Paik Questions: The Roles of Rightlessness

Introduction The Roles of Rightlessness (3-9) ● Who is “rightless” and how does Paik define these individuals? (3) ○ What are some key characteristics in terms of how rightless individuals come to that occupy that status? “Violence that their removal requires … capture, transport, surveillance, enforced boredom, interrogations, torture, etc.” ○ What does Paik argue is at the center of rightless subjects? “But as I argue, what lies at the very center of rightlessness … is not mattering, not being worth listening to.” ● What are the three historical consequences Paik argues led to the creation of the rightless? (4) “ (1) the color-blind legal reforms that produce racist state violence, (2) the management of perceived crises over ‘alien invasion’ by ‘diseased’ migrants, and (3) the fight against global terrorism.” ● According to Paik, can there be rights without rightlessness? (4) “... the recognition of rights depends on the denigration of the rightless. Rightlessness is therefore necessary, and endemic, to rights.” → “As these men and women [past detainees] recognize, people are rendered rightless not as the result of the failures of rights, but as a necessary condition for rights to have meaning in the first place.” ● What comparisons between Hannah Ardent and Nizar Sassi does Paik make? (6) ○ Why does she use these two individuals to make this point, and how does this example in the introduction frame her argument and historiographical intervention to come? ● Paik writes: “Thus, although camps, particularly those located outside formal US territory, are understood as extreme and external to the US, such ideological divides between the normal and the exceptional, or the foreign and the domestic, obscure their co-constitution and connection to each other.” (6) ○ In what ways do physical space and “spatial exceptions” shape camps/rightlessness? ○ How do these ideas of space shape Paik’s argument? ● Paik also writes: “While divisions between inside/outside and alien/citizen bleed into each other, the US can embrace rights and yet create rightless subjects by pushing camps and rightlessness beyond the forms of belonging conferred by spatial territory and national status.” (7) ○ How does shifting camps and rightlessness outside of the “borders of the US” mitigate the US seeming as though rights are violated? ○ What shift do we see from Japanese internment to present-day Guantanamo? ○ Does this shift in physical space work, in terms of public perceptions and attitudes, to shift the rightlessness outside of the US? 1 ● What is “camp thinking” as defined by Paul Gilroy? How does this idea related to rightlessness? “As Gilroy cogently argues, because we are divided and set against each other by camp thinking, a direct relationship binds the racism and nationalism that is considered conventional with the camps seen as exceptional.” (8) The Roots of Rightlessness (9-13) ● What is Paik’s argument regarding the UDHR and the US’ role in promoting human rights globally? What does this argument in particular reveal about the US’ ability to avoid/or ignore the UDHR among other impressions of human rights? (10) ● Paik writes: “The US delivers rights as a desirable, benevolent, ‘gift of freedom’, one that has helped secure US global dominance … with no alternative to this political lingua franca, the US invocation of rights has enabled global hierarchies of power and violent interventions.” (11) ○ Two questions from this quote: ■ How does this relate to our reading of Porter on Benevolent Empires? ■ Do you agree with Paik’s statement? Was the US only utilizing rights/freedom as a tool for ensuring US hegemony or for different benefits post-WWII/Cold War? The Testimonies of Rightlessness (13-17) ● Historiographical: Why does Paik utalize oral histories and testimonies from rightlessness individuals? (1415) ○ In what ways do these first-person accounts help to bring more personal understandings and accounts to rightless people? ○ What benefit does Paik see to use testimonies for its connections to the future? ● Paik writes: “In demanding recognition from the state, rightless subjects must reproduce their subordinate position to make their appeals intelligible to an entity not interested in recognizing either their suffering or its own transgressions … the rightless remained, even when speaking, ‘not worth listening to.’” (16) ○ In what ways does a rightless subjects’ need to maintain their subordinate position reveal that the state, regardless of the subjects’ current status, maintains the power at any time to make someone rightless? ○ What are the implications of this, in terms of how those who are/have been rightless continue to remain fearful of returning to that status? The Stakes of Rightlessness (17-18) ● What does Paik mean in the following: “As part of its pedagogy, the testimony of the rightless hails its recipients in ways that might forge relationships connecting the rightful and the rightless. And yet, the responsibility for forging these ethical and political connections lies not soley with the rightless witness, but also with the rightful recipient.” (17) ○ According to Paik and this excerpt, what responsibility is on the “rightful recipient”? ○ What is a “rightful recipient” to do if they are at risk of becoming rightlessness? 