Chapter 3

Biopolitical hierarchies of life

On 8 September 2006, the guerrilla artist Banksy staged another of his politico-artistic interventions, installing an inflatable doll dressed as a Guantanamo Bay detainee in the grounds of Disneyland, Anaheim, California.1 Banksy has achieved international fame as both a street and guerrilla artist. His graffiti projects have commented on everything from the Iraq war to the wall built by Israel on Palestinian land. Banksy's work consistently brings into focus the often effaced or naturalized relations of power and violence that underpin institutionally legitimated social sites and established cultural practices. In the course of this chapter, I want to flesh out the complex mesh of politico-cultural significations that inscribe Banksy's installation of an inflatable doll dressed as a Guantanamo detainee in Disneyland. In particular, I want to bring into focus the systems of relations that hold between subjects and sites that might otherwise appear to stand in absolutely dichotomous positions: Guantanamo detainees and inflatable dolls, Guantanamo military prison, Cuba, and Disneyland theme park, California. I bring these seemingly disconnected subjects and sites into relation through the deployment of the concept of 'relational geographies.' As I discussed in Chapter 1, in coining the term, Trevor Paglen argues that the concept of space should always been seen as enmeshed within inextricable relations so that 'What happens in one place affects the other.'2 Driving this analysis of seemingly untenable systems of relations between graphically incommensurable subjects (real prisoners and inflatable dolls, an entertainment theme park and a military prison) is a desire to materialize this understanding of relational geographies and. simultaneously, to address what I think is magnetized and brought to the surface through Bansky's provocative guerrilla gesture of installing the simulacrum of a Guantanamo detainee within a site that is charged with 'the inflammatory power of Disneyland as cultural metaphor.'*

In the course of my analysis, I read Banksy's tactical intervention in terms of the rhetorical figure of the apostrophe. In rhetorical terms, an apostrophe instantiates a break in either a narrative or a discourse for the purpose of addressing the reader or spectator. It marks, in other words, a rupture of the narrative flow in order to bring into unexpected focus a particular issue. The abrupt nature of the apostrophe ensures that the writer grabs the reader's attention. In this chapter, I proceed to read the specific site in which Banksy installed his Guantanamo detainee, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad in the Frontierland section of Disneyland, in social semiotic terms; as such, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Frontierland, will be construed in both narratological and discursive terms. As a narratological construct, Disneyland's Frontierland bespeaks to its visitors a story of heroic pioneers carving civilization out of a wild and savage wilderness. This narrative, embedded within the spatio-temporal coordinates of the site and its multiple historical reconstructions, is, in turn, discursively inscribed and structured. The discourses of colonialism and empire, embodied in the ideology of Manifest Destiny (as I discuss below), enable the teleological narrative of the heroic clearing of the land, and its uncivilized Indigenous inhabitants, precisely as they mark the labor of establishing the foundations for the future-oriented imperial visions of Tomorrowland, with its promise of the conquest of other alien lands and uncivilized spaces.

Situated within this narratological and discursive configuration. Banksy's startling insertion ol the simulacrum of a contemporary figure, that iconically signifies the violent prerogatives of empire and its attendant impunities, rends the seamless flow of the historical scene in question. As an apostrophic gesture, Banksy's Guantanamo detainee in Disneyland disrupts the narrative fabric of the site in order to enunciate to its audience/spectators three critical questions: What historico-political genealogies are at once ruptured and sutured through this figure? What occlusions can only be brought to light by the rhetorical force of this apostrophe? What are the hierarchies of life that organize and govern the lives and deaths of Guantanamo's prisoners? In the latter part of this chapter, I proceed to examine these questions by focusing on the incarceration and torture of a juvenile, Omar Khadr, in Guantanamo. Khadr, I argue, embodies the violent effects of Banksy's apostrophic intervention, precisely as he dramatizes the unsettling figure of the Muslim prisoner as a qualified, contemporary reincarnation of the Muselmann.

Guantanamo Bay penalogical theme park

Soon after Banksy's act of guerrilla intervention at Disneyland, he released a short video on YouTube that tracked in detail the process of making and installing his Guantanamo inflatable doll. Banksy's video begins with a line of real Guantanamo

prisoners, dressed in their now iconic orange jumpsuits and black hoods, being marched by US soldiers. Superimposed on this image is the text: 'Disneyland 2006.' The video then cuts to a nondescript room in which Banksy, his face pixelated, is shown dressing his inflatable doll with the orange jumpsuit and hood. Once the doll has been dressed, he stashes it in his backpack. The viewer is then taken on the car journey to Disneyland. Banksy is seen negotiating the security check at Disneyland's entrance, with a guard rummaging through his backpack and then giving him the all-clear to enter. Banksy's walk through the grounds of the amusement park is set, satirically, to the soundtrack of the Disneyland classic 'It's a Small World.' He is then shown sitting on a bench, where he removes the doll and proceeds to inflate it. Once the doll is inflated, he places it over the stockade-like fence that surrounds the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad in the Frontierland section of the park. The Big Thunder Mountain train is shown careering into shot, with the visitors abruptly confronted by the incongruous site of a Guantanamo prisoner in a diagonal relation to a Christian cross staked in the river. The doll remains in place for ninety minutes before the voice of a Disneyland official is heard to say: 'Sorry folks, due to some security reasons, we have to stop our ride.' The ride is closed to the public while the figure is removed. The last shot of the video is of the entrance plaque to Disneyland: 'Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.'

If nothing else, in his positioning of a simulacrum of a Guantanamo prisoner in the grounds of Disneyland, Banksy brings into focus the possibility that an entertainment theme park, Disneyland, is politically and culturally connected to its absolute other, Guantanamo military prison, and that, furthermore, both sites can be viewed through the specialist lens of the theme park. If Disneyland is a theme park oriented both by the practices of leisure and consumption and by its moralizing narratives of imperial US history, then Guantanamo military prison must be viewed as another type of theme park altogether. Even as Guantanamo stands as the inverse of Disneyland, it still can be seen to be coextensive with Disneyland's theme park logic of spectacle, control and moralizing didactics. The logic of both sites is predicated on the construction of absolutely quarantined space: in radically different ways, both sites function as types of camps, in which the points of ingress and egress are tightly controlled; the disposition of space is carefully mapped; and the movement of subjects is regulated. Guantanamo's military camp is surrounded by razor wire fences that isolate it from the outside world and imprison its detainees. In Disneyland, a massive berm surrounds the theme park, enclosing its visitors and blocking any views to the outside world. Furthermore, if the disposition of space and the governing principles of Disneyland's architecture are fundamentally informed by principles of 'security [and] restraint,'4 then precisely the same spatial and architectonic principles are operative at Guantanamo. In Guantanamo Bay carceral 'theme park,' the detainees are transformed, through costume, into instantly identifiable characters of 'evil': they are, on one level, the absolute other of Mickey Mouse. Between Guantanamo and Disneyland there is a line of connection that pivots on categorical representations of good and evil. Remarking on how California's Disneyland was built and opened in the context of the Cold War and McCarthyist America, Erika Doss underscores the labor expended in order to establish 'clear demarcations between the forces of good and evil (Snow White vs. the Wicked Queen, Peter Pan vs. Captain Hook, etc.), thereby heightening, perhaps, American desires for (or expectations ol) moralistic simplicity in an age of increasing sociocultural and political complexity.''1 On another level, Banksy's Guantanamo doll in its Disneyland setting brings into focus an unsettling symmetry between these categorical representations of good and evil. With prosthetically augmented ears (earmuffs), enlarged unblinking eyes (blackened goggles), a snout (surgical mask) instead of a mouth, and with oversized padded paws (leather mitts) instead of hands, the Guantanamo doll-prisoner emerges as a grotesque mirror-image of Mickey Mouse. Major General Dunleavy, who was assigned to supervise interrogations at Guantanamo, invoked Mickey Mouse in the course of his work there, as he found that 'as many as half the prisoners at the base had little or no intelligence value' and he consequently 'complain [ed] that too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners were being sent to the base." 3 In fact, as documented by Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, during some of their most agonizing interrogation sessions at Guantanamo, they were often 'shown photographs of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse." In the abject interrogation cells of Guantanamo, Disneyland makes its formal appearance via its famous cartoon characters. In the carceral confines of a site inscribed by an impossible address Guantanamo Bay, Disneyland - 'Mickey Mouse' is forced to face the still image of his absolute other: Mickey Mouse. In the context of this surreal encounter, there is no tautology as the moment of mimetic mirroring is rent by an unbridgeable and violent disjunction between playful fantasy and tortured reality: the suspensive function of the scare marks ensures that the one can never become the other. Whereas in Disneyland the animal characters (mice, dogs, ducks) are stripped of the alterity of their animality and are domesticated and anthropomorphized so as to create a magical affinity between humans and animals, in Guantanamo the human prisoners are, through the biopolitical caesura, animalized in order to mark their preclusion from the legal category of human-rights-bearing person. This is graphically documented in the WikiLeaked interrogation log of Detainee 063 (subsequently revealed to be Mohammed al-Qahtani, whose charges were dropped due to the fact he was tortured, yet who still remains imprisoned at Guantanamo), in which the Guantanamo guards clinically record the following entries:

