Emblematic of institutionalised Islamophobia, the detention centre has placed Muslims outside of the law and continues to be used by US authorities to threaten their lives and rights
n Monday, 6 January, 11 Yemeni Guantanamo prisoners were transferred to Oman after being cleared for release by the United States government.
Days earlier, the Pentagon repatriated Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, who had been held without charge in Guantanamo since its opening on 11 January 2002, to Tunisia. Three other survivors were also released in mid-December: two sent to Malaysia and one to Kenya.
After 23 years, the prison now holds its lowest population of incarcerated Muslim men, with 15 remaining, including the so-called “9/11 Five”.
While few men remain incarcerated, this chapter of the “war on terror” is hardly over – not only because the fate of the men who are still incarcerated is precarious but because of the lasting and haunting damage Guantanamo has done to former and current detainees.
Moreover, Guantanamo’s legacy of imperialism, exclusion and brutality serves as a reminder of the lengths to which the US will go to criminalise different communities, all while continuing to exercise hegemonic power over Cuban territory.
The violence that has come to define Guantanamo is not just a feature of the physical site.
For over two decades, it has long been a symbol in the American imagination of who deserves what kind of punishment and who can be and should be excluded altogether from any semblance of justice.
As long as Guantanamo remains open, it will continue to be a site of exclusion for those whose lives have been condemned as inconsequential, disposable and legally sanctioned as sacrificial targets of the state as a means to its national security ends.
That is why calls to close the prison and the base are incomplete: Guantanamo must not just be closed; it must be abolished.
US imperialist legacy
The US government has “leased” the land on which the Guantanamo Naval Base was built since 1903, five years after seizing the territory from Spain.
In true imperialistic form, the terms of the agreement stipulate that the lease cannot be terminated without the consent of both parties, thus allowing the US to maintain its occupation of the base.
This imperialist violence further underpins the human rights abuses at Guantanamo, as the US has waged war on, colonised and occupied numerous Muslim-majority countries since 2001
The violence through which the US obtained the territory of Guantanamo is critical to understanding the many iterations of violence it has inflicted worldwide.
In an article titled “Where is Guantanamo?”, American studies scholar Amy Kaplan wrote: “The use of Guantanamo as a prison camp today demands to be understood in the context of its historical location. Its legal – or lawless – status has a logic grounded in imperialism, whereby coercive state power has been routinely mobilised beyond the sovereignty of national territory and outside the rule of law.”
Even while occupying Guantanamo, the US government has continued to maintain that Cuba has sovereignty over its territory despite having no meaningful way of exercising control or challenging American hegemony.
This imperialist violence further underpins the human rights abuses at Guantanamo, as the US has waged war on, colonised and occupied numerous Muslim-majority countries since 2001, including many of the countries from which the prisoners were abducted.
Such violence was marked not only in the region but deliberately on the bodies of the men detained on occupied Cuban land, thus serving as unabashed and visible manifestations of the US empire’s reach.
This legacy endures, as some of the incarcerated men were not allowed to be transferred to their home countries, such as Yemen, where US forces continue to wage war.
A place and idea
In his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes about the visibility of public punishment over time: “At the beginning of the 19th century, the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment. The age of sobriety in punishment had begun.”
Foucault explains this trajectory as an outcome of the sophistication of power, which seeks to avoid provoking anger from the public to avert dissent and the questioning of authority.
When it comes to the “war on terror”, however, scholar Sohail Daulatzai observes that Foucault’s idea of the prison ushering in an “age of sobriety” contradicts the “new age of excess around torture, display and penal power” that the “post 9/11 security state seems to have revealed”.
Indeed, such excesses have not been inflicted on just any population, but Muslims in particular when it comes to detention and torture. They are frequently flaunted as evidence of winning the war and scapegoated to justify torture and other forms of violence in the public eye.
Furthermore, there is a particular way in which the punishment exacted on Muslims is deemed appropriate and proportional because of the spectre that the incarcerated Muslim has inhabited in the “war on terror”.
Here, Daulatzai argues that “the racialised figure of the Muslim and its multiple iterations haunts the geographic and imaginative spaces of American empire”.
As a haunting figure, the Muslim body and the existence of prisons such as Guantanamo became sites for the American empire to execute its imagination of unrestrained and extreme punishment deemed necessary to extinguish any lingering threat.
Legacies of exclusion
Twenty-three years ago today, a US Navy photographer took a now infamous photo of men brought to Guantanamo, dressed in orange jumpsuits, kneeling with goggles over their eyes and a sort of mouth gag.
