Guantanamo Detainees Research Articles

The Case for Closing the U.S. Prison at Guantanamo Bay

One of the secret CIA black sites that the U.S. government made use of was held at Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. It was used to torture suspected terrorists into providing intelligence following the terrorist attacks of September 11. Despite the end of the use of this black site, thirty detainees remain there today. Guantanamo detainees have often been captured from their homeland, then forcibly disappeared, and brought to the detention facility for indefinite detention and interrogation prior to having been charged with a crime. Despite their knowledge against its use, the U.S. government authorized the use of these “enhanced interrogation techniques” despite their being in violation of the Torture Statute and the DTA as well as several international frameworks. The goal of this article is to locate the contradictions between these legal frameworks and first-hand accounts to prove that human rights violations were committed at Guantanamo Bay detention facility and suggest that all the remaining prisoners should either be tried in a court of law for their alleged crimes or should be set free as soon as possible. This article will do so by comparing the violation of these rights to first-hand accounts from several Guantanamo memoirs.

Więzienie w Guantanamo jako przykład biopolitycznego paradygmatu globalnej wojny z terroryzmem

Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp as an Example of Biopolitical Framework of Global War on Terror The aim of this article is to introduce the problem of indefinite detainees of Guantanamo Bay into the framework of biopolitical interpretation of Global War on Terror (GWOT). From the very first days of GWOT, the George W. Bush administration mobilized all available resources to fight with everyone suspected as a potential terrorist in all areas, including legal area. The intentional consequence of this fight was the elimination of political rights for indefinite detainees. Potentially risky individuals were suspected in the context of normal law – what can be perceived as a visible result of sovereign’s decisions and actions – and were transformed into bare lives, figure of homini sacri. Homo sacer means an individual being excluded from the society and social order; it means the situation of being deprived of personal political rights, where the essence of human existence is diminished to physical aspects exclusively. According to Giorgio Agamben and his concept of biopolitics, the camp per se, is the paradigm of modernity. It is the place of permanent production of bare lives, the materialized place of state of exception, the place of law suspension. In the context of post-9/11, Guantanamo detention camp became the pure exemplification of Agamben’s biopolitical camp.

Commentary

Commentary

Indefinite Detention: Chronotopes of Unfreedom in Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary

Former Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi’s memoir, Guantanamo Diary (2015, Restored Edition 2017), has been well received as a document of the “emergency” violence in the war on terror, with explicit testimony to a range of grave rights violations. In this essay, we show how the book also reveals overlaps between these techniques of torture and abuse, on one hand, and both Guantanamo’s deep colonial roots as well its reliance on “ordinary” prison procedures marked by racist brutality, on the other. “Indefinite Detention and Targeted Harm” builds on the Bakhtinian chronotope as a theoretical frame to explore a set of simultaneously competing and complementary spatio-temporal frameworks that ground and emerge through the text. Analyzing the overlapping and often conflicting temporal registers of “national emergency” and “imperialist history,” our reading of the memoir accounts for the narrative’s production of a post-torture, but not post-carceral, subjectivity, reminding readers that the everyday violence of the war on terror persists into the reading present even though the most egregious violence the text depicts has largely ended.

La situación jurídica de los prisioneros en Guantánamo y el excepcionalismo norteamericano

La situación jurídica de los prisioneros en Guantánamo y el excepcionalismo norteamericano

Aesthetic Means of Ethical Engagement in Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture

In the context of the sensorial fatigue caused by the media’s saturation with representations of violence, Rithy Panh’s film The Missing Picture (2013) stands as a reinvigorating alternative of addressing trauma through aesthetic means that inscribe the affect within ethical dimensions. Panh’s testimony of surviving the death of his family through Pot Pol’s ‘killing fields’ is built around images of stylized clay figurines filmed in realistic dioramas. Forced labor, starvation and death make living a luxury – life fades away from the bodies of figurines that lose color and flesh, but is reaffirmed through the lush nature of dioramas and the resiliently colorful presence of the hero, the surviving storyteller. Khmer Rouge archival footage of carefully choreographed masses of people works as abstract imagery of an unreal reality. In an unmediated expression of affect, the sound mixes revolutionary choirs with electronic effects registering a fading daily life, and voice-over commentary that recuperates the words of propaganda slogans and shapes them into a personal narrative of wonder, pain, anger and guilt of survival. Panh achieves here “a formulation of affect understood as a radical act of interpretation in the face of unwilled subjugation”, in Judith Butler’s words on the poems of the Guantanamo detainees. (Butler 61) By mobilizing the realm of the affects through aesthetics, Panh fulfills what Simon O’Sullivan calls “the ethical imperative of art [that] involves a kind of moving beyond the already familiar (the human), precisely a kind of selfovercoming”. (O’Sullivan 129) Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture works as an art organism that leads us to recover our subjectivity through the detour of a necessary perception of our objectivity. It allows us access to the position of subjects concerned about the others only through the mediation of our occupying the position of objects perceptible as others.

Djamel Ameziane v. U.S.A., Report No. 29/20, Case 12.865 Merits, (Inter-Am. Comm'n H.R.)

On April 22, 2020, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Commission) issued its first decision on one of the Guantanamo detainees, Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Muslim who was held at Guantanamo for almost 12 years until he was deported to Algeria in 2013, in violation, inter alia, of the principle of non-refoulement. The case was brought on Mr. Ameziane's behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), and the decision is very comprehensive and carefully written, as is to be expected of a decision totaling 70 pages. Although the United States became a party to the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992, it never accepted the first Optional Protocol, which gives individuals the right to bring complaints against the United States before the U.N. Human Rights Committee; consequently, the only international body to which an individual can bring a complaint against the United States for a violation of international human rights law is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a principal organ of the Organization of American States (OAS).

Making Habeas Work: A Legal History

This is a short book, but it is heavy reading. It also has an agenda: to defend habeas corpus in its original purpose (to restrain extrajudicial, arbitrary imprisonments of individuals by federal or other legal authorities within the jurisdiction of the United States). The high point of this legal history is Boumediene v. Bush (2008), in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of some Guantanamo Bay detention camp prisoners to petition the writ of habeas corpus—against the George W. Bush administration's and Congress's wishes. An interesting question is whether history can truly prove anything about the validity of an individual court decision today, even if common-law practice is based on precedents. We know of a number of “precedents” once set by the Supreme Court that have since been overturned by that same Court because the common American understanding of decent social norms has changed over time. Be that as it may, Eric M. Freedman narrates dozens of cases since the colonial era, some in considerable detail, as related to habeas corpus or to a number of other legal proceedings by which the legality of detentions by local and government officials have been protested, prosecuted, and occasionally rejected in court, with fines levied.

From homo sacer to homo dolorosus: Biopower and the politics of suffering

This article argues that the indefinite detention and torture of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and the intentional destabilization of Palestinian civilian life in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories are indicative of the emergence of a new postmodern form of power. Coining the term homo dolorosus – the man who is available to be made to suffer – this article seeks to understand this emergent politics of suffering through a historicized reading of Foucault’s typology of power, informed by the work of Giorgio Agamben. It is argued that, just as discipline was the dark inverse of the modern utopian Enlightenment project of universal democratic inclusion, the politics of suffering is the dark inverse of the postmodern biopolitical project of security. Using the work of Mikkel Joronen, Jasbir Puar and Lauren Wilcox as signposts, this article argues that homo dolorosus is produced by power’s encounter with a population that it perceives or represents as simultaneously risky and dependent. Moreover, it is suggested that homo dolorosus may be the manifestation of a project that aims to do away with freely-deciding subjectivity while keeping the human body alive.

US military medical ethics in the War on Terror

Military medical ethics has been challenged by the post-11 September 2001 ‘War on Terror’. Two recurrent questions are whether military physicians are officers first or physicians first, and whether military...

