The Airstrip and the Cage

By Lisa Brawley

1. Symmetry

Three men died in U.S. custody in Guantánamo in June, 2006, the first

successful suicides to take place there since the detention camps were

opened in 2002. The deaths were seen to ratify a growing outrage, and the

official in charge became defensive: “I believe this was not an act of

desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."1 His

assertion that a captive’s suicide should be considered an act of war was

widely criticized; the asymmetry was taken as a given.

“Asymmetric warfare” is a military term of art, applied with increasing

incoherency to a broadening spectrum of threats and tactics. Military

strategists—using an apt if unruly analogy—often describe the asymmetric

threat as that posed to Goliath by David and his stone.2 The need to develop

a military response to asymmetry was taken to be self-evident when fully

fueled jet planes crashed into the command centers of U.S. military and

economic power on that necessarily clear, autumn day. To restore symmetry

to U.S. war-making capability, the strategists explained, the U.S. would need

to transform the “American Way of War,” and develop asymmetrical tactics of

its own. In 2003, the operatives in the Defense Department’s Office of Force

Transformation sketched the guiding vision of restored symmetry: “we

morph into a military of superempowered individuals (e.g., special

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 1

operations-like forces) fighting wars against superempowered individuals

(e.g., transnational actors). In this manner,” they continue, “the American

Way of War moves the military toward an embrace of a more sharply focused

global cop role: we increasingly specialize in neutralizing bad people who do

bad things.”3

Yet as Mahmood Mamdani has detailed, the use of asymmetrical

strategies became a U.S. specialty not in 2001 but in the 1970s, in the

postcolonial contexts of what he calls the “late Cold War.” In the wake of the

failures in Vietnam, a growing antiwar movement, and a congress reluctant

to authorize and finance war, architects of U.S. anti-Soviet policy increasingly

turned to fighting undeclared wars and wars by proxy. Covert CIA forces

engaged in what were termed “low intensity conflicts,” (which as non-wars

needed no congressional sanction), and also trained would-be insurgents to

fight their non-wars for them; the most infamous of the CIA’s proxy warriors

is of course Osama Bin Laden. As insurgency, both the tactics and doctrines

of low intensity conflict intentionally “blurred the distinction between military

and civilian targets.”4 This late Cold War re-orientation of U.S. military

strategy set in motion a process that Mamdani terms the “privatization of

war.” “The real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and

money but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread

violence—the formation of private militias—capable of creating terror.”5 In

2001, tactics once reserved for a more limited cadre were moved to the

center (if not always out into the daylight) of official, congressionally

sanctioned, U.S. military strategy.6

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 2

 Thus a “global war on terror” has been repeatedly declared, and has

been given its official U.S. military acronym. GWOT is the name for the

military effort to restore symmetry while retaining—indeed extending—the

underlying asymmetrical conditions of U.S. hegemony. 7 A “war on terror,”

as many have made plain, is a declaration of perpetual war: “not a war

between states, but a war of the state against civil society.”8 The declared

war on terror recalibrates and extends a process that began much earlier in

“the American Century,” the emergence of the United States as a capitalist

imperial power.9 The U.S. state, as it took shape after 1945, was unique both

in its capacity and in its ambition to foster the expansion of capitalism

globally; it worked to promote liberal democracy as the ideal form of the

capitalist state. Beginning in the late 1970s, the position of the United States

as the “superintendent” of global capitalism was reconstituted through the

(ongoing) “neoliberalization” of the institutional frameworks for capital

expansion. Prior to the declared global war on terror, as many have noted,

the American empire was rarely described as such; after 2001 the project of

global rule became official policy. As the American empire becomes more and

more visible—and more overtly brutal—it also becomes more vulnerable to

crises of political legitimacy, both at home and abroad.10

Militarized neoliberalism both produces and requires contradictory

spatial forms to meet its simultaneous demands for fixity and flux.11 A short

hand for this spatial dynamic: the airstrip and the cage. In what follows, I

briefly trace the paradigmatic figures of fixity and flux as they are registered

in the built forms of Guantánamo and its global subsidiaries. My focus on the

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 3

surfaces and spaces that make mass interrogation and indefinite containment

possible is meant to supplement not supplant the broader discussion of the

brutal treatment of captives, the illegality of holding people indefinitely

without charges, the absurdity of trials without evidence, the violent futility

of tortured confessions, the expansion of executive authority, the extension

of the state of exception, or the maneuvers both bold and banal by which the

United States establishes itself as the exceptional state.12

2. Boomtown

Between the airfield and the prison camps is the clear blue of Guantánamo

Bay. Unfolding around it, in an area about twice the size of Manhattan, is a

small American boomtown. “Before the war on terrorism, the Navy

maintained enough sailors at this remote base ‘to keep the lights on,’ the

base’s commander said. Three years later, the population has quadrupled

and construction is booming.”13 Since January 2002, when the first U.S.

captives began to arrive, the non-prisoner population has grown almost four-

fold, from 2,600 to nearly 10,000.