1115: ... Told detainee that a dog is held in higher esteem because dogs know right from wrong and know to protect innocent people from bad people. Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated. Haunting my reading of this log entry was the Nazi command issued by guards to their dogs in order to attack the prisoners of the concentration camps: 'Man, bite the dog.'" A series of racio-speciesist inversions scores the entirety of the al-Qahtani interrogation log: 1300: . . . Dog tricks continued and detainee stated he should be treated like a man . . . Interrogator showed photos of 9/11 victims and told detainees he should bark happy for these people. Interrogator showed photos of Al Qaida terrorists and told detainee he should growl at these people.'' Whereas in Disneyland the anthropomorphized animals have free run of the theme park, in Guantanamo the animalized humans are, in Suvendrini Perera's words, imprisoned in 'exposed chain-link pens more reminiscent of cages than cells."" This is a penalogical practice that has been exported from such domestic US supermax prisons as Pelican Bay State Prison, California, where prisoners have been locked naked in outdoor 'cages made of woven metal mesh the size of a telephone booth . . . even during inclement weather ... as if animals in a zoo.'" A former detainee, James Yee (a chaplain at Guantanamo who was wrongly accused of conspiracy and imprisoned in the very prison in which he had worked before being exonerated and released) describes his prison as 'like an outdoor cattle stable.'12 Mohammed al-Qahtani documents how he was 'forced to bark like a dog, wear a leash like a dog . . . and pick up piles of trash with his hands cuffed while being called "pig."'11 Murat Kurnaz, imprisoned for five years in Guantanamo, only to be found innocent and eventually released, writes: 'An animal has more space in its cage in a zoo and is given more to eat. I can hardly put into words what that actually means.'" This series of inversions, enabled by the violent logic of the biopolitical caesura, is perhaps most graphically evidenced by the fact that while the detainees at Guantanamo are denied basic legal rights, the iguanas that inhabit the camp are protected by US law under the Endangered Species Act. As a technology of power predicated on the hierarchization oi life, the biopolitical caesura recalibrates arid assigns its subjects along this hierarchy according to the exigencies of the regime that deploys it. In this case, the US government has deemed Guantanamo's detainees to be lower forms of life than the reptiles that inhabit the island. Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, a lawyer who volunteered to translate for the prisoners, remarks: 'The prisoners at Guantanamo are entitled to fewer protections than the iguanas.'1' During the interrogation sessions at Camp X-Ray, interrogators reflexively invoke the biopolitical caesura in order to underscore the detainee's exclusion from the category of'the human': 0100: Detainee began to cry during pride and ego down . . . He was reminded that he was less than human and that animals had more freedom and love than he does. He was taken outside to see a family of banana rats. The banana rats were moving around freely, playing, eating, showing concern for one another. Detainee was compared to the family of banana rats and reinforced that they had more love, freedom, and concern than he had. Detainee began to cry during the comparison."' Throughout the course of this interrogation log, al-Qahtani is repeatedly 'reminded of the fact that his standard of living is less than a Banana rat.' As captive subject, al-Qahtani is transmuted into object-thing as he is compelled to embody the combined effects of racio-speciesism: Arabo-Islamophobia is augmented and amplified by a virulent euroanthropocentrism. In this speciesist schema, the exercise of power can only achieve its cultural intelligibility and devastating lived effects by reproducing a series of biopolitical divisions (human/ animal/vegetable) that governs the hierarchical distribution of life (dog > banana; rat > detainee), its consequent assignation of value ('dogs know right from wrong'; 'banana rats have more love than a detainee') and, crucially, the right to torture or to exterminate with impunity those subjects designated as lesser forms of life. This speciesist schema achieves its cultural intelligibility and power effects through the following violent predication: 'Power over the animal is the essence of the "I" or the "person," the essence of the human.'17 The dense history of anthropocen-tric metaphysics proceeds to animate al-Qahtani's embodied figuration of the violence of racio-speciesism. Glossing the anthropocentric metaphysics that found and constitute the Kantian subject, Derrida discloses its axiomatic predication on the animal other: 'The subject that is [hujman is a person, "one and the same person [die selbe Person]," therefore, who will be the subject of reason, morality, and the law. What exists in opposition to this person? Well, the thing . . . The person is an entirely different thing (ganz verschiedenes Weseri), in rank and dignity (durch Rang und Wiirte), from these things (Sac/ten), which are irrational animals.' The power/knowledge effects that flow from this predication are borne out in the vestibularity of Guantanamo: 'One has power and authority (walten] over these irrational animals because they are things. One can use them and lord over them as one pleases.'18

The biopolitical hierarchy that governs the life and death of detainees at Guantanamo extends vertically along a line of descent that positions the captives beyond the threshold of the animal. In the military's 'training video,' they are situated at the locus of the vegetable: When [redacted] and the other Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents he travelled with first arrived at the US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military showed them a video that was produced by the United States Army. [Redacted] advised that the video was about how the military processed the detainees when they first arrived on the base. [Redacted] recalled one portion of the video where the detainees were hooded and kneeling in what was referred to as the 'pumpkin patch.' Various military personnel were yelling and screaming at the detainees while they were kneeling in the pumpkin patch. [Redacted] advised that the 'pumpkin patch' refers to the manner in which the detainees are placed on the tarmac when they arrive and are removed from the aircraft. [Redacted] recalled that while one soldier was yelling at a detainee in the pumpkin patch the detainee passed out. [Redacted] characterized the video as 'hard core.'19 In the pumpkin patch, the hooded detainees are compelled to embody the strange hybrid of vegetable-animal life. They fulfill, in a grotesque fashion, Martin Heidegger's euro-anthropocentric vision of the hierarchy of entities that inhabit the world: 'man is not merely apart of the world but is also master and servant of the world in the sense of "having" world. Man has world.' The hierarchy of life, after this imperial ground-clearing opening statement, follows: '[1] the stone (material object) is worldless; [2] the animal is poor in tlie world; [3] man is world-forming.'2" In the context of Guantanamo's 'pumpkin patch,' the masters of the world govern their militarized domain and all its entities according to the biopolitical hierarchy of life. As masters of the world, they are indeed world-forming, as they shape and constitute the lives, deaths and realities of their subjugated subjects. In the 'pumpkin patch,' the detainee, that strange hybrid that has

been reduced to animal-vegetable, is both worldless (in the absolute denial through shackling, hooding, manacling and goggling of his world-forming sensorium) and, once dispatched to his cage, entirely poor in the world, as he is stripped naked and denied the most rudimentary of things essential to a liveable existence. Critically, the 'solution' to this regime of violence is not to shuffle the categories of life up or down the biopolitical hierarchy as this merely reproduces the system while leaving intact the governing power of the biopolitical cut and its attendant violent effects. Reflecting on the possibility of disrupting this biopolitical regime and its hierarchies of life, Agamben writes: in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the two terms of the operation was what was at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new - more effective or authentic - articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that - within man - separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension. 21 Precisely because everything is always already at stake in the continued mobilization of biopolitical caesurae, the seeking of new articulations of life that will be valorized as more 'authentic' will merely reproduce the machine without having eliminated its capacity for violence as ensured by the re-articulation of the biopolitical cut. Looking back at the biopolitical infrastructure of the Nazi state, one can clearly see the imbrication of ecology, the regime of animal rights, and the racio-speciesist branding of Jews as collectively exemplifying the dangers of seeking more 'authentic' articulations of animals and humans that are predicated on the biopolitical division and its capacity for inversions and recalibrations while leaving the violent order of the biopolitical regime intact. The Nazis effectively called for a more 'authentic' relation to nature ('blood and soil') that was buttressed by animal rights (Reich Animal Protection laws) and the rights of nature (Reich Law on the Protection of Nature). 22 Animals and nature were thereby recalibrated up the speciesist scale at the expense of Jews. Deploying the violence of racio-speciesism, the Nazis animalized Jews as 'rats,' 'vermin' and other low life forms, situated them at the bottom of the biopolitical hierarchy, and then proceeded to enact the very cruelty and exterminatory violence (cattle car transport, herding in camps replicating stockyards and the industrialized killing procedures of animal slaughterhouses) that they had outlawed against animals. The Nazi state also exemplifies the manner in which the regime of (animal) rights can be perfectly accommodated within the most genocidal forms of state violence. This is so, precisely because the prior concept of human rights is always-already founded on the human/animal biopolitical caesura and its asymmetry of power otherwise the very categories of 'human' and 'animal' rights would fail to achieve cultural intelligibility. The paternal distribution of rights to non-human animals still pivots on this asymmetrical a priori. Even as it extends its seemingly benevolent regime of rights and protections to animals, rights discourse, by disavowing this violent a priori, merely reproduces the species war by other means.

