Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition Members Anna Davis, Chelsea Speed and Shane Holman

The Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition (MSSC), of which the ACLU of Mississippi is a founding partner, has decided to screen Groundspark’s new film Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up. We thought it would be an excellent way to raise awareness about gender identity and gender roles, educate the public about the MSSC, and raise some funds for our annual conference and other coalition expenses.

Our coalition, started in the fall of 2008, is almost entirely youth-led (if your definition of youth is 25 and under) and a unique model of LGBTQ organizing in the South. The beautiful thing about Straightlaced is that the documentary is told entirely by youth in their voice. Many viewers remarked that they haven’t seen a movie quite like Straightlaced with such diverse youth telling their experiences so candidly. Groundspark is partnering with community organizations around the country to screen Straightlaced and we were proud to host the first and only screening in Mississippi.

In Mississippi, being out and open about being LGBTQ-identified is in itself revolutionary. Likewise, an ally can face similar consequences of verbal or physical harassment. But it doesn’t stop individuals coming out, speaking out, and learning about their Constitutional rights in schools and communities.

My priest friend came up after the movie and gave me a big hug. “Sarah, that movie was phenomenal! I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he said with a smile. He might not be fully open about being here tonight, but at least he came out. It might happen more slowly in Mississippi, but it is definitely happening.

The publication of this document comes after years of advocacy on behalf of workers who are vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation (see here, here, and here). The pamphlet is the product of a collaboration between the federal government and numerous advocates and nongovernmental organizations, including the ACLU, CASA of Maryland, Global Workers Justice Alliance, Jenner & Block, Legal Momentum, Southern Poverty Law Center, National Employment Law Project, Farmworker Justice, National Immigration Justice Center, Farmworker Legal Services of New York, Solidarity Center, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc., AFL-CIO and Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking.

One group of these workers is domestic workers, predominantly poor women of color, brought here to work for foreign diplomats stationed in the U.S. Due to their isolation in the home, their anonymity, the power and immunity that their diplomat employers have, language barriers, and lack of information, these women are extremely susceptible to exploitation and abuse, and many have been enslaved for years with little or no recourse. With the issuance of this pamphlet, the State Department is taking an important step toward addressing the lack of information and misinformation propagated by some employers.

The pamphlet, whose creation and dissemination is mandated by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), enacted last December, is to be distributed to temporary visa holders before they leave their home countries. It will be available in 11 languages and will be distributed by every U.S. Embassy and Consulate throughout the world.

The pamphlet provides workers information about their legal rights regarding pay, discrimination, sexual harassment, health and safety, unions and collective bargaining, leaving an abusive employment situation, and employer retaliation. Domestic workers employed by diplomats are specifically advised that they have the right to an employment contract describing their work duties, work hours, days off, and pay and that their diplomat employers may not confiscate their passports or other personal property. The pamphlet also describes warning signs of human trafficking, explains how to get help, and addresses concerns about deportation.

We hope and believe that this information will go a long way to protect vulnerable domestic workers by informing them of their rights and how to access help and services. But the fact remains that they are still incredibly vulnerable and that much more must be done to eradicate their trafficking and exploitation. The State Department must implement the other provisions of the TVPRA, including improved tracking of reported abuses. To fully vindicate domestic workers’ rights, there must be a system through which they can bring their abusers to justice and receive compensation for their losses. We look forward to continuing our work with the State Department on these issues.

The State Department pamphlet is currently available in English, in an online version and a printable version.

To learn more about the ACLU’s work on behalf of domestic workers abused and trafficked by diplomats, visit www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.

— Vania Leveille, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office and Araceli Martinez-Olguin, Staff Attorney, Women’s Rights Project

For those who haven’t been following Diane’s case, it’s a perfect example of incredible harm caused by discrimination. After a distinguished 25-year career as an Army Special Forces Officer, Diane retired from the military and applied for a job as a senior terrorism research analyst. As someone who had been hand picked to lead a classified national security operation and had even briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, Diane was especially well qualified for the job. The Library of Congress agreed and offered her the job. Before starting work, Diane asked her future boss out to lunch to explain that she was about to begin transitioning from male to female and would like to start work as a woman. The next day, Diane received a call from her future boss rescinding the offer, telling her she wasn’t a “good fit” for the Library of Congress.

