Place and Misplaced Rights in Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom

Abstract

“The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was and is to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts.”2 These words, part of a speech Britain’s Lord Justice Johan Steyn delivered in 2003 exhorting the British judiciary to condemn publicly the detention center at Guantanamo, indicate that the suspension of habeas corpus constitutes one of the fundamental problems with the facility and the policies the United States uses to authorize it.3 In 2004 London’s Tricycle Theatre Company included this quotation in its documentary play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The explicitly political play, critiques the unlawful policies of the “war on terror” and in particular the US government’s practice of detaining “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay and Britain’s complicity in these detentions. The detention center at Guantanamo stands as one of the most striking examples of US abandonment of its own rule of law as a consequence of committing the country to an indefinite and extralegal war on terror. This impoverished war establishes what Giorgio Agamben would call a “state of exception” where sovereign authority exceeds the rule of law for a period of unspecified duration under the guise of protection. The US government’s commitment to hide from public view the most vital policies of this new state, defined by the creation of new vocabulary that is not bounded by any clear endpoint, leaves us in “a permanent state of emergency.”4