2 PART I: Japanese-American Internment Camps & Redress CHAPTER 1: Internment Remains, 1988 Civil Liberties Act and Racism Re-Formed ● What was the Civil Liberties Act (1988)? How does Paik contextualize this act and introduce readers to redress? What are Paik’s initial critiques of redress and the CLA of 1988? (30) ● Paik writes: “Redress demonstrates how the parameters of U.S. liberal governance can seem to become more inclusive without changing the logic of the state’s racially differentiated investment in the rightful and the rightless. “ The acceptance of some racial others through the auspices of liberal inclusion is not only limited and provisional but also works to entrench domains of exclusion.” (31) ○ In what ways does redress shift liberal governance? ○ Additionally, in what ways does Paik argue redress is promoting “model minorities”? ● What was the loyalty questionnaire issued to Japanese-American men? What does this test and the decisions made thereafter regarding that rightless individual reveal about the state and race at this time? (32) ● How did the “dominant rhetoric of redress” work to bolster American nationalism and exceptionalism? “Indeed, the dominant rhetoric of redress—of its “renewed . . . traditional commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice—recuperated American exceptionalism and a progress narrative of a state so enlightened that it could admit the errors of its past to move forward with a better understanding of its democratic essence.” (35) “He [Greg Grandin] further argues that truth commissions become a ritual that enacts ‘nationalism’s enabling paradox: the need to forget acts of violence central to state formation that can never be forgotten.’ Though inspired by the global struggle for rights, and cast as the embodiment of that struggle, truth commissions like the CWRIC acknowledge removal and exclusion, but only in ways that further consolidated the authority of the state.” (36) ● What do the CWRIC testimonies and Reverend Jitsuo Morikawa reveal about the way in which testimonies and redress were discussed and issued? (42-43) ○ Are there ties to Porter’s Benevolent Empire, domestically? ○ In what ways do the dialogues of the state, being the one at fault, determining the redress speak to the lack of buy-in and equity in these dialogues? ● What did Shirley S. Nakao’s comments during redress testimonies, particularly about the US’ racism, immigration, and exclusion policies being crucial to the US’ development say about shifting dialogues at the time from those testifying? “Insisting on internment’s “broader historical context,” she cited the “genocide of Native Americans,” slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the “annexation of Mexican land,” and the exploitation of braceros. “The systematic separation of people on the basis of race, color, and national origin to be specially exploited and oppressed has historically been, and is, an integral part of the development of the U.S. nation,” she asserted.” (45) 3 “She further called attention to contemporary forms of racism both in domestic and imperial contexts, like massive budgets cuts to social welfare, proposed calls for the mass detention of Iranians during the 1979–81 Iranian hostage crisis, and the U.S. military’s “saber-rattling” from “El Salvador to the Middle East to Southern Africa.” (45-46) ● What other comparisons and examples of American Imperialism did witness recount? And what were the impacts of these accounts in directly countering the US and did this impact their redress? “Witnesses also moved beyond racism within the United States, and shed light on the global reach of U.S. imperial state power. Multiple internees paired the devastation wrought by internment and by the military’s use of the atomic bomb. Internees who had families and homes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to cope with the catastrophe, and uncertainty, that had come in August 1945.” (49) ● How did broader shifts and changes in US domestic policies during the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations shape the neoliberal state and market reforms which would impact redress and “race statecraft”? (54) “Less obvious but equally insidious, the rise of the neoliberal state, what Gilmore calls the “antistate state,” “is being built on prison foundations.”98 The crisis in U.S. capitalism created the possibility for a massive, rapid expansion of the U.S. prison regime. Neoliberal reforms worked hand in hand with the escalating use of law-and-order tactics and the criminalization of social and economic insecurity and mental illness. Put differently, free market reforms of the economy and the undoing of the welfare state helped exacerbate social and material inequalities, while removing