Guantanamo Forever: United States Sovereignty and the Unending State of Exception

by Mary Anne Franks

The name Guantanamo Bay is now inextricably linked with images of shackled men in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, with the designation of “enemy combatants,” and with the uncertain, possibly severe violence to which they are subjected. The camps, in their strange positioning between the rule of law and utter lawlessness, stand for the outer limit of U.S. sovereign power. Guantanamo functions as this limit in two simultaneous but paradoxical senses. The camps at Guantanamo are first and foremost a creation of the United States, and those detained there are held pursuant to the exercise of American sovereign power. At the same time, however, the U.S. government asserts that American courts have no jurisdiction, and U.S. laws do not apply, in Guantanamo. Guantanamo is thus a kind of no man’s land where traditional conceptions of human rights do not exist, and where U.S. sovereign power is allegedly impotent to guarantee the basic human rights that are the cornerstone of democracy.

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