Guantanamo at 20: What We Haven’t Learned from this Debacle (Video)

Guantanamo at 20: What We Haven’t Learned from this Debacle (Video)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

USCB Center for Middle East Studies Presents
 

Guantanamo at 20

What We Haven't Learned from this Debacle


A Conversation with Lisa Hajjar


This event is part of the USCB Center for Middle East Studies Spotlight Lecture Series

Opening Remarks


My name is Sherene Seikaly and I am the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at UCSB. I am happy to welcome you all to this third event in the UCSB CMES Spotlight Series, which features the innovative research of the faculty and students that constitute our rich scholarly community across departments, initiatives, and programs at UCSB. 

On 11 January 2002, the Bush administration established the Guantanamo detention facility as a laboratory for generating "actionable intelligence" through coercive interrogations. It began as an illegal enterprise. Guantanamo remained open through the Obama and Trump administrations, and the Biden administration is on the same course. Closing this detention laboratory would require acknowledging that it was and remains an abject failure for its own designated mission as well as a policy debacle with international implications. The pinnacle of this debacle is the 9/11 case in the Guantanamo military commissions in which five detainees are being prosecuted for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks. Professor Lisa Hajjar will be discussing just this prosecution today.  Her forthcoming book, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture, will be published by the University of California Press this year. 

But before I hand it over to Professor Hajjar, I wanted to share some advance praise from the group of us who have had the great gift of accompanying her on her journey:

From the group of us who built the online journal Jadaliyya and in the words of Hesham Sallam: Lisa Hajjar is the exemplar of the scholar who puts all her intellectual energy in service of progressive social change and never relents in speaking truth to power with so much nuance, eloquence, and wit. Our discussions of Guantanamo, torture, and the "US War on Terror" would not be the same if it were not for the incredible work and the courageous voice of Lisa Hajjar.

In the words of the inimitable scholar and author Richard Falk: "No one on the planet has done more than Lisa to expose the damage done since 9/11 to the American body politics by US practice of torture at Guantanamo and no author, academic or otherwise, has Lisa's gifts enabling her to bring together with vivid prose the interplay of law, state crime, and the heroic efforts of public interest lawyers to uphold the rights of these torture victims. Her book promises to be not only illuminating on these vital matters of national disgrace but also a needed healing antidote to the traumas of official response arising out of the 9/11 attacks." 

From media scholar Jennifer Holt: Professor Hajjar is a force of nature and we are all so lucky she has dedicated the last ten years to realizing the true promise of this project. Once she has set herself on a path, it’s best to get out of the way. She stops for nothing and no one. And here we are at the finish line! Hajjar has brilliantly detailed this horrific chapter in US history for scholars, for interested observers, and for the public as only someone who has had a front-row seat to these proceedings could. The War in Court will light the way for future activists and researchers inspired by Lisa's unparalleled achievement, and for historians who will keep her teachings alive for generations to come.

From Global Studies scholar Paul Amar: Lisa Hajjar's The War in Court takes us on a journey to the heart of our nation's darkness factories.  This book traces the origins of the twisted terror/torture dialectic through which the US come to embrace and even legalize "maximum pain" just as it framed geopolitics as an absolutist "war on terror." As Hajjar teaches us, the Pinochet Precedent in 1998 reminded the world that the "right not to be tortured" is, along with the "right not to be enslaved," as the most foundational of human rights that no sovereign, anywhere, can ignore. But then, two years after the Pinochet arrest, the US looked to Israel's legalization of torture during the mass detention of youth during the Intifada to provide a new model, ignore the torture prohibition, and draw inspiration to reopen Guantanamo Bay as a prison of terror where Military Commissions would hold court. This spellbinding book about the horrific erasure of human rights through coerced interrogations is narrated, surprisingly and invigoratingly, as a brilliant story of heroic lawyers, detainees, and journalists, who make the very most of legal spaces, contests, and contradictions. 

And finally, from curator, art historian, and academic coordinator Shiva Balaghi, "After 20 years of research, 14 trips to Guantanamo, hundreds of interviews, a dozen notebooks filled with handwritten notes, and many months of sitting at the computer writing from dawn till late into the night, Lisa Hajjar has completed her magnum opus. Seldom does a scholar bring human compassion and academic rigor together as she has in this book. The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture is not just a detailed analysis of how the US government came to use and justify torture, those brave lawyers who fought the good fight, and the poor souls who suffered the unthinkable. It is, in some ways, a history of a nation that lost its way, charting a path for us once again to rededicate ourselves to justice for all."

Speaker


Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Her work focuses mainly on issues relating to law and conflict, including military courts and occupations, torture, targeted killing, war crimes, and human rights. Her publications include Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005) and Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights (Routledge 2013).

Discussant


Gehad Abaza
, a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology department at UCSB. Her research interests include forced migration, state-formation, violence, racialization, and memory. Abaza has an MA in Sociology-Anthropology and a BA in Political Science, with a specialization in Middle East Politics from the American University in Cairo. Before pursuing her PhD at UCSB, she was a journalist and photographer in Egypt. "Building a House, Crafting a State: Syrian-Circassian Wartime Migration in Abkhazia"

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412