Re-inscription and the Control of Meaning: America and the Signification Logic of Torture

`I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.

`When _I_ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll 1872

From Ends-and-means to the exclusion-of-meanings

With the interjection of Reaganomics to the stage of politics in the U.S., a shift began from the pragmatism of the social reality model of means-ends activity and political intervention to a re-working of the lexicon of ideology and power as language-handler. This application of power to the reworking of language was the means to recreate the political mechanism of the American state as a functional, and controlling, reality creator. The notion of supply-side economics and the "trickle-down" theory was the beginning of a fundamental application of power to redefine the vocabulary and language of a system in order to secure "normative" and pre-selected way for interpreting the system. This system of language delimited a selective path for the populace to grasp the mechanism of a (supposed) economic theoretical system while insuring a way for those who had come to the helm of power in the US to reinvent a rational for the further localization of wealth in and to the upper echelons of the economy as a generalized good for those (in actuality) excluded from the languid luxuries of this moneyed class. The clue in the language, to those who were in the vice grip of the receiving end of this language trap, and, naturally, those who were not to share in this redistribution of wealth to the top, was articulated by these re-inventors of the new language of the economy as the "trickle" by which money was meant to move from the upper to the lower moneyed classes. This "trickle-down" was in astonishing contradistinction (and takes the "meaning place-setting", here. in this re-inscription of denotation) to the "flowing-down" which one, as a member of the numerous but lower (actually lower-upper as well as middle and lower) classes, would hope that this weigh of capital would have due to its heavy concentrations at the top. Undisguised in the lexicon of the economic right was the reality of the supply side thinking: Give it to the rich and we promise they will share it with you.

Yet the need to create a more formalized system for the re-writing and re-inscription of reality, for using the control of meaning in the very fabric of its language to direct the activity of the social body, was still far away and in the future from this crude and experimental usage which the Reagan to the First Bush era had attempted. The application of power and epistemology to language and the ensuring construction of words was a method of freeing meanings and opening potential signification. However, this freeing and opening was enshrined only in the sense that the controlling classes would be able to remold these words and their meanings, and ultimately create and detail pathways of the non-negotiable. What was needed for this unmooring of meaning and the control of these denotations by the controlling classes was either a long processes of negating and reassembling of meanings for the US citizenry (and this was hoped for by the notion of a "permanent majority" which was a single party rule which could carry out this program consistently and through a protracted time-period) or a shock to the American psyche which would make such distortion of social reality malleable. As the ultra- conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation (and where the Bush Jr. administration was to gather many of its members), was to lay out this two-pronged method at the beginning of the sympathetic and puppetesque Bush Jr. Administration:

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor... (2)

What had already been chipped away from the negotiated meanings that the social body of America had endured through the Rovian (3) attacks from the Bush presidential runs, and which had transvaluated qualities into their antithetical and exact opposites (where being wounded in a war was a mark of cowardliness and deceitfulness, see the Bush-Kerry presidential campaign and the swift boat attacks (4), as well as the McCain-Bush nomination run and the Black Child implication (5)), was now abetted by the existential shock of the fall and catastrophe of the twin towers. The New Pearl Harbor had occurred. The very fabric of communally and culturally defined meanings, and the consensual agreements these generated temporally in the social body, now was vulnerable to the assault from the inner workings of the Bush Administration and the great number of people who had penned the text of "Rebuilding America's Defenses". The re-inscription of language and the control of meaning were to be described in lucid and appalling detail by "Bush's brain", Karl Rove (6), to the Journalist Ron Suskind. As Suskind notes:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." (7)

With much malice aforethought, the Bush administration, utilizing the transformative horror of the twin towers destruction, began to apply the radical and deceptive tools of power to redefine the basic tenets of a socially and communally delineated reality into one generated from the position of hierarchically "above" in the state and class and without recourse to negotiation in the generalized social body or framework. Mere propaganda was much too weak a tool for the grasp demanded by this group and desired by the White House, and what was desired and enable at this point was the administration of a reinvention and redefinition of language in order to create and control the bases of history and reality. The ordinary users of language, the "reality based community", that is, were merely seen, in this view, as those "who are a mite pathetic" and who fail to fully realize "the principle of the new age", i.e. this new Rovian-Bush age of power as language-creator and meaning-controller. "Power has made reality its bitch" as Mark Danner was to emphatically phrase it in his lecture, "Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President" (2007).