In order to short-circuit this machine, a deconstructive move is needed, a move that refuses to participate in the mere overturning of the binarized hierarchy, for example: animal > human, and that effectively displaces the hierarchy by disclosing the conceptual aporias that drive it. The challenge is to proceed to inhabit the hiatus, to run the risk of living the 'emptiness' of an atopical locus that is neither animal nor human. This non-foundational locus is the space that Agamben designates as 'the open,' marked by the 'reciprocal suspension of the two terms [human/animal], something for which we perhaps have no name and which is neither animal nor [hujman [and that] settles in between nature and humanity.' Critically, the reciprocal suspension articulates 'the play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a noncoincidence.'2* In naming their constellation in a non-coincidence, Agamben enunciates the possibility of a Levinasian ethics that refuses the anthropocentric assimilation of the Other/animal/nature into the imperialism of the Same/human. The urgent necessity of instigating the move to render inoperative this anthropocentric regime is not incidental to the violent biopolitical operations of the state. On the contrary, state violence is virulently animated by the logic of the biopolitical caesura and its 'anthropological machine' - which 'produce [s] the human through the suspension and capture of the inhuman.'21 The anthropocentrism that drives this biopolitical regime ensures that whatever is designated as nonhuman-animal life continues to be branded not only as expendable and as legitimately enslaveable but as the quintessential 'unsavable figure of life.'25 The aporetic force that drives this regime is exposed with perverse irony in one of the entries of the al-Qahtani interrogation log, which documents an interrogator reading to the detainee in the course of his torture session two quotes from the book Wlmt Makes a Terrorist and Why?: 'The second quote pointed out that the terrorist must dehumanize their victims and avoid thinking in terms of guilt or innocence.' In the context of the post-9/11 US gulags, this biopolitical regime of state terror is what guarantees the production of captive life that can be tortured with impunity and that, moreover, enables its categorization as unsavable. Once captive life is thus designated, it can be liquidated without compunction - without having to think 'in terms of guilt or innocence.' Writing on the logic of representation that is engendered within the space of camps of imprisonment, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that what unfolds in such spaces is 'the devastation of representation and/or the reduction of representation to mockery.'*' The penalogically prostheticized 'Mickey Mouse' detainee (who is less than a banana rat) attests to the perverse effects of this representational logic, and Banksy's guerrilla intervention tactically amplifies this reduction of representation to a queer mockery. In her discussion of Guantanamo Bay prisoners as exempla of what she terms 'terrorist assemblages,'Jasbir Puar asks: 'are these bodies queer?' As 'ungendered, un-raced, un-sexed, [and] un-nationalized' entities, they constitute, Puar concludes, queer forms of life that are expendable.27 As such, the 'innocence' or 'guilt' of the detainees is also rendered as expendable as many of the detainees were captured as a result of the US military offering bounties of as much as $5,000 per head. One of the US leaflets distributed in Afghanistan reads: '[front text] Get wealth and power beyond your dreams. Help the Anti-Taliban Forces rid Afghanistan of murderers and terrorists'; '[back text] You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.'2" These shameless bounties, with their graphic marking of the power of the Global North to use its wealth for dubious purposes, resulted in the capture of thousands of innocent people who were consequently handed over to US forces and shipped to Guantanamo. The release of a cache of WikiLeak files has revealed that the US believed many of those held at Guantanamo Bay were innocent or only low-level operatives ... At least 150 people were revealed to be innocent Afghans or Pakistanis - including farmers and chefs - rounded up during the intelligence gathering operations in the aftermath of 9/11. The detainees were then held for years owing to mistaken identity or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the memos say. In many cases, US commanders concluded there was 'no reason recorded for transfer.'29 The conceptualization of Guantanamo's military prison in terms of a penalogical theme park - what Mahvish Khan aptly terms 'an eerie Neverfand'30 - can be elaborated by bringing into focus the various 'themed' sections that characterize the toponomy of the prison. The themed sections of Disneyland - Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Main Street USA and so on have their themed equivalent in Guantanamo's prison: Camp America, Camp Delta, Camp Iguana, Camp X-Ray, Camp Eskimo, Camp Echo (the maximum security isolation block) and the Secret Squirrel (in which prisoners are secredy squirreled into an isolation room without the other prisoners being aware of their whereabouts). Beyond this constellation of named and themed camps, however, lies an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound located out of sight from the main road between two plateaus, about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America perimeter with the access road chained off. The unacknowledged 'camp no' is described as having had no guard towers and being surrounded with concertina wire, with one part of the compound having 'the same appearance as the interrogation centers at other prison camps'. 1' The existence of Camp No evidences the complex stratifications of secretive power that inscribe Guantanamo's carceral spaces. Camp No emerges, in its equivocating materiality, as both absent and present: it is at once absent and unnamed in the official registers of the prison and yet it is only too palpably present for the prisoners detained there. The United

Nations Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention reports that: 'The experts are concerned about the possibility that three Guantanamo detainees (Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal alZahrani) might have died during interrogations at this facility, instead of in their own cells, on 9June 2006' (I discuss these deaths in some detail below).ia At the heart of Guantanamo, then, is a black hole. As a black hole, Camp No does not exist on official maps. As a carceral deformation of spacetime, its clandestine existence can only be inferred by its impact on the surrounding landscape. Once the detainees cross its event horizon, as point of no return, they will be utterly destroyed, as the three named detainees were. As a type of black hole from which nothing can escape, a form of quantum tunnelling is yet operative that enables the flight of ghost particles such as the names of the dead: Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaiby and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani. In the face of the negation signified by its unofficial appellation - Camp

No its ghostly existence can only be confirmed through the spectres of the named dead.

Crisis heterotopias
'Guantanamo Bay,' Moazzam Begg (one of the detainees imprisoned for years and then released without charge) sardonically observes, 'is effectively a large, working American town,' with its own Starbucks, KFG and McDonald's.11 Prisoners who agree to 'confess' their terrorist connections and crimes are, furthermore, rewarded with a 'McDonald's Happy Meal or a Twinkle.'51 As penalogical theme park, the practice of entertainment is documented by Begg in his description of the guards, and their attack dogs, as hunters playing with their prey: 'Hey, do you want to chase some orange meat?'f' The al-Qahtani log of interrogations at Camp X-Ray exposes a phantasmagoria of theatrical performances designed to break the detainees: 1030: Control began 'birthday party' and placed party hat on detainee. Detainee offered birthday cake refused. Interrogators and guards sing 'God bless America.' Detainee became very angry. 1115: In order to escalate the detainee's emotions, a mask made from an MRE [Meal Ready-to-Eat] box with a smiley face on it placed on the detainee's head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labelled the 'sissy slap' glove. This glove was touched to the detainee's face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee's head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instructions with the detainee.
0930: Interrogators ran puppet show satirizing the detainee's involvement with Al Qaida. :1( Masks, puppet shows and dance routines intermixed with outright violence -Guantanamo emerges from these torture narratives as at once fantastically surreal and violently hyperreal. These ritualized and performative torture practices evoke the fascist aestheticization of torture as meticulously represented in Pasolini's harrowing Said. As with any self-respecting theme park, Guantanamo Bay penalogical theme park has its own souvenir shop." The penalogical souvenirs on offer are inscribed by the specialist commodification of the prisoners and their suffering. 'In Guantanamo,' writes Begg, 'there was a rodent nicknamed the Banana Rat, the size of a domestic cat, with long rat-like tail. Some of the soldiers and interrogators would wear orange T-shirts depicting these animals as detainees ... I had it confirmed because other people were talking about buying these T-shirts and taking them home as souvenirs.>i!l Banksy's Guantanamo figure in the Disneyland landscape materializes white America's tradition of intermixing festivity with cruelty, torture and violence, and of interlacing public executions with theatre, while selling souvenirs of the event. Banksy's Guantanamo figure in Disneyland channels this cultural history and gives it yet another contemporary guise. Once viewed as both prison and theme park, Guantanamo emerges as a heterotopic site that conjoins the jail and the resort, violence and entertainment, in the context of one site. Nick Bryant, one of the journalists who was granted access to visit Guantanamo, describes the place:
Though dubbed 'The Rock' by the personnel who served there, much of Guantanamo Bay felt more like a resort than an encampment, a heavily militarised holiday camp on the craggy shores of the Caribbean. On every night of the week, the Downtown Lyceum, an open-air cinema with terraced bleachers, offered the latest in Hollywood escapism. Tuesday and Sunday were bingo nights at the Windjammer cafe. The Cuban Club promised 'the genuine taste of the Caribbean.' If that did not suit, there was Rick's Lounge for the officer ranks, The Tiki Bar, a late-night hotspot with views across the

moonlit-dappled water, and, inexorably, an O'Reilly's Irish Pub. The bayside clapboard homes of the naval commanders again recalled New England, and could have provided the backdrop for a Ralph Lauren fashion shoot. w Bingo and Downtown Lyceum, Windjammer cafe and Tiki Bar these various practices and sites of leisure occupy spaces contiguous with unspeakable suffering, torture, suicide and homicide (as I discuss below). In an essay on the complex dimensions that constitute contemporary space, Foucault notes that 'The current epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.'40 Foucault's conceptualization of an epoch of simultaneity enables the possibility of thinking, at one and the same time, of the aporetic coexistence of a resort and a prison, of places of entertainment and pleasure, and places of torture and homicide. This epoch of simultaneity, with its violently disjunctive spaces, is what enables the articulation of 'an ensemble of relations' that makes these same spaces 'appear as juxtaposed, set off against each other, implicated by each other - that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration.'" Foucault proceeds to name these complex spatio-temporal configurations as 'heterotopias.' Heterotopias, he explains, stand in contradistinction to Utopias (entirely mythic and unreal places): they are the other places that 'exist in reality' even as they exert 'a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.'12 At once grounded in reality and yet invisible to some, at once marked by lived experience yet unreal because they are the other spaces that remain unintelligible to the dominant order that governs a space, heterotopias configure complex dimensions of time and contradictory formations of space. Guantanamo is such a heterotopic space. It is, more accurately, a 'crisis heterotopia,' the term Foucault coins in order to describe such sites as prisons and psychiatric hospitals." Guantanamo, as locus of a crisis heterotopia, is inscribed by the disjunctive spaces of the resort and the prison and the contradictory times of leisure activities and the violent labour of torture. Within the heterochronotope of Guantanamo, then, differential spatio-temporal experiences co-exist but remain heterogeneous to each other. Within this same site, different ontologies of living and dying are experienced by their respective subjects. In an emblematic manner, Guantanamo is a crisis heterochronotope that distils the biopolitical division of Global North and Global South: it consigns subjects to liveable or unliveable spaces and determines who can live and who can be let to die. The epoch of simultaneity that governs the lives of the inhabitants of Guantanamo is marked by an indelible line that ensures that the side-by-side (human/animal, resort/prison) cannot be breached.

