(GUEST) Revisiting Guantanamo Bay & Biopower In The Coronavirus Era
Guantanamo Bay demonstrates an investment in using imprisonment as a means to dispose and hide people, especially those deemed as ill.
📝 Monthly Round-Up
Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, Dr. Naomi Paik — Much of my interest in this work was inspired by Dr. Paik who dives into the legal precedent that allowed for state rightlessness in her book. She also has similar pieces in the Funambulist and Truthout.
As Trump Relaunches Countering Violent Extremism, Records On Past Illinois Program Reveal Links to FBI, Law Enforcement — Alex Ruppenthal and Asraa Mustufa — This report offers new details on CVE in Chicago, including its enlistment of mental health providers to hold “interventions”.
Community Defense: Sarah T. Hamid on Abolishing Carceral Technologies — I’ve previously written that any talk about abolition must include surveillance. And as Sarah T. Hamid brilliant lays out in this interview, in that same vein, any talk about abolition must also confront the technologies that make modern surveillance and policing possible.
In recent weeks we have seen the world shift in response to police killings, a reflection of the lack of redress for centuries of racial inequities further torn open by the pandemic. Human rights abuses in the United States are consistently painted as exceptions, rather than the norm. But in this conversation, I think often of the history of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, whose history of exceptions have persisted through party shifts and public campaigns to create a now infamous site through a series of legal loopholes.
Although Guantanamo Bay detained people long before President Donald Trump took office, his administration is tied to its horrific legacy. Trump’s Attorney General William Barr served as Attorney General under Bush from 1991 to 1993 when Haitians were detained at Guantanamo Bay. His past rhetoric parallels his rhetoric now, namely in the imprisonment of Black and brown people amidst a pandemic. This summer, Barr oversaw the dispatch of a specialized unit of correctional officers called “Specialized Operations Response Teams” to Washington and Miami in order to arrest and detain protestors, putting more people at risk of contracting the coronavirus, and showing his deep investment in imprisonment as a tactic of control.
The seeds for Guantanamo Bay were planted in 1898 when Spain gave the U.S. ownership of Cuba after the latter intervened in Cuba’s war of independence against Spanish rule. Five years later, the U.S. agreed to leave only if Cuba signed the Platt Amendment, a lease which gave the U.S. a military base that would later become Guantanamo Bay. However, the Platt Amendment introduced one key legal loophole for Guantanamo Bay’s creation: Under one key legal condition, the United States had “complete jurisdiction and control” over the military base but Cuba retained “ultimate sovereignty”.
After almost twenty years of the United States trying to find every possible means to deny Haitian refugees entry, the government turned to Guantanamo Bay. Starting in 1979, the “Haitian Program” thrived off anti-Blackness and U.S. investment in Haiti as a capitalist ally to deny Haitians the right to asylum through detainment, control, imprisonment, and interdiction. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush, with support from then Attorney General Barr, decided to detain Haitians in Guantanamo Bay, which the Department of Defense at the time described as a “safe haven”. However, advocates described Guantanamo Bay as a “concentration camp”, “prison”, or “detention facility”. Of the almost twelve hundred refugees that were housed at Guantanamo, many were denied entry into the U.S., and it was discovered in 1993 that almost three hundred were HIV positive. At the time the U.S. had an HIV ban in place, meaning that individuals with HIV or AIDS were denied entry into the country.
The U.S. government latched onto hysteria surrounding HIV to justify its treatment of Haitian refugees. The public was inundated by images describing Black Haitians as “disease-ridden” refugees languishing in overcrowded small boats and camps. By refusing entry to individuals who were HIV positive, the U.S. placed their bodies and movements under surveillance through the lens of both science and political priorities. The U.S. was invested in tracking the disease, how it spread, and who it spread through, not for the purposes of safety but in order to maintain a delicate status quo, in which denying the entry of refugees was critical.
The treatment of Haitian refugees then is similar to the continued imprisonment of vulnerable individuals with COVID-19. As hotspots develop in many major jails and prisons, the state continues to surveil these bodies while denying them adequate healthcare and treatment, exacerbating the illnesses they are supposedly trying to protect people from. While President Clinton originally refused to close Guantanamo Bay after he took office, a series of hunger strikes and robust legal campaign ended the Haitian prison camp in late 1993. However, this wasn’t the end of detainment at Guantanamo Bay.
All the legal exceptions that allowed the United States to commit the abuse against Haitians remained in place and were used again following 9/11. During the War on Terror, suspected individuals were captured and detained in Guantanamo Bay under the guise that they were potential terrorists. A broad category of South Asians, Arabs, and other Muslims were racialized by the state to fit the category of “enemy combatant”. While surveillance of Muslims was nothing new as seen in how the state surveilled the Nation of Islam during FBI COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s, the tools of imprisonment, detention, and expanding surveillance mechanisms thrived because of the precedent set detaining Haitians. In all the ways that the U.S. detention and deportation regime worked against Haitians in criminalizing migrants, those same tools were used against racialized Muslims.
The legal ambiguity of detention created on the site of Guantanamo Bay has transcended its walls and functions on “our land” as well. The prison regime surveils millions through both criminalization and imprisonment. The physical imprisonment of people in Guantanamo came with surveillance of their bodies – whether it be constant health exams or forced feeding – as well as surveillance as a whole expanding with War on Terror tools and the Immigration and Naturalization Services, new morphed into ICE, monitoring all the ways migrants traveled on U.S. land.
In the War on Terror, the U.S government sought out and captured individuals through surveillance and other military tactics to imprison them in Guantanamo—a site free of due process or constitutional oversight. The state claims that both leaving people to perish due to illness in the case of Haitians and continuing a state of living in the ambiguity of the law with racialized Muslims in Guantanamo now are situations of exception rather than indications of norms in this country. But in reality, the state is exercising what Foucault describes as the “biopower” or essentially the right to “make” live and “let die” in controlling the movement of people in Guantanamo Bay, but giving the federal government the right to determine the conditions of life and death.
Whether it be Haitian refugees or racialized Muslims, Guantanamo Bay demonstrates an investment in using imprisonment as a means to dispose and hide people, especially those deemed as ill. When thinking about the way the state currently deals with COVID-19 in prisons and jails, and continuously sending people to these institutions despite them being hotspots for illness, it is important for us to recognize how little the state cares about curtailing illnesses and more about controlling certain people.
📌 Organizing
Landlord Tech Watch — A result of collaboration between the AI Now Institute, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and [people. power. media], this map allows people to report “landlord tech” like home and neighborhood surveillance systems. Check out Motherboard’s writeup on the project to learn more!
Philly Landlord Spotter — Blasting y’all with tenant related content because, well. Mass evictions are happening. Last week, I published a feature on tenant organizing during the pandemic and featured the Philly Landlord Spotter, an incredibly necessary map that lets you know who owns what properties and where.
Students for Imam Jamil — This youth-led national campaign is working to free U.S. political prisoner Imam Jamil al-Amin, formerly known as H Rap Brown, who has been imprisoned for decades. You can learn more about Imam Jamil’s case and their campaign here.
Isra Rahman is a recent graduate from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with a degree in African American Studies and a minor in Urban Planning. She is active in Believer’s Bail Out and is interested in creating and joining mass movements that challenge all forms of systemic violence in the United States, whether it be through ICE, police, prisons, or the Department of Homeland Security. You can reach her at israfrahman@gmail.com or @israfrahman on twitter.