simply too many images and they appeared to the public to depict a sexual depravity, to say nothing of cruelty and brutality. The sex, if not the brutality, seemed to warrant explanation.

The theory that went the furthest to provide an explanation of the sex was based on the idea that sexualized torture was simply a culturally specific interrogation method. Fitting in nicely with the ‘clash of civi- lizations’ thesis 22 that had come to dominate Western explanations for conflict between West and non-West, and the Islamic world in particu- lar, pyramids of naked men forced to simulate having sex with each other was everywhere to be understood as nothing more than a con- temporary form of torture. Few in the media questioned the Orientalist underpinnings of this claim. (Unlike us, they are sexually repressed, homophobic, and misogynist and are likely to crack in sexualized situ- ations, particularly those involving women dominating men or those involving sex between men.) No one asked whether such methods would in fact humiliate men of all cultures both because they are violent and because they target what it means to be a man in patriarchy. If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 65Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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The ‘clash of civilizations’ approach to torture reinforced the idea of their barbarism at the same time that it enabled the West to remain on moral high ground. Through the idea of cultural difference, sexualized torture became something more generic – torture for the purpose of obtaining information. Sexualized torture, then, was meant simply ‘to attack the prisoners’ identity and values.’ 23Believing that the fault had to be traced back to the top, Mark Danner declared the photos ‘com- prehensible’ given the cultural characteristics of Arabs andthe Central Intelligence Agency’s manual on interrogations. The photos are ‘staged operas of fabricated shame intended to “intensify” the prison- ers’ guilt feelings, increase his anxiety and his urge to cooperate,’ Danner wrote, quoting parts of the CIA’s interrogation policy. 24Photos are a ‘shame multiplier,’ according to the Red Cross, since they could be distributed to the prisoners’ families and used to further humiliate detainees. 25 Second, through the idea of culturally specific interroga- tion techniques, Americans were marked as modern people who did not subscribe to puritanical notions of sex or to patriarchal notions of women’s role in it. The Iraqis, of course, remained forever confined to the pre-modern. When we in the West see photos of prisoner abuse, and when our official inquiries declare without irony that what is depicted amounts simply to a speciality form of torture required in these strange nether regions of the world, we too mark the boundaries between self and other – between here and there. ‘More than skin color, and dress, soldiers view mannerisms, cultural beliefs and tradi- tions as the true ground upon which they distinguish themselves as better and thus able to inflict pain and suffering,’ speculates one jour- nalist, thereby reducing the encounter in those prison cells to a culture clash. 26 For many who remained uneasy about pyramids of naked men or women soldiers brushing their bare breasts against prisoners and wearing thongs specifically for interrogations (as they are reputed to have done at Guantanamo), the sex was nevertheless scrupulously avoided. The current American administration’s aggressive approach to terrorism helped to fill the silence. 27 Both for those who saw pris- oner abuse as the work of a few reservists and those, such as Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the story, who concluded that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was ‘a fact of army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide,’ 28 torture had a political utility. For Hersh, the torture was ‘eye-for-eye retribution in fighting terrorism,’ something dictated by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George Bush – payback 66 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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perhaps for 9/11. 29 Despite determined efforts to view the torture instrumentally – that is as having a militaryfunction – the sex does not easily go away. Three questions persist about the Abu Ghraib photos, questions that are not answered in the latest findings of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘independent’ panel of civilian experts (the Schlesinger report), which conclude that ‘chaos’ and ‘sadism’ prevailed at Abu Ghraib prison. 30Why the photos? I have yet to find anyone other than Mark Danner and former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski 31 who believes that the nearly 2000 photos soldiers sent to their families and to each other were really destined for Iraqi prisoners’ homes or were meant to hang as a threat over detainees of their continual humilia- tion. 32 This leaves the compelling question, as one of Canada’s national newspapers headlined, ‘Why record evil?’ 33 Why so many of them? It is the excess of it all that troubles. When you are in the realm of such excess, it is harder to believe official accounts about a few bad apples. Finally, why the sex? (This last question is often connected to the question of women’s participation.) There is something too dis- turbing about the deeply sexualized acts and the grins. There is also something too familiar. Certainly the leash that Lyndie England held to lead around a naked Iraqi man reminded many of pornography, and the black-hooded figure from whose arms electrodes were sus- pended seemed to one scholar a spectacular and telling inversion of the white hoods of the KKK. 34 The photos hold the key to answering many of these questions.

