Tournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: Towson JR | Judge: Joe Leeson-Shatz
Torture of terror suspects as a source of information is a state-produced lie—its true function is to create a spectacle of state control over the enemy that carries a fantasy of power and the domination of dissent.
Ahuja 2011 (Neel, Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Studies, University of North Carolina) “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar” Social Text 106 • Vol. 29, No. 1 • Spring 2011 doi: 10.1215/01642472-1210292 pages 135-6

The spectacle of indefinite detention is an open secret regulated by the state, making the world a target and forcing community-endorsed racial terror. The exceptionalization of the spectacle obscures ongoing mass violence, but it also opens an excess of signification that could threaten the dominant paradigm, potentially disrupting the hope that ties people to the very institutions that legitimate the violence.
Ahuja 2011 (Neel, Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Studies, University of North Carolina) “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar” Social Text 106 • Vol. 29, No. 1 • Spring 2011 doi: 10.1215/01642472-1210292 pages 136-7

The celebration of the spectacle of violence that characterizes detention sites reproduces historical regimes of ongoing violence against the racial other. Such representations of suffering re-entrench the codification of this suffering into the structure of society while blaming aberrant individuals for the specific acts of violence.
Pugliese 2013 (Joseph, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones. Pages 81-83

Marking the violence of detention as exceptional ignores the existing matrix of state violence and camouflages everyday suffering, perpetuating a neofascist state in the name of idealized simulacra of justice and law.
Pugliese 2013 (Joseph, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney) State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones. Pages 79-80

This makes productive political engagement impossible—the way the state packages the story of detention marks it as an aberration, converting rage over specific instances into a ratification of the larger system—recognition of that larger system is key.
Bhattacharyya 2009 (Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at Aston University, Birmingham, UK) Globalizations March 2009, “Spectatorship and the War on Terror: Creating Consensus through Global Audiences” DOI: 10.1080/14747730802692401 p. 84

Emotional reactions are key to structuring normative political subjects as victims, turning the ordinary into that which is perpetually under threat from the other and binding people together with hate. The fear of the terrorist that opens up the power to detain is detached from a particular body and replaced with a fear of uncertainty that then extends to all those bodies associated with terrorism.
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London) “Affective Economies” Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, Duke University Press http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/v022/22.2ahmed.html pages 118-119 and 135-6

The undefined and undirected fear of the terrorist that is created by the state’s spectacle of violent control is intensified by its inability to be contained. This results in an arbitrary accumulation of anxiety directed toward unrelated objects.
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London) “Affective Economies” Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 117-139 Published by Duke University Press http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/v022/22.2ahmed.html pages 124-5

Consumption of suffering in the status quo lacks a personal, emotional connection and thus occurs in an apathetic state of denial. Responses rely on dominant social perceptions about the victims and are filtered through the hegemonic narrative that centers everything around 9/11.
Nayar 2009 (Pramod K. Department of English, The University of Hyderabad, India) “Scar Cultures: Media, Spectacle, Suffering” Journal of Creative Communications 2009 4: 147 http://crc.sagepub.com/content/4/3/147 pages 148-9

Vote aff to re-appropriate the spectacle of detention in act of recognition and engagement. 

Re-appropriation of the spectacle is a crucial recognition of the violence that is necessary to challenge it. We need to recognize unequal relations of power and vulnerability created by normalized ideas of the subject and other to allow for an ethical consumption that clears space for a new politics of resistance.
Nayar 2009 (Pramod K. Department of English, The University of Hyderabad, India) “Scar Cultures: Media, Spectacle, Suffering” Journal of Creative Communications 2009 4: 147 http://crc.sagepub.com/content/4/3/147 page 159

We must work toward the occupation of barbaric space that brings together the space of the spectator and that of the sufferer. This is the only way to tie our emotional reactions to suffering to a material change that we can work toward.
Nayar 2009 (Pramod K. Department of English, The University of Hyderabad, India) “Scar Cultures: Media, Spectacle, Suffering” Journal of Creative Communications 2009 4: 147 http://crc.sagepub.com/content/4/3/147 pages 152-3

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: George Mason | Judge: Chris Vincent
Removed:
The undefined and undirected fear of the terrorist that is created by the state’s spectacle of violent control is intensified by its inability to be contained. This results in an arbitrary accumulation of anxiety directed toward unrelated objects.
Ahmed 2004 (Sara, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London) “Affective Economies” Social Text, 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 117-139 Published by Duke University Press http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/v022/22.2ahmed.html pages 124-5

Added (at top of 1AC):
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely. 

