In January 2002, the first shackled and hooded men from Afghanistan were incarcerated behind barbed wire at the U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In April 2004, when the case challenging the legality of their detention was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, Guantánamo still appeared to many as a strange aberration, as an “animal,” with “no other like it,” as Justice Ginsburg stated. Descriptions of Guantánamo as a lawless zone enhanced this image of its exceptional status: a legal black hole, a legal limbo, a prison beyond the law, a “permanent United States penal colony floating in another world.”3 Yet since the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the leak of the Washington “torture memos,” it has become increasingly clear that, more than an anomaly, Guantánamo repre- sents the start of the “road to Abu Ghraib,” one island in a global penal archi- pelago, where the United States indefinitely detains, secretly transports, and tortures uncounted prisoners from all over the world.4 As a rallying cry against human rights abuses in the U.S. “war on terror,” Guantánamo has come to embody what Amnesty International calls a “gulag for our times.”5
The global dimensions of Guantánamo cannot be understood separately from its seemingly bizarre location in Cuba. Prisoners captured in Afghani- stan and around the world were transported here, to a country quite close geographically, yet far politically, from the United States, a country with which the United States has no diplomatic relations. Guantánamo occupies a transi- tional political space, where a prison housed in a communist nation against
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832 | American Quarterly whom the U.S. is still fighting the cold war has become an epicenter for the new “war on terror.” It also occupies a liminal national space, in, yet not within, Cuba, but at the same time a “bit of