In her important book American Archives, Shawn Michelle Smith argues that visual practices such as photographs have long served as a kind of technology of belonging, expressing the collective will at the same time that they create it. When they were first invented, photos were quickly enlisted ‘to establish social hierarchies anchored in new visual truths.’ 35 From depictions of the physical attributes of criminals to the middle-class family shot and photos of lynchings, photographs were called upon to tell us something about gender, race, and class hierarchies. In so doing, they not only reflected what was imagined but also actively produced what they declared to exist. 36 Photos helped an emerging middle class to affirm their place in the nineteenth century by marking who was white and middle class and who was criminal and racially other. Building on Smith’s insights, we would then have to consider how the photos at Abu Ghraib, which were mailed to family and friends and tacked up on the unit’s doors (as they were in Somalia), confirmed an imagined community among Ameri- If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 67Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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cans – one that is profoundly racially structured since it is achieved through the tortured and humiliated bodies of Iraqis and racialized others.

At the very least, the existence of large numbers of photos indicate something about the widespread nature of these acts of sexualized torture. Of the photo exhibit ‘War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1942–1944,’ which toured Germany and Austria during the late 1990s – an exhibit that contained hundreds of photos mostly taken by the perpetrators of crimes against Jews – Omer Bartov writes:

‘What many Germans found hard to take was that the exhibition demonstrated in the most graphic manner the complicity of Wehrma- cht soldiers in the Holocaust and other crimes of the region, especially in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.’ 37 If the sol- diers all knew of these crimes, and close to twenty million soldiers passed through the ranks of the Wehrmacht, then it follows that Germans knew much more about the Holocaust than they were pre- pared to acknowledge after the war. 38A debate has long raged among historians about what it took to get so many ordinary Germans to participate in, approve of, or remain indifferent to the Holocaust. The photographs seem to confirm that crimes against Jews had public approval. The record of abuse suggests, too, that there was no fear of reprisal. However, if the public recording of brutal acts reveals wide- spread approval and thus something of the collective will, it does not in itself tell us what the photographs do. The photographs oriented ordinary Germans to where they were (in an Aryan regime) and who they were – Aryans who were able to mark the boundary between themselves and non-Aryans.

A spectacular national use of the productive function of visual prac- tices in a context not unlike prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib was evident in France at the end of the nineteenth century when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was charged (unjustly) with selling military secrets to the Germans. The military faced a terrible problem in that Dreyfus did not look like the prevailing stereotype of the degenerate Jew. How, then, to prove that although Dreyfus looked like a regular Frenchman, a sinister alien lurked below this exterior? The answer was to trans- form his body into text, offering visual proof of his degeneracy. Cere- monially ripping the military epaulettes from his clothes and photo- graphing Dreyfus in ways that might make him appear non-military and effeminate, Dreyfus’s body then served to resolve the French mil- itary’s own concerns over its virility as well as French anxieties over 68 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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Jews, especially those who too easily passed for being French. 39 Photos, then, must be understood, as Shawn Michelle Smith suggests, as ‘visual codes of national belonging.’ The photos that did this most spectacularly for America were the photographs of lynched African Americans. 40 2. Rituals of Violence [Lynching] transform[ed] ‘whiteness’ into something visible and terribly tangible, into something ‘real.’ In the gruesome act of dissecting the body of an African American man, white men and women convinced them- selves of their own physical superiority. 41 Writing about these photos and the collective will they reveal, Andrew Austin considers the grins on the faces of the white people in the pic- tures. He asks how we might understand motive and agency. Why did so many participate so gleefully in these kinds of acts and wished to prolong their joy through recording it? It is remarkable, Austin observes, that one can find many expressions in the crowds of white men, women, and children who watch or who actually do the lynch- ing, but the expression one never sees on anyone’s face is horror. 42 Ordinary Americans participated in these crimes, had their photos taken beside lynched bodies, smiled for the camera, and sent postcards of the event in which they circled their own faces and described the ‘barbecue.’ As I am suggesting for Abu Ghraib, lynching photos were not intended for Blacks but for whites, a tangible and lasting reminder of an important occasion.

