'The worst of the worst'

During these first hellish weeks of Trump’s return to the White House, it’s been impossible to shake the feeling that he’s racing through the playbook of early 20th-century U.S. imperialism—the era that, yes, was the focus of my last book. He began by threatening to annex Greenland for its resources and strategic location, mirroring the U.S. takeovers of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and Guam. At the inauguration, standing in front of a billionaire’s row whose collective wealth and power would have made the Business Plotters blush, he praised the expansionist President William McKinley¹ . Next came rhetoric straight out from Teddy Roosevelt—”new and beautiful horizons,” “ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation,” “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars”—before announcing plans to seize the Panama Canal Zone, which is just a straight-up historical reboot.

So I wasn’t surprised when, on Wednesday, Trump brought the focus on the place America’s overseas empire really began—and the place that has become the mythic symbol of the United States’ lawless power in the 21st century: Guantánamo Bay. Specifically, he ordered the Defense and Homeland Security departments to “begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility” at the naval station in Cuba to receive the targets of his promised mass deportation. Or, as he put it: “detain the worst criminal, illegal aliens threatening the American people.”

Much of this is imaginary, for reasons I’ll get to in a second. But that’s the thing about Guantánamo: its power has long been more in what people imagine it to be and what its symbolic use permits, more than any actual function it serves—not that real people won’t end up getting crushed in the process.

Naval Station Guantanamo Bay² is a real place of course. (I’ve been there.) Its roots lie in the 1898 U.S. intervention in Cuba’s independence war, an episode Americans call the “Spanish-American War.” The Marines took the area around the bay, with the help of far more experienced Cuban independence fighters, or mambíses, and never gave it up. The U.S. coerced the new government in Havana to give them perpetual control of the land and bay in exchange for a nominal annual rent. Even after Fidel Castro’s guerrillas pushed out the puppet government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, they couldn’t get the U.S. to abandon its base. All Fidel could do was cut off the water supply (the U.S. built a desalination plant in reply) and refuse to cash the checks.³  

This strange arrangement—an overseas U.S. base about five hundred miles from Miami but inaccessible without special permission, not subject to Cuban law but arguably outside of most U.S. constitutional protections—is what made the base eligible, in the fevered minds of the George W. Bush administration, to become a gray zone of unlimited abuse, including torture and indefinite detention without trial. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the base was identified as a prison site for battlefield detainees from the new invasion of Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands, who Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously declared would be “the worst of the worst.”

But that was never true. With very few exceptions, the Guantánamo detainees were mainly what the DOD considered “low-level enemy combatants,” including footsoldiers, drivers, Uyghur refugees, and children as young as thirteen. Many were found to have been wrongly arrested in the first place. Nearly all the former detainees have since been released; out of hundreds in the 2000s, only fifteen now remain. Meanwhile, many of the worst torture and other abuses that the public associates with Guantánamo—crimes we were told throughout the War on Terror were necessary to keep us safe—were actually conducted elsewhere, in so-called “black sites” in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The role that Guantánamo played was to make the idea seem possible of a “black hole” beyond the reach of morality and the law, where America’s most dangerous enemies were being thrown, never to be seen again. Which is why some, including author Andrea Pitzer, deemed “Gitmo” by definition to be a concentration camp.

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