Beyond the Public Eye

During the War on Terror, increased secrecy and noncompliance with Freedom of Information Act requests allowed military detention programs to function with systematic efficiency in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and numerous other sites. Often, the released torture memos were heavily redacted and nearly unreadable. Through close readings of redacted documents, this article argues that the visual politics of redaction offer an aesthetic point of entry that brings into focus the limits of transparency for making visible necropolitical systems of violence. Although incongruent with the intention of concealing text, redacted spaces paradoxically can make contrapuntal readings easily available, as they visualize the ungraspable violent dimensions of detainee torture.