the social safety net for the working classes and the poor—the people most vulnerable to the economic contractions that came with the closing of the golden age of U.S. capitalism. The simultaneous, accelerated use of law-and-order tactics targeted those same people made insecure by neoliberal reforms.” (54) “Indeed, President Reagan shaped his political identity by asserting a tough stance on domestic crime and against “illegal” immigration, promoting the War on Drugs and increased border control and regulation of immigrants. These programs suspended constitutional rights and contributed heavily to the inequitable punishment and imprisonment of people of color. As Gilmore notes, the U.S. government increasingly met the rise of militant antiracist activism in the late 1960s by criminalizing these efforts to upend current structures of inequality and domination” (54) CHAPTER 2: Residues of Rightlessness, Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment ● What does Paik mean when she writes that “rightlessness can become an inherited condition” and how does she develop this argument as well as the “afterlife of internment” throughout the chapter? (58-59) ● In what ways did redress and the state push forward individuals who were detained to “move on” or move forward from their own past and that of Japanese-Americans? “Official redress sought to ensure that the damage of internment was safely put to rest. If the nation-state has already acknowledged its wrongdoing and thereby moved on from this shameful history, then subjects who continue to be affected by internment needlessly dwell on the past. Their refusal to leave those barbed wires behind harms only themselves … Further, the afterlife of 4 internment has proved even more difficult to convey. The transformation of rightlessness from its formation in the camps to its afterlife is indeterminate, elusive, and it registers in ways that are barely visible or not visible at all.” (60) -- Tajiari Excerpt Video -“By following the ghost and exploring the afterlife of internment, Tajiri shows how the release from camp and the restoration of rights do not solve the problems of rightlessness that internment created. Rightlessness and the camps permanently change the subject, far beyond the time and space of imprisonment, and far beyond the imprisoned. Tajiri copes with her postmemory by integrating her mother’s few memories and historical sources into her narrative, but the compiled images and texts can only document what remains of her loss. They cannot fill that loss. Making peace with the ghost of internment does not mean the ghost has vanished. In tracing what remains of rightlessness, Tajiri has documented her desire to represent what ultimately exceeds representation, what remains impossible to represent.” (76) “Nevertheless, internment’s past can be lived with. Tajiri’s ghost story shows how contesting rightlessness, even decades after the event, can generate ways of being that neither fully transcend it by becoming rightful subjects nor fully submit to its damage … Tajiri transforms a painful past into a project of the present. In the same way that she manages to recuperate images authored by the perpetrator state, to look past and find new meaning, she shows that rightlessness does not end solely in damage, even as its residues remain. It is not only possible but necessary to perform this kind of work, unhinging the seeming equivalence between the state’s perspective that captured the image and irrefutable authority.” (76) PART II: Haiti Refugees & Naval Station at GTMO CHAPTER 3: Just to Stay Alive, Haitian Refugees and GTMO’s Carceral Quarantine ● As Haitian immigrants who passed their asylum screenings, but tested positive for HIV, unable to go to the US due to Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), but also unable to return to Haiti due to their status → How was the USG’s initial plan made more difficult by different policies and executive detainment of refugees? “Though they passed their asylum screening interviews and therefore under international and U.S. law could not be returned to Haiti, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) refused them entry into the United States, following a 1987 law that prohibited HIV-positive persons from crossing into U.S. borders. Thus began their legal limbo. The U.S. executive branch ultimately detained the HIV-positive refugees indefinitely in a supposed “humanitarian mission,” under filthy, militarized conditions that so endangered their already compromised health that the federal Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. declared it “nothing more than an HIV prison camp.” (81) ● What historical context goes into the US renting out Guantanamo Bay from Cuba? What USG legislation led to Cuban independence with conditions of a US military base? (83) 5 ○ What does Paik argue GTMO represents for the US in the region? ○ What context does the creation of GTMO bring to how it will be used for Haitian refugees? “Produced through warfare and contradictory