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Guardians of the Night (2018) is a short‐length film set in Guantánamo, Cuba, that aims to engage with a temporal scape too long disregarded by visual anthropologists: the night. This article, written by the filmmakers, reflects on some of the challenges and opportunities offered by the night for ethnographic fieldwork, filmmaking, and more specifically, sound recording. We locate our work as part of a movement to recognize the night as a spatiotemporal dimension that should be explored further from a sensorial perspective and outside the diecentric focus that social sciences have established in their approaches to social and cultural phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the behavior of the Guantánamo detainees in terms of collaboration and disobedience and how it influences their chances of getting a release recommendation. Joint Task Force Guantanamo–authored memoranda on 765 detainees are used to create a network of accusations between detainees and an attribute data set, which are analyzed using multivariate regression and Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests. It is found that while the distribution of incriminating statements obeys a power law, 62.6 percent of all detainees do not incriminate anyone. Yemenis and Saudi Arabians heavily overcontribute regarding incriminating statements and disobedient actions, whereas Afghans and Pakistanis undercontribute. Disobedient behavior does not affect the likelihood of getting a release recommendation, except for hunger striking, which has a negative effect. By releasing information, detainees don’t improve their own chances of getting release recommendations but impair those of the detainees they implicate. Three different groups of detainees are identified whose behavioral patterns seem to follow distinct logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guantánamo Sugar Company Records in the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami represent some of the only accessible plantation documents for the province of Guantánamo in republican Cuba. Few scholars have researched in the collection and there have not been any publications to draw from it. Such a rich collection allows scholars to tie the province's local political, economic, and social dynamics with larger national, regional, and global processes. This is consistent with ongoing scholarly efforts to understand local and global interactions and to pay more attention to regional differences within Cuba. This research note uses the records to explore local issues of land, labor, and politics in republican-era Guantánamo in the context of larger national and international processes. The collection is especially useful for what it illustrates about Cuban sugar companies during the Revolution that succeeded in 1959. The note then identifies sources that could be useful for scholars researching in the growing fields of the history of business, science and technology, and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Specimens of the gorgonian Plexaura homomalla were sampled from several areas along the fringing reefs fronting the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sample coverage extended from apparently healthy reefs in oceanic waters to declining reefs located in the plume of the drainage from upper parts of Guantánamo Bay. Tentacle tips were excised, and trunk sections were cut and polished. Stable isotope ratios of nitrogen (δ15N) and carbon indicate a strong correlation of reef health with proximity to the plume of the river. Of all the worldwide cases in which land-based sources of pollution have impacted reefs, this one may well be the most intractable. The US Navy has jurisdiction over the reefs, with the obligation to protect them, yet the threat comes down the river from Cuba. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Collected Papers of Zagreb Law Faculty / Zbornik Pravnog Fakulteta u Zagrebu is the property of Sveuciliste u Zagrebu, Pravni Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

At the time of the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, many are wondering about the reasons of its very existence in a country that purports to be the defender of the rule of law and human rights. To answer this question, this paper reviews the development of the regulations (both US and international humanitarian law) that are applied to the detainees. It also examines the violations of basic principles of law that have occurred and continue to occur, such as denial of access to ordinary courts and the right to a trial in case of detention, as well as breaches of the protections and guarantees provided by international humanitarian law. Finally, the author analyses the reasons that have allowed the centre to remain in operation despite President Obama's pledge to close it, which he made early on in his term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's first theoretical proposition, that modern state torture systems contain four types of actors - perpetrators, facilitators, bureaucratic organizations, and bystanders - is followed by four additional propositions that link torture facilitation and bureaucracy to state torture system geography: (1) While facilitators span systemic boundaries - lending legitimacy, procuring resources, and managing protection - most torture perpetrators operate within the boundaries of their encapsulating micro systems. (2) Some torture facilitators traverse their own nation-state's government and non-government bureaucracies, while others cross national boundaries. (3) Torture system actors operate from a legitimized position within normal bureaucratic organizations; they are