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.Agamben s notion of the homo sacer does, nonetheless, capturesomething of what is happening here in the throes of the contradic-tion between political and civic life, but his schema is generally quitemetaphysical and ahistorical.Most notably, Agamben would seem ill-equipped to account for what I am suggesting is happening right now,post 9/11: namely, the wholesale importation of the tradition of  natu-ral justice into the political realm precisely to allow for the exactionof punishment and revenge.That is to say, the homo sacer of the presentmoment can no longer be described as the liminal or commutational cg-ure that marks the porous boundary between the political and the civic.The homo sacer has perhaps turned into a cgure like Zacarias Moussaoui,the subject of demotic revenge and punishment.The post 9/11 scenariois such that there can now be an absolute coincidence between thepolitical trial of the supposed  twentieth hijacker and the demotic urgefor revenge that was perhaps most visible during his trial in the shapeof the relatives of 9/11 victims regularly expressing for the televisioncameras their eagerness for a death sentence.Moussaoui, the captured al-Qaida enemy subjected to revenge andpunishment, barely escaped the absolute reduction to the animalisticthat marks the fate of other representatives of  the enemy. And thedetainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have experienced thematerial e,ects of what it means to become the extralegal human ani-mal.At the level of representation, at least, the archenemy Osama binLaden also has been reduced to savage animality, represented in Amer-ican public discourse as groveling around in the primitive caves of aprimitive landscape.The same kind of attempt to show the enemy asanimalistic was perhaps even better served by the circumstances of thecapture of Saddam Hussein.Few will forget the discovery in 2004 of thesubhuman Saddam, captured in his so-called spider hole, where he hadbeen reduced to the most basic functions of life before being paradedlike a dog before the world.The conduct of his American captors im-mediately afterward produced some of the most remarkable images ofthe Long War: the CNN video and its still outtakes of Hussein beingexamined by American doctors.Hussein s treatment brought a stronganimals 105rebuke one of many outside America from a top Vatican cardinal,who condemned the public humiliation of  this man destroyed, [themilitary] looking at his teeth as if he were a beast. The images wereindeed chilling.The medical technician, looking like some doctor froma sci-c movie inspecting an alien, shines a light into the animal s throat,set against what is almost the anthropometric grid of the imperialanthropologist.The examination echoes the inspection of slaves at amarket, Jews in a prison camp, or horses at a sale, and thus marks thecomplete mastery over this dangerous yet humiliated animal.The dissemination of the media images of Saddam was clearly adeliberate strategy on the part of the administration and the U.S.mili-tary and no doubt contravened the Geneva Conventions injunctionagainst public humiliation of prisoners of war.But especially at a timewhen the Bush administration had already sidelined the Geneva Con-ventions, very little was ever going to be said, or be allowed to be said,in the culture at large questioning or objecting to the treatment itself,still less the  mere depiction of that treatment.Indeed, the CNNvideo and its stills, beamed across America and immediately boodingthe Internet, by and large met with the requisite barbaric response.TheBBC Web site featured an image of two American fans at a footballgame, beers in hand, their chests naked, brandishing a homemade ban-ner:  We Got Saddam. Their victorious barbarism was only enhancedby the fact that they had painted their torsos red for their team, theKansas City Chiefs, one of several NFL teams that persist in the ex-ploitation of Native American signicers.The subsequent trial of Saddam Hussein has, of course, returnedhim to human status.The same transformation is e,ected on the CIAprisoners who were transported from CIA  black sites to Guantánamoin 2006 their animal status, deriving from  natural law, is revokedas soon as codiced law is invoked and the extralegal subject has to bepulled back to the political realm.But the politico-legal structuresprepared for both Saddam Hussein and the CIA prisoners remain atbest shaky.The Bush administration transported the CIA prisoners toGuantánamo in preparation for trial even though no approved consti-tutional mechanism yet existed for such trials, and Saddam Husseinhad been handed over to a hastily concocted Iraqi court that he had106 human rightsevery reason to describe as a tool of the American occupiers.In bothcases, for these humans returned from the status of animals, the likelyoutcome is the death penalty.Hussein s trial is, as most commentatorshave seen, a farcical a,air.It would not even have taken place under theauspices of Iraqi sovereignty were it not for the fact that the Iraqicourt, with all of its legal authority and process having been dictatedunder the imprimatur of the U.S.occupiers, would permit the deathpenalty.That most primitive form of human punishment is one thingthat the cultures of the United States and its Muslim allies and foesalike understand and appear to accept, and their sharing of this outrageto humanity will forever alienate them in their barbarism from the restof the world.human rightshave been suggesting that the promotion of a primitive belief inisome sense of natural law based, as Lord puts it, in  the nature ofthings  has facilitated the establishment of an at least inchoateauthoritarian politics in America.The fact of 9/11 has made this all themore possible, but it is a feature of American culture and life that hasbeen always ready to be activated, as it were [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]