The ACLU brought a lawsuit against the Library of Congress charging sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. After a trial last September, a federal court agreed, issuing a groundbreaking ruling that discriminating against someone who transitions from living as one gender to another is discrimination under federal law. In reaching this decision, the court compared the discrimination faced by Schroer to religious-based discrimination, saying, “Imagine that an employee is fired because she converts from Christianity to Judaism. Imagine too that her employer testified that he harbors no bias toward either Christians or Jews but only ‘converts.’ That would be a clear case of discrimination ‘because of religion.’ No court would take seriously the notion that ‘converts’ are not covered by the statute.” The court also ruled that the library was guilty of sex stereotyping against Schroer because of its view that she failed to live up to traditional notions of what is male or female.

Later the court ruled that Diane is entitled to the maximum damages of $491,190 for back pay, other financial losses and emotional pain and suffering after finding the Library illegally discriminated against Schroer because of her sex. The decision outlining why Diane is entitled to the maximum compensation, the court quotes an affidavit from Schroer:

I am not certain if I can adequately characterize how depressing, demoralizing and temporarily debilitating it is to lose hope. Especially when that hope is founded on something that, in my mind, was completely reasonable, doable, and logical. Doing a meaningful job and putting my qualifications and experience to work, completing my transition and just going on with life — all of these things seemed to me to be reasonable and achievable. When the Library took all that away, my life changed dramatically, because there were no other positive options.

The Department of Justice under the Bush administration vigorously defended the lawsuit, claiming that transgender people are not are not protected by any existing federal laws. Fortunately that era is over and the Obama administration rightly realized that it was time to put an end this litigation. A representative from DOJ has said in the press that its decision not to appeal was based on its assessment of the strength of the factual findings and the legal rulings made in this case, and not whether it would be a good move politically. That is a fine compliment to the ACLU lawyers who litigated the case, especially Sharon McGowan who has championed this case since her first conversation with Diane. But it also shows that the Obama administration really does recognize that discrimination based on gender identity shouldn’t be tolerated.

As far as lawsuits go, this one came out just about as good as we could have hoped. But no amount of money could ever compensate for the harm that is caused by discrimination. And I’m not just talking about the harm to Diane. I’m talking about the harm to all of us. As a man, Diane was considered the best person to help congress help our country fight terrorism. But the qualifications that convinced the Library of Congress to offer Diane the job were tossed aside as soon as it learned she is transgender. Our safety is a pretty hefty price to pay for the government’s discrimination.

Watch a clip about Diane’s life and the discrimination she faced at the Library of Congress.

The proposed initiative, spearheaded by Timothy Asher of the so-called Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI), represents a second failed attempt to eliminate valuable programs that open doors for people of color and women in Missouri. In 2008, and again this year, the MoCRI has attempted to mislead voters by giving them the impression that they would be voting to uphold equal opportunity programs when they would in fact be voting to destroy them. Both times, the ACLU went to court to ensure that, should the initiative appear on the ballot, voters would know the truth about what they were voting on.

Sadly, Asher and his allies — including Ward Connerly of the American "Civil Rights" Institute — relentlessly refuse to be transparent and insist on co-opting civil rights terminology. In 2008, Connerly et al. targeted Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma for anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, deceptively calling their campaign a "Super Tuesday for Civil Rights."

Fortunately, state after state has rejected Connerly’s underhanded assault on affirmative action. Out of the five states he targeted in 2008, Connerly lost in four (all but Nebraska). In Missouri, after being exposed through litigation and on-the-ground mobilization, Asher withdrew his own petition, stating that it did not likely have enough valid signatures to make it on the ballot. In Oklahoma, the Secretary of State identified the petition submitted by the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative as having an unprecedented number of serious irregularities, including numerous duplicate names and addresses and instances of petitioners signing their own signature sheets multiple times.

