Laleh Khalili’s text is an extract from
her book Time in the Shadows, Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. The
text is the fourth chapter of this work. This chapter is titled "Invisible
prisons, proxy-run prisons". Laleh Khalili investigates here the illeberal secret processes
put in place by the US (War on terror against terrorism) and Israel (occupation
of Palestine). Both sovereign states are in a logic of counterinsurgency.
The very definition of insurgency is to
be hard to isolate from the surrounding population. The processes implied by both states
include incarceration without trials and even torture (for example in
Khiyam). The use of proxy is characteristic.
Proxies provide the mechanisms of
concealment and denial by the State. A proxy may be an informal militia
or a sovereign state’s secret services.
Proxies create a space of uncertainty where responsibilities for actions do not appear easily. The sovereign state
itself does not appear to take in charge violent actions and
uses the legal ambiguities of juridiction and
accountability.
The heart of the matter is to create
zones of invisibility, to « relegate
detainees to invisibility and inaudibility » (p.128), in unidentified black
sites. The combination ofinvisibility and deniabilitu allows secret
services to perform interrogations that would be considered illegal otherwise.
The politics of intelligence needs such
a space to which the press has no access.
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