Although couched in a discourse of ethics and human rights, US national security operations are often characterised by the use of ethically questionable policies – torture, drone strikes and rendition amongst others. In many instances, a large amount of effort goes into preventing knowledge of these practices from entering the public domain –¬ defined within this paper as Clean Operations Strategies. This paper highlights some of the ways that the idea of the ‘other’ is drawn on in order to try and prevent knowledge of controversial practices seeping into the public domain. By utilising detention operations in Iraq as its main case study, it demonstrates the important links between the adoption of Clean Operations Strategies and ‘other’ categorisations and the manner in which the ability to manipulate categorisations facilitates the adoption of ethically questionable policies.
