Figuring Violence by Adelman Rebecca A.;

Author:Adelman, Rebecca A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

CHAPTER 5

Liberal Imaginaries of Guantánamo

In the waning moments of a 2006 interview with Donald Rumsfeld, Larry King posed a three-word question to the then secretary of defense: “Future of Guantánamo?” Rumsfeld began by framing the detention center as an “interesting problem.” He cited its “bad reputation,” averred that its conditions are humane, and then continued:

We don’t want to be jailer for the world. We don’t. We would prefer not to have anyone. We’d like to have all of these people go back to the countries they came from and be dealt with there. Unfortunately, some of the countries we aren’t allowed to give them to, because we worry that they would not be treated in a humane manner.1

There are good reasons to quibble with this portrayal of the United States as a reluctant power, exceptional even in its breaches, and we cannot know whether Rumsfeld was being sincere or disingenuous in his appraisal. But when I was at Guantánamo, I had an overwhelming impression of its tenuousness, reflected in its improvised facilities and practices, which lent some credence to the notion that this outcome was not part of the original plan. Nearly everyone I spoke to confirmed my sense of the place, echoing common refrains about the expense and inefficiency of the operation, the barely sustainable labor-intensiveness of the processes for confining and guarding the detainees, and the practical reality of being hamstrung by governmental refusal to either close the facility or adequately fund it so that conditions could be improved.

The origins for this chapter reside in an anecdote—of admittedly unknown veracity—that a Defense Department administrator told as we were flying back to Virginia from Guantánamo. Rumsfeld, the story goes, genuinely weary of being the “world’s jailer,” gave a quiet order to a group of DoD officials to generate a list of detainees who might be summarily released. Short on time and guidance, they decided to start with the oldest and began interviewing the men about what they would do if they were, hypothetically, freed. The administrator told me that they expected to hear about reunions with families and resumption of interrupted livelihoods. Instead, they were surprised when one answered that he would go home, fashion a bomb, and then detonate it in a place where it would kill as many American military personnel as possible. DoD officials scrapped the plan to release anyone on the list. Of course, this story may well be apocryphal, and I presume that the narrator had his own motivations for sharing it.

True or not, however, the story struck me because it was the first time in years of reading, thinking, and writing about Guantánamo that I had heard, albeit in a profoundly mediated way, the angry voice of a detainee. Authorized images and sound bites have been trickling out for over a decade, always under the auspices of state and military authority. But these are not the only institutions that mediate detainees’ voices: so, too, do the individuals and organizations that work on their behalf.

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