“If it weren’t for Camp Delta beside the sea, and the enormous

iguanas, Guantánamo would seem very much like a small, typical American

town.”14 It has, at least, the predictable strip: McDonalds, Subway, Pizza

Hut, KFC. Thursdays are karaoke night at one of the base’s two bars. The

base maintains its own schools, its own water supply, its own power system,

which includes the recent addition of four wind-powered turbines (Gitmo

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 4

goes green). A second gym is being built, as are stucco-ed townhouses that

cluster along curvilinear streets. On Chapel Hill, one can now attend a four-

year college; classes began in January 2004. There is a grassless golf course,

a bowling alley, and an outdoor movie theater. There are forty-five cable

channels, including HBO. Flush times on Guantánamo were signaled by the

arrival of Starbucks.15 Asked about the recent upsurge in amenities, a base

commander remarked, "Everyone wants to feel like they are going home

after work."16

When, in the 1990s, thousands of Haitian refugees were held there,

Guantánamo was not described as a boomtown in armed forces press

releases.17 The “migrant operations” of the 90s did not apparently require

Guantánamo’s transformation from remote refueling station to sprawling

American suburb, suggesting that the present “detainee operations” pose

new challenges. KFC, Starbucks and especially the Windjammer Bar help to

normalize the regime of labor required to install the “manpower intensive,

close-quarters operation of a long-term internment facility.”18 This involves

containing the competing and contradictory forces at work “inside the wire:”

military police, translators, military intelligence, interrogators-for-hire, the

various institutional cultures and competing hierarchies of the different

military divisions of the “joint task force.” Normalizing the regime of labor

also includes reinforcing the distinction between the world inside the wire and

life outside of it. (A man recently returned from Gitmo recalls his guard

duties: “There was one guy who would call women cats and men dogs," he

said. "He would bark at me when I would walk by, and I would bark back."19)

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 5

The earliest recruits, housed in the unfinished plywood shacks at “Freedom

Heights,” complained that the detainees received better food than they did.

Work to upgrade and expand Joint Task Force housing and other base

facilities is ongoing. Finally, managing the regime of labor on Guantánamo

includes rendering the labor of torture routine—not only for those who have

chosen to make a career of interrogation, but also for an all-volunteer

military comprised, increasingly, of the casualties of neoliberalization. (In the

base newsletter, a Gitmo naval officer explains her choice to join the Navy: “I

joined when I’d had enough of Dunkin’ Donuts and Kmart.”20) The American

suburb being built on Cuban soil helps to ensure that staffing the U.S. global

war prison remains an acceptable alternative to working in Walmart.

It is not enough to declare the state of exception; someone has to

labor to produce and maintain it. The project of indefinite detention requires

just such a town.

3. Creative Destruction

The construction boom on Guantánamo is driven by and reflected in a series

of ever-grander renovations in the structures of detention, interrogation, and

tribunal. A graduated series of increasingly permanent, increasingly opaque

structures employ a procession of materials: concertina wire and canvas give

way to chain-link and corrugated metal, which are themselves replaced by

modular steel and concrete.

The first of these structures is Camp X-Ray: it is comprised of pairs of

cages, arranged back-to-back, in rows, which share a flat roof made of

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 6

corrugated metal. Brutally functional, they seem, as has been widely noted,

like cages for animals. The human elements: a bucket for a toilet, a foam

mattress bed on the concrete slab floor.21 The cages of Camp X-Ray, along

with plywood guard towers and orange jumpsuits, provided the first images

of Guantánamo, and were made public by the Department of Defense. The

“primitive yet highly publicized facilities” have become part of what Susan

Willis has termed the “symbolic economy” of Guantánamo, simultaneously a

“shameful secret and public emblem of power to which Washington clings

with extraordinary tenacity.”22 The cages have also become an icon around

which has rallied a growing opposition to the United States and its global

ambitions. A full-scale replica of the camp was constructed in protest in

Manchester, England. (The art installation, “This is Camp X-Ray,” was

applauded by most in the generally supportive inner city neighborhood of

Manchester—some local residents felt the U.S. had overstepped its authority

in setting up a military base in North West England.23) Camp X-Ray was

closed in April, 2002. Its cages, which the U.S. Department of Defense

admits were “make-shift” and “highly visually arresting,” are now covered

with vines that blossom yellow in the tropical spring. As a ruin, it is a feature

of DoD photo-essays and included in the official Guantánamo tour.

