This paper will examine Shahla Talebi’s memoir Ghosts of A Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran alongside Foucault’s 1976 Lectures on bio-politics. Reading Talebi’s memoir as part of a transnational critique of the “privatization of torture” (Arundhati Roy’s term) and the bio-politics of Iranian and U.S. nation-state discourses and discipline and violence, I will situate her memoir at the center of debates on torture and terror. By placing this memoir at the center of transnational critiques around policies and politics of torture allow us to examine the role of American empire in the global war against terrorism. Talebi’s memoir, which describes hers and her fellow inmates imprisonment during the reign of the Shah and the Islamic Republic is particularly important in these debates as it describes the ways in which putatively oppositional regimes of government (the United States and Iran) in fact inscribe their power by “cloning” similar practices of violent discipline of their body-politic. Situating this memoir at the center of these transnational debates on torture and terrorism allows us to examine the potential political implications of reading Iranian memoirs beyond the traditional and myopic frameworks of cultural translation. Talebi’s memoir stands in direct contrast to the canon of Iranian-American memoirs of the last decade and a half that focus on exile and displacement after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Alongside Azar Nafisi’s critically acclaimed Reading Lolita in Tehran and Firoozeh Dumas’ popularly received Funny in Farsi, Asayesh’s Saffron Sky, Bahrampour’s To See and See Again, and Seyhan’s Lipstick Jihad, these texts consistently emphasize and revisit the binaries of East and West, Iranian versus American, The Shah versus the Islamic Republic, and themes of familial/generational tensions, language barrier, longing for home, and attempt to reconcile putatively disparate parts of their identity. Instead of reifying neoliberal discourses that support U.S. empires’ global hegemongy, Talebi’s account of imprisonment, torture, and bio-terrorism, inside Iran and meditations on similar practices in Guantanamo, highlight not the differences between Iran versus the United States, but point to the alarming points of similarity in maintaining control and power. In this way, this paper will examine the political implications of reading this scholarly acclaimed but largely ignored memoir alongside the ongoing debates on fighting terror, American empire, and the privatization of torture in the 21st century.