A few days before New Year’s Day, 2002 John Yoo and Patrick Philbin, two lawyers in the Department of Justice, drafted a memorandum for the Department of Defense. The memo was entitled Possible Habeas Jurisdiction over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration had announced plans to try suspected terrorists by military commission, a kind of military court. As the memo was being completed, the war in Afghanistan was still ongoing. But coalition forces had taken Kabul and other major cities and had already captured many suspected Al Qaeda members. The Bush administration feared detaining these individuals within the United States and generally rejected the criminal justice model of counterterrorism championed by previous presidents. The United States naval base at Guantanamo, the subject of the lawyers’ memo, was appealing as a long-term site for detention and trial. It was distant from the Middle East, very secure, and, as the Justice Department noted, probably free of the influence of American courts due to its location outside the territory of the United States. In time the detention camp at Guantanamo would become a source of sustained criticism around the world and a major political liability for the United States. But in late 2001, with the World Trade Center site still a smoking ruin, Guantanamo appeared to be a very attractive option to those formulating the legal response to the 9/11 attacks. Two years after the Guantanamo memo was written the New York Times reported that the CIA and the Pentagon were operating a network of offshore prisons in various foreign locations. In these overseas prisons, so reported the Times, were some of the most high-value detainees in the war on terror. Successive stories in the Washington Post revealed that a number of these “black site” prisons were in Europe, and that the CIA had flown individuals there for extensive and coercive interrogation. As the Times reported, the “suggestion that the United States might be operating secret prisons in Europe and the idea that American intelligence officers might be torturing terrorism suspects incarcerated on foreign soil have been incendiary issues across Europe in recent weeks.”
US alt-right media and the creation of the counter-collective memory