American gulags: colonial and imperial palimpsests

Banksy's Guantanamo doll in Disneyland generates a politico-cultural charge that accrues from the fact that like 'the Grand Canyon or Chicago or the Golden Gate Bridge, Disneyland is a key American place-marker, an icon.'" Precisely as the Guantanamo prisoner functions as an icon of'the terrorist,' Guantanamo Bay is also another (in)famous American place-marker: the military camp situated beyond the purview of the rule of law; the offshore prison imprisoning detainees in cages. Through his tactical superimposition or, more accurately, collision of two seemingly polarized icons and placemarkers, Banksy draws attention to the relations that hold between seemingly dichotomous sites and subjects. Banksy's Guantanamo prisoner stands, in the context of Disney's Frontierland, as a mute figure in the landscape, destitute of speech and denied any right of reply. Yet this totemic figure silently embodies the form of an accusation as it sets in train a polemical transvaluation of received values: this site of leisure, it accuses, is a site of effaced and disavowed violence. Couched in rhetorical terms, Banksy's Guantanamo doll in Disneyland functions as an apostrophe in the landscape. As apostrophe, this figure instantiates a coup de theatre which generates a series of unsettling rhetorical effects, including the disruption of the mise-en-scene, the rupturing of the narrative fabric and the enunciation of what Agamben terms 'a call that cannot be avoided.'k> The apostrophic effects of Bansky's figure come into being because of the charged semiotics of place that accrue from the signs 'Disneyland,' in general, and 'Frontierland,' in particular. In her cultural history of Disneyland, Karal Ann Marling explains how the theme park was specifically designed 'to provide comfort and refuge from that world of woes . . . His [Disney's] park was built behind a berm to protect it from the evils that daily beset humankind on all sides. It aimed to soothe and reassure . . . Disneyland is about . . . the overarching reassurance that there is order governing the disposition of things.' lb In the context of Disneyland's landscape of reassurance, with its ordered disposition of things, Banksy's Guantanamo figure instantiates a breach that imports the evils of the outside world into the quarantined space of the entertainment theme park, disrupting the seamless narrative fabric of reassurance; simultaneously, this apostrophic figure demands that points of connection be established between this quarantined and controlled space, the internal and effaced world upon which the park was built and now stands, and the external world quarantined by the park's berms. Banksy's installation of his Guantanamo figure in the context of Frontierland, 'one of the icons of Disney's world,'17 brings into focus a number relational geographies and effaced genealogies of colonial and imperial violence that inscribe the site even as they have been invisibilized by the power of the hegemonic narratives that organize the theme park. Walt Disney's decision to build his theme park in California is inscribed with the mythic resonances of the West in white America's history. In his detailed analysis of tourism in the

twentieth-century American West, Hal Rothman draws attention to the manner in which the burgeoning industry of recreational tourism in the West was marked by the 'power of conquest embodied in Manifest Destiny.'48 The West emerges, Rothman notes, as a space at once marked by the violence of colonial conquest of Native Americans and their lands and by the concomitant erasure of this violence through the scripting of the West as a place of 'mythic purpose' and 'expiation': 'To Americans the West is their refuge, the home of the "last best place" . . . home to the mythic landscapes where Americans become whole again in the aftermath of personal or national cataclysm.'" 1 In the schema of American providential teleology and eschatology, the figure of the Guantanamo prisoner signifies a type of absolute sub-human detritus that cannot be ideologically dialecticized or eschatologically redeemed. Marked by the fusion of charged triple indices Arab-Muslim-terrorist - that collectively spell 'un-American,' this figure embodies the unfreedom constitutive of the racialogic-ally inflected liberal democratic state. Banksy's Guantanamo doll, as a form of visual apostrophe, disrupts the white narrative of historicidal forgetting and expiation. As a figure embodying stories of torture, violence and sexual assault, its location in Frontierland generates points of connection with California's violent colonial history. The relations of sexual violence, abuse and torture that were operative in the colonial conquest of the West resonate with what has unfolded at Guantanamo Bay. 'Thus Guantanamo is a location,' writes Amy Kaplan, 'where many narratives about the Americas intersect, about shackled slaves brought from Africa, the important role of Cuba in U.S. history, and U.S. intervention in the Caribbean and Latin America."" Both geopolitical sites have borne witness to the transmutation of the captive subject into a biopolitical object that can be violated, sexually assaulted or killed with impunity. Banksy's Guantanamo doll instantiates a type of visual chiasmus in which past imperial histories cross through this totemic figure of contemporary imperial subjection. The symbolic lexicon of the Wild West folds over into the contemporary war on terror and its cowboy language of 'smoking out' the 'bad guys': '[TJhere's an old poster out West,' former President Bush declared soon after the 9/11 attacks, 'that said, "Wanted, Dead or Alive.'"51 Writing of his experience in Kandahar prison before he was transferred to Guantanamo, Moazzam Begg brings into focus this point of intersection between colonial history and the contemporary war on terror: One of the MPs I often spoke to was Cody, an Irish American who had been brought up on a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina . . . [H]e identified more with them than with white America. He said to me once, 'When I see you people here, it reminds of me of my people. They were treated the same way. Their lands were invaded, they were slaughtered and imprisoned, their language and religion were not understood, and they were depicted, until recently, as savages and murderous heathens.'52 These points of intersection that cross seemingly discontinuous histories and lives are reproduced across many of Guantanamo's testimonies. They are evidenced in the testimony of the child prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani. In October 2001, at fourteen years of age, El-Gharani was captured in Karachi, sold for a bounty to American soldiers and consequently imprisoned in Guantanamo. At Guantanamo, he was subjected to a range of extreme tortures and attempted to 'commit suicide on several occasions, by slashing his wrist, trying to hang himself, and, on one occasion, by running head-first into the wall of his cell as hard as he could.'53 He was finally released in January 2009 after Judge Richard Leon found that the 'government's claims primarily, that he had travelled to Afghanistan for jihad - were based on statements made by a mentally unstable prisoner who had provided demonstrably false information against numerous prisoners.'51 In an interview he made after his release, El-Gharani narrates how he was repeatedly called by the US soldiers ' "Fucking nigger!" I didn't know what that meant, I learned later.' In the context of his imprisonment in Guantanamo, however, he also recounts that: Once, in 2005, one of our brothers was badly beaten in front of us. I sat in my room not speaking to anyone all day. During the night shift, one of the good guards, a black guy from Louisiana, came to me. We called him Mike Tyson because he was a boxer. He used to bump my fist through the bars: 'Wassup, Chris? [El-Gharani's nickname]' 'If at least I could understand we'd done something bad, I could understand . . .' 'Brother, look at my face!' he said. 'How long you've been here with the Americans?' Four years.' Ive been suffering 27 years, man! I know what it is. They put my brother in jail for no reason, instead of a white guy.' Most of the people in jail in US are blacks, he told me. 'My grandfather and my great-grandfather were in the situation you're in now.' He meant they were slaves, shackled like us.55

This moment of exchange articulates lived points of intersection between past and contemporary histories and lived experiences of racialized punishment. In the face of radically diflerent geopolitical sites - Louisiana/Guantanamo and biopo-litical regimes of racist governance - slavery/enemy combatants nodal points of connection are established. These transhistorical nodes evidence the continuity < race as the governing category for the reproduction of the native, slave atii captive, precisely as they underscore the critical function of the prison as the appa ratus for the sequestration of the colored subject into that vestibularity that will, ii Spillers' terms, cut them off from 'the culture' - and all of its attendant rights am privileges. Banksy's act of placing a Guantanamo doll in Frontierland, with its Big Thundei Mountain train ride, works to resignify the mise-en-scene of the tourist park intr a type of contemporary diorama, thereby accentuating its effaced colonial genealogies and significations. In the nineteenth century, visitors to the colonial exhibitions and world fairs would take train rides that, through live exhibits and dioramas, 'brought far-Hung territories and exotic peoples near,';' transmuting them into objects of colonial fixity and visual consumption. The colonial logic of the diorama was predicated on objectifying Europe's others and marking their status as 'proto-humans'; 'silent specimens in a frozen zoo."7 Banksy's carceral doll in Frontierland brings far-flung Guantanamo Bay and its exotic inhabitants home, suturing past imperial histories to the contemporary US colony in Cuba. For the brief duration of ninety minutes, every circuit of the Big Thunder Mountain train will bring its passengers face-to-face with an apostrophic 'security breach' that disrupts the Disneyfied tourist narrative. The colonial frontier-as-post is jarringly compelled to assume the dimensions of a 'live' imperial present every time the shackled and hooded Guantanamo prisoner careens into view. Big Thunder Mountain train, as the fabled 'machine in the garden' that rends the reassuring spectacle of a pastoral America, 'changes the texture' of the scene: 'Now tension replaces repose . . . arousfing] a sense of dislocation, conflict and anxiety."" As the train speeds past the Frontierland stockade and brings into view Banksy's Guantanamo detainee, the Disneyland spectator is confronted with the sight of a fluorescent orange apostrophe in the landscape that generates a momentary derangement of the field of vision and its visual cues. Banksy's apostrophic gash in the landscape flies in the face of the 'Disney Realism' outlined by Disneyland's planners: 'we program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements."'* The temporality of nostalgia for a simpler and better time past, symbolized by this train journey through the Wild West, is disrupted by this dissonant, shackled figure. This figure generates a complex relation of rupture and continuity as it emblematizes a genealogy of tortured and imprisoned subjects - the native, the slave, the anti-colonial insurgent - while also bringing into focus a palimpsest of colonial camps of imprisonment, beginning with the same 'Caribbean island [Cuba] that gave birth to the institution of the concentration camps in the late nineteenth century."'" For the duration of the time it remains in place in Frontierland, Bansky's Guantanamo detainee magnetizes a series of temporal retentions and protentions: the past (the colonial project of the Wild West), the present (the camp at Guantanamo) and the future (the war on terror that unfolds without an end in sight) all collide, overlap and disjoin. Simultaneously as this figure brings into focus this palimpsestic matrix, it resigni-fies it with the irruptive force of its own unique historicity, a historicity gathered under the imprimatur of the contemporary war on terror. Banksy's tactical installation of his Guantanamo detainee inside this iconic theme park breaches the berm that quarantines Disneyland from the outside world: the excluded and disavowed exteriority of America's absolute other is thereby brought home to roost in this most identifiably American of all landscapes. Banksy's Guantanamo prisoner in Frontierland graphically embodies Alexander Solzhenitsyn's unforgettable words: 'there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us."'1

