Butler's Indefinite Detention asks what makes humans unqualified for human rights. She specifically brings up the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. They were denied practically every right, such as the right to legal counsel and even the right to have a trial. How can the U.S. government mandate this? Law was suspended in the name of a national emergency. This suspension allows for a new form of sovereignty to arise.
Governmentality is the way political power manages the population, and has become the main way state power is vitalized. It functions through state and non state institutions. Traditionally, sovereignty is known as providing legitimacy for the rule of law. Butler argues that the emergence of governmentality doesn't necessarily always weaken sovereignty.
"Whereas the suspension of law can clearly be read as a tactic of governmentality, it has to be seen in this context as also making room for the resurgence of sovereignty, and in this way both operations work together" (55). Here, sovereignty means protecting one’s own territory. The detainees in Guantanamo were not considered human. They were people deemed dangerous, dangerous not being a term with specific qualifications. After 9/11, this was based mainly on ethnicity. This ignorance towards particular populations helped support the claims of sovereignty, which in turn advanced it to being accountable to no law. People made assumptions about others with no justification, but nevertheless, after 9/11, the public culture of the United States didn’t trust some groups of people, like Muslims. Vicious or criminal acts weren’t necessary to prove their dangerous nature.
Many of the people in Guantanamo were detained without any evidence against them. Only the high-ranking officials, with a good amount of data supporting their guilt, are allowed trials. What is the worth of those peoples' lives that were not entitled to certain rights guaranteed by laws that have been in the U.S. for a long time, as well as international laws on human rights? They are presumed guilty and denied due process, by a lawless power that indefinitely detained them. Those who determined which detainees were dangerous exercised sovereign power. "Sovereignty extends its power in excess of the law and defies international accords; for if the detention is indefinite, then the lawless exercise of state sovereignty becomes indefinite as well" (64). The U.S government invoked its own sovereignty by attempting to justify the war in Iraq, claiming our self preservation was at stake. Thus, the state was acting in a way not grounded in law, but with other forms of judgment in mind. The government also justifies indefinite detention by comparing the people in Guantanamo Bay to people hospitalized for mental illness. They are detained without any particular criminal charge, but on the basis of the threat that they may pose to themselves and others. This assumes that the detainees lack normal mental functioning. Secretary Rumsfeld explained the detainment on the prisoners by saying if not restrained, they would kill again, and therefore implying that restraint is what keeps them from doing so. They must be killing machines, without cognitive functions, and thus, not human. If they’re not human, they are undeserving of rights reserved for humans.
Department of Defense General Counsel Haynes says that the Guantanamo prisoners pose dangers that can’t be resolved in courts and set right with punishment. Even if they couldn’t be convicted and proved guilty, the captives were held for “a specific reason,” and just because they weren’t tied to a particular crime, doesn’t mean they didn’t need to be there, according to Haynes. If they proved to no longer fit the criteria that brought them in, they would be released. However, this criteria is never specified.
Butler thinks that government policy should follow the established laws, however she recognizes a problem with the law, because it can be changed. In the Geneva convention, universal rights weren’t extended to everyone—only to the imprisoned combatants whose nations were already a part of the convention. The others, who essentially needed help the most, lacked the Geneva protection. Another issue Butler has is that we use a limited cultural frame to understand what is human. We are bias, and often use how we as a nation act as the basis for what constitutes a human. There is not a single definition for “human”. Human rights laws have yet to recognize this. The problem with Guantanamo was that they were asking who should be treated humanely, when they had yet to understand who should be counted as human. She worries that the indefinite detainment of prisoners on Guantanamo will become a model for the way the world acts, making rights not guaranteed. The detainees were held because they were enemies of the U.S. based on the war of terror. However, a war on terror can never end, and based on Haynes’ logic, people therefore can be indefinitely detained. If sovereignty, ie, lawless and illegitimate power, takes place, violence will revitalize and global cooperation on who should be treated humanely. “We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed” (100).