Clearly, it was not enough to simply kill Blacks, Austin comments.

Instead, ‘the killers had to murder Blacks in the most excessive and public way. Afterward, instead of shame and guilt, the perpetrators expressed pride in their actions, taking trophies, fragments of the corpse, selling body parts as souvenirs, and proudly displaying the photographs they had taken in local shop windows.’ 43 People walked around town carrying the bones of lynched men. The collective, open aspects of these acts make them hard to grasp. Phillip Dray recounts the story of W.E. Dubois discovering that crowds were excitedly gath- ering to see the lynching of Sam Hose. Dubois was forced to face the fact that lynching was not the action of a few violent men as he had assumed, but rather a collective expression of hatred and white supremacy. These acts of violence ‘made clear to everyone the proper If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 69Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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social order of things.’ 44 Those in power did not move to stop it and often participated in it. City officials posed for photographs alongside of lynched men without fear of punishment and the United States Senate failed to enact anti-lynching legislation for several decades, a fact for which it has recently apologized. 45 As an expression of a col- lective will, lynching and the practice of recording it confirmed for white men and women who they were.

Symbolically and materially, lynching may be considered as a pub- licly shared and approved of practice to create community – white community. Both historians and Black fiction writers describe lynching as a ritual, as Trudier Harris documents. Through the ritual, ‘Whites consolidate themselves against all possible encroachments upon their territory by Blacks, whether the encroachments – physical, psycholog- ical, or otherwise – are committed wittingly or not. ‘ 46 The title of Harris’s book, Exorcising Blackness, suggests what she thinks the ritual is intended to do. Harris, who focuses on the pedagogic intent of the lynching ritual, first describes it: A crowd of whites, attributing to themselves the sanction over life and death and viewing themselves as good and right, are reduced to the level of savages in their pursuit and apprehending of a presumed black crimi- nal; they usually exhibit a festive atmosphere by singing, donning their Sunday finery, and bringing food to the place of death. A castration or some other mutilation usually accompanies the killing in addition to a gathering of trophies from the charred body. Sometimes the crowd lingers to have its picture taken with the victim. 47 ‘The actions of white lynch mobs and the ritualistic nature of their behavior,’ she argues, ‘cannot be attributed to some strange and foreign beast released at the time of cruelty.’ 48Lynching is not only the work of some exceptionally violent white supremacists. There has to be prior socialization to make lynching acceptable, and each partici- pant in the drama understands what is collectively at stake even at the height of the excitement.

When people participate in this ritual, what are they thinking and feeling? What is personally at stake? Harris writes that white men involved in lynching spent an inordinate amount of time examining the genitals of the black men whom they were about to kill. Even as they castrated the black men, 70 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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there was a suggestion of fondling, of envious caress. The many emotions involved at that moment perhaps led the white men to slash even more violently at what could not be theirs, but which, at some level, they very much desired (without the apish connotations, of course). 49 Sexualized racial violence does double duty: it provides the sense of power, control, and mastery and, at the same time, it offers an intimacy to what it is forbidden to desire or to see as human. The ‘lynched Black man becomes a source of sexual pleasure to those who kill him,’ a receptacle for hate and fears and forbidden feelings. 50 Let me draw on another scholar of lynching to explore further the identity that is achieved through these rituals of racial violence.