Childhood's end: juveniles in Guantanamo

'Just think of me as a child who died Omar Khadr"2

The seemingly strange mapping of the relations that hold between a fantasy theme park and a penalogical camp that I staged above pivots on disclosing shared colonial histories, geopolitical orientations (the Cold War and the war on terror) and authoritarian dispositions of space. Both Disneyland and Guantanamo are predicated, moreover, on relations of exclusion. If in Disneyland the sordid realities of the outside world ('undesirables') are what must be shut out, then in Guantanamo, in a type of inverse relation, it is precisely the most excluded of all subjects, the so-called 'worst of the worst,' that are held captive there; what is excluded for them are the range of rights that constitute the legal category of the human subject. In this section of the chapter, I want to take up once more the semiotic burden of Banksy's Guantanamo doll in Disneyland in order to bring into focus yet another range of critical significations; significations that are fundamentally concerned with the category of the child. Disneyland is marketed as the very epitome of childhood escape and fantasy. Banksy's installation of his Guantanamo doll in such a site discloses an aspect of Guantanamo that is rarely commented upon: that the camp has imprisoned children of a variety of ages, in direct violation of the UN

Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which the US is a signatory. 1'* Former Defense Secretary Donald

Rumsfeld, when questioned by reporters about juvenile detainees at Guantaiiamo, dismissively replied: 'This constant refrain of "the juveniles" . . . these are not children'01 - denying, in the process, the very juvenile status of these prisoners and thereby negating their access to special treatment as accorded to child prisoners under the UN Convention. At various stages, Guantanamo has imprisoned children, some as young as twelve years old. One of the juveniles, Yasser Talal Al Zahrani, imprisoned as a juvenile, is alleged to have committed suicide while still a prisoner in Guantanamo at the age of 21.65 WikiLeaks has released documents that evidence that at least 22 children have been imprisoned at Guantanamo.''1' Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is one of the children imprisoned in Camp Delta. He was captured in Afghanistan at the age of fifteen. As a juvenile prisoner, he 'should have been rehabilitated rather than punished, as stipulated in the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, even though Canada, in particular, has stood up for the rights of child soldiers in other countries.""' Yet this disregard of the UN protocol cannot be seen as exceptional once it is situated within the US criminal-justice system of racialized punishment. James Forman, in his analysis of the domestic incarceration of juveniles, draws attention to this telling statistic: 'worldwide there are 2237 people sewing life sentences without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles. All but twelve of them are in the US."'" Determined to be an 'enemy combatant' by the Combat Status Review Tribunal through a dubious process that ensures that 'the prisoner remains in a black hole,"*'1 Khadr has been imprisoned at Guantanamo for eleven years. Aside from a few dissident voices, he has been completely abandoned by the Canadian polity. 70 As Sherene Razack writes, in Canada his ongoing unjust imprisonment 'fails to elicit concern and even incites warm feelings of national belonging.'7' As I write this, he is still imprisoned at Guantanamo despite having agreed to a plea deal. Khadr was well aware of the travesty of justice he was compelled to undergo in agreeing to a plea deal in the context of the military commissions. He wrote the following to his lawyer: 'About this whole MC [military commission] thing we all don't believe in and know it's unfair and know Dennis that there must be somebody to sacrifice to really show the world the unfairness, and really it seems that it's me.' 72
On 15 July 2008, a Guantanamo interrogation video was released. The video shows Khadr, sixteen years old at the time, being questioned by a Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agent. 73 The legality of this interrogation has been questioned by 'Omar's defence attorneys [who] claim that the Canadian government acted illegally, sending its counsel and CSIS agents to Guantanamo Bay to interrogate Omar, and then turned their findings over to the Military Tribunal prosecutors to help convict Omar.'74 Released by Khadr's Canadian lawyers, the video was made by US government agents using a camera hidden in a vent and was originally classified as secret. Khadr is accused of having killed a US soldier by throwing a grenade in the course of a firefight in a compound in Afghanistan. Michelle Shephard, the National Security Reporter for the Toronto Star, however, has uncovered photographic evidence that questions this official account. The photographs of Khadr immediately after the firefight with US soldiers, at the time and place he is alleged to have thrown the grenade, show him buried, face down, under the debris of the bombing, with gaping wounds in his back.75 Fara McLaren, moreover, has drawn attention to 'the accidental release of a five-page "OC-1" witness report. . . which revealed that Omar had not been the only survivor in the compound, as previously claimed, and that nobody had seen him throw the grenade.'71' In his detailed documentation of the case histories of all the Guantanamo prisoners, Andy Worthington writes of Khadr: One dubious example of a 'fighter' captured as this time was Omar Khaclr, who was shot three times by US soldiers during a firefight near Khost on July 27, 2002, and is nearly blind in one eye as a result of his injuries. According to the US military, he killed a US soldier during the fight, and as a result, even though he was seriously injured, his interrogation began as soon as he was taken into custody. His case was later mentioned by a US official, who claimed that prisoners were so scared of abuse by US soldiers that they would talk without prompting . . . According to Khadr, the abuse was all too real. During his detention in Afghanistan, he 'asked for pain medication for his wounds but was refused,' and was 'not allowed to use the bathroom and was forced to urinate on himself.' Like many other prisoners, he was also hung from his wrists, and he explained that 'his hands were tied above a door frame and he was forced to stand in this position for hours.'77 In his Federal Court Affidavit, Khadr testifies to the torture he endured after his capture by US soldiers: 'I was severely wounded in the battle where I was captured. I was shot at least twice in the back, at least once through my left shoulder exiting through my left breast, and once under my right shoulder exiting out of my upper right side. I was also struck with shrapnel in my left eye, and was wounded in my left thigh, knee, ankle and foot.'7" Khadr explains how the pain was so intense it was all he could focus on. Yet, in this wounded state, he is immediately subjected to torturous interrogations:

During this first interrogation, the young blonde man would often scream at me if I did not give him the answers he wanted. Several times, he forced me to sit up on my stretcher, which caused me great pain due to my injuries. He did this several times to get me to answer his questions and give him the answers he wanted. It was clear that he was making me sit up because he knew that it hurt and he wanted me to answer questions. I cried several times during the interrogation as a result of this treatment and pain.79 Worthington cites further testimony from Khadr on the torture and ritualized humiliation and degradation he had to endure once he was imprisoned in Guantanamo: Short-shackled and left in a room for six hours, he [Khadr] said that 'occasionally a US officer would enter the room to laugh at him.' Once, the guards left him until he urinated on himself, and then 'poured a pine scented cleaning fluid

over him and used him as a "human mop" to clean up the mess.' As if further humiliation was required, he added that he was 'not provided with clean clothes for several days after his degradation.'" 0 The practices of torture and ritualized humiliation that Khadr has been forced to endure function to transmute him into the embodiment of waste. Precluded from inhabiting the category of human-rights-bearing subject, he is instrumentalized into non-sentient object that is at once the embodiment of defilement and the tool used to clean up his own waste. The violence that Khadr, as a juvenile prisoner, has had to endure is replicated across other US transnational gulags. An interrogator stationed at Abu Ghraib recounts the following incident: The dog was on a leash, but was not muzzled. The MP guard and MP Dog Handler opened a cell in which two juveniles, one known as 'Casper,' were housed. The Dog Handler allowed the dog to enter the cell and go nuts on the kids, barking and scaring them. The kids were screaming, the smaller one hiding behind [redacted]. The Handler allowed the dog to get within about one foot of the kids. Afterward, I heard the Dog Handler say that he had a competition with another Handler to see if they would scare detainees to the point that they would defecate. He mentioned that they had already made some urinate, so they appeared to be raising the competition. 81 In the squalor of Abu Ghraib, two children become the pawns in a competition whose ultimate goal is to traumatize them to the point of bodily incontinence. In this game, their juvenile status, their vulnerability and fear - all are reduced to the level of excreta as a quantifiable sum in the stakes of a competition between two players. The one reference to their juvenile status in the eyes of the guards -'Casper' the cartoon ghost - emerges from this site of trauma as a haunting evocation of everything that they, as children, have been brutally denied. The prosecution of the war on terror is here made manifest in all of its utterly bankrupt dimensions: emptied of any ethical principles, devoid of compassion, and gratuitous and indiscriminate in its exercise of violence. For many reasons, Khadr's interrogation video is harrowing to watch. The secret video was filmed through the opened slats of a Venetian blind. Khadr's body is segmented by the out-of-focus slats. The grid of the blind materializes a number of critical visual relations and effects. On one level, the grid of the blind functions as a metonym for the embedded series of cages, bars and prisons that constitute Khadr's everyday conditions of existence. On another level, the slats mark a symbolic bar that separates the free spectator from the imprisoned Khadr. The persistence of this bar in the field of vision forecloses the possibility for the filmic lens/spectator's eye to be invisibilized. It materializes the voyeuristic relation of this 'peephole' looking into the anguish of the target subject, thereby bringing into scopic focus the asymmetries of power that mark this relation; in this asymmetrical scopic relation, Khadr has no visual right of reply to his unknown and invisible spectator. As the video of Khadr's interrogation unfolds, it becomes evident that the interrogating agent is clinically detached from Khadr's plight. In the course of his interrogation and of his unsuccessful pleas for help. Khadr abruptly lifts the top of his orange jumpsuit and points to the scars that mark his body, scars from wounds he received in the battlefield as a child soldier, and says that he has requested medical help but has received none. Khadr begins to sob and the interrogator orders him to put his hand down and look him in the eye, to which Khadr replies: 'No, you don't care about me. Nobody cares about me.' The interrogator silences Khadr with the order: 'Put your shirt back on.' Khadr's appeal is completely negated. Concerned more with restoring a sense of propriety to the proceedings, after this order the interrogator leaves the room. Khadr's corporeal gesture of exposing the scars of his wounds marks the limits of his speech act and also its failure. In the penal colony of Guantanamo, Khadr's body attests to the dermographic inscription of a violent history that would otherwise remain unspeakable and that can only be evidenced by the thick materiality of his scars. This gesture, however, only serves to mark a rift between speech and body,

