This article originally appeared in Journal of Political Inquiry.
On September 17, 2001, the United States took its first steps into a global War on Terror. President George W. Bush signed a memorandum authorizing the capture and detention of individuals they believed were linked to terrorist attacks against the United States or its interests. In pursuing a program that was, CIA officials assured, vital to protecting the country from potential attacks, Bush set the United States on a path of moral compromise that has led to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. This transnational war has defined two presidencies and will undoubtedly define a third.
Abu Zubaydah was captured during a Pakistani raid in March 2002, the first individual detained following the issuance of a memo stating that al-Qa’ida and Taliban detainees were not entitled to humane treatment as prisoners of war. Zubaydah spent the next four years at Detention Site Green, a CIA black site believed to have been in Thailand. Despite cooperating with FBI special agents and providing the identity of “the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks,” CIA officials believed interrogators needed to overcome Zubaydah’s “resistance to interrogation.”
This was the beginning of the CIA program that would, over the course of five years, capture and detain 119 men, and torture at least 39 of them. In their latest graphic novel, comic authors Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón take on one of the darkest corners of the War on Terror. The Torture Report depicts the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into CIA use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). Closely following the structure of the 576-page executive summary, Jacobson and Colón chronicle the treatment of six men, the lies and misrepresentations of the CIA and the committee’s findings.
The War on Terror has morphed and swollen in response to the persistent threat of terrorism domestically and abroad, with drastic consequences for US citizens and noncitizens alike. The Patriot Act—enacted by Bush and extended by Barack Obama—has led to the expansion of surveillance within and outside the state, and the greatest number of leak prosecutions in US history. Drone strikes and private military contractors have become regular features in US operations abroad, despite questionable legality and numerous missions resulting in civilian casualties. Opening the door for techniques that amounted to torture has sent the United States spiraling into ever-increasing anti-terror measures which have threatened freedoms and protections domestically, while diminishing the state’s moral standing abroad.