In spite of their repeated losses and public knowledge of their dishonest practices, Asher and Connerly have continued their attempts to strip away equal opportunity programs benefitting all Americans. Indeed, the fight in Missouri is far from over: on June 29, Asher filed yet another petition for the 2010 ballot. The ACLU will not allow Asher to deceive the people of Missouri or the people of any other state. Expanding opportunity is a full-time job, but its importance cannot be overstated.

To learn more about the ACLU’s affirmative action efforts, visit: www.aclu.org/racialjustice/aa/index.html.

But apparently, America’s Toughest Sheriff also believes he’s above the law, because Arpaio continued to demand a court order from inmates seeking abortion care, in violation of the court rulings. We asked the court to hold Arpaio in contempt for blatantly violating the courts’ orders. Shortly thereafter, we began to try to find a settlement. Though Arpaio agreed to adopt a policy ensuring access to abortion without a court order, he decided to implement a new requirement: that inmates seeking abortion care must prepay up to $600 for transportation and security costs in order to be taken offsite to see a doctor.

Imagine you are poor, in jail, pregnant, and in need of an abortion — how are you going to raise $600? Who will you tell about your pregnancy to try to get the money? What if you can’t get the money? Arpaio provides transportation at no cost to inmates for all other medical care, court visits, and even visits to dying relatives or to attend a funeral. Arpaio singles out abortion care solely because of political opposition to abortion. Though it is a political game to Arpaio, these are real women with real medical needs, and this is a game he can’t win. This new policy is just as unconstitutional as the last one, and we filed our brief yesterday asking the court to prevent Arpaio from demanding upfront payment from inmates who seek abortion care.

Ms. Rosenthal has been a powerful advocate for housing and economic justice for survivors of violence, two of the most important factors in women’s ability to escape violent situations. As an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times lays out,

Ms. Rosenthal’s challenge, and the administration’s, will be to improve the carrying out of existing laws intended to protect women, starting with better coordination of the activities of all the government bureaucracies involved, including the Justice Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In particular, we look forward to a new emphasis on HUD’s implementation of the Violence Against Women Act’s provisions protecting survivors from housing discrimination.

Ms. Rosenthal has also been a strong ally in efforts to hold police and government accountable for protecting women and children’s safety by enforcing court protective orders. We hope that she will be a force for implementing any recommendations that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will issue in the ACLU’s case, Jessica Gonzales v. USA.

More broadly, this appointment is an opportunity for the administration to look holistically at the issue of violence against women and how it intersects with poverty, racism, immigration status, substance abuse, homelessness, and other factors that make women and girls vulnerable to violence. It is also an opportunity for the administration to recognize the integral role that violence plays in women’s involvement in the criminal justice system.

We urge Ms. Rosenthal to move government response to the violence that women and girls experience away from a punitive one and in the direction of prevention, services, and empowerment.

To learn more about the ACLU’s work to combat violence against women, visit www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence.

Our Accountability for Torture Blog Forum ended yesterday with a focus on detainees who were tortured to death while in U.S. custody. More bloggers picked up on the general issue of accountability.

Jeff Kaye writes at Firedoglake about the use of drugs in interrogations on prisoners in the current Army Field Manual—the same one President Obama has held as the standard for interrogation procedure:

[…]Yoo’s memos, which were written to provide supposed legal cover for the use of drugs and other forms of torture, appear to place the Army Field Manual’s restrictions on the use of drugs out of sync with Yoo/Addington’s legal justifications. Yoo would disallow the use of drugs that "cause profound mental harm," that "penetrate to the core of an individual’s ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities, or fundamentally alter his personality," and are calculated to that end — a fairly stringent standard.