mechanisms—such as recognizing independence while maintaining the right to intervene—the naval base at Guantánamo Bay is a manifestation of U.S. imperial power, creating control beneath the veneer of flexibility, suggesting negotiation while actually demanding compliance.” (83) ● What neoliberal reforms are taking place at this time in Haiti and what political instability leads to the influx of Haitian refugees? “The transformation of Haiti into a free trade zone took root under the repressive regimes of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his heir, Jean-Claude, called “Baby Doc,” both of whom relied on the Volunteers for National Security (VSN), also known as the tontons macoutes, a personal security force that spied on and extorted the population, reportedly disappearing tens of thousands. Seeing the Duvaliers as important Cold War allies in containing communist Cuba despite their human rights violations, the U.S. government funneled tens of millions of dollars to their repressive regimes through avenues like military support, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the CIA. In 1971, it also smoothed the undemocratic passing of political control from father to son in exchange for Jean-Claude’s support of “a new economic program guided by the United States,” featuring neoliberal reforms that siphoned wealth from Haiti to U.S. businesses.” (83) ● How are the Haitian asylum claims reviewed by the USG? Their labeling instead of refugees to economic migrants is what sends them to GTMO, but why does immigration/refugee policy function this way, what government agencies are involved in this decision? (85) → 1980 Refugee Act “The evidence unveiled the racist mechanisms behind the ban on Haitian asylum claims. For example, a 1979 State Department report claiming that repatriated refugees had nothing to fear on their return to Haiti was so fundamentally flawed as to be “unworthy of belief.” But these flaws produced their intended result—ostensibly proving that Haitians could only be economic migrants, not refugees … including Public Health Services, Customs, Border Patrol, and the State Department.” (85) ● What is interdiction as related to the law of the UN Convention on Refugees and the 1980 Refugee Act? According to Paik, how does interdiction benefit the US’ interests in avoiding an influx of Haitians? “Nevertheless, interdiction enabled the United States to evade federal and international law. While the reach of the courts ostensibly ended at the edges of U.S. territory, the practice of interdiction extended the U.S. border, and the government’s claims of sovereignty, to include the six hundred miles between the United States and Haiti. Interdiction exemplifies the ways in which human rights have advanced U.S. interests.” (86) ● What was the US’ HIV ban? Was it effective in prohibiting those with HIV to enter the US? 6 “Although the HIV immigration ban targeted and stigmatized all persons living with HIV, regardless of national origin, the law was not effectively implemented and did not equally impede all HIV-positive persons from entering the United States. Further, the HIV ban included an exemption for refugees who passed their asylum interviews. Thus, while the law already permitted refugees, even if HIV positive, into U.S. territory, the INS nevertheless used this law to justify its exclusion of Guantánamo’s HIV-positive Haitians.” (87) ● Why does the proposed repatriation of Haitian refugees by H.W. Bush’s Administration not hold up under US law? What amendment in the US Constitution is argued doesn’t allow this? ○ “The Second Circuit Court of Appeals prohibited the INS from rescreening or repatriating any refugees who had already did screened in. It decided that the Fifth Amendment right to counsel did, in fact, apply at Guantánamo, “since the U.S. has exclusive control over Guantánamo and given . . . the apparent familiarity of the governmental personnel at the base with the guarantees of due process, fundamental fairness, and humane treatment that this country purports to afford to all persons.” (88) ● What was President Clinton’s reaction to the USG’s actions in GTMO and the Haiti refugees when he took office? “Clinton focused on the continued costs the United States would have to pay unless the state deployed its military force. Indeed, Clinton admitted that the management of Haitian refugees, including camp imprisonment, was temporally indefinite and potentially expanding, as the danger of hundreds of thousands of poor, desperate black people ready to flood across the U.S. border loomed. Unless the United States militarily invaded Haiti, he suggested, Haiti’s poorest and most desperate would invade the United States. Yet, before the U.S. military invasion of Haiti alleviated such fears of “alien invasion,” refugees had been languishing in the Guantánamo camps with no end in sight—nearly three hundred HIV-positive Haitians whom the United States could not repatriate, but to whom the United States would not offer asylum.” (90) ● How do concerns regarding HIV/AIDS