This picture was subsequently and intentionally released by the US Department of Defense in the days following the prison’s opening in the aftermath of 9/11.
Referring to this first group of Muslim prisoners, then-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, described them as so dangerous that they would “gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down… So, these are very, very dangerous people, and that’s how they’re being treated”.
Also described as housing the “worst of the worst” by Michael Lehnert, a major general who commanded the notorious Camp X-Ray, the use of animalistic metaphors and demonising narratives in Guantanamo’s early days was critical to constructing an image of the Muslim enemy that would continue to provide the rationale for sidestepping legal norms and casting the men outside of the law.
An Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo from 28 December 2001 set a precedent for excluding those detained.
It concludes that “the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at GBC [Guantanamo Bay, Cuba]”.
In other words, Guantanamo did not default into becoming a legal black hole; it was intentionally created for this reason.
‘Enemy combatants’
Of course, this was not the only way the incarcerated men were excluded from the law.
Another legal memo declared them to be unlawful enemy combatants who were not entitled to Geneva Convention protections for prisoners, including the prohibition of torture, or any other meaningful rights for that matter.
The designation of the men as such was not just about denying them rights but to ensure that the denial of these rights would not constitute a crime.
Speaking specifically to the use of torture at Guantanamo, human rights attorney and historian Michel Paradis argues that “just as it is impossible to torture a stone, the United States, it was maintained, did not violate the legal prohibitions on torture because it was impossible to commit a crime against individuals against whom no act was illegal. The unlawful enemy combatants were individuals who could not be ‘tortured’ because they had no right not to be tortured”.
Though seemingly part of a distant history of Guantanamo in the “war on terror”, the construction of the men as unlawful enemy combatants, coupled with the violence that they were subsequently subjected to, served to render them as “bare life”, with consequences even after their transfer out of prison.
A term coined by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “bare life” refers to the reduction of human life to being merely biological because it has been stripped of political, social and legal rights.
Even though the majority of the men detained at Guantanamo were never charged or convicted, they were never vindicated of any wrongdoing
Being reduced to “bare life” without any meaningful protections of the state or society necessarily means that those existing as such are ripe for violence and exclusion.
Rather than a temporal relegation of these men to mere biological life and stripped of any rights, this state of rightlessness continues to dictate their lives.
Even though the majority of the men detained and subsequently transferred out of Guantanamo were never charged or convicted, they were never vindicated of any wrongdoing.
Instead, their releases were made based on a group of intelligence agencies’ determination that they posed a low-level security threat to the US.
Thus, survivors of Guantanamo have to forever live with the stigma of being constructed as terrorists and have little to no meaningful rights once resettled or repatriated.
An omnipresent threat
As one of the earliest pillars of the “war on terror”, Guantanamo is emblematic of institutionalised Islamophobia and continues to be deployed by US authorities to threaten Muslims and exceptionalise alleged Muslim-perpetrated violence.
In 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov, a Muslim man who was then accused (now convicted) of driving a rented truck into pedestrians and bikers on a New York bike path, then-President Donald Trump said that he would “certainly consider” sending him to Guantanamo Bay.
At the time, the White House press secretary said Trump considered Saipov an enemy combatant.
Recently, in response to the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners, Republican congressman Michael McCaul issued a press release condemning US President Joe Biden for this move, insisting that the “transfer of 11 Gitmo prisoners is highly reckless, dangerously naive, and – in the wake of last week’s horrific New Orleans attack – indefensible”.
US Senators Tom Cotton and John Thune also expressed similar outrage, with the latter stating that “In the wake of an ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]-inspired terror attack in New Orleans last week, it is appalling that President Biden would pursue an 11th-hour attempt to release the same detainees that were rejected for transfer on a bipartisan basis in 2023 after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel.”
While these statements never demanded sending the New Orleans attacker, a US military veteran, to Guantanamo, they aim to entrench further the idea that any Muslim transgressions justify the prison’s ongoing operations.
As a frequently weaponised threat, Guantanamo has consistently been used by the state as a way of disciplining Muslim bodies by cultivating fear and trauma for any Muslims who resist or defy it.
When asked to define Guantanamo, a once-detained Muslim man at the prison named Nizar Sassi said this of the prison: “If you want a definition of this place, you don’t have the right to have rights.”
As long as Guantanamo remains open, it will continue to be used as a site of incarceration for those who have been expelled from the law and denied their rights.
That’s why it is past time to close and abolish the prison. Until then, it will continue to loom as an omnipresent threat to Muslims and other marginalised communities.
