victoria brittain

Guantanamo
A feminist perspective on U.S. human
rights violations

The Play

On 24 May 2004 in London our play Guantanamo, Honour Bound to Defend

Freedom 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, their
censored letters home, and the explanations of their lawyers of the legal
black hole their clients are in. It was to be a tiny snapshot of what the war
on 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 both
by the United States and by various allied regimes on behalf of the United
States; the impact of this within U.S. society; the assault on civil liberties
by 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 Muslim
children.
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 in
2005. But eight U.K. residents, most of them originally refugees, remain in

[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2006, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 209–219]

©2006 by Smith College. All rights reserved.

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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 (Brittain
2005). 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 other
U.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 in
other theaters in various countries. Hundreds of community hall readings
have 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 from
a secondary school in Lahore, Pakistan, where the young actors had a huge
local 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 original
backgrounds: Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Jamaica. In the
cases of two Caribbean prisoners, the families are not Muslim, in fact some
family 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 emerged
during an interview, although sometimes they sat silently or sent in tea. The
interviews were arranged through their lawyers, and in every case where
there 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 has

somewhat changed in the years since our interviews were done, in March
and April 2004. In one small sign of this, several of the women from the
families 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, although
they knew little or nothing about where their brothers had been arrested
or what had happened to them before. They had never been to London’s
House of Commons before, until they were invited by a woman MP, who
had 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 the
men’s release in late 2004, following the play’s unexpectedly successful
reception across the U.K. political spectrum.
On the wider canvas, we now know that women in senior positions in
the U.S. military played key roles in the scandals of prisoners’ deaths and
torture in the U.S. prisons of Bagram and Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and we also know how closely linked these prison regimes were with
one 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 and
applicable laws” had their genesis not in Iraq but in interrogation rooms
in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—and ultimately in decisions
made by high officials in Washington” (Danner 2005).

Kidnapping, Rendition, and Sales

Among these decisions—made incidentally in an unusually masculine-style

White House—was the policy of extraordinary rendition, whereby men were
kidnapped by U.S. forces in many countries and flown to countries with a
history 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—was
seized 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 in
terrorism, and they let him go after pressure from the Canadian government
(see Shane 2005).1 His wife, like many others, has attempted to describe

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 the horror and impotence of months of not even knowing where he was.
Two Egyptian refugees, Ahmed Agiza and Mohamed Al-Zery, were ar-
rested in Sweden at the request of the United States and flown shackled and
blindfolded in a private CIA jet to Cairo. Mr. Agiza’s mother visited him in
prison, where he still is, and she has spoken out about what has happened
to him. His wife was granted political asylum in Sweden in 2004, but she is
deeply traumatized with the fear that another brutal upheaval could hit her
family at any time. Mr. Al-Zery remains under house arrest in Egypt.
Only in the past two years has it emerged that kidnapping was a common
pattern in the U.S. war on terror. It has also come out that many of those
taken prisoner, such as Mr. Arar or the Algerian martial arts champion
with a Bosnian passport Mustafa Ait Idir, have never been anything other
than law-abiding citizens. Mr. Idir was one of six Algerians living in Bosnia
who were first held for three months by the Bosnians at the request of the
United States but then released on the orders of the Bosnian Supreme Court
in January 2002. As they left prison, they were handcuffed and forced into
waiting unmarked cars by men who one of the group later claimed were
Americans wearing Bosnian uniforms over their own attire. These newly
released prisoners were flown to Guantanamo. The wife of one of the men,
Hadj Boudella, expressed perfectly the sensation many describe after hear-
ing their husband’s pleas of innocence dismissed. Nadja Dizdarevic wrote
to her husband’s U.S. lawyers, “I am so shocked by this information that
it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was
dead” (Mayer 2005). The Algerians found themselves among men who
were simply sold to the Americans directly or through the Pakistani police.
For instance, Fawzi al Odah was a student in the university in Kuwait. With
friends he had the habit of spending Ramadan in impoverished remote ar-
eas on the Pakistan/Afghan border, teaching village children. He was sold,
with four others, to Pakistani officials by tribal elders (Gutman, Dickey, and
Yousafzai 2002). They all ended up in Guantanamo and Fawzi is still there
despite numerous efforts by the Kuwaiti government to get him released
(as some Saudi men and some Kuwaitis were). Mr. Odah’s mother is very
active along with her husband, a former fighter pilot, in efforts to bring
their son’s plight to world attention and to press her government for more
action.2
Our play tells the stories of three men in Guantanamo, an aid worker and
two businessmen, who were kidnapped by U.S. forces in Pakistan and in the