The rudimentary structures of Camp X-Ray were always meant to be

temporary. They were replaced by Camp Delta—a more elaborate “detention

campus,” as it were, comprised of a series of internal camps, numbered one

through six (so far). The detention facililty also includes Camp Echo, an area

for interrogations and tribunals, and another area, Camp Iguana, which was

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 7

initially for boys ages 13 to 15, and which has also held those who are

scheduled for release but have no where to go.24

The subdivisions within Delta accomplish the camp’s central purpose—

not primarily as a detention facility but as an interrogation factory. A

spectrum of spatial arrangements and the orchestrated movement between

them are designed to produce both docility and information. Camp Three is a

high-security sorting facility, where detainees are “processed,” and given

“internment serial numbers.” Depending on the outcome of these

procedures, captives are moved either to medium-security facilities or to

maximum-security isolation units. At one end of the spatial spectrum,

corrugated metal barracks with rows of cots provide communal spaces for

captives deemed cooperative; at the other are blocks of often windowless

isolation cells.

Camps One to Four are comprised of semi-permanent “drab off-white

metal structures” and “made from old shipping containers . . . cut in half

lengthwise, with the two pieces stuck together end to end.” The cells in these

structures are six feet eight inches by eight feet—smaller than the cages of

X-Ray, their size determined by the dimensions of a standard Connex

shipping container. Twenty-four of these cells are placed opposite twenty-

four others; “this assemblage of 48 cells constitutes a cellblock.” By the

Summer 2003, “there were 19 of these cellblocks at Camp Delta, suggesting

a capacity of approximately 1,000.”25

The newest facilities at Guantánamo are massive and permanent:

Camps Five and Six are multi-story concrete and steel buildings modeled on

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 8

high security prisons in the United States. Both are maximum security

prisons, although Camp Six, which was completed in mid-December 2006,

“was to be a medium-security facility with communal eating and praying,

until a riot last summer led to its redesign as a maximum-security

compound.”26

In its public relations campaigns, the DoD stresses the modernity of

these facilities, emphasizing especially the climate-controlled environment

they provide. Unlike the wire and metal cages, or the converted shipping

containers, the cells and corridors of Camps Five and Six are air-conditioned

against the heat. It is a cynical claim. Climate control is one of the many

techniques that are used in the extended interrogation of detainees: extreme

air-conditioning, lights left on in cells twenty-four hours a day, large loud

fans which prevent inmates from communicating with each other, and

protracted, indefinite isolation. With the completion of Camp Five and now

Camp Six, interrogations that had been taking place in trailers and

windowless plywood shacks at the edge of the campus have been moved to

more high-tech modern facilities, and detainees are shuttled from cell to

interrogation room to cell without going outside. In maximum isolation,

detainees are prevented from seeing natural light for months at a time, and

taken outside for brief periods of exercise only at night. Detainee lawyer

Joseph Margulies describes Camp Delta as the “ideal interrogation

chamber.”27 The newest prisons are expressly designed to reduce the guard

force required to operate not only the detention but also the interrogational

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 9

project of Guatanamo, as that twinned function is increasingly transferred to

the building itself.28

4. Flow

The cages and containers of Guantánamo, as improvised, semi-permanent,

or repurposed structures, have their counterparts in all the “forward

locations” of the declared global war on terror: an abandoned brick factory

north of Kabul, a former aircraft-machine shop in Baghram “built by Soviet

troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980's,”29 and countless,

less permanent structures made of canvas, dirt trenches, and concertina

wire—wherever the war finds its captives.