not extra-systemic "deviant" outsiders and their torturing does not result from an atypical organizational "break down". (4) Some torture facilitators - such as "private" military contract corporations - mediate between formal national and international bureaucracies and a privatized "terra incognita" - a "nether world" simultaneously inside and outside government and state. Such propositions emerged in spite of numerous data collection challenges, with secrecy and data validity ongoing stumbling-blocks to research. Power imbalances between researcher and researched enhanced outcomes in interviews with Brazilian torturers, while inhibiting obtaining information on torture by nation-states. An outcome of comparing torture by authoritarian Brazil (1964-85) and by post-"9/11" US at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is "Torture 101" - a model that replaces "bad apple" and "broken bureaucracy" explanations for torture, with ten structural variables associated with systematic torture by modern states. It is recommended that since modern torture systems are global, those who study modern state torture must traverse states and theorize globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines intra-Caribbean migration and transnationalism through the case of anglophone Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in Cuba. In seeking an explanation for the resurgence of English-speaking Caribbean associations in Cuba during the 1990s, it explores the historical trajectory of this group from the time of arrival through the 1959 Revolution to the present. In addition to providing a narrative of the experience of this particular group of Anglo-Caribbean/Afro-Latin American/African diasporic subjects and illuminating the continuities and discontinuities in transnational practices over time, I argue that this case of West Indian Cubans expands the notion of the transnational social field itself beyond the sending and receiving countries, particularly for those who lived in Guantánamo and worked on the US naval base. I also argue that this case clearly, and perhaps dramatically, demonstrates the primacy of the state in regulating transnational processes and provides insights into how second and third generation immigrants, who are very rooted in their national identity, can become agents of transnational and Diasporic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Metodos en Ecologia y Sistematica is the property of Instituto Centroamericano para la Investigacion en Biologia y Conservacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

What are the likely mental and related physical health consequences of prolonged exposure to common stressors to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Significant distress leads to high rates of psychiatric disorders, medical problems, and functional impairments. The consequences are severe, physically and psychologically, affecting the individual, his or her family, and the culture at large. Damaging conditions endured by detainees are multiple and severe and are reviewed here in detail. The author identifies parallels between Guantanamo detainees and similarly mistreated populations (e.g., prisoners of war, asylum seekers, prisoners) to draw inferences from existing research regarding likely outcomes for Guantanamo detainees. Protective factors normally present are systematically disrupted at Guantanamo. Overall, it is likely that detainees and their families are experiencing significant mental and physical health problems as a result of overlapping severe and chronic stressors related to detention and that this will worsen over time, particularly in the absence of appropriate assessment and treatment. The author addresses political and ethical factors, as well as basic implications for assessment, treatment, and advocacy, although these are not the focus of the article. Researchers and clinicians will face challenges in providing care for this population and understanding the long-term effects of such mistreatment. Sources reviewed are current up to September 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For hundreds of years procedural rights such as habeas corpus have been regarded as fundamental in the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence. In contemporary international law, fundamental norms are called jus cogens. Jus cogens norms are rights or rules that can not be derogated even by treaty. In the list that is often given, jus cogens norms include norms against aggression, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. All of the members of this list are substantive rights. In this paper I will argue that some procedural rights, crucial for the fair functioning of criminal proceedings, such as habeas corpus, should also have the status of jus cogens norms. I will begin by explaining what it means for a right to have jus cogens status. And I will follow this with a defense of having procedural rights like habeas corpus added to the list of jus cogens norms. I will then rehearse some of the debates about the jus cogens status of procedural rights in the European Commission on Human Rights. At the end of this paper, I will look at the attempts to deal with the abuses at Guantanamo by the American Commission on Human Rights, and by the US and Australian courts, as a way to understand why there needs to be a stronger support for habeas corpus than is today provided by regional courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines contestations over psychiatric knowledge during the legal proceedings of Guantanamo detainees. First, the US government's use of mental health professionals to introduce reconfigured definitions of torture is probed. Next, the government's