This reinvention of reality was to be founded on language as a principle of exclusivity and the premise of control. There was to be no negotiation of meaning in this abyss of re-definement. The President, grasping the ultimate means of the power of lexicon creation and the control of possible meanings of this language, was the sole arbiter of definitions and the networks which surround and inform them. Language and meaning was to be sequestered in the office of the President exclusively and pried loose from the normal operations and discussions between the co-existent and concurrent branches of governance in the US and the populace at large. Languages, and the meanings they harbor, generate, and entailed; flowed (not trickled) only one way and gives only one thought.

The Rewriting of Pain

The most singular (and horrific) case study in this rhetorical bounding of discussion is that of Torture. John Yoo (8), in the now infamous "Torture Memo" to the White House (October 2002), gave any and all power to the President to the US. in time of war (9). As the Constitution of the United States, according to Yoo, gives the powers of the "commander-in-chief" exclusively to the president, no law may be passed which, in any form or method, restricts the activities of the President in relation to war, or any activity with may revolve around the issue of war. The detailing in the United States Constitution that the Congress was the body of the government which had the sole power to "declare" war was meant, in the Yoo interpretation, to be the polite addressing of an enemy government to tell them that the Government and People of the US were now legally at war with them, but, actual war and all of its invested powers, was to be only per the discretionary power (now unbound) of the President of the United States. Any official Declaration of War voted through by the Congress and addressed and delivered an enemy government, in Yoo's, and now the President's mind, was a mere formality of diplomatic amenities and had no real force of law. Only the President held these powers, and all of the conjoined powers which are, even loosely, tied to them. (10)

Because of this, the use of torture, Yoo reasoned (and this reasoning was all to eagerly grasped by the inner circle of the White House), could not be constrained by any body, institution, or branch of government, either domestic or international, as the President in his role and function of the "commander-in-chief" was neither limited nor determined by any restrictions in the pursuit of war.

The Bush Torture Memos (known as the Bybee Memo, named after Jay Bybee the head of the Office of Legal Counsel) titled formally the "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation", was a document to specify the endeavor of torture to be defined and used by the Bush administration and was to be an ("Through the Looking Glass") interpretation of pain and torture which was, in the words of the document itself, "a binding legal opinion on the government policy" of "interrogations". The legalese of the Torture Memo was a method of reinvention of language and the control of the letter of the law in order give absolute and complete interpretative authority to the President (as the "signing statement" (11) did in a synonymous and comprehensive way for active presidential meaning control),on the one hand, while on the other to formally exclude the President (who this was actually written for in the first place) from any legal mess incurred by the illegality of torture both in the American domestic sense and in its relation to international agreements. As the Yoo document gushes:

As the Supreme Court has recognized ... the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces. [We] will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the President's ultimate authority in these areas. (12)

The law, in all senses, could be superseded and transcended by the president in the case of "war" (which has in actually not been "declared" by the congress in regard to the Iraq "war") and who, in the most absolute sense, could not be curtailed in any way in this endeavor. The time table of this extra-legal status of the president was continual from the point of the destruction of 9/11 (and the open ended "war on terror" which means it will stay in force indefinitely) and is focused on the necessity of torture because of the damage to property as a symbol of which control must be retaken and restricted once again. The attack and its symbolic, and therefore critical nature, reveals its uniqueness and divines a complete freedom which the President is entitled to in regard to any and all responses which are deemed "necessary".

