Media Necropower: Australian Media Reception and the Somatechnics of Mamdouh Habib‪.‬

This paper discusses the manner in which Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, who was arrested in Pakistan just after September 11, tortured in Egypt, and subsequently spent three years imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo Bay was discursively positioned within Australian media reception. Specifically, I argue that Habib's body was made culturally intelligible within what I call media necropower or contemporary media practices which reconfigure the politics of race and assimilability within the somatechnics of racialised bodies. Reading at least two televisual interviews on Sixty Minutes (2005), and Dateline (2005), as well as newspaper articles and a number of public responses to Mamdouh Habib's interviews, this paper will explore how the materiality of Habib's body was produced within a speculative, judgmental regime, media necropower. 1. In February 2006, Mamdouh Habib took a defamation action in the New South Wales Supreme Court against two major Australian newspapers, The Daily Telegraph and The Australian. Clive Evatt, his lawyer, stated that the articles in these newspapers portrayed 'Mr. Habib as a terrorist, someone who supports terrorism and as someone who trained in an Al Qaeda terrorist camp' (ABC News, 2006a). Out of 24 imputation cases, the four person jury found that 23 'were not defamatory' (ABC News, 2006b). The article which was found to be defamatory was an opinion piece by the journalist Piers Akerman published in The Daily Telegraph, where Akerman claimed that 'Mr. Habib had knowingly made some false claims' (Arlington, 2006). This understanding of defamation, however, fails to take account of what I call media necropower or contemporary media practices which reconfigure the politics of race and assimilability by making racialised bodies culturally intelligible in the current context of the war against terrorism. The following paper is a discussion of media necropower in the context of Australian media's reception of Mamdouh Habib.