Search

The article offers a personal recollection of Barbara Harlow and her impact on the author's intellectual development. Harlow's book Barred: women, writing, and political detention (1992) and her later writings on the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay are revisited for their contemporary significance. The author situates Harlow as a unique literary critic whose sustained work was conjunctural reading, translating and writing across geopolitical and disciplinary borders; her interventions being made in commitment to her honed liberatory agendas and visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is a quintessential structure of the US national security state and contemporary Empire. For such imperial formations to proceed as if they are 'normal' requires solidarity from various publics. This paper explores what it means to refuse such solidarity through an ethnographic examination of Witness Against Torture (WAT), a group of US citizens enacting solidarity with the men detained at Guantánamo. WAT's tactical repertoire intervenes in three ways. The Guantánamo prison is not supposed to be seen, but WAT travels there to expose state secrets and the administration's myth of transparency. The prisoners are not supposed to be heard, but WAT publicly amplifies their testimonies through affectively potent street performances. Indefinite detention and torture are meant to remain distant, but WAT links the plight of detainees to that of Black communities in the US interior. Through these acts, WAT simultaneously reveals and contests the culture of erasure and radical divisiveness upon which the US national security state depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just over two years into the Obama administration, what have been its achievements in relation to the abuses formerly committed by the Bush administration under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’? On his first full day in office, Obama, a former scholar of constitutional law, signed an order to close Guantánamo within one year. However, as the record of the past two years examined here shows, that early promise has not been fulfilled. Instead, the ‘global war on terror’ has continued to be prosecuted by his administration, and, in some areas, the extension of executive power, in apparent defiance of the US Constitution, has gone even further. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The effects of the war on terror in restricting civil liberties have been widely documented; its exacerbation of Islamophobia less so. But one shocking development has remained invisible - the rounding up, imprisonment and indefinite house arrest of a number of Muslim men resident in the UK, in a situation analogous to Guantánamo. Held for years without charge, under restricted regimes of twelve to twenty-four hour curfews, with virtually no access to the wider world and kept in ignorance of the alleged evidence against them, the impact on them and their families has been devastating. Many had come to Britain as refugees seeking a safe haven; some have been driven into madness, some have attempted suicide, some have left their families and returned voluntarily to regimes where they may face imprisonment and torture. The mental and physical health impacts on the men and their families, of an inhumanity that beggars belief, masked under the bureaucracy of 'control orders', 'SIAC deportation bail' and torturous legal processes, is here unveiled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the torture and sadistic treatment of prisoners brought about by the United States war on terror. The treatment of prisoners epitomizes the nature of military imprisonment. Also, the actions of the military prison guards show the norms of a civilian prison. The war on terror is executed with excessive force and indefinite detention. In a way, imprisonment quarantines the effects of poverty worldwide.

Focuses on the practice of torture to the detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Publication of a massive body of evidence on the systematic use of torture by the army and police; Debates on the damage done by counter-insurgency to the victims and to the individuals and regimes deploying the troop; Impact of the planned invasion of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration on leading to a renewed interest in French theories of revolutionary warfare.