Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror Agenda-Building Struggles

Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror examines the communication battles of the Bush and Blair political administrations (and those of their successors in America and Britain) over their use of torture, first-hand or second-hand, to gain intelligence for the War on Terror. Exploring key agenda-building drivers that exposed the torture-intelligence nexus and presenting detailed case studies of key media events from the UK and USA, this insightful volume exposes dominant political discourses on the torture-for-intelligence policy. Whether in the form of unauthorized leaks, official investigations, investigative journalism, real-time reporting, or Non-Governmental Organisation activity, this timely study evaluates various modes of resistance to governments’ attempts at strategic political communication, with particular attention to ’sousveillance’: community-based recording from first-person perspectives. A rigorous exposition of the power-knowledge relationships constituting the torture-intelligence nexus, which re-evaluates agenda-building models in the digital age and assesses the strength of the public sphere across the Third, Fourth and Fifth Estates, Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in media and communication, sociology and social theory, politics and political communication, international relations, and journalism.

Contents: Studying torture, intelligence and media manipulation in the war on terror; Strategic political communication, intelligence and its discontents: manipulating and challenging intelligence; The rise of the torture-intelligence nexus; The sousveillance failure of John Walker Lindh; The surprise of sousveillance at Abu Ghraib and the struggle to contain it; The persistence of sousveillance: Baha Mousa and torture in the British military; The absence of sousveillance: Binyam Mohamed and the British intelligence agencies’ complicity in torture; Conclusion; References; Index.

Vian Bakir is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Bangor University, Wales, UK. She is co-editor of Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media and is author of Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication: Iraq, USA, UK.