موقف الولایات المتحدة الأمریکیة من جماعات الإسلام السیاسی فی أفغانستان (2001- 2008)

حاربت الولايات المتحدة الأمريکية برئاسة جورج بوشGeorge W. Bush (2001- 2009) جماعات الإسلام السياسي في أفغانستان لاسيما تنظيم القاعدة وحرکة طالبان والجماعات المرتبطة بهما، جاءت الحرب انتقاما من أحداث 11 سبتمبر 2001، ولم تکتف الولايات المتحدة بالجانب العسکري فقط، بل لجأت أيضا إلى منح مکافآت لمن يدلي بمعلومات تساعد في القبض على عناصر تلک الجماعات، وأحيانا أخرى لجأت إلى طاولة المفاوضات مع العناصر المعتدلة من حرکة طالبان، وأثناء تلک المواجهات وقعت الولايات المتحدة في بعض الانتهاکات لعل أبرزها معتقل غوانتانامو، الذي أبتکرت فيه الولايات المتحدة صنوفا جديدة في التحقيق والتعذيب لعناصر تلک الجماعات المتطرفة، واستمرت حرب الولايات المتحدة على تلک الجماعات على أشدها حتى عام 2008، الذي شهد نهاية توجهات الإدارة الأمريکية للمحافظين برئاسة جورج بوش، التي أتسمت بحربها المتشددة ضد جماعات الإسلام السياسي المتطرفة. Abstract: Under the leadership of President George Bush (2001- 2009), the American United States fought the political Islam groups in Afghanistan, particularly Al-Qaeda and Taliban and their affiliated groups. The American war on these groups was an act of revenge for the September 11 attacks. It is worth mentioning that the United States did not confine itself to military force but it also offered rewards for information leading to the arrest of the members of these groups. Sometimes, it resorted to the negotiation table with the moderate members of the Taliban. During these confrontations the American United States has committed numerous violations and breaches of which the most notable is Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp where the United States has invented new ways of investigating and torturing these extremist groups. The American war was at its most intense until 2008; this year witnessed the end of the orientations of Bush's Conservative administration which was obviously marked by its fierce war against extremist political Islam groups.

Extra-Legal Legality: Orientalism and Biopolitics in a State of Exception

With recourse to the poetry of Guantanamo’s detainees, this article describes the extra-legal legality that typifies the conception and activities of post-9/11 terror-suspect prison camps. It argues that the state of exception, which has become integral in the war on terror, is not a product of necessity, but a reflection of the interplay between biopolitics, biopower, and Orientalism in the post-9/11 era. By considering the ways in which Guantanamo detainees employ poetry to plead their innocence and exhibit their suffering body as political subjects and objects, this article pays careful attention to the aesthetics of Guantanamo poetry and how it reveals the poets’ individual humanity against the fabric of the brutality and illegality packaged ironically as the ‘war on terror’.

En/Gendering dystopia: the performance of torture at Guantanamo Bay prison

ABSTRACTIn the post 9–11 era, the war on terrorism hastened the questionable practice of detaining alleged terrorists in confinement sites such as Guantanamo Bay. These mainly Muslim male detainees underwent interrogation by female agents with the intent to inflict suffering to gain covert information. Female agents used torture tactics by exploiting their sexuality, showing gender-specific undergarments, menstrual blood, and sexualized body taunts, all in opposition to detainees Islamic beliefs as interpreted by the Qur’an. This essay explores the role of sexuality and torture as performance strategy arguing that such practices move the U.S. closer to a dystopian society.

The Boy Who Lived: Harry Potter, Suicide, and an Opportunity for Mental Health Literacy

It has been 20 years since the first of the Harry Potter books was published. In the interim, they have been translated into 73 languages and sold more than 450 million copies. It seems everyone knows Harry, even within the notoriously restrictive Guantanamo Bay prison.2 When I first read the books, I thought I knew Harry too, but I was missing something important that has significance for our field.