The situation in which these issues arise is unprecedented in recent American history.... These attacks were aimed at critical government buildings in the Nation's capital and landmark buildings in its financial center. (13)

If the symbolic meaning was to be correctly redistributed to the more localize and proscribed meanings of the controlling and moneyed classes of the United States the extra legal position of the President must be thoroughly detailed and confirmed within the language of control itself. The use of terminology to privilege the Bush administration in meaning construction and control by the use of the (above) qualifiers of "complete", "ultimate", and the like, was to be further elaborated in the extraction of the Presidential position from the legal bonds of the state and its laws by the inversion of Constitutional (where as the president resides in the body of law via the constitutional position of the office of the president) to Unconstitutional (where the president in an absurd tautological move of legalese seems to be above the constitution as renounced by the constitution as being unconstitutional). The president, in regard to all of the laws defining the use of torture, or, sadly enough, now any activity curtailing his power, is above the law. The law cannot even be broken if in fact (arguably?) it is broken:

Even if an interrogation method arguably were to violate Section 2340A, the statute would be unconstitutional if it impermissibly encroached on the President's constitutional power to conduct a military campaign.... The demands of the Commander-in-Chief power are especially pronounced in the middle of a war in which the nation has already suffered a direct attack.... Any effort to apply Section 2340A in a manner that interferes with the President's direction of such core war matters as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants thus would be unconstitutional. (14)

From these arrogant and convoluted beginnings the Yoo memo moves on to the inflicting of pain and the terror of torture - the use of the interrogations was to be obligatory in a simple arithmetic of necessity. The mathematics was simple - one in pain for many, many (or even more) lives saved. The obligation of numbers was further enhanced by the "certainty of information" which would be "gain" from the abstracted "personnel" tortured and makes the inflicting of pain "reasonable" in the grand logic of interrogation.

Given the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the September 11 attacks, it is reasonable to believe that information gained from al Qaeda personnel could prevent attacks of a similar (if not greater) magnitude from occurring in the United States. (15)

The logical necessity of torture inured the president and those who carried out these sessions of torture from being bound within any legal system of responsibility, but even further this torture and the application of pain was, fundamentally, demanded by the higher form of obligation to the rational world. Responsibility (of, indeed, a strange sort) created within the logic of torture brings one both above the law and beyond normative moral reasoning to the network of created and controlled meanings. Even death in the logic of the Interrogative syllogism and the mathematics of torture detaches the President and his proxies from the world of negotiated meanings in which the grounds of humanity struggle. The logic of torture necessitates all circumstances of torture and free all actors of torture, even up to "intentional homicide" (i.e. murder) from any responsibility, in a simple and complete three step plan of necessity and intention:

The necessity defense may prove especially relevant in the current circumstances.

First, the defense is not limited to certain types of harms. Therefore, the harm inflicted by necessity may include intentional homicide, so long as the harm avoided is greater (i.e., preventing more deaths).

Second, it must actually be the defendant's intention to avoid the greater harm....

Third, if the defendant reasonably believed that the lesser harm was necessary, even if, unknown to him, it was not, he may still avail himself of the defense....

Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives. (16)

The logic of torture does not fully demand that the inflictors of torture, or their enablers in the creators of controlled meanings, are innocent. However, it takes merely a relocation in the dynamics of the torturers mind to side-step blame and condemns any subject of torture as not fully innocent and themselves as the inflictors of pain as blameless in intent. The Torturer-interrogators, in the twisted logic of pain is free of the guilt of any action of torture as the actual and primary concern in the activity of torture is not to "inflict pain", but is to get information. The logic of torture mandates the necessity of torture to secure information and control it. If the primary intent of the "extractor" is merely extraction of information, an attempt at the aquistion of knowledge, and not to make suffer those in their power, the torturer has acted in "good faith" and has, therefore, and in actuality, not fulfilled the linguist meaning of torture. Pain is secondary and may be dismissed as the actual "deed" is toward the objective of knowledge. We do not inflict pain and suffering, as this is a secondary characteristic, but we obtain knowledge, which is our first and primary concern. Torture deferred consistently in the persuit of knowing.