Robyn Wiegman has argued that lynching is a symbolic sexual encounter between the white mob and its victim. The castration is meant to evict Black men from the community of men. The threat that Black men represent is the threat of masculine sameness (here we could also say that the threat that the racial other represents is the threat of sameness and common humanity). Sameness must be disavowed and no more so than at the moment when it is too threat- ening a possibility, when, in other words, the racial hierarchy is revealed as a fiction. Weigman notes, as many other scholars do, that lynching increased and led more often to death when Black people gained more rights. (We might consider that racial violence in the policing or prison encounter in North America is often initiated when the prisoner talks back.) Sexualized violence accomplishes the eviction from humanity, and it does so as an eviction from masculinity.

Significantly, it is the white man who descends into savagery in order to establish his own civility – the paradox is mediated through the story of protecting white women from the bestial excess of black- ness. With the myth of the Black rapist, Black men were accused of what white men were guilty of – rape. The inversion, the imputation of bestial excess on to Black bodies, makes white violence disappear, leaving in its place only white men. White innocence is secured through the sexual disciplining of the Black body. 51The miscegenation taboo, as several scholars have argued, where white women are for- bidden to Black men, expresses white men’s fear of racial difference, and provides an instance of how the circulation of women establishes the relationship of men to each other. 52 Notably, while white men are allowed access to Black women in white supremacy, the offspring of If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 71Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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such unions are not entitled to access the power and prestige of their fathers, as many miscegenation laws ensured.

In her study of lynching, Lisa Cardyn catalogues the practices that express the sexual disciplining of Black bodies – practices that were present at Abu Ghraib and in peacekeeper violence. Lynching involved whippings of a ‘distinctly sexualized cast’; incidents of young men forced to simulate intercourse; humiliation; stripping of victims; the use of sticks as extended phalluses; sadistic homoerotics; group sex; and men made to kiss another man’s bottom. Cardyn con- cludes that ‘in their quest to possess, inscribe, and finally obliterate the bodies of their victims, lynch mobs unwittingly revealed the awful coalescence of sexual rage, desire, frustration, and obsession that con- strained them to act as they did.’ 53 We must turn to James Baldwin for a literary rendition of the ‘awful coalescence’ to which historians refer.

In his story ‘Going to Meet the Man’ Baldwin describes a white sheriff who finds himself impotent. 54 Sexual excitement is only possible through blackness, a blackness understood as body and savagery against which must stand the hard erection. The sheriff cannot ask his wife to do what the Black girls he arrests and coerces do, and although the image of a Black girl gives rise to ‘a distant excitement,’ it is only when the sheriff can summon up the sensations of beating a Black pris- oner to a pulp and the memory of being taken to see a lynching when he was a child that he is able to generate sufficient sexual excitement to overcome his impotence. As Baldwin shows, the sheriff experiences himself as drowning in blackness, ‘an overwhelming fear, which yet contained a curious and dreadful pleasure.’ 55 He is haunted, for instance, by the singing of the Black men and women forming lines and defiantly intending to register to vote. It is a singing that he feels he has been hearing all his life, a sound that ‘contained an obscure comfort’ as though ’they were singing to God.’ Yet he cannot indulge in this positive meaning of the song. What he fears most is that the song is not about ‘singing black folks into heaven,’ but instead about ‘singing white folks into hell.’ 56 Faced with this ever-present possibil- ity, there can only be the daily battle against the singing – a battle between the fear of and the desire for oneness with the other that wears him out.

Briefly, and it is only a fleeting sensation in the night, the sheriff wishes that he could be buried inside the warmth and safety of his wife’s body and never again have ‘to go downtown to face those faces.’ 57 However, to fulfil this longing for the feminine, to give 72 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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himself up to the song, means having to abandon the masculine self that stands as a barrier against blackness. He defends himself against the longing by calling up the sensations of beating the prisoner, a Black man who led the voter registration drive and who, as a ten-year-old child, had once confronted the sheriff. When the prisoner reminds the sheriff of that earlier confrontation, a rage builds in the sheriff. Only the sensation of feeling himself violently stiffen interrupts the beating the rage inspires. As with the lynching that he witnessed as a child, the violence (the castration at the lynching) produces a climax, a moment when ‘the blood came roaring down.’ It is through the violence, a literal orgasm, that the white man knows himself as master of his own fate, as a man not overcome by the singing or by feminine warmth. The violence, the moment of terrible intimacy when the racial and the fem- inine threat are both averted, offers the only antidote to fear. It also offers a transfer of sexual power from the Black body to the white man.

