Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

In March 2002, the Department of Defense, led by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in coordination with the Department of Justice, announced new guidelines for military tribunals. Only six out of 650 people detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay at the time of Butler’s writing, however, were afforded any kind of hearing under these military tribunals, which were themselves outside of any legal jurisdiction. These new military tribunals were not courts of law in which detained people were afforded a trial. The right to counsel, appeal, and repatriation was not afforded to anyone held by the United States at Guantanamo.

Moreover, no one at Guantanamo had a prisoner of war status. This means that all people held at Guantanamo, in not being recognized as prisoners, were not legal subjects and did not have full human status.

Butler marks this as a total suspension of the law in response to security concerns. This suspension of the law happened in coordination with a new state sovereignty: While decisions were made outside legal oversight, this does not mean that these decisions were absent of any structural oversight. Instead, this extralegal action occurred through an “elaboration of administrative bureaucracies” (51), in which officials decided who would be apprehended, detained indefinitely without trial, tortured, and killed.