The aim of this paper is to contribute to a still growing body of critical literature dealing with the War on Terror by focusing on these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, which, as many authors argue, effectively constitute acts of torture. When reading the recently published US Senate report on the CIA interrogation programme (US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2014) that describes various methods used on detainees apprehended in the wake of 9/11, one must think of the first lines of Michel Foucault’s (1995) Discipline and Punish, which famously opens with a vivid description of the horrific torture inflicted on the body of a convict in the middle of the 18th century. What is striking when these two accounts are compared is the consistency in terms of the site on which the discussed practices are operating: in the case of both the CIA programme and the public executions described by Foucault, power was exercised on detainees’/convicts’ bodies. But whereas in the past these techniques were applied on the basis of a sovereign prerogative, the US security forces consistently justified their resort to harsh methods by referring to their importance in eliciting valuable intelligence in the fight against the global terrorism. Nevertheless, as is discussed in more details below, these arguments are, in fact, untenable in the light of both historical evidence and available information on the US interrogation programme, which demonstrate that torture is not an efficient tool in gathering reliable intelligence.
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