concerns around ascertaining competency to stand trial is reviewed. The article then examines debates over the appropriateness of the death penalty in the cases of five Guantanamo detainees, all suspected of masterminding the 9/11 attacks. The article concludes by exploring how critical anthropology can help elucidate the state's exercise of power over people and their bodies (“biopower”) – an exercise governed in part by legal institutions. Throughout the article, psychiatry is viewed as a discourse that bridges US medical and legal understandings of the body while recognizing that conceptions of the body, life, and death that vary across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the premise that Michael Winterbottom's films exemplify a certain model of transnational cinema, because they are made with international crews and casts, shot on location around the world, financed by transnational capital, and concerned with questions of borders, immigration, imperialism and identity, this article offers a close analysis of The Road to Guantánamo (2006) in order to set out the kind of political practice it claims Winterbottom's cinema enacts. The Road to Guantánamo appears to have been conceived as a very precise and partial intervention in the mediated public sphere: it was released simultaneously in cinemas, on broadcast television, on DVD and over the internet for streaming and downloading. By addressing multiple and overlapping publics in this particularly direct way, the film was revealing its partial and contestatory status, a status deriving as much from the multiple media of its transmission as from its content. Offering a close analysis of the heterogeneous composition of The Road to Guantánamo and the striking coolness and neutrality of its style of docudrama (also characteristic of Winterbottom's other films), the article concludes that the film may refrain from political affect because of its concern with political effects, and addresses specific and informed publics in a new type of political practice made possible by transnational media and a recently transnationalized public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the true costs of war? If anthropologists are to help answer this question, it will be because we can link personal narratives (and qualitative methods) to historically deep and geographically broad analyses of conflict. This essay seeks to explore the costs of armed conflict—the economic, affective, and general social costs of war—by examining the experience of a single family, two generations of it, caught in the midst of two conflicts. Their experience links the United States to Haiti, Cuba, and Iraq. As limited as conclusions might be, in reflecting on these narratives, we might still conclude that the true costs of war are rarely, if ever, gauged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critique of the laws of war (and international law in general) coming out of America as the war on terror began seemed to have emerged as a response to the horror of 9/11 and the belief that the United States was now engaged in a “new paradigm” of warfare. However, the Bush administration’s argument needs to be situated in a wider historical context. The source of the arguments against applying the Geneva Conventions to the prisoners caught in Afghanistan emerged well before 9/11 and can be traced to the end of the Cold War. These doctrines emerged out of the work of the “new sovereigntists” and out of the frustrations guided by coalition warfare. This paper seeks to trace the origin of these arguments which challenge the traditional division between jus ad bellum (the law governing the resort to force) and jus in bello (the law governing tactics in warfare). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to advance in the analysis about the nature, the meaning and the reach of the Guantánamo base. In order to do so, we describe the route of the phenomenon, integrating it in the broader dynamics of the current militarized globalization whose vector and dominating shape go through the imperial strategy of the USA post-September 11. Deep articulated with the enlarging logic and consequences of global capitalism, this strategy implies, among other distinctive traces, the legitimation of growing spaces of exceptions, the preventive war without imminent attack threat and the ascension of the "absolute enemy" embodied in the deterritorialized image of the new theological political terrorist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the challenges for the construction of an announced smart power agenda in the American foreign policy taking for granted the closure of the military prision in the Guantánamo Bay in the Obama administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have mostly analyzed information from mental health practitioners, attorneys, and institutions to critique mental health practices in the War on Terror. These sources offer limited insights into the suffering of detainees. Detainee accounts provide novel information based on their experiences at Guantánamo. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary is the only text from a current detainee that provides a first-person account of his interrogations and interactions with health professionals. Despite being advertised as a diary, however, it has undergone redaction from American government officials. This article examines Slahi's account of his interrogations and representations of mental health at Guantánamo and considers its role within the narrative function of the nation. At stake is the right of detainees to narrate, scholars to critique medical practices in the War on Terror, and the nation's attempts to control its narration.