and public health unfairly prejudice Haitians? What role does race play in these public health concerns? “The long-standing concept of black bodies, particularly Haitian bodies, as carriers of contagion. That concept exploded amid the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s … Multiple fears around contagion thus merged in the bodies of the HIV-positive refugees of Guantánamo, the disease they carried compounding their preexisting status as contagious agents.” (90) “These ideas about race, nation, and contagion enabled the Guantánamo camp; they made the isolation and quarantine of Haitian refugees, and the forms of violent coercion that occurred therein, seem both logical and necessary. The body of knowledge equating Haitians and contagion justified the U.S. state’s carceral quarantine without ever having to justify itself.” (92) ● How, if at all, does global public perception and the USG’s representation of a “benevolent, compassionate, caretaker” change how the refugees are managed at GTMO? “Only when in its self-interest—fostering an image of benevolent, compassionate caretakers—did the U.S. state try to make the camp appear livable, making visible improvements to the conditions for the sake of outside observers. But as Shenson’s comments indicate, even with these extra efforts 7 to clean the grounds, provide edible food, and remove barbed wire, the camp remained barely habitable. Despite these brief moments of subterfuge, the camp’s precarious deficiencies were not atypical, but constituted the mundane norm for the refugees.” (95) “The refugees’ question, whether the U.S. state intended for them to live longer or die sooner, points to the essential paradox of the camp as a humanitarian mission that did not recognize its inhabitants as human. ” (99) CHAPTER 4: Not a Place to Live: Resisting Rightlessness through word and body ● In what ways did military and INS representatives mislead and misinform the refugees about their rights under the law and/or repatriation? “To name only a few examples, state officials told the refugees that returning to Haiti would cause them no danger or risk, that failing to repatriate voluntarily would result in staying at Guantánamo for ten or more years, and that submitting to the second asylum interview was the only way to get to the United States” (104) ● What was Camp VII and who was held there? Why in particular was this noted by the refugees? What did the refugees do to attempt and disband it? (108-112) “... this performance of militarized warfare backed by nonlethal but concrete, brutal violence. The raid emerged from the paradox underlying the camp—as a humanitarian mission that “could not let us die,” as Camy said, but held the refugees under conditions of minimal existence, “just to stay alive.” Though not intended to kill them, the raid was a dramatic reassertion of the camp’s authoritarian control, and an explicit retaliation for the refugees' political organizing and protest.” (111) ● What changes did Colonel Stephen P. Kinder bring to the camp and relations with refugees? What change in approach did he take with the refugees that arguably worsened relations? “On taking command, Kinder treated the camp not as a transient operation, but as long-term undertaking. He assumed that the courts would not expedite their decision on the refugees’ status and that the INS would not, on its own accord, allow the refugees to enter the United States.” (112) “Believing “it was best not to hold the Haitians on Guantánamo” for both the military and the refugees, Kinder made recommendations through the military chain of command to transfer the refugees off the Guantánamo base, out of the military’s hands, and into the custody of another, more appropriate organization. In the meantime, he worked with the refugees to make camp conditions more tolerable and ease the tensions between captives and captors. He met individually with each Haitian detained in Camp VII and released them; gave all the refugees access to more areas of the camp; provided a communal television and access to outgoing phone calls to Haiti; and improved the food service. He also created quality-of-life programs, like beach trips, shopping and meal excursions on the base, organized basketball and soccer games, education classes, and, at the request of the women refugees, a beauty parlor. Recognizing that “the most solid thing they had was their faith,” Kinder helped them build a church to encourage their spiritual commitments. He also recommended, in consultation with the base doctors, that five of the most immunodeficient 8 Haitians be medically evacuated to the U.S. mainland, where they would be less likely to acquire a potentially fatal infection. His superiors rebuffed these requests without explanation” (112) ● Do you agree with Paik’s assertions that Kinder was acting with paternalistic methods and those of control over the refugees? ○ If this is the case, is this still not a better approach than prior approaches, being more punitive under past leadership? “Despite many