Because Section 2340 requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant's precise objective.... If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent. As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent.... Thus, even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith. Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his custody or physical control. (17)

If this gymnastics of the absurd does not insure the bid of control of the Conscience of the Interrogator, who may (even after the daunting task of re-inscribing the act of torture to necessity and redefining its reality away) still harbor doubts to what he or she (18) has done in the act of torturing, one final re-inscription of good-faith is carried out.

A good faith need not be a reasonable one. (19)

Though the logic of torture states the logic of torture will and must, always be reasonable, the good faith of the torturer need not be. The torturer may be deceived by the logic of torture to apply pain to the victims he or she torments, but even if they knew it was torture and it was the primary concentration for the act…… Torture is freed by logic, separated from psychology, and buffered from ethics in every extreme.

At this point in the Torture memos the very act of torture is now to be distributed, regulated, and defined away. Whereas at the beginnings of the memo Yoo was to define torture as "up to the failure of the organs", now the definition begins to look for a more "diffuse" reading to determine if the act of the interrogator was actually fulfilling the requirements to make this act an actual the operation of torture. The activity of "organs" (working or not, in this case) is much too specific for a reassessed meaning which Bush wishes and the controlling regime to embrace and one which may cause "differing views" from those mandated by the Yoo document. Therefore a more disperse and non-detailable definition (just as the act of torture and the intention of the torturer are now scattered and non-definable) must be created for the position of torture which is impossible to grasp or define within the act of torturing. The Transcendental position of the "future" is both real and unreachable, while not actually "being", for this scheme to now boast:

For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture ... it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years. (20)

Only by knowing the future of the torture victim and, with the good faith that far and away this victim will be "just living out his or her life" or not, can we say the action of the interrogator is torture. Yet as this cannot "be" (as the future does not exist in the present) no action can ever definitely be defined, with certainty, as torture. As the ontological position of the future may not be resided within, nor fully and faithfully determined, the present act which appears to be torture, is merely position outside of "reality".

If a defendant has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture. (21)

Torture can never happen in the present. The unknowable, distant, and transcendent future is the abode of torture. Torture is epistemologically impossible and ontologically distant. The revision of meanings become a means and way for the new post-rhetorical Presidency not to give potential and openness to our joint efforts at elaborating a world of fluid and unanticipated conclusions, but a way to narrow and control the world at the basis of language itself. While being described as the first of the post-modern Presidents due to his and his administrations uses of the unmooring and reworking of language as meaning and its constructions, Bush (and the Rovian world view) has instead let the lessons of postmodernism fall on deaf ears and a closed mind. The fluidity of meanings within language was meant to be a place where the diverse and dispersed members of a community would work and negotiate the platforms of meanings. This would entail a locale of continual renegotiation, but one where the common cultural products and the shared farming of language would reinvent alternate post-normative models for action and thought. The horrific static creation of meanings and the iron-maiden grip of necessity and action in the Bush/ Rovian world has moved the flow of diverse and divergent political meanings and social positions, meant to be fostered (in its best times) by the democracies in general, and the American Constitution specifically, to a Orwellian abyss of meanings detached from the shared negotiations of thought and meanings of the community of language builders and users. It is at this juncture of the American system, where the openness of language and meanings (on the one side) and the miniaturization of inscription (on the other) are facing off in a formal function of the two Americas . Whether it will fall to the grace and openness of possibilities entailed in the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th amendments of the US Bill of Rights - whether these are grasped and reinvested by the open negotiators of meanings - or whether these will fall to the limitation and the supplanting of communication with a contained language of oppression entailed in the re-inscription and control of meanings and words, benefiting the few and offering up only one interpretation for the numerous rest, is yet to be seen.