Military training documents describe the relationship between the

intermediary holding pens and Guantánamo. They describe an “evolving

paradigm” for “detainee operations” in which Guantánamo becomes a

“Strategic Internment Facility.” In previous wars, “the lines of battle were

easily distinguishable,” the “flow of captured prisoners proceeded almost

seamlessly to the rear,” and all captives were considered prisoners of war. By

contrast:

The emerging doctrine will now show an initial detainee collection point
(IDCP) at the brigade combat team level, a detainee holding area
(DHA) at the unit of employment or division level, and a theater
internment facility (TIF) at the theater level. Beyond the TIF is the
strategic internment facility (SIF) in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where
selected enemy combatants are interned.30

This emerging paradigm for “detainee flow” is designed to accommodate “the

growing nonlinear and noncontiguous environment,” and to describe a new

category of the captured, the enemy combatant.31 There are few

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 10

photographs of these subsidiary sites, and no tours. Neither do the military

training and planning manuals mention that the “flow of detainees” also

includes a network of “black sites,” secret facilities where detainees are taken

to be interrogated and tortured, as part of the “extraordinary rendition”

program.32 These include not only dim cages in countries where torture is not

illegal, but also the airplanes themselves, which enable “‘interrogations’ in

the sky—literally outside the grounded legal norms of their own or, for that

matter, any other nation.”33

At issue is not merely the fact of extra-legal, extra-territorial state

violence but its scale and scope: the global network of detention and

interrogation, in the words of Joseph Margulies, “merges the broad scope of

military operations with the unchecked power of clandestine interrogation.”34

Yet even the training manuals and simplified “detainee flow diagrams” make

plain that capture and interrogation are the core functions of the declared

global war, and on a mass scale. The engineering specifications for the

intermediary “detainee holding areas,” for example, are designed to hold

4000 people.35 “The asymmetrical threats currently challenging national

policy, are not large standing armies. . . As a result, the mission of the U.S.

national forces has changed from find, fix and destroy, to identify, locate and

capture.”36 To be clear: every encounter on every front of the indefinite war

produces captives, who are shuttled into make-shift, semi-permanent cages

that repeat the brutal functionalism of X-Ray. The end-points of the mass

production of detention and interrogation are the banal, hulking cement

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 11

“super-max” structures of Camp Five and Six; temporary wire cages are the

architecture of interrogation’s avant-garde.

5. Base and Superstructure

Guantánamo is one of 3,376 U.S. military installations across the planet, and

one of 737 that exist outside the CONUS—the military acronym for the

Continental United States.37 The building boom in Guantánamo coincides with

and is part of the transformation of the United States’ basing posture

overseas. In August 2004, President Bush “announced a series of sweeping

changes to the numbers and locations of military bases overseas.”38 The

“Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy” remaps the planet, no

longer as a stand-off between equally matched states, but in terms of broad

asymmetrical zones of instability. It outlines a seemingly paradoxical

strategy: to extend the U.S. global war-making reach while reducing the

number of overseas bases.

The conventional military base (now re-named a “MOB” or Main

Operating Base) “with all the comforts of the U.S., family housing, schools,

supermarkets, convenience stores,” is giving way to a “flex-basing overseas

posture.” The new basing plan will relocate seventy thousand soldiers

currently stationed abroad back to the territorial U.S. Over half of those,

forty thousand, are currently stationed in Europe. The basing plan also

introduces new categories of military installation: semi-permanent

“cooperative strategic locations” (CSL) and even less permanent, more

austere “forward operating sites” (FOS). Soldiers are to be deployed to these

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 12

semi-permanent facilities for shorter durations; there will be no family

housing.39 The use of more flexible, less permanent structures, in turn

require less elaborate, more fluid legal agreements with a given host

country. The proposed basing plan outlines the infrastructural requirements

for these new flexible facilities using the 4rs: “ramps, runways, roll-on, roll-

off.” This shorthand refers to the minimum land-based infrastructure needed

to deploy soldiers and their machines anywhere on the globe: a willing

runway or a ready port. Central to the vision of “flex-basing” is the

development of new technological capacities that will allow the United States

to expand its use of the oceans for “sea basing.” The plan calls for the

development of new kinds of ships, which will enable battalions to assemble

at sea and would serve as “floating warehouses.”40

In this new paradigm, CONUS becomes a MOB. That is, vast sectors of

the continental United States itself increasingly serve as the primary staging

area for soldiers-on-the-ready. In this new paradigm, “quality of life” costs—

housing, schools, hospitals—are increasingly outsourced to civilian

communities, as towns, cities and whole regions are enlisted, quite

materially, into the expanded project of war-making. The restructuring of the

U.S. global basing system is coordinated (some insist quite poorly41) with an

ongoing restructuring of military installations in the United States. The Base

Realignment and Closing program (BRAC) began in the late 1980s in the first

wave of neoliberal restructuring; base closings followed the patterns of

neoliberal restructuring more generally, as bases downsized in the heavily

industrialized, urbanized areas of the Northeast and Midwest, further rusting

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 13

the rust-belt. The most recent phase of BRAC closings were announced in

2005. They are the first such in a decade and continue earlier patterns: the

Northeast, for example, which has 14 percent of the nation’s Defense

Department personnel, will lose more than 14,000 jobs; the South, which

has almost half of the current defense jobs, will gain more than 10,000 jobs.