refugees’ feelings of respect and even fondness for him, Kinder managed the refugees through paternalistic methods, treating them as children for whom he held responsibility … Kinder says that he “would always stay on the Haitians to do it [clean the port-a-johns],” not unlike a father pestering his children to clean their rooms or take their medicine, “because it was their responsibility.” (113) ● What do some Haitians hope to show through attempted suicides? In what ways does this reflect the neglect or even Paik’s rightlessness being “not mattering, not being worth listening to.” ○ What does the USG do to try and address attempted suicides? “The refugees considered each suicide attempt a genuine effort to end a life, not solely a cry for attention. At the same time, they simultaneously recognized that, as Michel noted, “each one of these people who have tried to kill themselves, they always said that they were doing that so that the people at the camp can have their freedom.” (115) “Within the camp’s boundaries, suicide was no longer an individual act of despair, when it so clearly emanated from urgent, shared conditions of rightless imprisonment. To the refugees, suicide was a collective, political action with the communicative potential to make themselves heard in a context of disregard. Michel challenged the military commanders to take responsibility for the refugees by raising the specter of their possible deaths. However, as Colonel Trimble suggested, their acts of dissent—verbal or physical, even resulting in death—remained unheard by the U.S. state” (115) ● How is the treatment and situation of those detained at GTMO resolved by the USG? Is redress and the response to their mistreatment as noted as Haitians would have liked, did they receive fair compensation and redress? “Although judicial successes like HCC III seem to challenge state power, in this case closing Guantánamo’s “HIV prison camp,” only the most truncated victories for rights can emerge in a situation in which the U.S. state can decide when and where those rights can be annulled. When read within the parameters of the legal context that produced them, the refugees’ testimonies seem inherently restricted from making bolder claims regarding justice or U.S. statecraft—their value and effectiveness instead contained within this specific case. Nevertheless, even though the state has rendered it dead in the law, this case has left a rich archive of the interpretations of rightlessness and of the camp from the situated perspectives of subjects who have lived at this limit.” (128) 9 PART III: Post 9/11 GTMO CHAPTER 5: Creating the Enemy Combatant, Justice & Realities of Rightlessness ● In what ways, as Paik earlier argues and is discussed in the previous history, does GTMO operate as President Bush stated a “useful corner of the world” and how does this reflect physical space and geography in defining rightlessness? ○ “Legal black hole” or “legal equivalent of outer space” (133) ● What was the 2001 AUMF? How did this allow President Bush and others to create the category of “an enemy combatant”? What are the legal implications of this new category for rightless? (134-135) “These memos reveal a deep concern about legal limits, emanating in part from the overlapping and contradictory laws at stake, particularly the ambiguously worded Convention against Torture (CAT), a United Nations human rights agreement that the United States ratified in 1994. “The language of the statutes is written vaguely,” John Fredman, a chief counsel to the CIA’s counterterrorism center, stated. “It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” (135) ● What does the series of lawsuits, Supreme Court challenges, and responses of executive authority show about how the “enemy combatant” was constructed? In what ways did this series of lawsuits and memos change things, if it all, for detainees in GTMO? (137) “Rasul v. Bush (2004), the Supreme Court determined that Guantánamo prisoners did have access to the writ, thereby inciting a rush of habeas petitions and allowing lawyers to meet clients in the camp for the first time, two years after the camp opened.” (137) ● How do the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) and the broadening of the scope of the definition of an enemy combatant to anyone “who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy forces” against the United States further drive rightlessness? “The category of the enemy combatant became increasingly amorphous and increasingly distanced from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or the specific Afghan conflict. According to this revised definition, the CSRTs had to establish only that each prisoner engaged in the vaguely termed “belligerent acts” or “hostilities” against the United States.” (137) ● Paik writes: “ Presumed guilty until proven innocent, the prisoners were condemned to indefinite detention not by evidence proving their crimes, but by an absence of evidence that would refute the government’s (unprovable) allegations. Whereas the state could formerly declare a population like Japanese persons living on the West Coast to be rightless and sweep them into detention by executive fiat, under the ascension of rights, the state here developed a more sophisticated means to achieve these same goals under a veneer of rights recognition and due process.” (138) ○ In what ways does these legal changes and ability see a progression in the USG’s ability develop a rightless population? 