On 28 April 2004 CBS 60 Minutes aired a report on the brutalization of Iraqi detainees at the hands of US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison; this was rapidly followed by an article on the same story that appeared in The New Yorker on 30 April 2004. These images flooded newsstands and media outlets worldwide, and the debate over moral culpability and immunity occupied talk-show radio hosts and news commentators alike. Needless to say, the then US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, responded to the media frenzy by quickly engaging a hermeneutic battle over the definition of ‘torture’ in an attempt to water down the legal ramifications of what had happened and save the face of his administration, demanding the actions be described as ‘abuse’ not ‘torture.’ Our focus will be not so much on the problem of ideology – the hermeneutic hair splitting that went on over the definition of ‘torture’ – or even the subsequent legal arguments surrounding the moral responsibility of the military and/or the individuals involved; rather, carrying on from the previous discussion in chapter 4 concerning the media's role in producing an overabundance of memory, we will explore the effects of this situation, asking the question: how is collective memory put to work in the service of social subjection?

Using Foucault's notion of power as a form of disciplinary control in concert with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire as social, we will explore the sociality of memory in terms of a productive power. This means we will attend not so much to the problem of free will (the moral culpability of certain individuals) but we will start with the nonindividual forces and affects operating in relation with other forces, such as collective memory, delving down deep to discover how these libidinal affects and energies are invested throughout the social field. It will be proposed that the potentially revolutionary social energies that the release of the Abu Ghraib images initiated were disciplined by another series of social forces: the collective memory of 9/11 still fresh in every American’s mind and the deeper racist visual history that the Abu Ghraib images resonated with.