lou jones on Thu, 17 Jan 2002 00:15:44 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> ON THE THRESHOLD: SACRIFICE AT CAMP X-RAY |
ON THE THRESHOLD: SACRIFICE AT CAMP X-RAY Homo Sacer (Sacrificial Man) = 'bare life' - situated at an 'extraterritorial threshold in which the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme misfortunes.'(1) Does this not equal the state in which the 'unlawful combatants' on the wrong side of the 'War on Terror' now find themselves at the US Naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, 'Camp X-Ray'?(2) Each prisoner shackled in his own 6-by-8-foot concrete and chain-link fencing cage, just able to stand upright, shaved, *completely exposed to the elements*; a state of physical suspension which is identical with his political/juridical status and its novel designation: 'unlawful combatant' - a category which does not exist in the Geneva Convention and which has no legal basis at all. As State Secretary Donald Rumsfeld simply puts it, 'unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.' (True insofar as the Geneva Convention does not anywhere mention 'unlawful combatants'. The US government position is that for captured soldiers to be considered 'combatants' they must be 'wearing a uniform with recognizable insignia, being subject to a chain of command, and carrying arms openly' - standards by which very few of the soldiers on any side in Afghanistan could be considered entitled to prisoner-of-war status if captured. One thinks, for example, of the American special forces who, as the Western media proudly reported weeks ago, cunningly rode horses, wore civilian clothes and kept their weapons concealed during Enduring Freedom.) And of course the 'unlawful combatant' designation has nothing to do with dress code: it became necessary at the exact moment of the removal of these 20 men to Cuba- shackled, bound, hooded, drugged. Had the prisoners been prisoners-of-war, legitimate combatants, this would have represented a contravention of the Geneva Convention; so the men are not legitimate prisoners-of-war and the Geneva Convention therefore does not apply. (A simple enough formula. We've noticed it before in the 'War on Terror': America has literally become 'living law', altering and/or adding new code as required.) On the other hand, we mustn't imagine that because this is a 'War on Terror', these must be terrorists to be charged under US domestic law, and protected under that same judicial regime. Not at all. All but a single one of them - an American - now exist in an state of absolute exception, poised between orders (not quite soldiers, not quite terrorists,) and it is in this state that trial under the Patriot Act will occur. Does America recognise that the conditions under which the prisoners now find themselves - completely reliant on the moral and ethical whims of their captors (which, the media again report, are reasonably noble) are identical with those of the Jews interned in the Nazi concentration camps? As we already know, the Patriot Act is another piece of juridical innovation which allows any non-US citizen who is suspected of being associated with terrorism to be tried before a military tribunal in which not only the judges/jurors, but the prosecutors and defense attorneys will all be serving US military officers. The Act allows for evidence to be withheld from the accused and his or her lawyers, and for the death sentence to be imposed on a bare majority of the officers making up the tribunal. (All this, as UK politician Tony Benn has recently pointed out, 'flies in the face of [...] the human rights upheld by the United Nations and amounts to the tearing up of the charter itself...': living law has no time for fixed statutes.) As 'bare life', not protected by any international juridical conventions, the prisoners may be also denied any outside counsel in their proceedings. Here, then, are men who have been stripped of their most basic rights, rights only recently 'guaranteed' at the International Tribunal in the Hague for the alleged architects of the genocide in Yugoslavia. There is an air of brinkmanship about all of this, as if America wants to test further whether its operations under the new state of exception (which, like that of the Third Reich, has never needed a declaration) will stand. Will the twin totems of 'terror' and 'peace' convince the rest of the world to allow the new regime sufficient latitude? In this sense, the prisoners at Camp X-RAY are *literally* sacrificial, burnt offerings at the altar of a much greater project whose shape is still emerging. The sense that the fates of human rights and that of the nation-state are somehow implicated(3) is becoming overwhelming. Will the sacrifice of the X-Ray Camp prisoners under conditions of absolute exception, whilst the world looks on, be the gesture that allows a new order of further and equivalent actions, taking place under the 'living law' ('Infinite Justice') of the US? Will our complicity in allowing these actions to take place fund future complicities with far greater evils? 'The truth is that the Taliban prisoners have been taken to Guantanamo only because the US government had the physical power to do so,' someone wrote. But if they're murdered, it will be because s11 has been allowed to produce a context in which power politics may operate openly, with complete transparency. Will it even, eventually, allow America to admit what we already suspect, that the fall of the twin towers was itself a staged event (and that its dead, like those Camp X-Ray will produce, were sacrificial lambs?) (1) See Giorgio Agamben, 'The Camp As Paradigm', in Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1995.) (2) Has anyone made any comment yet about this appellation, meant to suggest, presumably, that Amercia intends now to physically penetrate these men, to 'see inside' them to their core motives? (3) Agamben, Homo Sacer, 134 _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net