A Redacted America: Critiquing the Lack of Transparency at Guantanamo Bay

The willingness to undermine liberal standards of justice and imprisonment has been a major criticism of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The camp’s propensity to evade judicial mechanisms offered on American soil is particularly due to its deliberate opacity. This paper begins with a brief overview of the major arguments in favour of the closure of the facility and the challenges that have prohibited the closure thus far, based on a review of debates and commentary found in investigative reports, legal documents, and scholarly analyses. A substantive portion of this piece will highlight three demonstrable areas where transparency is being detrimentally avoided in the conduct of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp: press access, health care, and the detainee defense counsel. A critique of increasing transparency as a possible impetus to keep the facility open will close the discussion. Ultimately, the transgressions of Guantánamo are so detrimental to American self-conception of liberal values that a correction of the facility’s opacity should be but an intermediary step to closing the facility entirely.

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.

Observing Justice at Guantánamo Bay: Human Rights NGOs and Trial Monitoring at the US Military Commissions

The article critically considers the role of NGOs at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On the basis of observation of pre-trial hearings for the case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed et al.—those allegedly responsible for the September 11 attacks—the article analyses NGOs as trial monitors of the US military commissions set up to deal with ‘alien unprivileged enemy belligerents’. In spite of continued efforts by human rights NGOs and incremental improvements in the military commissions’ institutional arrangements and practice, the article shows how NGOs have become so much a part of the everyday operation of justice at ‘Gitmo’ that they legitimate the military commissions’ claim to be delivering fair and transparent justice.

Introduction

“Can military medicine be ethical?” is one question that may puzzle readers whose knowledge of medical ethics since 9/11 is colored by the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. To address these and other challenges, Military Medical Ethics in Contemporary Armed Conflict explores controversial topics that include preferential care for compatriot warfighters, force feeding detainees, weaponizing medicine to wage war, medical experimentation, and neural enhancement for warfighters. Less controversial but no less compelling concerns direct our attention to postwar justice: the duty to rebuild war-torn nations and the obligation to care for war-torn veterans.

Who wants ‘the worst of the worst’? Rationales for and consequences of third country resettlement of Guantanamo Bay detainees

Against the backdrop of countries increasingly being confronted with undesirable but unreturnable non-citizen terrorist suspects, this article describes the resettlement process of 150 cleared but unreturnable Guantanamo Bay detainees. Merely 13% of these detainees have been resettled in full democracies, compared to 52% in authoritarian regimes. Using Starkley et al.’s concept of ‘zone agreement’ the article explains how the U.S. particularly managed to incentivize pragmatically oriented – rather than idealistically motivated – governments to engage in third country resettlement [16]. From the perspective of the U.S. the resettlement scheme can be considered relatively successful, while the experiences of resettlement countries and the resettled detainees themselves have been very mixed.