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West African state of Gambia and taken first to Bagram in Afghanistan and
then to Guantanamo. Two of them are among the five U.K. residents, not
citizens, still there (as of April 2006) (Brittain 2006). In this limbo they have
minimal contact with families through censored letters that the Red Cross
delivers. They have no idea why they are held, what they are accused of, or
how long their ordeal may last. Like their families they are made completely
powerless by the system the U.S. government has put in place. And the pro-
paganda about their “guilt,” which the highest U.S. officials have constantly
put in the media, combined with government lies about their “capture on
the battlefield,” have made the isolation of their families even worse. The
prisoners are held in cages with minimal conditions of comfort and privacy.
Interrogations are constant, abusive behavior such as beatings and sleep
deprivation is the norm, and solitary confinement can last for years.

The Legal Black Hole

It is inescapable to frame discussion of Guantanamo in the factual context

of law as well as in the context of the moral issue of human rights law viola-
tions by the most powerful democracy in the world.
The code of international human rights law has been built up since the
end of the Second World War, and it now consists of a voluminous body of
law (albeit what the lawyers call soft law, that is, law that cannot be enforced
by simply obtaining a court order). The basic documents are the Geneva
Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the two
UN Covenants of Civil and Political Rights and of Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights (both 1966), and the UN Convention against Torture.
But Guantanamo is the deliberate use by the Bush administration of a
place beyond the rule of law. The first President Bush used Guantanamo—
part of Cuba illegally occupied by the U.S. for more than half a century—to
hold Haitian refugees, and he formulated then the idea that the U.S.
constitution did not apply there (Ratner and Ray 2004). The younger Bush
compounded this by deciding that the Geneva Conventions did not apply
there either.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York is the leading
U.S. lawyers’ human rights organization that has fought the George W.
Bush administration in the courts for access to justice for the prisoners.
They were given a hearing in the Supreme Court in April 2004 in the case of

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 Rasul v. Bush, after losing in the U.S. District Court and the appeal to the cir-
cuit court. The Supreme Court ruled in their favor—that the federal courts
had the authority to review the detentions. The New York Times called it the
most important civil rights case in half a century. But the White House and
the Pentagon then began a remarkable politicization of U.S. law to avoid
compliance.
After the Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 that prisoners in Guanta-
namo—all foreigners—did have the right to hearings in U.S. civil courts,
some dramatic developments were expected. But it has so far gotten the
prisoners nowhere near any federal court. The U.S. government response
has merely been to organize another layer of meaningless hearings by a
military board inside Guantanamo—Status Review Tribunals—and some
access to a handful of detainees by American civilian lawyers who accepted
to be bound by such draconian gag orders that they could not even tell the
detainees’ families how their health was.
As one of these lawyers, Michael Ratner of CCR, put it, “The government
has us tied up in knots over issues concerning access to our clients, gag
orders, and the like. In addition they have asked that all the federal cases be
dismissed because first, our clients have no rights and second, even if they
do have a right to minimal due process, the Status Review Tribunals frauds
are sufficient hearings that obligate the federal court at most to review their
findings” (Personal telephone interview). The military commissions and
status review tribunals that Pentagon lawyers created have been roundly and
publicly criticized by some of the same military lawyers who were to partici-
pate in them, as well as by numerous civil rights lawyers.

Torture

A now infamous memo of 25 January 2002 from the then White House legal
counsel, now attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, spells out the evasion of
the Geneva Conventions for Taliban and Al Qaeda, and it lays the basis for
what has happened at Guantanamo: torture and its inevitable consequences
(Ratner and Ray 2004). The ex-prisoners have testified to the Guantanamo
routine of false confessions, false witnessing against others, a cats’ cradle
of bad information corroborated by men prepared to say anything to end
torture (Rasul, Iqbal, and Ahmed 2004). In August 2004 the CCR presented
the 115-page dossier prepared in the offices of the British solicitor Gareth

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Pierce on the torture of the three young British men from Tipton (Rasul,
Iqbal, and Ahmed 2004). The details, corroborated by prisoners who re-
turned home to a number of European countries and gave evidence to law-
yers or spoke to the media, are well enough known not to need repeating
here. Much of it has been corroborated, too, by guards inside the facility.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a rare public an-
nouncement of their confidential findings, cited in particular the high-level
anxiety experienced by men at Guantanamo, who can see no end to their
ordeal. Nothing has been published on the acute anxiety of their wives,
mothers, and children, who also live with this uncertainty.

