Secret torture integrated with information extraction is a defining feature of policing

Evidence

Public rituals of torture are no longer deemed to be necessary to the maintenance of sovereign power (whether they were ever necessary to the maintenance of “social order” is, of course, another question). But Foucault’s thesis about disciplinary power is not subverted by evidence of surreptitious torture in the modern state. On the contrary, when torture carried out in secret is intimately connected with the extraction of information, it becomes an aspect of policing. Policing presents itself as a governmental activity directed at defending a fundamental “interest of society”: the ordinary and extraordinary security of the state and its citizens. It is also an institution in which knowledge and power depend upon each other. Much of it—and this point is curiously neglected by Rejali—circulating in secret. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 506

Categorization

• XREF: The fusion of knowledge and power into policing echoes the panopticon/knowledge-power theme and bears on how modern states rationalize coercive practice.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 506