How Muslims Became Corn

Over the past 16 years, the global “war on terror” has expanded in scope, ranging from US-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, domestic counter-terrorism and counter-radicalization legislation, and mass surveillance of Muslim communities to the “Muslim ban” on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. This expansion in scope has normalized the idea of Muslims as threats to and within Western societies. This article analyzes this process of securitization, how Muslims are constructed as terrorists, and threats to national security, through a discussion of three books that illustrate how violence, politics, and state power are intricately related in the production of the “war on terror.” It advances a critique of the relationship between state power and the construction of knowledge about Muslims as terrorists, whether in the US government-supported counter-radicalization industry or in the documentation of Muslim experiences as prisoners in Guantanamo Bay's prison. Last, this article discusses Muslim agency and the position of racialized scholars in the “war on terror” as a question of authority and scholarship. It notes the gap between those whose voices are legitimized as “experts” on “explaining Muslims” in ways that conform to accepted assumptions about Muslims as threats, and the voices and experiences of racialized scholars whose expertise is considered not “objective” enough.

The Detainee, the Prisoner, and the Refugee: The Dynamics of Violent Subject Production

This article takes violence in the law seriously, scrutinizing three sites engaged in violent subject production and resistance: the Guantanamo Bay detention center, supermax prisons in the US, and European refugee camps. The concepts of martyring and torturing serve help to untangle the dynamics of the law’s violence. The violent subject production techniques used in these sites are discussed as torture practices that aim to reproduce the dominant subjectivity. As the law has often proved unable to fully address the situation of the detainee, the prisoner, and the refugee, hunger striking as martyring is discussed as a way to deconstruct hegemonic subjectivity and to force the law to face its own violence.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwards: A General Analysis of the US Supreme Court's Decisions in the Enemy Combatantss Cases

As we seem to be witnessing the last chapters of the closure of the Guantanamo detention camps, we are compelled to evaluate the successes and the failures of the US Supreme Court’s decisions on the cases emerging from Guantanamo bay. Such an assessment is vital in that it enables us to establish an emerging pattern in the modalities of the interaction between the judiciary and the executive in the Twenty First century. My paper will seek to scrutinise two main dimensions of the Guantanamo cases, namely, procedural and substantive restraints put on the detention powers of the US executive by the US Supreme Court. On the account of a detailed analysis of the aforementioned dimensions, and with a view to the implications of these decisions for the future judgements of a similar nature, I will conclude that whilst the US Supreme Court showed a great degree of fortitude in upholding some procedural safeguards for the Guantanamo detainees, its overall conduct fell a long way short of putting substantive restraints on the authority of the US executive.

Fight Against Misuse of Psychiatry Wins Sharfstein Award for Courage

Fight Against Misuse of Psychiatry Wins Sharfstein Award for Courage

In the shadow of the great charter: common law constitutionalism and the Magna Carta

In the Supreme CourtAEs 2008 ruling on whether Guantanamo detainees could be barred from U.S. courts, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the U.S. Constitution, of course. But he also linked the decision to the Magna Carta. Why would a twenty-first-century judge, even under the extraordinary circumstances of the owar on terror,o invoke a document signed by an English king in the thirteenth century? To address this question, as Robert Pallitto does in this clarifying book, is to probe the history of modern civil liberties, and to explore the process by which judges decide individual rights cases. PallittoAEs work, with its insight into competing ideas about interpreting the Constitutionuooriginalismo versus oconstitutional common lawouis of critical importance to our understanding of the nationAEs founding document. Of far more than symbolic significance, the Magna Carta exerts immediate practical influence on legal outcomes, as Justice KennedyAEs opinion demonstrates. To explain this, Pallitto first goes into the CharterAEs origins, history, and nature, especially its explicit use of othe law of the lando to protect subjectsAE rights and liberty. The Magna CartaAEs legacy in the United States reaches back to the nationAEs founding, with even the colonial charters reflecting its influence. But it is in the Supreme CourtAEs reference to the Charter, spanning the institutionAEs full two-hundred years, that Pallitto finds the greatest impactumost frequently in the principles of due process (in criminal proceedings) and habeas corpus, but in many other provisions as well. And the weight of this impact registers most deeply and clearly in the development of the constitutional common lawuthe theory that courts should and do interpret and expand on constitutional texts by reference to tradition and precedent rather than to the draftersAE original intent. Charting the Magna CartaAEs influence on the contemporary jurisprudence of individual rightsufrom the legal thought of the American colonies through exemplary cases over the history of the Supreme Courtuthis book offers resounding evidence of the evolution and value of abiding principles through which American liberty endures.