10 ● Why do some detainees chose different ways to identify with the label of being an enemy combatant? Some use their tribunals to speak out against their treatment with others viewing the label as a “honorable emblem of faith” or others to not go to their tribunal at all? What do each of these approaches reflect about sentiments towards the system? (142). “Even while cooperating with the tribunal and asking that their claims be taken seriously, multiple prisoners used their chance to speak before their captors to criticize the tribunal system, their imprisonment, and the religious and racial injustice that undergirded their predicament.” (140) “You will come up with a classification if this is an enemy combatant or not. If they come up with the classification enemy combatant, it is my honor to have this classification,” he asserted. “For your culture, the enemy combatant is Muslims Islam.” (142) “The absent witnesses who refused to “have the body” before the CSRTs may have communicated the most powerful critique of this game of habeas substitution” (142) ● Why did President Bush work with Congress to pass the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) in 2005? ○ What was this in response to? And what does this indicate in terms of legal pressures? ○ What did the DTA change/codify? “President Bush collaborated with Congress to pass the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), a direct contestation of the Supreme Court’s effort to check the executive’s expanding authority in Rasul. The DTA determined (once again) that Guantánamo did not form part of the United States and stripped all courts of jurisdiction not only for the writ of habeas corpus but also for any action against the United States regarding any aspect of imprisonment” (144) ● What was the Military Commissions Act (MCA) passed in 2006? What did this do? “Which denied non-citizen “unlawful enemy combatants” access to habeas corpus and essentially legalized all the unconstitutional inadequacies of the military commissions. Further, it again expanded the definition of the enemy combatant to include anyone who “supported hostilities” against the United States or anyone who the CSRTs determined to be one” (144) ● What do challenges against habeas corpus, and their decisions at the Supreme Court, achieve, if anything, for detainees at GTMO? ○ What do these decisions do for the actual territory in Cuba? (Nothing) “In the habeas cases Rasul, Hamdan, and Boumediene, the Supreme Court interpreted the law through an exceedingly narrow and technical framework and refused to address the core issues of justice at stake. Although these decisions are touted as defeats against unchecked executive power, the court nevertheless refused to determine the legal status of Guantánamo, leaving it flexibly situated between Cuba’s “ultimate sovereignty” and the United States’ “complete jurisdiction and control.” (145) 11 “Mohamed illuminated the core contradictions of rights discourse for the rightless subject. The U.S. state remained the guarantor of his rights even as it produced and maintained his rightlessness. Though he was ostensibly a subject of international human rights, no other institution or entity was capable of intervening on his behalf or “giving me these rights.” Furthermore, the content of his rights remained undefined.” (147) ● What argument and/or historiographical intervention about the law and state power does Paik make in the conclusion of this chapter? “Thus, on the other hand, working through U.S. law has proved entirely inadequate to the task of achieving justice. The limits of the Supreme Court cases and Guantánamo’s quasi-legal system have not impeded the executive branch’s ability to indefinitely imprison detainees … “ The law cannot effectively challenge the U.S. state’s power to indefinitely detain prisoners, because the law is one tool the state uses to produce rightlessness. The detainees have therefore looked to other means of challenging their imprisonment outside the parameters of the law. But their efforts, as the following chapter shows, have made the detainee body itself a terrain of the power struggle between them and their captors.” (156) CHAPTER 6: Living in a Dying Situation, Preserving Life at GTMO ● Paik writes: “In addition to their efforts to boycott, resist, or otherwise seize these forums to testify to rightlessness, the prisoners engaged in acts of self-harm, deepening their resistance to the camp regime and unveiling the violence of permanent imprisonment that the state’s legal maneuvers obscure … For while Guantánamo’s quasi-legal process provided