The opening of Guantánamo as a US detention centre in the initial phase of the ‘war on terror’ in January 2002 and its continuing existence almost a decade later have spawned a vast body of literature and cultural production: political commentary, personal accounts of detainees, memoirs, fiction, legal analysis, film, documentary, reconstruction, and so on. In this major review of Guantánamo literature, which foregrounds work by Moazzam Begg, Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, Anna Perera and Clive Stafford Smith, the author analyses the whole field to shed light not simply on the interconnections and disjunctions between the various modes of representation, but also on how the works serve, in different ways, the aim of closing Guantánamo for good, and what they reveal about the nature, imperatives and relationship to international law of the US state.
This essay foregrounds and focuses in particular on the following works: Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Guantánamo: honor bound to defend freedom (taken from spoken evidence) (London, Oberon Books, 2004); Moazzam Begg, Enemy Combatant: a British Muslim’s journey to Guantánamo and back (with Victoria Brittain) (London, Free Press, 2006); Clive Stafford Smith, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the secret prisons (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007); Mahvish Rukhsana
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Khan, My Guantánamo Diary: the detainees and the stories they told me (New York, Public Affairs, 2008); and Anna Perera, Guantanamo Boy(London, Puffin, 2009).
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Article 3: Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Adopted on 12 August 1949.
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Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) 1985.
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Adeno Addis.‘"Informal" suspension of normal processes: the "war on terror" as an autoimmunity crisis’, Boston University Law Review (Vol. 87, no. 2, 2007).
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Moazzam Begg.Enemy Combatant: a British Muslim’s journey to Guantánamo and back(with Victoria Brittain). London, Free Press, 2006.
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Victoria Brittain.‘Besieged in Britain’, Race & Class (Vol. 50, no. 3, 2009).
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Victoria Brittain.The Meaning of Waiting: taken from spoken stories. London, Oberon Books (forthcoming).
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Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo.Guantánamo: honor bound to defend freedom (taken from spoken evidence) . London, Oberon Books, 2004.
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Cageprisoners.Detention Immorality: the impact of UK domestic counter-terrorism policies on those detained in the War on Terror. London, Cageprisoners, 2009.
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Cageprisoners.The Horn of Africa Inquisition: the latest profile in the War on Terror. London, Cageprisoners, 2010.
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Joshua Comaroff.‘Terror and territory: Guantánamo and the space of contradiction’ , Public Culture (Vol. 19, no. 2, 2007).
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Mark Danner.Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (includes the torture photographs and the major documents and reports). New York, New YorkReview of Books, 2004.
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Mark Danner.‘US torture: voices from the black sites’, New York Review of Books (Vol. 56, no. 6., April 2009).
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Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz (eds). The Guantánamo Lawyers: inside a prison outside the law. New York and London, New York University Press, 2010.
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Mark Denbeaux et al. Report on Guantanamo Detainees: a profile of 517 detainees through analysis of Department of Defense data. Seton HallUniversity School of Law, 2004.
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Mark Denbeaux et al. No-hearing Hearings: CSRT: the modern habeas corpus (an analysis of the proceedings of the government’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo). Seton HallUniversity School of Law, 2006.
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Mark Denbeaux et al. Death in Camp Delta. Seton Hall University Law Center for Policy and Research, December 2009.
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Dorothea Dieckmann.Guantánamo: a novel. (Orig. pub. 2004.) Trans. from German by Tim Mohr. Brooklyn, NY, Soft Skull Press, 2007.
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Mark D. Falkoff.Poems from Guantánamo: the detainees speak. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2007.
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Mark D. Falkoff.‘Conspiracy to commit poetry: empathetic lawyering at Guantánamo Bay’, Seattle Journal for Social Justice (Fall/Winter 2007).
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Paul Farmer.‘Pestilence and restraint: Guantánamo, AIDS, and the logic of quarantine’, in Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005.
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Dan Fesperman.The Prisoner of Guantánamo: a novel. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
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Laurel E. Fletcher and Eric Stover.The Guantánamo Effect: exposing the consequences of US detention and interrogation practices. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2009.
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Laurel E.Fletcher, Eric Stover, et al. Guantánamo and its Aftermath: US detention and interrogation practices and their impact on former detainees. University of California at Berkeley, Human Rights Center and International Human Rights Law Clinic/Center for Constitutional Rights November, 2008 .
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Frederick Forsyth.The Afghan. New York, Bantam, 2006.
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Major DavidJ.R. Frakt.‘Closing argument at Guantánamo: the torture of Mohammed Jawad’ , Harvard Human Rights Journal(Vol. 22, 2008).
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Alex Gibney (director). Taxi to the Dark Side(2007).
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Karen Greenberg.The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s first 100 days. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Lisa Hajjar.‘Does torture work? A sociolegal assessment of the practice in historical and global perspective’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science (Vol. 5, 2009).