specifically between a subject that is being verbally compelled to confessional speech by his interrogator and a body that remains mutely traumatized, signifying unintelligible ciphers/scars that fail to be interpreted as they are beyond the hermeneutic purview of the uninterested interrogating agent. I cite here the first-hand account of Khadr's wounds and scars by Moazzam Begg, fellow Guantanamo detainee: His wounds didn't seem to me as if they had been caused by the blast of a shotgun. They were much more horrific. Chunks of his chest and shoulder had been blown out - or so I'd assumed - and he was unable to see through one of his eyes because of the injuries he'd sustained, allegedly in a firelight with US troops. His chest looked like he'd just had a post mortem operation performed on him - whilst he was still alive . . . Photographs released by the US military this year show Khadr when he was first captured. The missing chunks of flesh were exit wounds from shotgun rounds fired. It is now clear, based on statements by the soldiers who captured him, that Khadr had been shot in the back - point blank range."'Begg's description of Khadr's injuries is corroborated by the testimony of Damien Corsetti, a disabled veteran who served at Bagram. Gorsetti, nicknamed by his fellow soldiers during his time at Bagram the 'monster' and 'King of Torture,' describes how he was 'struck by how he was an injured "child" detained in "one of the worst places on earth." He added, "More than anything, he looked beat up. He was a 15 year-old kid with three holes in his body, a bunch of shrapnel in his face. That was what I remember. How horrible this 15 year-old child looked." ' 'All I can say about him,' says Corsetti, 'is that he was a kid, typical 15 year-old kid . . . the child was still there, that's what was prevalent in him: the child.'1" In the course of this interview, Corsetti repeats the terms 'child' and 'kid' five times as if to materialize the very category that has been denied to Khadr.
The rift between speech and body that is articulated in the Khadr video becomes even more graphic as the interrogation continues. The disjunctive nature of the two speech acts, of interrogator and interrogated, becomes unbridgeable in the moment that Omar Khadr, while crying, exclaims: 'I lost my eyes, my feet, everything . . .' and the interrogator coolly replies: 'No, you still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your legs, you know. Look, I want you to take a few minutes ... I want you to get yourself together . . . relax a bit, have a bite to eat and we'll start again.' Enunciated in Khadr's cry is the psychic toll of torture, isolation and indefinite detention. Enmeshed within the psychic and physical violence of torture, Khadr's body is fragmented, dispersed and 'lost.' Khadr's cry bespeaks a suffering so intense that it causes the dissolution of the borders that encompass his sense of a corporeal self that is whole and integrated. The impact of past and ongoing trauma violently truncates Khadr's sensorium so that it no longer works to connect all the parts of his body to his sense of self as unified embodied subject in the world. In her acute analysis of the 'structure of torture,' Elaine Scarry traces the destructive dimensions of this feedback loop: 'as the prisoner's sentience destroys his world, so now his absence of world . . . destroys his claims of sentience.'8' The disabling of his sensorium and the loss of his sensate knowledge of the contours and limits of his body reproduce the chronic deprivation of sensory input sound, sight and touch - experienced by the Guantanamo prisoners who are forced to wear sound-blocking earmuffs, surgical masks, padded gloves and blackened goggles. Khadr attests through his cry of loss to a psychic amputation that is at once also symbolically corporeal. In the face of Khadr's attestation of his trauma of fragmentation and loss, the interrogator replies with a clinical observation that fails to register the psychic reality of Khadr's suffering: 'No, you still have your eyes and your feet at the end of your legs, you know.' Inscribing this moment are multiple levels of disjunction: perceptual, psychic and temporal. Precisely as Khadr marks the trauma of fragmentation and dissolution of his sense of embodied reality, the interrogator replies with a

sense of disciplinary normativity ('get yourself together'), instrumentalizing hospitality ('have a bite to eat') and recursive inquisition ('we'll start again') that effectively negate Khadr's anguished testimony through their neutralizing violence. A fault line opens between the two discourses: I have lost my body/no, your body is there. The bar that separates the two speakers marks the violent rupture between irreconcilable levels of perceptual and experiential reality. Once the interrogator leaves the room, Khadr, unaware that he is being filmed, begins to cry in Arabic for his mother: 'la ummi (Oh mother). He buries his head in his hands, sobs and pulls at his hair. His repeated calls for his mother,' 1 'a ummi, ya ummi, ya ummi,' wrench the air of the empty interrogation room and fall to nothing. Inconsolable, Khadr rearticulates his burden: '1 'a ummi,ya ummi,ya uinini.' Khadr's somatic cries are not mere supplements to his oral testimony. Rather, they emerge as enunciative gaps that rupture the disciplinary order of inquisitorial language and underscore its violence. For the interrogator, Khadr's cries are so much non-sense and non-knowledge. Excess to the functionalist demands of the interrogator, they mark the superfluous status of Khadr's body and they underscore the pain of having his somatic testimony dismissed as useless waste. The video is left filming for sixteen minutes after the interrogator has left the room in the hope that something 'meaningful' will be confessed or captured, but Khadr offers nothing more than the articulation of his pain. Khadr's spoken and somatic

testimony evidence a temporality of incessant suffering; what Maurice Blanchot calls 'a time without respite that he [the subject] endures as the perpetuity of an indifferent present.'1"' Caught in the vise of an incessant suffering that must be endured as the perpetuity of an indifferent present, Khadr is transmuted into a 'no body' ('I lost my eyes, my feet, everything') that becomes utterly coextensive with the experience of unrelieved trauma. Blanchot captures this acutely paradoxical logic in his discussion of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps: 'The one afflicted no longer has any identity other than the situation with which he merges and that never allows himself to be himself; for as a situation of affliction, it tends incessantly to de-situate itself, to dissolve in the void of a nowhere without foundation.'"' Khadr emerges as a subject transfixed in the event horizon of incessant suffering: his organs and limbs, as the coordinated sensorial ensemble that would allow him to establish a perceptual foundation in the world, have been absorbed into a black hole of unrelieved trauma and affliction. The harrowing temporality of this event horizon of suffering without future is evidenced by many of the testimonies of the inmates of Guantanamo, where the sense of a present without future emerges as a key burden of their suffering. Jumah al-Dossary, imprisoned for over five years, and having attempted suicide twelve times, writes: 'Oh, those days and nights. I felt that time had ended at that time and did not want to move forward. I felt that the whole world with its mountains and all its gravity was bearing down on my chest.'88 The temporal structure that al-Dossary articulates here is marked by the torsions of paradox: time ceases yet persists to endure without movement or progress or future. This is a time without time that crushes the subject in its immovability. Al-Dossary relates how 'he has lived for years alone in cells . . . and has been told by the military that he will live like that forever. All he can see is darkness.'" 9 Blanchot delineates this present of infinite suffering without future:
Time is as though arrested . . . [T]he present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering, and thus dispossessed of any future: a present without end and yet impossible as a present. The present of suffering is the abyss of the present, indefinitely hollowed out and in this hollowing indefinitely distended, radically alien to the possibility that one might be present to it through the mastery of presence . . . time that can no longer redeem us, that constitutes no recourse. A time without event, without project, without possibility ... an unstable perpetuity in which we are arrested and incapable of permanence, a time neither abiding nor granting the simplicity of a dwelling place.'1" The simplicity of a dwelling place is what is foreclosed in the psychic withdrawal of the body's limbs and perceptual organs: there is no place in the world left to inhabit; rather, there is only the perpetuity of suffering to endure. In one of his suicide notes, al-Dossary writes: 'The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed.'91

Spectres of the Muselmann

Blanchot's writing on suffering in the Nazi concentration camps effectively illuminates the lived experience of many of the inmates of Guantanamo. Mahvish Khan, who worked as translator for many of the prisoners in Guantanamo, has also documented the parallels between the two camps, including the cataloguing and referring to all the prisoners by serial numbers instead of names, and the manner in which 'soldiers at Gitmo shaved the beards of the Muslim prisoners to punish them for minor infractions. What stronger image does this evoke than that of the Third Reich and the Nazi shaving of the beards and heads of the Jews?'92 Other scholars have drawn attention to the structural parallels between Guantanamo and the Nazi concentration camps without, however, reflexively marking the significant differences between the two.' J31 want to pursue these structural parallels between Guantanamo and the Nazi concentration camps by focusing, in particular, on the figure of the Muselmann. Before I proceed, however, I want to underscore that the relations that hold between the two camps are marked by both similarities and fundamental differences. Precisely what I do not want to argue is that one, Guantanamo, is simply the same as the other, Auschwitz for example, and that there is a simple homology between the two camps. This move would effectively reproduce its own form of epistemic violence, flattening and erasing the enormity of historical, geopolitical and racial differences that mark the two camps. Guantanamo is not Auschwitz. Rather, I want to focus on the structurality of the camp, specifically on those features of the camp that appear to be constitutive of its operating logic and that, across different spatio-temporal configurations, continue to be reproduced.'" Situated in this context, I want specifically to examine the figure of the Muselmann and its relational status across two historically different sites and geopolitical embodiments. In his Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben spends some time tracking the figure of der Muselmann in the Nazi death camps. The term Muselmann, according to the testimonies of the camps' survivors, referred to those prisoners who had completely