Military analysts express concern that the most recent phase of base

realignments, "will further polarize the country culturally into heavily

militarized red states and demilitarized blue states," and create “a situation

where military bases are normal in states like Alabama and Texas and

abnormal in states like Michigan and Wisconsin."42

Neoliberal, flexible war-making increasingly militarizes everyday life in

the United States—but it does so unevenly. This latest turn in the long

history of the militarization of the U.S. “homefront,” as Catherine Lutz has

powerfully demonstrated in her study of Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, has

begun to erode the distinction between soldier and civilian.43 Here one

might note, darkly, that the blurring of military and civilian at home is

literally productive of the form of war-making that does the same thing

elsewhere, and more violently.

6. Feral Justice

Mike Davis has recently charted the starkest of global asymmetries in an

extended elaboration of the 2003 United Nations study, “The Challenge of the

Slums.” The study documents escalating levels of world poverty compounded

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 14

by mass migrations into the world’s poorest cities; the number of people

living in slums is growing by “a staggering 25 million per year.”44 As Davis

also reports, the growing slums of the world’s megacities have captured the

attention of U.S. military strategists who see in them the future of warfare:

“The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings,

industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks, and shelters that form the

broken cities of our world.”45 Davis cites the 2003 essay by Navy War College

Professor, Richard Norton, who describes teeming, lawless zones in the

world’s “feral cities”:

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a

vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban
environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense
petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule
of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only
security available is that which is attained through brute power.46

Military visionaries imagine that these feral cities in failed states will provide

an “anarchic allure for criminals and terrorists groups” and will serve as

breeding grounds for future asymmetrical threats. Their dystopic vision of the

future is one for which U.S. forces are actively training, in a series of

developing protocols for “Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain” (MOUT).

There have been wars in cities as long as there have been cities and war, but

as Robert Warren explains, the new military doctrines for urban warfare are

formulated “with the expectation that they would be primarily applied by

advanced industrial nations within developing parts of the world.”47 The

invocation of failed states, states presumably unable or unwilling to police

the brewing trouble within their borders, is seen to legitimize the expansion

of the U.S. military apparatus in the “global cop role.” The terms of the

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 15

analogy in the doctrine of asymmetrical warfare are inverted: somehow the

Goliath is not the United States, but the growing anarchic regions inhabited

by an increasingly impoverished multitude.

...

Not far from Camp Delta, on the windward side of Guantánamo bay, is the

proposed site of a “mini military city” to accommodate detainee trials. The

$125 million dollar compound would be by far the single most expensive

undertaking yet to be constructed on Guantánamo, and it would be funded

through an emergency construction provision of the state of emergency

declared by the president in 2001.48 The compound would be a series of

structures to replace the double-wide trailers that have been serving as the

place for “combatant review tribunals” and the other forms of improvised

justice provided at Guantánamo. This mini-city is designed to accommodate

over a thousand people: “It would include dining areas, workspaces, and

sleeping accommodations for administrative personnel, lawyers, journalists

and others involved in trials.” “It would include three separate courtrooms to

allow for simultaneous trials,” and “a separate high-security area to house

those on trial.” The request for bids from military contractors went out in

November 2006, “even as Justice and Defense Department lawyers are still

writing new guidelines for new trials.”49

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 16

Guantánamo detains people from forty-three countries; it extends the

process by which U.S. policy “has sought not to suspend the law but to

extend U.S. law internationally—in effect, to give U.S. courts jurisdiction over

the world’s citizenry.”50 Thus the joint military forces on Guantánamo prepare

to construct an edifice befitting the project of global rule. Imperial justice

demands more than a double-wide trailer, especially if its legitimacy is in

crisis.

Thus, a final phantasmatic symmetry: as American soldiers train to storm the

world’s growing slums, architects of U.S. global rule propose a mini-city with

laws all its own. They plan to site this feral city in an abandoned airfield

overlooking the bay.