But the Army Field Manual only prohibits the use of drugs in interrogations which would cause "lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage," a much more permissive standard than "profound mental harm," especially when the latter is defined as something similar to "brief psychotic disorder" (per Yoo) . Thus, when Cambone and Company, getting off on their oh-so-smart word games in the redraft of the AFM, removed the prohibition against "chemically induced psychosis" from the old AFM, and replaced it with their new formulation, then according to Yoo’s own analysis, the Army Field Manual now allowed the drugging of prisoners in a manner that would amount to torture.

McJoan at Daily Kos writes:

Torture wasn’t limited to waterboarding. It was the combination of sleep deprivation, stress positions, "walling," exposure to extreme heat and cold. It was used indiscriminately and in combinations that were not only approved but were "virtually choreographed" by the highest levels of government: Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet and John Ashcroft. And, as we’re likely to find confirmed in the CIA report to be released tomorrow–unless it is redacted into utter irrelevance–that the CIA knew it wasn’t an effective tool for gathering intelligence.

Don’t forget, the intelligence that it was employed to gather very early in the war in Afghanistan was the false intelligence to take us into Iraq.

[…]Our collective hands are stained. Sunlight, in the form of accountability is our only hope of cleansing that stain.

Digby writes:

[…]We deserve to know and the tortured dead deserve some justice. And if we want to just deal in pragmatic concerns, if anyone thinks that refusing to hold people accountable for what happened and showing the world that we can be trusted to civilized at least after the fact doesn’t make us less safe, they are out of their minds. This is how countries become pariah states.

The United States went crazy after 9/11 and tortured many, many people, at least a hundred of them to death. It happened. How do we live with that?

In "When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan," Andy Worthington culls from his exhaustive research and reporting on detainees to highlight 10 murders, "three of which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been investigated at all."

Christy Hardin Smith says in response to yesterday’s outline for accountability by the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer: “[T]he building of a complete and transparent public record has to be at the top of the list for me. More sunlight, please. And soon.”

Daphne Eviatar at the Washington Independent wrote about the hearing in Mohammed Jawad’s case today. We’re arguing that the evidence extracted through torture—the same evidence that a judge threw out in Jawad’s military commission case—should not be admissible in his case challenging his detention in federal court.

At Firedoglake, bmaz writes:

[…]So, what do we do about the criminal, immoral and depraved acts officials of the US government have conducted in our name? Clearly Bush and Cheney had no interest in accountability for their crimes of torture. But now President Barack Obama, who sold the electorate that he was the man to bring change and accountability, has shown himself to be more of the same. He truly desires to walk the other way and not address the wrongs committed against our nation, Constitution and fiber of existence. And, as Glenn Greenwald adroitly points out, President Obama even wants to raise the ante on indefinite detention without charges. How should we deal with that?

[…]The Founders gave us the answer to that conundrum. You follow the Rule of Law. You uphold the Constitution, what it stands for, and honor every drop of blood spilled since the Revolution to establish and defend it. You honor your oath to office. You do the right thing and have accountability on the merits. That is what you do, and it is time for a concerted effort from the grassroots to demand just that. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would give up the essential Rule of Law for temporary security and political gain, deserve neither.

John Amato at Crooks and Liars added:
“The torture issue is horrifying and the longer we get away from the Bush years, the more information the ACLU is able to gather. These documents are, in a word, vile.”

So while Torture Awareness Month is over, our call for accountability is only just beginning. Remind President Obama of his own words on Inauguration Day. Ask the Justice Department to appoint an independent prosecutor. Only then can we truly know what was done in our names, and begin the work needed to repair the damage done.

