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June 10, 2005
There is a post by Nicolas Gruen over at Troppo Armadillo that refers to Amnesty International's linking the Soviet Gulag to the American Guantanamo Bay in its Amnesty International Report 2005 in Irene Khan's Foreward. Gruen's post is basically a link to a post by Ted Barlow over at Crooked Timber.
In the foreward Irene Khan says:
"...the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to "re-define" torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding "ghost detainees" (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the "rendering" or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process."
Exception was taken to Khan's phrase, "detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times", by the New Republic (subscription required) online.
Ted Barlow's post is his open letter to the New Republic.
In it Barlow says:
"In this speech, she [Kahn] made an overheated and historically ignorant comparison of Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulags. In response, Bush administration officials joined the ignoble ranks of leaders who have responded to Amnesty International reports of human rights abuses with spin and self-pity."
He says that he understands the objection to the term 'gulag' because the gulags were a vastly larger evil, and a part of a far more sinister and omnipresent system of repression. He critises New Republic for not scrutinizing and criticising the human rights abuses performed in America's name, by the elected government.
Lots of fuss then centres around the use of gulag in the American context. Agamben's use of the camp as a juridico-political category cuts through to the heart this debate. It enables us to link the different kinds of camps--Australia's mandatory detention, the Soviet gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, America's Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the British emergency detention camps in 1950s Kenya, or the French detention camps in Algeria--and to think of these in terms of a bare life.
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