Inspired by the memory of racial mastery and transformed now by this recalled encounter with the Black body, the sheriff calls to his sleeping wife: ‘Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a n-----, just like a n----- come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a n-----.’ 58 The psychic processes that Baldwin captures so powerfully, and that scholars of lynching theorize, are central for post-colonial theorists who maintain that ‘we find an ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racism, a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion.’ 59 Robert Young, considering the ‘desire in fantasies of race, and of race in fantasies of desire’ 60 that is so evident in English fiction, suggests that colonialism is less about the Manichean categories of colonizer/colonized than it is about ‘the intri- cate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and dysfunction.’ 61 Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Young notes their con- tention that the ‘prime function incumbent on the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channeled, regulated.’ 62 Capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari theorized, requires the territorializing of desire that Freud assumed was an individual process when he described the Oedipus complex. Paraphrasing them, Young writes: Oedipus is not simply the normal structure through which all humans travel on the path to mental, sexual and social maturity: it is the means through which the flow of desire is encoded, trapped, inscribed within If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 73Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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the artificial reterritorializations of a repressive social structure – the family, the party, the nation, the law, the educational system, the hospital, psychoanalysis itself. 63 Young utilizes the same analytic to argue that colonialism required similar ‘violent physical and ideological procedures’ as well as the damming up, diverting, and reterritorialization of desire that Deleuze and Guattari describe for capitalism. 64 The ‘endlessly repeated colo- nial fantasy of the uncontrollable sexual drive of the non-white races and their limitless fertility,’ for example, ‘only took on significance through its voyeuristic tableau of frenzied interminable coupling, of couplings, fusings, coalescence, between races.’ 65 Colonialism’s endless preoccupations with miscegenation (a preoccupation shared in slave regimes) and the policing of sexual boundaries through violence resolve the ambivalence in the moment, only to have it threaten to overwhelm colonial subjects again and again. It is in this ambivalence, and in the violence that it gives birth to, that we find the tracks for what happens at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and similar settings.

In our own time and referring to pornography, Andrea Dworkin notices the same confluence of race, gender, sexuality, and violence that took place in the colonial context in the making of white men today. She comments: ‘I am struck by how hate speech, racist hate speech, becomes more sexually explicit as it becomes more virulent – how its meaning becomes more sexualized, as if the sex is required to carry the hostility.’ 66 Following a line that I would very much like to take with respect to the Abu Ghraib photos, Dworkin asks: ‘What does that orgasm do? That orgasm says, I am real and the lower creature, that thing, is not, and if the annihilation of that thing brings pleasure, that is the way life should be; the racist hierarchy becomes a sexually charged idea.There is a sense of biological inevitability that comes from the intensity of a sexual response derived from contempt.’ 67 As Dworkin suggests, ‘a sexually reified racism is always sadistic; its purpose is always to hurt.’ 68 It is perhaps only through a sexualized violence – one that offers both intimacy and repulsion – that white supremacy can maintain its most central fiction of a permanent differ- ence between the races, a fiction that Deleuze and Guattari suggest is always threatened by desire for the racial and cultural other. 69 Can we consider the racial hierarchy in Iraq a sexually charged idea?

What does the sex do? Certainly sexualized torture evicts Arabs from the community of men, and from a common humanity. As the Dreyfus 74 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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case has shown, both the acts and the photos transform the body into text, confirming that the Arab is emasculated, body not mind, and that occupation is as necessary as it is dangerous. How else to mark the boundary between them and us, and how else to avoid drowning in blackness, but through violence? The excess (overworked prison guards nevertheless find the time to assemble human pyramids and to take pictures – many other soldiers laugh and join the exhibition) and the sex both tell us of what must be so forcefully and ritualistically dis- avowed – their humanity, their masculinity, and, above all, the desire for what must not be desired.