The ACLU became involved to help stop this potential invasion of medical privacy. When the Roes’ attempt to obtain the private medical records reached the Ohio Supreme Court, we filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians; the Society for Adolescent Medicine; the National Association of Social Workers; the National Center for Youth Law; the Center for Adolescent Health & the Law; the Ohio NOW Education and Legal Fund; the Ohio Domestic Violence Network; ACTION OHIO Coalition for Battered Women; Break the Cycle; and Women Empowered Against Violence, Inc. As our brief explained, these organizations entered the case to protect the minors whose records were at stake in the case, who were never asked for and never gave their permission for anyone to see their medical records, and who therefore had no opportunity to object to this violation of their privacy.

Our brief argued that disclosure of the records — even in redacted form — would undermine minors’ confidence that their reproductive medical information would be kept private, and thereby drive them away from seeking this critical care.

In today’s ruling (PDF), the court made the important point that the records would not lose their privileged (private) status simply by being redacted.

Those who seek to harass and deter providers of abortion care will not stop, but today’s ruling is a victory for the medical privacy and medical wellbeing of minors in Ohio.

Instead of attempting to deduce the truth claims in journalistic reportage (whether textual or visual), Holzer pared story or scoop down to the basics of communication—the directives, emails, memos, letters, and autopsies that are the linguistic bones (and individual voices) of a potentially instrumentalized and motivated rhetorical body. Her urgency was partially goaded by what has characterized as the Bush administration’s "secrecy obsession." From secret military tribunals to continual reclassification of documents to ordering agencies to use the most restrictive and legalistic response possible for FOIA requests, the Bush administration’s withdrawal and obfuscation of information made it imperative to assemble and classify materials from a slippery archive that furtively slides in and out of exposure.

Translated into photographic positives that are then made into screens, the documents the artist appropriates are transferred, unaltered, onto linens that have been painted with oils. The scale of the works is some ratio of the original 8.5-by 11-inch page, keeping manipulation minimal, merely enlarging for presentation. In the catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition, the paintings are distributed and classified under three headings: Archive, Guantanamo, and Iraq. Archive largely includes works that trace the history of the U.S.’s presence in the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War. President George H. W. Bush’s January 15, 1991, security directive establishing the parameters of war and authorizing military action in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s February 7, 2002, memo suspending the Geneva Conventions for suspected al Qaeda detainees sandwich documents like the infamous July 10, 2001, Phoenix memo that presaged the 9/11 attacks and Richard Clarke’s January 25, 2001, memo to Condoleezza Rice urging a review of the Presidential policy towards al Qaeda. Guantanamoand Iraq, unlike the Archive documents, do not represent the now canonical governmental communiqués of bold-faced historical names. Rather, the emails, interrogation technique documents, sworn statements, letters, and autopsies that provide the surround sound of voices implementing and impacted by a policy and culture of torture are authored by the unnamed or unknown—these pieces are the day-to-day filler predestined for a policy crust shipped from Washington to be baked in the heat of an Iraqi, Afghani, and Cuban sun.

The photographs from Abu Ghraib, like any representation, provide an ideologically malleable surface. As Mark Danner wrote in October of 2004:

As I write, four months have passed since a series of bizarre photographs were broadcast on American television and entered the consciousness of the world. Seven military police, those ‘few bad apples,’ have been indicted and two have pled guilty…What has been on trial thus far, however, is the acts depicted in the photographs and these acts, while no doubt constituting abuse, have been carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, US policy—a policy that permits torture. Thus far, in the United States at least, there has been relatively little discussion about torture and whether the agents of the US government should be practicing it.

(Click to enlarge in new window.) Fig. 1 Wish List pewter, 2007 oil on linen 102.25 x 79 in. Text: U.S. government document © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Moving outside of the confining frames of the Abu Ghraib photographs to reconstruct context, sequence, and a narrative shell, Holzer’s use of the documents also assertively places both feet within the frame to demolish a limited purview that sees the abuse as exceptional. The operation of constructing a framework to house a painting such as Wish List (fig. 1) that details alternative interrogation techniques that are categorically contrary to the Geneva Conventions (stimulus and sleep deprivation, white noise exposure, close quarter confinement, and open hand strikes, among others) along with one like Jaw Broken (fig. 2) where a detainee in Iraq testifies to abuse he suffered consistent with the techniques listed in Wish List works to link concept with event, hypothetical with enacted. And instead of rhetorically making the link, dogmatically crafting an argument that interweaves policy and torture, Holzer’s suspension of the two documents as paintings lying in proximity creates that spatial and conceptual gap for undetermined reception. Instead of pointing at the enmeshment of policy and torture, she allows one to see with one’s own eyes.