a minimal forum for the prisoners, it has also left more than one hundred men to waste away in the space of the camp—seemingly forever, until they die.” (158) ○ In what ways can we draw connections to a lack of autonomy in the rightless to other populations who were at GTMO or detained in the US? ● How do hunger strikes, self-harm, and suicide at GTMO show autonomy and in a way a refusal to work in the system and detainees resisting where they can? “Like the Haitian refugees who previously endured the “dead space time” of Guantánamo,6 the enemy combatants have realized that their bodies are one of their final resources to assert their will. They have deployed their bodies as a powerful medium of communication, resistance, and agency—the means to “craft opportunity from the wherewithal of everyday life,” (158) “Most of all, administrators seek to prevent martyrdom among the prisoners.” (162) “where the discursive violence of denial amplifies the physical violence of imprisonment” (165) “Indeed, the position of the Guantánamo prisoner here splits. On the one hand, the U.S. military must force-feed the prisoners because it values all life, even the lives of terrorists. On the other hand, when situated within the context of U.S. militarism and warfare, specifically the War on Terror, the imprisonment of these enemy combatants affirms the boundary dividing persons whose 12 lives are sanctified and those other subjects who must be rendered rightless in order to protect “persons” at all. Because the United States stands for freedom, justice, and the sanctity of life, the government begins from the assumption that all actions taken by the U.S. military are moral and ethical, no matter how violent. In this iteration of American exceptionalism, the force-feeding of hunger strikers cannot be anything but just.” (168) “Hunger strikes, suicides, and other acts of self-harm reveal that power relations are much more nuanced and complex than the state would like—even in a space carved out and sustained by its attempts to command totalizing authority. Guantánamo is a space of necropolitics, but it remains mired in the state’s investment in life.” (174) Conclusion “Both the Haitian refugee and War on Terror camps of Guantánamo, as I have argued, are defined by indeterminacy—as spaces situated between Cuban and U.S. legal regimes and jurisdictions, with their captives caught in the indeterminate time of indefinite detention. While this indeterminacy, or in-betweenness, helps create rightlessness by severing the prisoners from the United States and Cuba, and the rights that either nation-state could secure, it is the fact of their removal that defines rightlessness and that thereby links these camps beyond U.S. territory to camps within it. By examining Japanese American internment alongside the Guantánamo camps, I have traced how the U.S. state has adapted its tactics and maintained its ability to create rightless subjects by removing them to camps, even under the ascension of rights, in which rights have become the lingua franca of international and national political discourse. Rightlessness is defined in part by the dispossession of rights, like those to habeas corpus, due process, and protection from torture. Deprived of such guarantees, rightless people are subjected to violence, from the extraordinary physical abuse of force-feeding to the less visible, but no less brutal, violence of life in limbo, of indefinite detention itself. But such deprivations are only possible by first removing a person from the larger social and political community; it is that larger community that provides the precondition for rights to have meaning in the first place.” (179) “While I have argued that the U.S. state has adapted to the ascension of rights by narrowing the scope of rightlessness to noncitizens, rightlessness leaches past categorical boundaries. Formal, legal citizenship does not protect against being rendered rightless. Severed from the rule of law or the protection of rights, the drone strike killings removed these people from social and political community; indeed, through death, they were removed from the world entirely. The concurrent deployment of indefinite detention (and its mandate that the prisoners physically survive) and assassination reveals the range of ways that the state creates rightlessness—from the biopolitical mandate to make live, to the necropolitical creation of death worlds, to the sovereign power to make die.” (184) “Alongside the recognition of our right to have rights, explicit exclusion and exploitation of vulnerability seem to be gaining ground. The bird-carving class at Poston and the Kinder camp of Bulkeley existed simultaneously with the repressive conditions of the Tule Lake Segregation Center and the raids against refugees already in captivity; but the pretense of the camp as a liberal project that would foster U.S. values and democratic participation, or as a humanitarian mission to safeguard refugees, has given way to another manifestation of rightlessness.” (185) 13 14 15