3. Where Are the Women?

The women thronged to look but never a one Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue. 70 When scholars theorize racial violence as a ritual, they stress that it is an ‘an affair between men.’ 71 As in Baldwin’s story, men’s disavowal of the maternal, the feminine, and the body, as well as the replacing of the body with the phallus, is required to mark the boundary between whiteness and blackness, producing what William Pinar poetically describes as ‘the despair of the loveless.’ 72 For Pinar, racial violence cannot be understood unless queered – that is to say, in the words of Frantz Fanon, ‘the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual.’ 73 The problem is that white men are neither permanently white nor per- manently men and white heterosexual manhood is constituted by per- petually disavowing homoerotic desire for black men. 74 The issue of racial violence, Trudier Harris agrees, ‘really boils down to one between white men and black men and the mythic conception the former have of the latter.’ 75 For Robyn Weigman too, the obsession with black men’s genitals in lynching reveals desire and a sadistic homoeroticism that is being disavowed. Similarly, Andrea Dworkin maintains: ‘The essential sexual antagonism that is basic to racism is expressed as if the possession of women were the issue, but funda- mentally the antagonism is homoerotic.’ 76 If we accept these premises, where are the women? In Claude Mackay’s poem about lynching, they throng to look, an eager part of the crowd. Women are the bearers of the white phallus’s meaning, Weigman explains, and Baldwin makes clear that the sheriff ’s wife must answer his call. Women express white male power. They are its If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 75Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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conduits. Black women must confirm with theirbodies that it is white women who are the coin of the realm. Optimistically and ahistorically, Pinar opines that the major difference between white men and white women was that the latter did not sexualize race: ‘White women were – are – often awful to Black women, but they didn’t track them, strip them, sexually torture and mutilate their bodies, keeping parts as sou- venirs.’ 77 They watched, however, as Black people were lynched in their name, made the picnic baskets, kept the photos and treasured the souvenirs, and, in slavery and its aftermath, developed their own gender-specific cruelties. At Abu Ghraib, they also tortured and sexu- ally humiliated Arab men.

Troubled by the direct participation of women in the abuse at Abu Ghraib, several prominent Western feminists have felt unable to account for such agency. Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, confessed that a certain kind of feminism died within her when she saw the photos – the feminism ‘that saw men as perpetual perpetrators’ and women as morally superior. 78 For her, then, the participation of women in these acts of torture simply meant that anyone could become a torturer under the right circumstances. The circumstances for Ehrenreich were simply about war – working-class women who wanted an education joined the military and found themselves in the midst of ‘our species’ tragic propensity for violence.’ 79 Thoughtful attempts to explain white women’s role remained for the most part attached to this notion that as a subordinate group themselves, women could not participate in any way comparable to men. Zillah Eisenstein argues that women were ‘gender decoys,’ meant to distract attention from the real empire builders. ‘In the case of Abu Ghraib,’ she writes, ‘racial codings are used to deeply seed gender meanings and their con- fusion to build empire.’ 80 In this view, women are merely dupes, working-class women with little agency and certainly no stake in white supremacy who found themselves in the middle of a man’s game. The idea of a decoy makes of white women passive, not active, participants in colonialism, and, indeed, Eisenstein claims that ‘[f]emales are present to cover over the misogyny of building empire.’ In the pursuit of redemption for white women, namely, the drive to show that white women are less culpable than white men and that their violence towards people of colour is somehow a lesser violence, it is easy to recognize the staking of a claim for justice by confining white women to the margins as victims and not as oppressors. 81 The problem posed by women’s active participation in racial violence is 76 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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resolved, however, if we begin with the fact that in empire (which Eisenstein acknowledges exists, while Ehrenreich does not) white women signify principally through their race and not their gender. 82 The call to participate in the practices of empire is a powerful one, as I have argued about men of colour who have participated in peace- keeping violence against Somalis, 83 and answering it brings rewards.

White women secure access to citizenship when they participate in the violence of nation, as indeed we all do.