(Click to enlarge in new window.) Fig. 2 Jaw Broken, 2006 oil on linen, 3 elements 33 x 76.5 in. Text: U.S. government document © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In her study, Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture, Elizabeth Klaver writes, "The Greek roots of the word ‘autopsy’ (auto+opsis) contain the dead metaphor of vision together with the empirical thrust of Western epistemology since the Renaissance—to see with one’s own eyes." Holzer concludes her catalogue with four diptychs—final autopsy reports conducted by the Office of the Armed Forces Regional Medical Examiner in Landstuhl, Germany, of three Iraqi men and a Pashtun male murdered under circumstances consistent with torture while held in American detainment facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan (fig. 3).

(Click to enlarge in new window.) Fig. 3 FINAL AUTOPSY REPORT DOD 003235-DOD 003241 Ochre, 2006 oil on linen 66 x 25.5 in. Text: U.S. government document © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

To make paintings of medicolegal documentation that details the surgical move within the body to ascertain cause of death is to reveal the shocking inadequacy of sensational representation—like the Abu Ghraib photographs. While avowing the specificity of a body and a subject identified by visual description, paperwork, fingerprints, and DNA sampling and the particular traumas that resulted in death by, respectively, a pulmonary embolism due to blunt force injuries, strangulation, blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration, and blunt force injuries and asphyxia, the paintings work to fix the mobility of signification by replicating the physical operation of autopsy as a uniquely visual one. The paintings provide an operation of vision that doesn’t rest on the surface of symptom but pierces the skin of the spectacle to reveal a consistency of violence evincing a system of torture. Holzer works to endow the still unnamed tortured with the coordinates of personal identity (date of birth, date of death, home, ethnicity, bodily markings, rank, gender) that provide a schema for subjectivity and personhood. That is, the display of the autopsy documents allows one to see with her own eyes, simultaneously, individual bodily fragility as well as the network of systematized and like abuse covered by the mask of symbol and spectacle.

Autopsy assumes that the body exists within a framework (in this case, social, medical, legal, and juridical) that is a pre-condition for, constitutes, and testifies to a subject. The autopsy also figures as a categorical end. Unlike the photograph that suspends the pictured figure at a particular moment of concomitant becoming and undoing, a superficial symptom that hides the origin and context of meaty, temporal life, the autopsy, in the words of Foucault, "plunges," "penetrates," "advances," and "descends" into sequential, ordered, geographical, bodily space. The end of the autopsy is knowledge of the body itself and the deceased in particular, not the symptom in its exteriority and precarious associative valences. In his short essay "What Is a Camp," Giorgio Agamben writes:

The correct question regarding the horrors committed in the camps, therefore, is not the question that asks hypocritically how it could have been possible to commit such atrocious horrors against other human beings; it would be more honest, and above all more useful, to investigate carefully how—that is, thanks to what juridical procedures and political devices—human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime."

Working with the autopsy as a visual document, Holzer refutes the Abu Ghraib photographs as sufficient visual evidence. And this is primarily because the photographs of abused bodies solely signify exceptional horror without revealing the regularity of horror, the accounting of atrocity, which the torture autopsies—through their similarities and congruities with approved "alternative interrogation techniques"—disclose as system. As a medicolegal document, the autopsy and its discourse as report circulate among the directives, memos, and emails that established a policy of torture (and not its individual incarnations). Yet, the policy reaches its crisis when the body constructed as extralegal (outside of nation-state as figured in Bush’s notorious February 7, 2002 memo) is re-inscribed using the legal paraphernalia of the state itself. A body is not only represented in the autopsy, but physically reconstructed as a life functioning within a juridical system—that is, one that can end through the legally defined event homicide, the cause of death given in each autopsy painting.

