Today the Guardian broke the story about the US practice of keeping prisoners from (as Borat put it) the ‘War of Terror’ imprisoned onboard US naval vessels. Of course, the US denies this, but given the US government’s track record denying their well-documented practices associated with extraordinary rendition, I think it’s safe to say that at least the main thrust of the story is probably true. It even makes intuitive sense – as the US has been trying to wind down Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay because it is a public relations disaster, they have to keep the prisoners somewhere (since it’s not like the US is actually conceding the point that detentions are illegal and immoral).
Why make the shift to the ships? Well, as Derek Gregory has argued, Gitmo offered a place in which the US was not technically sovereign (since the land is leased from Cuba) but in which the US had full jurisdiction. This ’space of the exception’ gave the US a space to contravene international law. Denied this, it makes sense for the US to fall back on US navy ships, which are technically sovereign territory of the US but nevertheless have nobody around to rat them out (at least nobody who is outside the chain of command). It’s worth mentioning that Diego Garcia, the island in the Indian Ocean mentioned by the story, is itself something of a ’space of the exception’. It’s British territory, leased by the United States. The US wanted it for a naval base in the 1970s so the local population was forced from their homes and since then the island has been used as a refueling site for US flights of extraordinary rendition.
The sad thing is that this story is so totally non-shocking. We’ve arrived at a point in history where we expect this out of the United States. It’s shameful. This isn’t even on CNN.com’s main page at the moment. Who cares?