If there is any specific aspect of gender that may be glimpsed in what white women such as Lyndie England did, it is perhaps, as Susan Willis has suggested, in white women enacting desire for Arab men, ostensibly to humiliate them, but accomplishing at the same time a crossing of both racial and gender boundaries. The transgres- sion serves, paradoxically, to remind white men that they are not the only objects of white women’s sexual attention. White women at Abu Ghraib might have been, as Willis put it, ‘playing their poor Southern white boys against racial others of forbidden desire’ 84 and coming as close to miscegenation as white supremacy will allow. Yet the joke, in the end, was on the Arab men, and it is more likely that it is in the spirit of cheering on the lynching and drawing of racial boundaries through hostility and fascination that we can better read the white women’s actions. The following newspaper excerpt suggests that race overdetermined what went on: Colleen Kesner, a resident from England’s hometown, said: ‘A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq. To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way that girls like Lynndie England are raised.

Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting something. Over there they’re hunting Iraqis. 85 Of the women who thronged to watch, then, the white wife in the sheriff ’s bed and the women soldiers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, we might simply assert that they sought access to racial power – a power perhaps coded by white women’s role as the bearer of the phallus’s meaning. Certainly, through affirming the power of the phallus and rejecting the feminine (alien other), white women ulti- mately undermine themselves and in this sense they are dupes. In the meantime, however, through such acts of racial power they have If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 77Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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gained membership in a racial regime. One becomes Western, Yegenoglu reminds us, through imagining oneself in the fantasy of Orientalism, a fantasy with material effects: both the European man and the European woman must dream of possession of the Oriental other to secure sovereign status for themselves. 86 Conclusion: Racial Terror and the Trade in Methodologies As rituals of lynching suggest, what we euphemistically call ‘prisoner abuse’ today is not new. Colonial regimes have long been structured by what, borrowing from Michael Taussig, we might more appropri- ately call racial terror. Taussig reminds us that we would be unwise to ignore the role of terror in securing power. Terror is ‘the mediator par excellenceof colonial hegemony,’ Taussig notes, and ‘the space of death is one of the crucial spaces where Indian, African, and white gave birth to the New World.’ 87Terror is how we come to know and make known colonial power – how it gets written on our bodies. Hated and feared, objects to be despised, yet also of awe, the reified essence of evil in the very being of their bodies, these figures of the Jew, the black, the Indian, and woman herself, are clearly objects of cultural construction, the leaden keel of evil and mystery stabilizing the ship and course that is Western history. With the cold war we add the communist.

With the time bomb ticking inside the nuclear family, we add the femi- nists and the gays. The military and the New Right, like the conquerors of old, discover the evil they have imputed to these aliens, and mimic the savagery they have imputed. 88 To Taussig’s list, we must add the Arab / t he Muslim.

Taussig is insistent that ‘behind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning – structures of feeling – whose bases lie in a symbolic world and not in one of ration- alism.’ 89 We have to move through the electrodes and the mutilated human body, and the experience of torture, in order to confront ‘the hallucination of the military’ (referring to Jacobo Timerman’s Prisoner without a Name) 90– in other words, to confront what the savagery is all about. Offering a case example of racial terror, Taussig examines Roger Casement’s Putomayo report, which was submitted to the British House of Commons in 1913, based on seven weeks of travel in 1910 through the rubber-gathering regions of the Amazon, specifically along 78 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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the Putomayo River in Peru. Rubber could not be gathered without the help of the Huitotos Indians. Uncovering tremendous violence, what Casement’s report conveyed most of all through all the facts and witness accounts was the ordinariness of the violence. People passed the time by hunting Indians. The torture was too excessive to be explained as simply economically rationalized. Taussig suggests that such terror entailed a trade in mythologies. The narratives of terror that abounded tell us something about the terror itself – they were stories of the savagery of the jungle and the savagery of its inhabitants. The ‘wild Indians’ could reflect back to the colonizers their reality as civilized and business-like only if they were controlled through acts of savagery.