given up on hope and life. As Primo Levi explains, 'the term Muselmann, "Muslim," [was] given to the irreversibly exhausted, worn-out prisoner close to death. Two explanations for it have been advanced, neither very convincing: fatalism, and the head bandages that could resemble a turban.'95 Catatonic, indifferent to pain and suffering, no longer interested in food or drink, the Muselmann embodied the figure of the living dead. As such, the Muselmann was viewed with revulsion and even ostracized by the other prisoners of the Nazi camps. In the words of one of the survivors: 'No one felt compassion for the Muslim, and no one felt sympathy for him either. The other inmates . . . did not even judge him worthy of being looked at ... [Fjor the SS, they were merely useless garbage. Every group thought only about eliminating them, each in its own way.' In his attempt to elucidate the emergence of the term in the camps, Agamben suggests that the 'most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim [sic]: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God.'97 Regardless of the term's origins, Agamben concludes, 'it is certain that, with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews/"1 The 'ferocious irony' that Agamben draws attention to is, however, inscribed by yet another level of ferocity that remains unspeakable throughout his book. Despite the fact that Agamben devotes a substantial chapter to his analysis of the Muselmann, at no point does he name the racism that inscribes this term, specifically the Islamophobia and Arabophobia that constitute its very conditions of enunciation and signification. Rather, he only refers to the 'deprecatory sense of the term in European languages,' 'concerning Islam's supposed fatalism.''''' In the glossary of terms that the translator Catherine Leach includes in Anna Pawelczynska's text on Auschwitz, the word Muselmann is defined in the following manner: 'German for "Moslem." In the camps the word carried no religious connotation whatsoever. Used by the prisoners and the SS alike, it signified a prisoner who showed symptoms of the advanced stages of starvation.'10 Although the term was purged of any 'religious connotation whatsoever,' the question remains as to why the term Muslim was, in the end, deployed to describe the camp's living-dead. Levi's tentative explanation which he suggests is unconvincing - that it was due to 'the head bandages [of the camp prisoners] that could resemble a turban' resonates on both racialogical and historical levels and, indeed, opens up other, non-European histories of this term. In his analysis of the term 'Musalman' in the context of both pre- and post-unification India, Shahid Amin maps the way in which the word has insistently been used in order to mark 'the resident-Indian Muslims as "the other."'"" Amin analyzes the manner in which, in the Indian context, the Turkish cap, invested with the burden of signifying the unassimilable alterity of the Muslim body within the corpus of the Indian nation, 'is made to stand for an essential marker of the otherness of things "Muslim."' 2 Tracking the historical permutations of the Musalman across a range of Indian texts, Amin concludes: 'It is the belief in the Musalman as someone recognizably different that counts and endures variedly.' 103 I draw upon this doubly other history of the Muselmann in order to bring into focus what remains constant across radically different historical and geopolitical uses of the term: that whoever is designated as a A/att-tea/wi/Musalman/Muslim is compelled to wear the burden of absolute alterity. This semantic kernel continues to signify across a wide range of spatio-historical sites and subjects.104 The significant lacuna that I have drawn attention to haunted me as I read Agamben's text, and the complex dimensions of this denegation were finally crystallized in my reading of Parvez Manzoor's essay, 'Turning Jews into Muslims: The Untold Saga of the Muselmanner: There can be little doubt, then, that the contemptible image of the fatalist Muslim predates the arrival of the pitiable figure of the Muselmann at Auschwitz. And even if at the camp it surfaces from the netherworld of Jewish consciousness, it was the Islamophobic European imagination that gave birth to it in the first place. Be that as it may, it is disconcerting to learn that even for the inmates of the camp, the Muslim was the Untermensch, the lowest of the low. This is certainly what Agamben has in mind when he, in a moment of brutal encounter with the truth, seeks refuge in 'the postmodern irony' and belittles the import of this realization: 'In any case, it is certain that, with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews' (45). For others, there's no escaping the perverse logic of the Holocaust: While the Nazis killed the Jews, the Jews in turn sacrificed the 'Muslims' (die Muselmanner)! Manzoor meditates on the symptomatic repetition of this lacuna across Holocaust studies, suggesting that the 'disregard of any Muslim stake at Auschwitz is part of the awesome silence that the victims of the Holocaust [are] always entitled to exercise.'""' 'Nevertheless,' Manzoor contends, 'the Jewish "christening" of the "damned of the camp" as Muselmanner does implicate the Muslim in the Holocaust. And it does so brutally and scornfully, neither in the name of the executioners, nor in that of the victims, but as the victims of the victims; it implicates them in the name of the living-dead, the non-men whose death cannot be called death.""7 In the wake of Manzoor's critical work on the Muselmann, I want to transpose this figure onto the Muslim inmates of Guantanamo in order to bring into focus certain genealogical relations and discursive cross-hatchings that emerge from the locus of the camp. As contemporary reincarnations of Muselmanner, the Muslim inmates in Guantanamo are compelled to

live, in a critically qualified way, the ontotautology of the Muslim Muselmann. In the context of Guantanamo, the Muslim prisoner literally lives and dies as '^Muslim,' simultaneously as he is transmuted into the haunting figure of the Muselmann. The Guantanamo Muslim inmate does not, I underscore, incarnate the Nazi spectre of the 'living dead' - the two figures are caught in radically different biopolitical regimes. Critically, the Nazi regime had the end-goal of the attempted genocide of an entire people; no such genocidal biopolitical program underpins Guantanamo. Rather, in the context of the operational logics of the camp, one can discern the symbolic reproduction of the term through the literal effects that this biopolitical figure exacts from its target subjects. In the case of Guantanamo, the Muslim inmates resonate with their Jewish counterparts along the limited lines of reproducing, amongst other things, the shuffling gait of the Muselmann because of their shackled feet, legs and arms. They also effectively embody subjects who, as I discuss in Chapter 4, can be tortured and starved with impunity. Traversing historical divides and politically unique trajectories, the one, the Muselmann, through the instrumentalizing and serializing logic of the camp, inflects the symbolic production of that other figure: Guantanamo's Muslim prisoner. In keeping with the operational logic of the camp, a logic underpinned by an anomic violence that respects no categorical borders or limits, the Jew-become-Muselmann is spectrally interwoven into the Muslim-become-Jew-become-Muselmann. Yet the irreconcilable outlines that haunt this moment of superimposition mark the specificity of historical determinations that cannot be assimilated: the one is also not the other, even as the assimilative forces of the camp labor to erase difference through the production of the serial figure of the Muselmann. In the context of the serializing and assimilative forces constitutive of the violent operations of the camp, I want to emphasize the fundamental difference between the Jewish Muselmann of the Nazi camps and the Muslim Muselmann of Guantanamo. Unlike the selective imprisoning of Muslim subjects at Guantanamo in the waging of the war on terror, the serial production of the Jewish Muselmann in the Nazi camps was driven by the totality of the apparatuses, both repressive and ideological, of the German state; a totality predicated on achieving the complete liquidation of Europe's Jews. As Anna Pawelczynska, an Auschwitz survivor, writes: 'The objective of a [Nazi] concentration camp was the biological destruction of prisoners.'" 1 Through the systematic deployment of 'assembly-line-style death,' the Nazis put in place 'the operation of industrial genocide.'10 The convoluted structure of the paleonymic formation Muselmann as Muslim-become-Jew-become-Muslim - that I have attempted to trace is marked by a complex weave of categorical oppositions and racist sedimentations that collide, affiliate and cleave, precisely as they (re)constitute their target subject and attempt to erase the traces of these contradictions through a liistoricidal logic in which the other is serially assimilated into the same. The literal and symbolic violence of the Muslim Muselmann ramifies across a number of levels at Guantanamo Bay. As embodiment of the violent effects of the biopolitical caesura, the Muslim prisoner of Guantanamo is compelled to cross the 'threshold in which man passefs] into non-man.'"' 'I convince myself each day,' says one Guantanamo guard to the prisoners, 'that you guys are all subhuman.'"1 One of the ex-detainees, Murat Kurnaz, terms Guantanamo 'a fully constructed project of dehumanisation.''' In the process of crossing the threshold from human to non-human, the Muselmann, Agamben writes, was also compelled to be known by a number of other de-humanizing appellations: 'the thing itself,' 'donkeys,' 'cretins,' 'camels,' 'tired sheiks' and 'trinkets.'1" At once animalized (donkeys), disabled (cretin) and repeatedly branded by a number of Arabophobic slurs (camels, tired sheiks), the Muselmann can be effectively left to die without those responsible feeling any sense of guilt or remorse. Within the schemata of speciesist, ableist and racist taxonomies, the linguistic transmutation of a Jew into a Muslim/Arab-animal-cretin enables the recalibration of their position down the different hierarchies to, in every instance, the very bottom rung, the 'lowest of the low.' The bottom rung of these hierarchies becomes coextensive with the 'space of the camp, where,' in Perera's words, 'the category of the "citizen" is no longer operative'; it is also 'the space where the claims and limits of the "human," what remains of the residue of the "citizen," are tested and revealed in lethal form.'" In moving toward the close of this chapter, I want to focus on one more constitutive aspect of the Muselmiinnei"that both enabled and facilitated their torture and extermination with impunity: 'we know from other witnesses,' writes Agamben in a parenthetical aside, 'that under no circumstances were they to be called "corpses" or "cadavers," but rather simply Figureii, figures, dolls.'"' The naming of the Muselmann inmate as 'doll' compels a return to the opening concerns of this chapter, specifically, the ramifications of Banksy's installation of a Guantanamo detainee doll in Disneyland. According to accounts from the camps, the Muselmanner were said to be characterized by 'faces rigid as masks,'"'1 they embodied a 'faceless presence,'''7 an 'anti-face.'''" Figurally. Banksy's Guantanamo doll and the prosthetically defaced Guantanamo detainees are transmogrified into one spectre: Muselmann Jiguren/dolls. Forced to wear blackened goggles, earmulfs and a surgical mask, the face of the Muslim detainee becomes the rigid mask of a doll that precludes the face-to-face relation because it is faceless, gazeless and speechless. In my invocation of the relation of the face-to-face, I draw upon the work of Levinas. In formulating the ethical relation between humans as principally founded in proximity with the other's face, Levinas draws attention to the irreplaceable alterity of the other: every face is unique, and to proceed to deface the face of the other instantiates the possibility to murder the other by stripping them of their personhood. 'The facelessness of the men at Guantanamo makes their abuse palatable,' writes Sabin Willet, a lawyer working at the camp." 9 For Levinas, the