Notes

1
“Guantánamo Suicides ‘Act of War,” BBC online report, June 11, 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5068606.stm; quoted is Rear Adm.
Harry Harris, camp commander. These three are by no means the only
deaths in U.S. custody since the GWOT was declared. Joseph Margulies
writes that as of February 2006 “ninety-eight prisoners had died in U.S.
custody, and thirty-four of these deaths are being investigated by the
military as suspected or confirmed homicides,” Guantánamo and the Abuse
of Presidential Powers (New York: Simon & Schuster), 17. See also Jane
Mayer, “A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?” New
Yorker, November 14, 2005, 44. In his powerful analysis of Guantánamo,
Derek Gregory refers to the suicides on Guantánamo as a mode of
“biopolitical resistance,” a reading that arguably could be seen to support
Adm. Harris’ contention. See Gregory, “The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and
the Space of Exception,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, 88, no. 4 (2006):
421.

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 17

2
Jonathan Tucker, “Asymmetric Warfare,” Forum for Applied Research and
Policy, (Summer 1999):32-28, http://forum.ra.utk.edu/specialreport.html;
on the growing conceptual incoherence of “asymmetry” as military doctrine,
see Steven J. Lambakis, “Reconsidering Asymmetric Warfare,” Joint Forces
Quarterly 36 (December 2004): 105-108,
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/1736.pdf.
3
Arthur K. Cebrowski and Thomas P.M. Barnett, “The American Way of War,”
Transformation Trends, January 13, 2003, n.p.,
http://www.oft.osd.mil/library/library_files/trends_165_transformation_trend
s_13_january_2003%20Issue.pdf. Cebrowski was the Director of the
Defense Department’s Office of Force Transformation from 2001-2005, and
had been involved in helping to transform the U.S. military apparatus since
the 1970s; those analyses that attribute the restructuring of the U.S. military
apparatus to “Rumsfeld’s War” miss a critical feature of its historical depth
and institutional breadth.
4
Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and
the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 88. As Mamdani explains,
low intensity conflict also introduced a new distinction, targets and victims;
the latter were re-named collateral damage.
5
Mamdani, 138.
6
This shift has not, however, prevented covert operations from themselves
expanding in the declared “global war on terror,” both domestically and
abroad.
7
See David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of
Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006).
8
Malcolm Bull, “States of Failure,” New Left Review 40 (July-August 2006),
23-24.
9
I rely here on an understanding of a specifically “capitalist imperialism” as
articulated by David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), and importantly augmented by the work of Leo Panitch and
Sam Gindin, “Finance and American Empire,” The Socialist Register (2005):
46-81, and “Superintending Global Capital,” New Left Review 35 (Sept-
October 2005): 101-123.
10
Panitch and Gindin, “Finance and American Empire,” 74-75.
11
On fixity and flux as expressions of the spatial logic of capitalism, see
David Harvey, Limits to Capital, Second Revised Edition (London: Verso,
1999). Harvey elaborates his theory of the ‘spatial fix’ in relation to current
geopolitics in Spaces of Global Capitalism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 18

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Neil Brenner and Nik
Theodore, Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America
and Western Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
12
I here refer to the broad and growing literature on the political, juridical,
and cultural location of Guantánamo in relation to U.S. imperial ambition. I
site those that most influence the contours of this essay: Derek Gregory,
“The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception”; Joseph
Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2006); Jane Meyer, “Outsourcing Torture: The Secret
History of America’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ Program,” New Yorker,
February 14, 2005; Jack Hitt, “There is no U.S. in Habeas,” in This American
Life, Episode 310, March 10, 2006, http://www.thislife.org; Scott Michaelson
and Scott Shershow, “Does Torture Have a Future,” Boundary 2 33, no. 3
(2006); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence
(London: Verso, 2004), see Chapter 3, “Indefinite Detention,” 50-100; Ann
Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September
2005): 831-858; Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, “Crude Wars,” South
Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (Winter 2006); Martin Puchner, “Guantánamo
Bay,” London Review of Books, 26, no. 24 (December 2004); Giorgio
Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005); Fluer E. Johns, “Guantánamo and the Annihilation of
the Exception,” European Journal of International Law 16, no. 14 (2005);
Catherine Lutz, “Empire is in the Details,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 4
(November 2006); Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the
American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
13
Kathleen T. Rhem, “From Mayberry to Metropolis: Guantánamo Bay
Changes,” American Forces Press Service, March 3, 2005,
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/20050303_77.html.
14
Stephan Bachenheimer, “Guantánamo Unplugged,” Deutche-Welle World,
http://www.viewmagazine.tv/berlin2.html. See also “A Visit to Guantánamo:
DW-TV takes a look inside Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp,” January 4, 2005,
http://www.dw-world.de/popups/popup_printcontent/0,,1845420,00.html.
See also the many published reports of official tours of the island base, and
of the curtailing of such after the suicides: Mahvish Khan, “My Guantánamo
Diary,” Washington Post, April 30, 2006; Emily Witt, “From Gitmo With
Love,” Miami New Times, June 8, 2006; Stacy Sullivan, “The Minutes of the
Guantánamo Bay Bar Association,” New York Magazine, June 26, 2006,
http://nymag.com/news/features/17337; Carol J. Williams, “Kicked out of
Gitmo,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2006.
15
Alexandra Olson, “Guantánamo Struggling with Population Boom,”
Associated Press Online, March 28, 2005. See also the “Branded Concepts,”
website of the Navy Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Program,
http://www.mwr.navy.mil/mwrprgms/branpro.htm.