As early as the fourteenth century, autopsies were being executed for medicolegal purposes. These early procedures were performed in order to determine for the courts whether the manner of death was homicide, abortion, poisoning, or infanticide. It was not until the eighteenth century that the autopsy became the institution that we know today—that is, a regulated confluence of subjects working within an ideologically governed space. As Elizabeth Klaver writes:

Since a vast network of subjects is involved, the practice of autopsy cannot be idiosyncratic—it must be governed by highly regulated procedures as to how the medical operation is performed on the corpse and how the discourse is used to record and report it, together with stringent privacy rules and obligations with respect to the deceased, the family, and the public.

Marie François Xavier Bichat, best known as the father of modern histology and pathology, established the lesion-based concept of disease through autopsy—a transformative epistemic break that looked to irregularities and mutation in tissue, and not the organs, for the origin and spread of disease. Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, locates Bichat’s work as a radical rupture not only in the direction of medical practice, but the means through which illness would be known and discerned—the deceased body’s interior would trace the origin of disease allowing a tabulation and organization of attendant symptoms, as opposed to a loose assemblage of symptoms signifying disease in the living. And Foucault primarily explains this fissure through language that references the visual—the medical gaze. Preceding Bichat, observation was limited to the visual study of manifest symptoms. At this juncture, the medical gaze was a survey of surface. In contradistinction, the gaze of Bichat used autopsy as an instrument to chart a geographic spatiality, of actual lesion in the dead rather than symptom in the living, a "plunging from the manifest to the hidden." Foucault writes:

The gaze plunges into the space that it has given itself the task of traversing. In its primary form, the clinical reading implied an external, deciphering subject, which, on the basis of and beyond that which it spelt out, ordered and defined kinships. In anatamo-clinical experience, the medical eye must see the illness spread before it, horizontally and vertically in graded depth, as it penetrates into the body, as it advances into is bulk, as it circumvents or lifts its masses, as it descends into its depths. Disease is no longer a bundle of characters disseminated here and there over the surface of the body and linked together by statistically observable concomitances and successions; it is a set of forms and deformations, figures, and accidents and of displaced, destroyed, or modified elements bound together in sequence according to a geography that can be followed step by step. It is no longer a pathological species inserting itself into the body wherever possible; it is the body itself that has become ill.

If torture can be considered an illness (a palsy of policy), with particular sources that can be empirically examined, I have taken the autopsy as painting by Jenny Holzer as a visual means of diagnosing it. Following Foucault’s analysis of medical observation, the autopsy document creates the tortured body as a legal subject when the medical procedure of seeing is inscribed within bureaucratic discourse. Piercing the illusion of exception and surface, the autopsy document not only reconstitutes the tortured body within a legal, juridical, medical, and political framework, but permits the circulation of it within an archive capable of constructing torture as policy and not event—that is, torture no longer as "a bundle of character disseminated here and there over the surface of the body" but as "the body itself that has become ill."

Holzer has hung the two panels of each autopsy painting stacked on top of each other. Displayed in this totemic fashion, the painting measures twenty-five and a half by sixty-six inches (a factor of the original 8.5 x 11 inch document), approximately human size. She considers it critical to have the idea of body (both of the viewer and the deceased) implicated, accentuated even, in this clinical presentation. The bureaucratic body, then, a matrix of the political, the medical, and the juridical, looks back at us. And as it does, we are undone before it into the strands of competing structural formations that weave a life—our nationalities, medical histories, ranks, political affiliations, statistics, titles, statuses. There is some consolation that the concession of autopsy suggests that the life of the "Other" finally is deemed substantial enough to be categorized in "our" bureaucratic terms. The mourning at work in the paintings is that "our" very terms are the ones that invalidated those bodies and lives to begin with. The hope is that they provide enough to hold the guilty accountable.