face incarnates more than the unique alterity of the other. 'The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenceless face' articulates 'the possibility of encountering a being through an interdiction. The face is the fact that a being affects us not in the indicative, but in the imperative.' This imperative invokes the command 'Thou shall not kill': 'it is the impossibility of killing him [or her] who presents that face.'12 Yet, even as Levinas here delineates the interdiction that the face articulates -'Thou shalt not kill' - this ethical relation is, across his corpus, anthropocentrically circumscribed and qualified. When confronted by the question - 'According to your analysis, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is revealed by the human face; but is the commandment not also expressed in the face of an animal? Can an animal be considered as the other that must be welcomed?' - Levinas equivocates: 'I don't know if a snake has a face ... It is clear that, without considering animals as human beings, the ethical extends to all living beings. We do not want to make an animal suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is human ethics.'12 Even while extending the ethical relation to humans' treatment of animals, Levinas reasserts the biopolitical caesura and its attendant specio-supremacist hierarchy: 'in relation to the animal, the human is a new phenomenon . . . The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics.' 122 The animal is here unequivocally divested of the anthropomorphic attribute of'face' and its ethicality. What is legitimated in this moment is the possibility to kill the animal and, by definition, any human so classified, regardless of Levinas's non-negotiable interdiction - without fear of punishment. This is not to claim that Levinasian ethics cannot encompass human-animal relations; on the contrary, the very notion of the Other, as what a priori enunciates the ethical imperative to welcome, and

the call for the assumption of ethical relations, is perhaps best exemplified by what is not self-identically the Same/human.'2' Stripped of his faciality and prosthetically transmuted into an anti-face, the Muslim prisoner of Guantanamo becomes the contemporary, yet critically qualified, embodiment of 'the Muselmann, the "core of the camp"'; 'the being whose death cannot be called death, but only the production of a corpse.'121 At Guantanamo, the production of corpses is driven both by murder and suicide through penalogical forces that are, in truth, forms of'letting die.' The blurring of lines between murder and suicide at Guantanamo is perhaps nowhere more graphically evidenced than in the deaths of three detainees at Camp Delta. Three detainees - Mani Shaman Turki Al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, Ali Abdullah Ahmed and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani - were found by their guards hanging in their cells on the night of 9 June 2006. The US military declared their deaths to be suicides. Yet, in its analysis of the three deaths, the Center for Policy and Research (CPR) has documented a catalogue of inconsistencies that appear to undermine the military's assertion that these deaths were suicides, including the following: There is no explanation of how three bodies could have hung in cells for at least two hours while the cells were under constant supervision, both by video cameras and by guards continually walking the corridors guarding only 28 detainees. There is no explanation of how each detainee, much less three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of his cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards. I2j According to Camp Delta's Standard Operating Procedure manual, 'A block guard must observe skin or movement for every detainee on the block every ten minutes even during the overnight hours while detainees sleep' 121 and yet the bodies were not discovered by guards for at least two hours after the hangings, by which time an 'advanced level of rigor mortis' had set in,' indicating 'that the detainees were dead for significantly longer than two hours, all the while under continuous guard presence.'127 The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Final Autopsy Report for Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 1 August 2006, states that: 'The hands are bound with surgical towels and secured string.' 12" The detainees are also described as having their faces and heads covered by cloth masks. No explanation is offered as to how a detainee could access surgical towels, string and cloth masks in an ultra-secure and super-surveilled prison such as Camp Delta. The Final Autopsy Report for Al-Utaybi states that submitted as 'evidence of hanging' 'are several strips of white cotton-like material consistent with a bedsheet that have knots and have been tied together.'12" The impossibility of the detainees tearing up their sheets in order to make their own nooses is thrown into sharp focus by the fact that, according to a summarized witness statement by Major General Mike Dunleavy, former commander of the Guantanamo interrogation Task Force, under his command: 'We changed their [Guantanamo detainees'] sheets to the sheets in the federal prison system so they can't be torn or tied.'15" Dunleavy's

statement is dated 2005, a year before the 'suicides.' The 'suicide' by hanging case is also thrown into question by the fact that Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, Camp America Commander, called a meeting of the guards on the morning after the death of the three detainees and 'told his audience that "you all know" three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death.' 111 According to the CPR's report, the autopsy report of one of the detainees 'revealed a broken hyoid bone. The hyoid is located within the neck and is a distinct sign of manual strangulation when broken.'" 2 When the bodies of the three detainees were returned to their families, 'The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose.' When Al-Zahrani's father saw his son's body, 'he saw evidence of homicide. "There was a major blow to the head on the right side," he said. "There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm." None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report.'15
The CPR's report concludes that 'On June 10, 2006, three men died under questionable circumstances.'"1 Yet the military and government positions on these deaths, soon after they were made public, not only glossed over these questionable circumstances, they framed these deaths in terms of a 'good PR move' by the detainees in order 'to draw attention' to themselves.135 Rear Admiral Harry Harris, Commander of Guantanamo Naval Forces, declared to the media that 'this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.'IMl The power of the state to construct its own realities is here seen in all of its Hagrancy. In the context of what, in the face of the evidence, appears to be three homicides, murder is transmuted into suicide. The death of three detainees is traduced as an act of asymmetrical war and a PR stunt. Everything in these official declarations is mobilized to evacuate any sense of ethical responsibility for what transpired at Camp Delta on a June night in 2006. A series of conceptual inversions is publicly enacted that effectively dispossesses the dead detainees of the tragedy of their own deaths; rather, in the phantasmagoria of the gulag, their deaths are scripted as the abject, last-ditch performatives of'committed' attention seekers.137 In the face of the travesty of justice that inscribes virtually every level of the official account of these deaths, I want to return to the time of the detainees' death at Guantanamo. As the detainees' cadavers hang from the cell walls, they mirror the lifeless, doll-like status of the mannequins lying in their beds: their lives and deaths are worth no more than the rag dolls seemingly asleep in their bunks. The ontotautological transmutation and reduction of the Muslim inmates into Figuren and dolls facilitates the murderous operation of this penalogical system. Whether as suicides or homicides, rendered faceless with cloth masks around their heads, their feet and hands bound, and rags shoved into their mouths and down their throats, they embody the insignia of unfettered state power to silence, bind and kill.

Apostrophe of empire
In the closing section of the video that documents Omar Khadr's interrogation, as he has not given the information that the interrogator requested, he is insistently accused of lying. Khadr responds by challenging the good faith of the interrogator: 'I told you the truth. You don't like the truth. You just want to hear whatever you want to hear. I told you everything. You wouldn't believe me.' The impossible burden of not being able to convince the interrogator of one's truth-telling is reproduced across many of the testimonies of the detainees tortured at Guantanamo. A number of the tortured detainees, such as Shafiq Rasul, would cave in and say what the interrogator wanted to hear: I said it wasn't me but she [the interrogator] kept pressing that I should admit it. She was very adamant. She said to me, 'I've put detainees here in isolation for 12 months and eventually they've broken. You might as well admit it now so you don't have to stay in isolation.' Every time I tried to answer a question she insisted I was lying. She kept going on and on at me, pressuring me, telling me I was lying, telling me that I should admit it. Eventually, I just gave in and said, 'Okay, it's me.' The reason I did this was because of the previous five or six weeks having being held in isolation and being taken to interrogation for hours on end, short shackled and being treated in that way. I was going out of my mind and didn't know what was going on. I was desperate for it to end.13"

In the face of all the odds, Rasul was fortunate enough to have his truth-telling vindicated. Joseph Margulies, the lead attorney in the Supreme Court case Rasul v. Bush, writes that Rasul was eventually released and has 'never been charged with any wrongdoing' and that: 'In just another odd twist to the litigation, Rasul became a case about the lawfulness of executive detention named for a person who was no longer in custody.'1 i!l Omar Khadr has not been so fortunate. As the video of his interrogation draws to a close, for one final time his interrogator scathingly accuses him of being a liar, to which Khadr

replies: 'I'm not lying. If you were tortured like I was tortured, you'd probably say more than what I said. You're not in my position, that's why you're saying this.' To which the interrogator dismissively replies: 'You're saying this like a robot.'"" Khadr replies with silence. His journey through violence - as child soldier, as torture victim, as juvenile detainee - allows him no speaking position. Whatever testimony he can offer in his truth to power can only be evidenced by the scars that harrow his body and that insistently speak his truth in the face of oral evidence that counts for nothing. As a child who lost his childhood in Guantanamo and who had to endure the violent transmutation of his being into an insentient robot, a mere detainee-doll with no claims to the legal status of either child or human, Khadr can enunciate no other reply but silence. Khadr is compelled to inhabit a violently inverted world in which children's Sesame Street songs become instruments of torture, as they are played at unbearable levels of volume for days on end in order to drive the detainees demented."1 In the context of Guantanamo, Omar Khadr's childhood is only ever addressed through taunting gestures. One such gesture evidences the impossible intersection of fantasy theme park and penalogical camp, of Disneyland in Guantanamo. James Yee, former chaplain and detainee, describes how, on one visit, he found Khadr 'reading a book that had pictures of Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck that Yee knew wasn't one the library stocked. Omar told Yee the book was a gift from one of his interrogators. He expected Omar to be insulted but instead he appeared delighted.'1'"' In Guantanamo penalogical theme park, Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck are presented to a boy prisoner in order to insult him. In the solitary confines of his prison, he embraces this cast of cartoon characters: they are the relics of a negated childhood; they are the obverse of the violence of the prison; they are the traces of a world otherwise obliterated. For the brief duration of ninety minutes, a Guantanamo Bay doll is installed in the recreational surrounds of Disneyland. Instantiating a dissonant and scandalous rupture in the fantasy landscape of the theme park, Banksy's doll magnetizes the disavowed violent histories that stratify that place. As an apostrophe of empire, this Guantanamo doll testifies to regimes of biopolitical violence that suture the past to the present. As a contemporary conjuration of the Muselmann, Banksy's Guantanamo doll stands as an apostrophic figure that rends the consoling fables of empire, exposing economies of violence that breach the prophylactic berms of the theme-park nation through the articulation of a seemingly impossible address: Guantanamo Bay, Disneyland.