United States–torture outsourcing to allies

The relation between the United States and the outsourcing of torture to allies is presented as a means of displacing violence and responsibility rather than eliminating either. The book compares this practice to corporate subcontracting: just as a company can distance itself from harmful production carried out by another firm, a government can leave coercive acts to partners while claiming that its own laws and values remain intact. The comparison makes outsourcing a political arrangement as well as an administrative one, separating the public image of lawful democracy from the practices used in its name.

Outsourcing and the Appearance of Legality

The book frames the transfer of torture to allied countries as a way for the United States to avoid legal constraints and public protest. It cites a post-September 11 argument, published in Newsweek, that torture could not be legalized because it contradicted American values, yet suspects might instead be transferred to less scrupulous allies. The contradiction is central: the refusal to authorize torture openly can coexist with its practical use through another state's actions. The arrangement preserves the language of principle while shifting the burden of violating that principle elsewhere.

The Practice Returns Within the State

This division between the United States and its allies, the book argues, could not hold. By the time of the discussion, Americans did not trust allies to carry out the work properly; the disavowed partner had become part of the U.S. government itself. The book links this development to the Central Intelligence Agency's decades-long teaching of torture practices to military allies in Latin America and elsewhere. What appears to be an external service thus has a history of instruction and institutional connection that complicates any clean separation between the state and its proxies.

Outsourced Violence and Outsourced Belief

The argument extends the pattern from coercive practice to political belief. The book characterizes a skeptical liberal attitude as outsourcing belief to others, allowing people described as fundamentalists to perform a conviction that the liberal subject disavows. The rise of religious fundamentalism within Western societies is treated as evidence that this displacement cannot be reliably assigned to distant societies. In both cases, the supposedly external bearer of an unwanted practice or belief exposes its proximity to the political order that disowns it.

Significance

The outsourcing relation therefore functions as a critique of the gap between democratic self-description and the exercise of power. Delegation does not make responsibility disappear: the book's account connects allied practices to U.S. policy, training, and institutions, then shows the arrangement folding back into the state itself. Its analogy with subcontracted production clarifies the mechanism of displacement, while the extension to belief suggests that what a society assigns to others may remain part of its own structure.