Savages, mythically endowed with great strength, had to be put down.

Torture took on a life of its own in this environment, passing from indi- vidual acts to an organized culture and mode of life. Taussig makes an eloquent plea for coming to terms with the ‘hallucinatory quality’ of terror, for understanding what I think of as its deeply psychic structure.

‘Fascist poetics succeed where liberal rationalism self-destructs,’ he warns, unless we confront the emotions generated by terror. 91 It is in the interest of confronting a ‘fascist poetics,’ and out of the need to move beyond the mythologies (of cultural difference) that so easily reconciles the West to the sexualized torture of Arabs and Muslims, that I have pursued an interlocking analysis of prisoner abuse. Drawing on scholarship on lynching, I have been advancing a theoretical framework that suggests how white masculinity is consti- tuted simultaneously against warmth and sensuality as well as against desire for (oneness with) the racial other. To adopt this kind of theoret- ical framework for contemporary prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, Guan- tanamo, and elsewhere is to insist first and foremost that the new world order is an imperial world. People in the West come to know them- selves within the Manichean categories that Fanon rendered so superbly, as gendered beings who must participate in violence against racial others in order to mark the boundary between self and other. Yet they do so out of a deep and threatening ambivalence. Culture has been the language of contemporary narratives of terror. Cultural difference, understood as theircannibalism,theirtreatment of women, and their homophobia, justifies the savagery that the West metes out. ‘The Chris- tian in me says this is wrong,’ Charles Graner, one of the soldiers charged with abuse and the alleged ringleader, is reputed to have said, ‘but the corrections officer in me can’t help making a grown man piss himself.’ 92The West has appointed itself as the corrections officer to the non-West, and Charles Graner should not be understood as a man who If It Wasn’t for the Sex and the Photos 79Razack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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has simply taken his duties too far. For what else is a civilized man to do in his encounter with savages but civilize them? Baldwin’s sheriff resembles Graner in this respect. As the sheriff ’s rage builds and cli- maxes in violence and orgiastic release, he reflects of himself later that night: ‘He tried to be a good person and treat everybody right: it wasn’t his fault if the n----- had taken it into their heads to fight against God and go against the rules laid down in the Bible for everyone to read!

Any preacher will tell you that. He was only doing his duty: protecting white people from the n-----s and the n-----s from themselves.’ 93 The fact that the status of Iraqis is so evidently subhuman, so cul- turally different, and so in need of discipline, crowds our newsreels.

Unless we too have become numb to it all, we will need to find an explanation for the sexualized terror and for the ways that ordinary people participate in it. Pyramids of naked men forced to simulate having sex should not baffle us, but neither should we believe that they are trivial or exceptional moments in a giant clash of civilizations.

To grasp their import, we will have to attend to prisoner abuse as a publicly enacted, sexualized ritual of racial violence and track the trade in mythologies signalled by our persistent marking of ourselves as modern and the non-West as culturally different.

If ordinary men and women possess even the smallest connection to the structure of feeling I have been sketching for the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, and if they come to know themselves as subjects only through erecting walls between themselves and racial others – a practice that requires violence – critical educators will have to consider more seri- ously how white supremacy is embodied. We ignore the psychic under- pinnings of the exception at our peril, its unconscious structure, but in order to grasp its installation, we will need to consider how race, class, gender, and sexuality give each other meaning, structuring desire and producing men and women whose sense of coherency rests on anx- iously marking the line between the civilized and the uncivilized, between those who are to be abandoned and those who are to remain members of political community. As the next three chapters will show, a growing European and North American obsession with the culturally different and their casting out of political community has coalesced not only around the figure of the ‘dangerous’ Muslim man but also around that of the imperilled Muslim woman. Unveiling her body, insisting that she be made ‘modern,’ functions not only to discipline the Muslim man, who is considered to be the source of her containment, but also provides the pleasure of colonial mastery and possession. 80 Part One: ‘Dangerous’ Muslim MenRazack, Sherene. Casting Out : The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, University of Toronto Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=3268422.

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