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 19

16
Alexandra Olson, “Guantánamo Struggling with Population Boom,” quoting
Cmdr. Anne Marie Reese. See also Katherine Q. Seelye, “Guantánamo Bay
Faces Sentence of Life as Permanent U.S. Prison,” New York Times,
September 16, 2002, A:4, 1.
17
See Jana Evans Braziel, “Haiti, Guantánamo, and the ‘One Indispensable
Nation’: U.S. Imperialism, ‘Apparent States,’ and Postcolonial Problematics of
Sovereignty,” Cultural Critique 64 (Fall 2006): 127-160.
18
Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations, March 23, 2005, VI-3, available via
Human Rights Watch,
http://hrw.org/campaigns/torture/jointdoctrine/jointdoctrine040705.pdf.
19
Rob Mitchell, “Novato Man recalls Duty at Guantánamo,” Marin
Independent Journal, July 20, 2005. The normalization of war-making labor
is central to the general argument of Catherine Lutz's powerful case study of
the urban politics of U.S. militarization in Homefront; she addresses the
normalization of the labor of torture and terror in particular on 101-2.
20
“Welcome to the GTMO Community,” Guantánamo Bay Gazette, August 11,
2005, 5,
http://www.nsgtmo.navy.mil/Gazette%20Online/archived%20editions/2006/
060811all. pdf.
21
Moazzam Begg describes an isolation that lasted almost two years in
Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Baghram, and
Kandahar (New York: New Press, 2006).
22
Susan Willis, “Guantánamo’s Symbolic Economy,” New Left Review 39
(May-June 2006): 123.
23
Ultimate Holding Company, “This is Camp X-Ray,” artists’ website,
http://www.uhc.org.uk. Video interview available online via youtube,
“Guantánamo Camp X-Ray Replica in Manchester, UK,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv1M5wK_z9U.
24
There is debate about the actual ages of the juveniles held at Guantanmo:
“They don’t come with birth certificates. . . We used bone scans in some
cases and age was determined by medical evidence the best we could.” See
Neil H. Lewis, “Some Held at Guantánamo are Minors, Lawyers Say,” New
York Times, June 13, 2005; Josh White and Robin Wright, “Detainee cleared
for release in limbo at Guantánamo,” Washington Post, December 15, 2005,
A9.
25
Erik Saar and Viveca Novak, Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence
Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantánamo (New York: Penguin,

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 20

2005), 45. See also Ted Conover, “In the Land of Guantánamo,” New York
Times Magazine, June 29, 2003, 40.
26
Tim Golden, “Military Taking A Tougher Line With Detainees,” New York
Times, December 16, 2006, A5, 1. Adm. Harris is quoted as saying, “I don’t
think there is any such thing as a medium-security terrorist.”
27
Margulies, 39. Margulies compares the prisons on Guantánamo to the
many maximum-security and death row facilities that he has visited in the
United States and concludes, “I have never been to a more disturbing place
than the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. It is a place of indescribable
sadness, where the abstract enormity of “forever” becomes concrete: this
windowless cell; that metal cot; those steel shackles,” 214.
28
Margulies, 212.
29
"A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo," New York Times,
February 26, 2006, A1. The article reports that the intermediary facilities are
also being renovated; $10 million is being spent to upgrade the Soviet
prison.
30
Ed Lowe and Joseph Cryder, “Detainee Operations: An Evolving Paradigm.
Military Police. October, 2005, 2,
www.wood.army.mil/mpbulletin/pdfs/Oct%2005/Lowe-Crider.pdf.
31
Revised in the wake of Abu-Ghraib prisoner abuse, the detainee operations
manuals and flowcharts clarify the chain of command over detainees in
transit, a process which they admit “became clouded and confused,” Lowe
and Cryder, 2. Yet there appear to remain discrepancies of terminology.
Lowe and Cryder refer to Guantánamo as the sole SIF, but the Detainee
Operations Manual suggests that there are additional SIFs “in theater.”
Former detainee and British citizen, Moazzam Begg mocks the proceduralism
of the military business model in a satirical poem about life in a maximum
security US military prison camp, entitled ‘A Taste of Echo’ and composed
while in custody: “Astringent rules of process/appear to be a caper/Requiring
an Act of Congress/To get some toilet paper. . .” See 274-275.
32
See Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,” New Yorker, February 14, 2005;
Martin Puchner, “Guantánamo Bay,” London Review of Books, December 16,
2004, 7.
33
Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, “Crude Wars,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 105, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 27.
34
Margulies, 43.