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Barbara Harlow.‘Crossroads Guantánamo’, New Formations (Vol. 59, autumn 2006).
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Peter Jan Honigsberg.‘Chasing "enemy combatants" and circumventing international law: a license for sanctioned abuse’, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs (Vol. 12, no. 1, 2007).
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Peter Jan Honigsberg.‘Inside Guantanamo’, Nevada Law Review (Vol. 10, no. 1, 2009).
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Gavin Hood (director). Rendition (2007).
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Scott Horton.‘The Guantánamo "suicides": a Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle’ , Harper’s (March 2010).
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Scott Horton.‘Lawfare redux’, Harper’s (12 March 2010), available online at: www.harpers.org/archives/2010/03/hbd-90006694
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Human Rights Council(United Nations).Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Countering Terrorism, advance unedited version (A/HRC/13/42, 26 January 2010).
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Human Rights Watch.Locked up Alone: detention conditions and mental health at Guantanamo (June 2008).
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Jon Hurwitz and Harold Schlossberg (directors). Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008).
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Kristine Huskey (with Aleigh Acerni). Justice at Guantánamo: one woman’s odyssey and her crusade for human rights. Guilford, CT, Lyons Press, 2009.
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ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross).ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody (February 2007).
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Amy Kaplan.‘Where is Guantánamo?’, American Quarterly (Vol. 57, no. 3, 2005).
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Neal Katyal and Laurence H. Tribe.‘Waging war, deciding guilt: trying the military tribunals’, Yale Law Journal(Vol. 111, no. 6, 2002).
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David Kennedy.The Dark Sides of Virtue: reassessing international humanitarianism. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004.
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Mahvish Rukhsana Khan.My Guantánamo Diary: the detainees and the stories they told me. New York, Public Affairs , 2008.
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Arun Kundnani.Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism. London, Institute of Race Relations, 2009.
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Murat Kurnaz (with Helmut Kuhn). Five Years of My Life: an innocent man in Guantanamo. (Trans. Jefferson Chase.) New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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Jana K. Lipman.Guantánamo: a working-class history between empire and revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2009.
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David Luban.‘Lawfare and legal ethics in Guantánamo’, Stanford Law Review(Vol. 60, April 2008).
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Jonathan Mahler.‘The Bush administration vs. Salim Hamdan’, New York Times Magazine (8 January 2006).
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Jonathan Mahler.The Challenge: Hamdan v Rumsfeld and the fight over presidential power. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
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Joseph Margulies.Guantánamo and the abuse of presidential power. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2007.
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Jane Mayer.The Dark Side: the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals. New York, Anchor Books, 2008.
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Gareth Peirce.‘Was it like this for the Irish?’, LondonReview of Books(10 April 2008).
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Gareth Peirce.‘"Make sure you say that you were treated properly"’, London Review of Books (14 May 2009).
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Gareth Peirce.Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice. London and New York, Verso, 2010.
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Anna Perera.Guantanamo Boy. London, Puffin Books , 2009.
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Laura Poitras (director). The Oath, 2010.
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Asim Qureshi.Rules of the Game: detention, deportation, disappearance. London, Hurst, 2010.
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Kal Raustiala.‘The geography of justice’, Fordham Law Review (Vol. 73, 2005).
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Simon Reid-Henry.‘Exceptional sovereignty? Guantánamo Bay and the pre-colonial present’, Antipode (Vol. 39, no. 4, 2007).
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Darius Rejali.Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009.
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David Rose.Guantánamo: America’s war on human rights. London, Faber & Faber, 2004.
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Kenneth Roth, Minky Worden and Amy D. Bernstein (eds). Torture: does it make us safer? Is it ever OK? A human rights perspective . New York, New Press, 2005.
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Philippe Sands.Torture Team: deception, cruelty and the compromise of law. London and New York, Allen Lane , 2008.
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Michelle Shephard.Guantánamo’s Child: the untold story of Omar Khadr. Missiauga, ON, John Wiley, 2008.
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Henry Shue.‘Torture in dreamland: disposing of the ticking bomb’, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law (Vol. 37, nos 2-3, 2006).
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Clive Stafford Smith.Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
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Jim Threapleton (director). Extraordinary Rendition(2007).
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David Weissbrodt and Amy Bergquist.‘Extraordinary rendition: a human rights analysis’, Harvard Human Rights Journal(Vol. 19, 2009).
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Michael Winterbottom.The Road to Guantánamo(2006).
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Andy Worthington.The Guantánamo Files: the stories of the 774 detainees in America’s illegal prison. London, Pluto Press , 2007.
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Abdul Salam Zaaef.My Life with the Taliban. (Edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. ) New York, Columbia University Press, 2010.
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Hamdanv Rumsfeld, 2006
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