Guantanamo Bay

Abstract

Abstract Guantanamo Bay is geographically part of Cuba, but has been leased by the United States since 1903. The lease agreement followed the Spanish–American war and was confirmed in a 1934 treaty. The treaty allows the United States to use the area for coaling or naval stations as long as required, in practice making the lease indefinite. Guantanamo Bay is a naval base, but was used in the 1990s as a detention camp for Haitian and Cuban refugees and asylum seekers (Gregory 2006: 411–412; Johns 2005: 616). In January 2002, shortly after the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, the United States started transferring persons captured on the battlefield to Guantanamo. The base was used by the Bush administration because it was initially considered to be outside of the United States legal jurisdiction. In 2006, in the court case Hamdan (a detainee at Guantanamo Bay) vs. Rumsfeld , the United States Supreme Court ruled that this assertion did not conform to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. Guantanamo is part of a global pattern of CIA‐run so‐called black sites. Black sites are facilities outside the United States where detainees from the war on terror are being held and interrogated for intelligence purposes. These sites remain shrouded in secrecy but it is widely believed that such sites have been in operation in several countries around the world, including in Europe (for an account of the early phase of the detention camp, see Greenberg 2009; for a wider historical perspective, see Carvin 2010; for a collection of papers and statements by detainees, see Worthington 2007).