David Breslin is a project manager at the Jenny Holzer Studio and is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.

To those of us who have been working on the lawsuit, though, the remarkable thing is not how much information has been released but how much is still being withheld. Six years after we filed our FOIA request, and five years after the Abu Ghraib photos were broadcast by CBS 60 Minutes, the Defense Department is still withholding photographs showing prisoners being abused at facilities other than Abu Ghraib as well as details of abusive interrogation methods used by military interrogators in Afghanistan and Iraq. The CIA is still withholding a crucial report authored by that agency’s Inspector General, transcripts in which prisoners describe the abuse they suffered at the hands of their CIA interrogators, as well as hundreds of documents relating to the destruction of videotapes showing CIA prisoners being waterboarded. We’re expecting some of these documents to be released to us tomorrow, but it’s clear that it will be months and perhaps years before we have anything that resembles a complete picture of how the torture policies were developed, on whose authority they were implemented, and what consequences they had for prisoners held by the military and CIA.

If it’s remarkable how much information is still being withheld, it’s even more remarkable how little has been done to address the information that has been released. Congress has convened no select committee. The Justice Department has inaugurated no criminal investigation other than a narrowly circumscribed one into the destruction of the waterboarding tapes. The victims of the Bush administration’s torture program have received no official acknowledgement, and the proposition that they should be compensated for the abuse they suffered at the hands of their interrogators is one that has not got traction at all.

Earlier this month, the ACLU launched an initiative that will put new resources behind our transparency work and behind the larger aim of accountability. The Accountability for Torture initiative has four interrelated goals.

1. Comprehensive disclosure about the torture program and its consequences. Over the next few months, we will step up our efforts under the FOIA. On the same day we launched the Accountability for Torture initiative, we filed a new FOIA lawsuit seeking some critical documents that in our view ought to be made public. These documents include OLC memos as well as correspondence between the White House and CIA about the CIA’s interrogation and detention program.
2. The assembly of an accurate, comprehensive, and accessible historical record. Beyond advocating for comprehensive disclosure, we’ll also step up our efforts to make the documents we’ve obtained through the FOIA more accessible. We’ve already launched a new version of our search engine; while it’s still far from perfect, it’s an improvement on the original version and we will be making additional improvements over the next few months. Our legislative office will continue to press Congress to appoint a select committee that can examine the origins of the torture program, produce a comprehensive account of that program, and recommend legislative changes to ensure that past abuses are not repeated.
3. Recognition and compensation for the victims. We will step up our efforts — both in Congress and the courts — to obtain recognition and compensation for the victims of torture. We’ve already filed several lawsuits on behalf of victims — in Ali v. Rumsfeld, for example, we represent Iraqis and Afghans who were abused at Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and in Mohamed v. Jeppesen we represent five victims of the CIA’s rendition program. Over the next few months, we’ll develop a broader strategy to ensure that torture victims are not forgotten.
4. The appointment of an independent prosecutor. The publicly available evidence warrants a criminal investigation. Senior government officials who authorized torture should not be immune from prosecution, and they certainly should not be shielded from investigation. In fact, sanctioning impunity for government officials who authorized torture would send a problematic message to the world, invite abuses by future administrations, and further undermine the rule of law that is the basis of any democracy. As more information gets released — through FOIA litigation and through the hard work of investigative journalists — we will continue to call on the Justice Department to appoint an independent prosecutor to examine issues of criminal responsibility.

President Obama has spoken eloquently about the importance of restoring America’s moral authority abroad. Restoring that moral authority, though, will require restoring the rule of law at home, and restoring the rule of law at home will require finally confronting the gross human rights abuses of the last administration. Over the next few months, we’ll press the Obama administration to do this. As we’ve been saying, accountability for torture is a legal, political, and moral imperative.