Steven Dixon

(1) The Ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation is a "think-tank" founded in 1973 by Joseph Coors (Owner of Colorado's Coors Beer Brewery) and was created to formulate and promote "the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense". In 2007 Heritage reported an operating revenue of $48.7 million dollars. Early in 1980, the Foundation published a large compilation document titled a "Mandate for Leadership" that was to be the intellectual foundation for Reagan's Right "Revolution," and one of the core ideological landmarks of the "neo-conservative movement". The ideas called for and described in this document included, trickle-down economics, massive reductions to social programs, substantial market deregulations, and the evisceration of citizen advocacy in government. Many of the members of conservative administrations since the 80's, and up through the Bush jr. Administration, have been gathered from the Heritage Foundation. Additionally a disproportionate number of current and former members of the foundation are employed as political "pundits" in US news media.

(2) The Heritage Foundation, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century," September, 2000

(3) Named after Karl Rove (see footnote 6, below), Rovian tactics for political campaigning are a mixture of misinformation, repetition, innuendo, and personal attack. Also, once a candidate ascends to office (or wins), these tactics are not left behind, but are integrated into the operations of the office (the politics of the office are minimized in favor of maximizing the politicization of the office). A number of "elements" have been vaguely designated for what comprises the spectrum of Roveian tactics but include are: 1- attack your opponents strengths (take a strength and imply or redefine it to make it a weakness, while doing the reverse for your pick), 2 - move concerns from issues to personalities, 3- underline tensions or create falsely conceived ones, in order to fashion wedge issues which separate members of society from one another, 4-create a set of concerns which define the social as good vs. another which is evil (this attracts or creates the values voters), 5-repetition of misinformation is still information (and will create "memes" controlling thinking), 6-associations and coincidences are elevated to conspiracies (you worked in the same building as "x", you must be part of "x"s plot),7-Whisper attacks (rumors actively spread by paid-operatives).

(4) The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is a conservative group of Vietnam veterans, who were brought together to impugn the military record and "personal integrity", of the 2004 Presidential nominee John Kerry in his bid against George Bush (2nd term). Though Kerry had won three Purple Hearts (for being wounded in the line of duty), a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star during his duty in Vietnam, the swift boaters, as they were to be called, were able to paint the service of Kerry as questionable at the least, and treasonably anti-American, at the most. This Smear Campaign worked well and, because of its effectiveness, has become a term used for campaigning which uses outright lies to win elections ("I was swift-boated!"). The word "truth" in this groups name acquired a vastly ironic overtone in the years following the 2004 election.

(5) During the 2000 Republican Nomination bid (McCain Vs Bush) direct phone calls, mailings (with pictures) and a large "whisper" campaign were made in many states by Bush "supporters" asserting that McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black Child. The fact that McCain had adopted a daughter from Bangladesh (and whose picture was being used), as opposed to circumventing the attacks, actually gave them further legitimacy. Notably it was Karl Rove (see footnote 6, below) who coordinated this, and other anti-McCain (including the McCain as closeted homosexual and communist brainwashed Manchurian Candidate scenerio) attacks (and which McCain called "personally devastating and the lowest of the low"). Yet Rove was to become a primary political consultant to McCain's Presidential Run of 2008 and many of the Roveian tactics were on unambiguous display.

(6) Karl Christian Rove was Deputy Chief of Staff of George W. Bush until his resignation in August of 2007. After leaving the White House, and up to the present time, Rove is a political analysis and pundit for The Wall Street Journal and Fox Television News. For most of his career Rove has worked as a Republican political consultant. Rove's most famous client was George Bush, in both his 2000 and 2004 presidential runs, though his work goes back as far as 1972 where he was a participant in Nixon's presidential campaign (and where he was to initiate his "Rovian Tactics" by smearing Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, as a leftist, hippie-loving, peace-monger, although McGovern was a decorated WWII fighter pilot.). Within Republican, and even supposedly savvy US political circles, Rovian tactics (see footnote 3, above) are often considered "admirable", "inspired", and "powerful"; and Rove, himself, is frequently cited as a political or "boy" genius. George Bush's nickname for Rove is "Turd Blossom" for obvious reasons.

