Torture’s secrecy lets states claim civilized status while preserving coercive knowledge

Evidence

Modern torture linked to policing is typically secret partly because inflicting physical pain on a prisoner is considered “uncivilized” and therefore illegal. It may also be secret because policing agents claim they do not wish to advertise what they learn from (tortured) prisoners—if and when they learn anything of significance. After all, the effectiveness of certain kinds of disciplinary knowledge is enhanced by its secrecy. The secret character of knowledge acquired in policing therefore relates at once to the uncertainty of outside critics as to whether, and if so how often, something illegal has been done by bureaucratic power to obtain it (“torture is intolerable in a civilized society”), and also to how, when, and where that power chooses to act given that it possesses secret information (“every society must protect itself against criminal and terrorist conspiracies”). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 507

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s throughline: how ‘civilized society’ discourse (the denial that civilized states torture) is itself an ideological framing Asad elsewhere ties to secular modernity’s tolerance narrative.
• SEED: The dual secrecy logic (illegality shielded from critics + operational secrecy) is a clean analytic frame usable for analyzing Abu Ghraib or renditions coverage.