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Guantánamo 159 in films, museums, docudramas, internet sites, photography books, comics, fiction, even fairy tales, . . . and pop songs” (18).19 Furthermore, even if we were to consider a “connection” between the concentration camp and Guantánamo Bay, it would not necessarily follow that we would therefore be aghast at our own capacity for antipathy and inhumanity. Guantánamo Bay exists for one of two or a combination of both reasons. One could argue that we are perfectly capable of imagining how another would suffer, and it is precisely because of this imaginative capacity that we devise formidable apparatuses of suffering and inflict them upon those we actively choose to target. the moving testimony in may 2008 of stephen Oleskey and other detainee defense lawyers to the House subcommittee on Foreign Affairs (subcommittee on international Organizations, Human rights, and Oversight) on the horrific conditions that detainees endure at Guantánamo Bay highlights in full measure this tendency. Oleskey (2008) asserts: these six and one-third years have seen our client mustafa Ait idir beaten to the point of facial paralysis and broken bones and sprayed with pepper spray in unprovoked attacks by guards at Guantanamo. they have seen our client saber lahmar’s muscles atrophy and his psychological well-being decline precipitously during the nearly two years he has spent confined to an 8′ × 6′ concrete cell in near complete isolation , cut off from human contact, physical activity, and all natural light. And they have seen our client lakhdar Boumediene—now entering the eighteenth month of his hunger strike against the injustices he and others have suffered at Guantanamo—painfully force-fed twice every single day through a 43-inch tube that is excruciatingly inserted into his nostril and down into his stomach. (2–3) Jasbir puar (2005) argues that our ability to inflict cruelty upon certain types of people—those whom we consider barbaric and unlike us—is not “exceptional”; the violation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib is part of a broader culture of abominating human bodies that permeates our society, she observes: “torture is at the very least doubly embedded in sociality: it is integral to the missionary/savior discourse of liberation and civilizational uplift, and it constitutes apposite punishment for terrorists and the bodies that resemble them” (15). Donald rumsfeld, first secretary of defense under the George W. Bush administration, railed that the men at Guantánamo Bay are “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth” (qtd. in Gilmore 2002). Gen. richard myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff until October 2005, said of them: “these are people that would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down, i mean. so these are very, very dangerous people” (Fein 2008, A14). the “suicides” by hanging in June 2006 by three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were seen by the camp commander as an “act of asymmetrical warfare against us” (BBC news 2006). 160 Chapter 4 (scott Horton’s recent Harper’s Magazine essay [2010] raises the possibility that these suicides were in fact killings.) the men at Guantánamo Bay are “the wretched” (Fanon 2005) of our national earth; their bodies are at the mercy of an overwhelmingly determined and arbitrary machinery of legal power. While most of the nation is willing to let Guantánamo Bay reside at the periphery of its consciousness, a few hundred lawyers are making it the battlefield for the national soul. they are wresting Guantánamo from its status as “the excised space of the state” (Davidson 2003, 6) and are laboring to ensure that the detainees confined there do not linger indefinitely in a netherworld of abandonment . seton Hall law professor mark Denbeaux (2006) and his team of law students conducted a meticulous analysis of government documents (the Combatant status review Board letters) to reveal that even by the government’s own data, the individuals held at Guantánamo Bay are in overwhelming number remarkably innocuous. in a report distinguished by its dispassionate and clinical analysis of information, and buttressed by compelling charts, Denbeaux and his team imply that the government’s continued holding of the detainees with no prospect of their being released is illogical and arbitrary. Once language is part of an official document, it can take on an importance that has little relation to its inherent worth. the kind of evidence that the government views as sufficient to determine that a detainee has...

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