Mental Health in the War on Terror: Culture, Science, and Statecraft

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessMental Health in the War on Terror: Culture, Science, and StatecraftJerrold M. Post, M.D.Jerrold M. PostSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Sep 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.660704AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail by Neil Krishan Aggarwal, M.D.; New York, Columbia University Press, 2015, 232 pagesReflecting his long-standing interest and fellowship training in cross-cultural psychiatry, Neil Aggarwal looks at the theory and practice of psychiatry through the lens of an anthropologist as he surveys the complexity of the psychiatrist’s role in the war on terror in this important book. Early attracted to the interdisciplinary perspective of Michel Foucalt, Aggarwal provides a perspective that will challenge the complacency of psychiatrists as they enter the culturally complex arena of mental health in this era. During our training as mental health practitioners, we all were taught the importance of assessing our patients accurately in their cultural context. Here Aggarwal confronts us with the importance of understanding that psychiatrists, too, are embedded in a cultural context that affects the manner in which they understand their clients’ behavior, and it inevitably affects diagnosis and treatment.At the 2005 major terrorism summit in Madrid, a committee on the psychological roots of terrorism, which I chaired, included in its consensus statement that “it is not going too far to assert that terrorists are psychologically normal”—in the sense of not being clinically psychotic. They are neither depressed, nor severely emotionally disturbed, nor crazed fanatics. In fact, terrorist groups and organizations regularly screen out emotionally unstable individuals. They represent, after all, a security risk. “But if not individual psychopathology, then what?” The committee concluded that “it is group, organizational and social psychology that provide the greatest analytic power in understanding this complex phenomenon,” that “terrorists have subordinated their individual identity to the collective identity.” Aggarwal powerfully stresses the importance of the social field of the terrorist and of the examining psychiatrist.In his chapter on bioethics, Aggarwal stresses the dilemma of dual loyalties. This is particularly relevant for the military psychiatrist. He explores the challenges of how to resolve the conflicting issues of operating in the command hierarchy and being true to the ethical imperatives of the Hippocratic Oath.In a chapter devoted to the complexity of the role of the psychiatrist in cases involving the Guantanamo detainees, he persuasively demonstrates the differing interpretive contexts of working for the defense versus working for the prosecution, as psychiatrists interpret patients’ symptoms. The chapter on the psychology of suicide terrorism is especially powerful concerning the requirement of the examining psychiatrist to be actively aware of the manner in which the patient has been socialized, that the individual has been promised rewards for martyrdom, such as a higher place in the afterlife, a place in Paradise. In an interesting chapter on deradicalization programs, Aggarwal directs attention to the central role played by moderate Muslim clerics in several of the programs, noting the tendency of psychiatrists to operate in a medical hierarchy, whereas challenging beliefs to which they have been socialized by religious authorities may be quite efficacious.This book should be considered required reading for psychiatrists and mental health professionals interested in the psychology of Islamist terrorism, especially those who will be involved with the evaluation and treatment of terrorists. It is an exemplar of the manner in which the lens of transcultural psychiatry can clarify our perspective as we try to understand the complexities of the manner in which ordinary people can be socialized to righteously pursue the path of political extremism.Dr. Post is professor of psychiatry, political psychology, and international affairs at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., where he is director of the Political Psychology Program.The reviewer reports no financial relationships with commercial interests. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 66Issue 9 September 01, 2015Pages e1-e2 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 September 2015 Published in print 1 September 2015