(7) "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush", Ron Suskind, New York Times magazine October 17, 2004'

(8) John Choon Yoo is a lawyer and teacher who is best known for his work from 2001 to 2003 in the US Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Currently he has returned to teaching and holds a professorship of law at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. He is most well known for his writing of the "Torture Memos", but he also has contributed extensively to the PATRIOT Act (an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, 2001) which expanded and opened surveillance procedures, expanded the definition of terrorism, and eradicated Habeas Corpus for (the newly ,and vaguely, defined) terrorists, enemy combatants, and immigrants, etc, and the Theory of the Unified Executive which granted exclusive and sole powers to the president, vis a vis the two other branches of the legislative and judiciary (see footnote 9, below).

(9) This localization of complete sovereign powers for the President, beyond the limitations of the law and outside of the operations of the Government (from the Legislative and Judicial branches of the US), is called the theory of the Unitary Executive. Championed by Yoo, all cases which revolved around the question of torture (because of its obvious illegality both internationally and in domestic US law) had this Yooian element inscribed into them which, gives all and full interpretative power to the President and which placed him (Bush) above the law. As another case study in following the Yooian logic, we can see in this Department of Defense Document (March 6th, 2003), titled "Detainee Interrogation in the Global War on Terror", which, with Yooian delight,, states "…the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his "commander-in-chief" authority, including conducting operations against hostile forces… In light of the complete authority over the conduct of war…Criminal Statues are not read as infringing on the Presidents ultimate authority…

(10) Congress (additionally) lacks authority to set the terms and conditions under which the president may exercise his authority…" That this is one of the greatest of re-inscriptions is obvious, though, because of the interpretative hegemony which has been manifested and conceded to the controlling classes, this has not been overtly commented upon or contradicted by the populace of the US.. Yet, as the US Constitution quite unequivocally states: "Congress shall have the power…to declare war and make rules concerning captures on land and water … (and further) to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces."

(11) A Signing Statement is a written statement tacked onto legislation by the President of the United States upon the signing of a bill into law. It is a way to control the meanings, interpretations, and application of the law used by a president, and can be, and often has been in the Bush administration, a way to dismiss the law as such entirely (without rejecting it actually and causing communicative reactions), or to "define" what the law, or the words composing the law, "actually means" regardless of palpable popular or legislative intention (Senate and House or Representatives who originally sent the legislation to the president). As an editorial in the New York Times (January 16, 2006) complained about Bushes historic number of signing statements : "And none have used it so clearly to make the president the interpreter of a law's intent, instead of Congress, and the arbiter of constitutionality, instead of the courts." For a list of the over one thousand signing statements and a feel for the language of control they entail visit, http://www.coherentbabble.com/. The list and number is updated hourly

(12) "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation" August 1st, 2002 From the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee, coauthored by John Yoo, per request of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Note: these memos were actually written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time. The intent of the "Memos" is to provide arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated and to further provided legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from "war" scenarios.

(13) Ibid

(14) Ibid.

(15) Ibid

(16) Ibid

(17) Ibid

(18) Both genders participated in the acts of torture and humiliation to the incarcerated. See, for instance, the Abu Ghraib photos of torture.

(19) "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation"

(20) Ibid

(21) Ibid

(22) The phrase of "the Two Americas" comes from a speech of John Edwards to the Democratic Convention of 2004. Its original intention was to distinguish between the lower and upper classes of "haves" and "have-nots" and was meant to expose the rift which cleaved America apart. This "Two Americas" meant for Edwards a separation founded on money as well as power, recognition, and a voice. I am using this phrase in a further expansion to mean those who utilize the mechanism of power to control and impose meanings vs. those who negotiate the signifying field of the social to continually and temporarily work through meanings amongst community members.

(23) These Amendments (which cannot be rescinded by law) are:
1st amendment- Everyone has the freedom of speech, assembly, and petition (speech to the government)
4th amendment- Protection from unreasonable search and seizure by the state
5th amendment- Due process will always be carried out in all realms of the Law
6th amendment- Those accused of crimes do not forgo their rights 8th amendment- There will be no punishments of a cruel or unusual nature