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded. 

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”
—Jumah al Dossari

Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 1 | Opponent: Wake Forest Duff-Langr | Judge: Ewald
—Department of Defense 2005, Army Regulation 15–6: Final Report, Investigation into FBI Allegations of Detainee Abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba Detention Facility, 9 June 2005, http://www.defense.gov/news/Jul2005/d20050714report.pdf#page=25

The status quo of indefinite detention forces prisoners into a liminal state of hidden theatricalization that reduces people to the status of unprotected bios, animated flesh whose lives can be terminated at any time. We are made spectators to the violence and we ratify it when we see what is happening and fail to respond.
Pease, 03 (Donald E. Pease, the Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, “The Global Homeland State: Bush's Biopolitical Settlement”, Duke University Press, boundary 2 30.3 (2003) 1-18)

Treatment during indefinite detention makes the prisoner physically and ontologically powerless, an object among other objects, a carcass of captive flesh, even as liberal Western society demands that this carcass exhibit signs of vitality, forcing upon it a redemptive story that belies the fact that no justice will be served.
Joseph Pugliese 2013 State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones¶ Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. Pages 167-8

Policy has developed in such a way that detention is now inextricably linked with interrogation and torture.
Foley 2007 (Brian J. Foley, assistant professor of law at Florida Coastal School of Law) Guantanamo and Beyond: Dangers of Rigging the Rules, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Volume 97 Issue 4 Summer 2007 Article 2 http://works.bepress.com/brian_foley/2 page 1053

Even from a purely pragmatic perspective, torture fails because suspects say whatever their torturers want to hear, it cannot be employed with strategic precision, and it increases anti-US sentiment. The only effect is the elimination of the agency of detainees.
Hajjar 2009 (Lisa, Law and Society Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106) Does Torture Work? A Sociolegal Assessment¶ of the Practice in Historical and Global Perspective, page 336. 

Beyond their deaths, detainees’ identities are eliminated from the world. The redaction of declassified documents exemplifies state-regulated meaning, creating a cloak of impunity for torturers and annihilating the identities of their victims so that the redaction itself is the only memorial that remains for them.
Joseph Pugliese 2013 State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones¶ Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. Page 178

Beyond the symbolic, redaction is used as a strategic tool by the federal government to suppress exculpatory evidence that detainees need for a fair trial, while they continue to use the illegitimate evidence gathered through torture.
Dixon and Gutierrez 2007 (Wells Dixon, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gitanjali Gutierrez, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and first lawyer to visit a Guantanamo captive) Motion for Preservation of Torture Evidence in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Majid Khan (Petitioner) Robert M. Gates (Respondent), http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/Khan_motion_Nov.pdf 

The state chooses to strategically release certain information, but never the true identities of the victims, normalizing torture and indefinite detention into a system with which we are all complicit, responding to the show of violence with a show of outrage that we see as absolution.
Bhattacharyya 2009 (Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at Aston University) Globalizations March 2009, “Spectatorship and the War on Terror: Creating Consensus through Global Audiences” DOI: 10.1080/14747730802692401 p. 84

Current authority is an illegitimate construct, fabricated in the moment to justify the state’s abuse of power.
Butler 2004 (Judith, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkley) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, pages xv-xvi

Vote aff. This authority should not exist.  

The only way to confront this authority is to explore the aspects of the resolution that have been rendered unspeakable. Challenging the practice of redaction allows us to attempt to read for meaning where it has seemingly been obliterated, challenging its annihilative iconography of nothingness.
Joseph Pugliese 2013 State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical caesurae of torture, black sites, drones¶ Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. Pages 179-80

There’s no way to re-narrate the un-narration that declassification requires, but we can make the invisibility visible, illuminating the absence that redaction creates.
Slaughter 2010 (Joseph R., associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He studies and teaches African, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures, postcolonial- ism, critical theory, and human rights) “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Not Simply There”, Journal of Human Rights, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14754831003761712 pages 210-211