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Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism

victoria brittain

Guantanamo

A feminist perspective on U.S. humanrights violations

The Play

On 24 May 2004 in London our play

Guantanamo, Honour Bound to DefendFreedom

opened in Tricycle, a small London theater. It is a play using only the words of the families of British prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, theircensored letters home, and the explanations of their lawyers of the legalblack hole their clients are in. It was to be a tiny snapshot of what the waron terror means. But in fact it has proved to be, for many people who saw it or read it in many countries, a vehicle for understanding the profound world power struggle in which we are all, like it or not, involved.Among the major themes that arise from it are: the U.S. readiness to ﬂout all international legal norms; the politicization of the U.S. legal system;the effective acceptance of torture as a tool for U.S. aims, carried out bothby the United States and by various allied regimes on behalf of the UnitedStates; the impact of this within U.S. society; the assault on civil libertiesby governments around the world; the demonization of Muslim men by Western governments, media, and societies; the resistance strategies of Muslim women; and the inevitable effects on the next generation of Muslimchildren.There were nine U.K. citizens in Guantanamo when we began our work,ﬁve were released before the play opened and four were released early in2005. But eight U.K. residents, most of them originally refugees, remain in

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spring 2006, and the British government has refused to take any responsi-bility for them, despite several having lived in Britain for ten or twenty years,and several have small children in Britain who are U.K. citizens (Brittain2005). The play ran in two London theaters, one (New Ambassadors The-atre) in the mainstream West End, until September 2004. It was then put on in New York City for four months. It has also been in theaters in otherU.S. cities: Washington D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco, California;and Tucson, Arizona. The play has been on tour in Sweden (in translation),Italy, New Zealand, Poland, and Germany, and it is under consideration inother theaters in various countries. Hundreds of community hall readingshave been done in the United States, Canada, the U.K., Sweden, Italy, New Zealand, and Pakistan, where readings have been done by non-actors as well as professionals. The most touching feedback we have had was froma secondary school in Lahore, Pakistan, where the young actors had a hugelocal success and wrote to the authors to say how proud they were to be part of what they saw as a struggle for justice across the world.The play’s characters are British, but they have widely differing originalbackgrounds: Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Jamaica. In thecases of two Caribbean prisoners, the families are not Muslim, in fact somefamily members are devout Catholics.In the cases of the Muslim families, the members who agreed to be inter- viewed were invariably men, fathers or brothers. The women rarely emergedduring an interview, although sometimes they sat silently or sent in tea. Theinterviews were arranged through their lawyers, and in every case wherethere was no male family member to consult, the family refused to give any interviews. There is only one woman in the play, a lawyer, Gareth Pierce.Guantanamo is an apt symbol of a male-dominated, militarized culture of ostentatious demonstration of U.S. power, which cannot be questioned,and a society that believes this model should be accepted throughout the world.

Women and Guantanamo

The image of female absence or passivity in relation to Guantanamo hassomewhat changed in the years since our interviews were done, in Marchand April 2004. In one small sign of this, several of the women from thefamilies came to the play and thereafter became friends and set up mutual

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support. Some of the men’s sisters took a lead in speaking out, althoughthey knew little or nothing about where their brothers had been arrestedor what had happened to them before. They had never been to London’sHouse of Commons before, until they were invited by a woman MP, whohad been mobilized by other women, including women lawyers, notably Gareth Pierce. The sisters became relatively active in the increasing num-bers of public meetings and pressure on the British government for themen’s release in late 2004, following the play’s unexpectedly successfulreception across the U.K. political spectrum.On the wider canvas, we now know that women in senior positions inthe U.S. military played key roles in the scandals of prisoners’ deaths andtorture in the U.S. prisons of Bagram and Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan andIraq, and we also know how closely linked these prison regimes were withone another and with Guantanamo. Writing about the Abu Ghraib scandal,Mark Danner, professor of journalism at the University of California, Berke-ley, quotes from a classified secret section of the official military report by Major General George R. Fay, Deputy Commander U.S. Army, to show “how procedures that violated established interrogation procedures andapplicable laws” had their genesis not in Iraq but in interrogation roomsin Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—and ultimately in decisionsmade by high officials in Washington” (Danner 2005).

Kidnapping, Rendition, and Sales

Among these decisions—made incidentally in an unusually masculine-styleWhite House—was the policy of extraordinary rendition, whereby men werekidnapped by U.S. forces in many countries and ﬂown to countries with ahistory of routine torture for interrogation—usually Morocco, Syria, Jordan,and Egypt—from where many have gone on to Guantanamo. For example,the Canadian engineer Maher Arar—now suing the U.S. government—wasseized in September 2002 while changing planes at Kennedy airport in New York and ﬂown to Jordan before being handed over to Syrian intelligence.(He had left Syria as a teenager.) He was held for ten months and so brutally tortured that he agreed to confess to anything they wanted him to say. But the Syrians said publicly that they found no evidence that he was involved interrorism, and they let him go after pressure from the Canadian government (see Shane 2005).

His wife, like many others, has attempted to describe