To enter the headquarters for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey, you must pass through barbed wire gates and a security checkpoint. If you are applying for asylum (because, for example, you have escaped Iraq after being raped and tortured or because you will be executed if forced to return to Iran), you will be escorted through these gates and then taken downstairs into the holding chambers of the basement. There you will be required to answer a series of questions to determine whether you meet the specific conditions for refugee status under international law. If your answers do not suffice, you will be deported back to your country of origin. The interview rooms are small with poor ventilation. Larry Bottinick, eligibility officer for the UNHCR, explains that they will be moving to a new building soon. "Whenever you ask an Iraqi to describe the conditions of their detention," he says of refugees from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, "they answer: `It was like this room.'"
    But this article is not about what it feels like to be interrogated. It is about what it feels like to interrogate someone. I visited the UNHCR in Turkey as part of a larger research project on organizations that intervene in humanitarian crises by using language instead of food, medicine, or weapons, organizations whose most important act is, finally, not delivering supplies but asking questions. Through a series of formal and informal interviews I documented the organizational dynamics and communicative practices of some of the world's most recognizable humanitarian inquisitors: the UNHCR, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the Human Rights Association (HRA). I focused in particular on the everyday practices of activists in the field, hoping to better understand not only how we can use language to alter the operations of violence but also to see how, by using language in such ways, we might be altered.
    Each of these three organizations seeks to eliminate physical suffering by using words. They do certain types of language work (personal interviews, investigation of document trails) that enable them to perform certain types of speech acts (the UNHCR announces: "This person is now officially a refugee"; the ICRC declares: "You are guilty of violating international norms"). The daily work of rescue is a matter of words instead of deeds or, rather, of words as deeds. As one delegate in the ICRC explained: "For outsiders, and to get money from sponsor governments, what you have to show is airplanes, and big trucks full of food, and field hospitals filled and packed with wounded people—because this type of work can be shown. But most of the work that we do is just talking. Really what is at the heart of the ICRC is to make representations."
    The fundamental representational task of the ICRC, like that of the UNHCR and HRA, is to document harm. The work ranges from compiling comprehensive reference indices culled from second-hand data to making first-hand visual confirmations. One UNHCR legal officer described an interview she conducted with a woman whose face had been so severely burned during her torture that the only recognizably human features that remained were the holes where her eyes and lips should have been. It was hard to know if and where she should look. Another worker from a different organization gave me a list he had created of the torture techniques his nation currently uses, with frequency variations. It reads: psychological coercion and physical deprivation while in detention (insults, isolation, blindfolding, mock-executions; forcing prisoners to declare obedience to the state, to kiss boots, to shout slogans, to obey nonsensical orders, to listen to the screams of tortured persons; depriving prisoners of food, water, sleep, needed medicines, heat, bedding; forbidding urination or defecation or confining prisoners in holes full of human urine and feces), physical assault (beating and punching the head, the hands, the soles of the feet; beating with hoses or other implements, wrapping in wet blankets and beating; spraying with cold or pressurized water, forcing the head under water, pulling out hair, pushing down stairs or dropping from heights, suspending upside-down from parallel hangers; electrocution, freezing, burning, strangling), and sexual abuse and assault (forcing prisoners to strip naked, to have sex with spouses in the presence of security officers, to perform sexually taboo practices including sex with friends of the same sex or with one's own children; beating the genitals and squeezing and twisting testicles and nipples; rape by single or multiple assailants, rape with blunt or sharp objects).
     This essay is about what it is like to be the person who maintains such a list, the person whose job it is to document pain, to bring it into language. One of the most striking things about such work is that, in the organizations that use language as rescue, some of the most damaging stress results not from the necessity of witnessing suffering, but from what the organization's rules and goals are for communication. What uses are these surrogate voices designed to serve? How do inquisitorial organizations train their officers to structure dialogue, to document, to report? How are the words of the survivor translated into the officially sanctioned vocabulary of the institution? In other words, what for the organization counts as language in the first place? The different tactics of these three organizations (the UNHCR, ICRC, and HRA) represent the full spectrum of the representational strategies available to human rights activists and humanitarian workers, from using language as a precise tool of objective, agent-neutral measurement to using it as a form of emotional exhortation and moral coercion. And, as we shall see, the moral risks and strategic compromises these organizations make in finding their place along that spectrum are embodied most dramatically in the psychic double-binds that structure the daily working lives of their workers.