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 21

35
Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations, March 23, 2005, see figure IV-3,
available via Human Rights Watch,
http://hrw.org/campaigns/torture/jointdoctrine/jointdoctrine040705.pdf.
36
John R. Dodson, “Man-hunting, Nexus Topography, Dark Networks and
Small Worlds,” Iosphere (Winter 2006): 7, http://www.au.af.mil/info-
ops/iosphere/iosphere_win06_dodson.pdf.
37
“DOD’s Overseas Infrastructure Master Plans Continue to Evolve,” United
States Government Accounting Office, August, 22, 2006,
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06913r.pdf. The number of installations are
as of FY 2005, and do not include installations in Iraq.
38
Robert D. Critchlow, “U.S. Military Overseas Basing: New Developments
and Oversight Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, Library
of Congress, Order Code RL33148, October 31, 2005, 1,
http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA45836.
39
“Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure of the
United States,” May 9, 2005, available via Federation of American Scientists
website, http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/obc.pdf. The report, which is
critical of DoD planning and implementation, was reportedly removed from
the Department of Defense website.
40
“Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure,” J-19.
41
“Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure,” 3, 29-32.

[42] See Katherine Hull Scott, “BRAC toll heaviest in Northeast, Midwest,”
Gannett News Service, May 29, 2005, http://globalsecurity.org; Matt Kane,
“Base Closings and Military Presence in the Northeast-Midwest,” Northeast-
Midwest Institute, April, 2005,
http://www.nemw.org/BRAC2005updateweb.pdf; Ledyard King, “Head of
BRAC panel concerned over loss of bases in the Northeast,” Gannett News
Service, July 20, 2005. Lutz challenges the growth-coalition claims that
military presence in a community provides an economic or general benefit for
the local community. See Catherine Lutz, “Base benefits don’t add up,” Los
Angeles Times, August 25, 2005, B 13.
43
Lutz, Homefront, 227-239, 245-246.
44
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 201.
45
Ralph Peters, “Our Soldiers, Their Cities,” Parameters (Spring 1996): 43-
50, also cited in Davis, 203.

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 22

46
Richard J. Norton, “Feral Cities,” Naval War College Review (Autumn
2003): 100.
47
Robert Warren, “City Streets – The War Zones of Globalization: Democracy
and Military Operations on Urban Terrain in the Early Twenty-First Century,”
214-230, in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Toward an
Urban Geopolitics, (London: Blackwell, 2004), 215. As Warren notes, MOUT
“has also become a template for suppressing and controlling citizen
mobilizations in European and North American Cities.” The spatial
geographies of MOUT support David Harvey’s assertion that neoliberalism is
the restoration of class power; MOUT literalizes class warfare on a global
scale: class warfare as outright war. See Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism, 31-38, 201-206.
48
To date, $199 million has been spent on detention construction alone;
much of that has gone to Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root.
See “Plans to construct legal compound at Guantánamo halted.” Miami
Herald, December, 10, 2006. “Mini-City” and “mini military city” are the
terms the Herald uses.
49
As of this writing, the Pentagon, despite earlier agreeing to table the fast-
track construction project, is apparently pushing ahead with its plans. See
“Guantánamo Needs Courthouse, Pentagon says,” Los Angeles Times, Dec
27, 2006. See also “Plans to construct legal compound at Guantánamo
halted.” Miami Herald, December, 10, 2006.
50
Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, “Crude Wars,” 25.

Brawley. Politics and Culture 7.1 (January, 2007). 23