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5. Prison Portents: Guant
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122 5 Prison Portents Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror I guess we weren’t really thinking, “Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered,” Harman said. “It was just—Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person.” I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them, I go, “Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.” But when we’re in that situation it wasn’t as bad as it looks coming out on the media, I guess, because people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they’ll take photos of it. —Philip Gourevitch and Erroll Morris, quoting Sabrina Harman, in Standard Operating Procedure, 2008 Woe betide any man who depends on the abstract humanity of another for his food and protection. Woe betide any person who has no state, no family, no neighborhood, no community that can stand behind to enforce his claim of need. —Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers, 1984 To imagine the individual caught outside of the safety and security of history and society seems impossible, a resolute fiction. However, human rights law, in its very establishment, requires us to acknowledge such a reality—as do prisons. As political philosopher Michael Ignatieff insists, “Beneath the social there ought to be the natural. Beneath the duties that tie us to individuals, there ought to be a duty that ties us to all men and women whatever their relation to us. In fact, beneath the social, the historical, there is nothing at all.”1 Prisons and their spectators exist in Prison Portents 123 the precarious space where this “nothingness” risks perpetual disclosure but strangely rarely achieves such visibility. Punishment always carries within it the distinct ability to sever the most fundamental of social bonds and deny individuals the legal status that might not ensure but at least invoke their needs, their rights, and their lives. It is a rare case where the limits of punishment are exposed, but in the midst of the war on terror, the United States not only created such sites but actively invoked them as authoritative and legitimate spaces from which to punish. Public discussions about imprisonment in a post–9/11 context have been structured by a small set of seemingly anomalous U.S. war prisons— detention sites like those at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, just outside of Baghdad. In the war on terror, these prisons, in a manner distinct from any other, have predominated American media as well as public and legal discourse on punishment and pain. Their invocations across legal documents, government hearings, human rights documents, news, comedy , television, and film are common. They have become, in their routine invocation since the establishment of their operation, normalized, familiar aspects of American and global culture. As sites in which spectacle is symbiotically joined with suffering, they represent not simply another primary way in which prisons have pulled our attention and popular consciousness but a place from which to investigate the relationship of social response to the production of pain. In these spaces, the meaning and possibility of penal spectatorship, particularly in its ability to achieve any kind of meaningful witnessing, is sorely tested. Popular engagement with these new war prisons is complex, marked by troubling gaps and silences in cultural vocabularies and an ephemeral , fleeting quality in the duration and depth of public attention. Guant ánamo as the epicenter of the legal architecture of the war on terror has been commonly cited in public discourse due to its ambiguous legal and political origins, but as a site of ongoing indefinite detention and interrogation since the first prisoners were moved there in January 2002 remained largely closed off and invisible to public oversight. Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, materialized through a spectacular visual display of torture, creating an immediate popular and juridical debate about oversight with little resolution, and then dropped away quickly from popular discussions. Nevertheless, even as these prisons deny public oversight and eventually are closed, they refuse to go away, becoming instead the subjects of a wave of recent war documentaries,2 legal and political exemplars of the Bush administration’s legacy, and penal portents of the role of [3.229.122.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:18 GMT) 124 Prison Portents prisons amid shifting rules of engagement in the war on terror. Other...