The Women Interrogators

Other aspects of the regime at Guantanamo, which have only recently

emerged, are the use of female interrogators and the deliberate sexual
humiliation of these Muslim men. The American writer Seymour Hersh has
drawn attention to the influence on many senior officials in the U.S. admin-
istration of the book The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai. “The notion that Arabs
are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point
among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March
2003 invasion of Iraq” (Hersh 2004a, 38–39). In the interviews for our play,
no one mentioned these practices of sexual torture by female guards and in-
terrogators, but in the past two years it has become well known to have been
a key method in U.S. authorities’ attempts to break devout Muslim men.
The crude use of red ink to simulate menstrual blood that women rubbed
on men refusing to talk, the use of provocative clothing, and offers of sex to
prisoners appear in a book being prepared by a male interrogator, and they
have come out, too, in recent testimonies. This has been U.S. government
policy, made in Washington, but, like the infamous Abu Ghraib photo-
graphs of Private Lynndie England standing laughing over naked men, it
has found uneducated young American women willing to use their sex in
this alienated way under the direction of powerful male superiors. Women
in power in the army, such as General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge at
Abu Ghraib, or Captain Carolyn Wood, who lied in the cover-up of deaths
at Bagram, remind us that women are not exempt from plumbing these
depths in their actions. The women in the U.S. army in this period have ac-
cepted the dominant masculine culture, apparently without question.

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 It is a well-known pattern in authoritarian states. In Chile under the
Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, for instance, when many of the militants de-
tained and tortured were women, some of the political prisoners said later
that among the torturers “the women were the worst.”

A Brutalized Society: The United States

And to continue with the Chile parallel, Fermin Cabal’s play Tejas Verdes con-
tains the memorable character of the woman military doctor who oversaw
the prisoners and when called to an enquiry into the horrors of the torture
center years later and when questioned about the practices said, “Do you
really think these things are possible? That the army of a civilised country
could behave in this way?” President George W. Bush attempted similarly to
dismiss these kinds of accusations of brutality when the Abu Ghraib pho-
tographs flashed around the world, by saying that those responsible were
just a few bad apples. But his attempt to shrug off a wide responsibility has
failed in the light of the twelve hundred pages of official documents now
published that show the decisions made at the highest levels (Greenberg
and Dratel 2005).
The impact of torture on both the victim and the perpetrator is well
known from such classic testimony as that of the Algerian students tortured
in Paris by the French in 1959 (La Gangrene, 1959), and in English (Silvers
1960), and in the French journalist Henri Alleg’s experience with the French
military in Algeria recounted in La Question (Alleg 1958). In 1973, an Amnes-
ty International report stated: “Cancer is an apt metaphor for torture and its
spread through the social organism. The act of torture can not be separated
from the rest of society . . . to give in to the use of torture is to invite its
spread and the eventual debasement of the whole society. . . . Torture is the
ultimate human corruption” (Amnesty International 1973.)
However, it is not only torture but also the demonization of an enemy
that undermines societies. A generation of American youth came back from
Vietnam brutalized and uneasy about their place in society after what they
had done—as dozens of books and films have recounted. And in Israel
today increasing numbers of young men are refusniks who will not do their
military service in the Occupied Palestinian Territories because they have
seen enough of how Arabs are treated as less than human, and they prefer a
clean conscience and a prison sentence.

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 Guantanamo is producing its own dissidents among the staff, espe-
cially military lawyers, who are talking to journalists, writing books, and
denouncing the injustices they see as well as the pointlessness of repeated
interrogations of men who know nothing. (Note in particular the Muslim
military chaplain James Yee’s account [2005].) The work of the writer
Franz Kafka is frequently invoked in Guantanamo, as detainess attempt
to describe what it feels like to be locked up and repeatedly interrogated
without knowing what they are accused of, nor when, if ever, they will face a
court of justice.

Heroic Endurance

It is in the hidden role of the wives and mothers and sisters of Guantanamo
prisoners that feminism can find some deeply inspiring expression. For
instance, Sharon, Kathleen, and Jeanette are the sisters of three British
men held in Guantanamo for two years and now released, whose families
were originally from Africa and the Caribbean. None had the educational
or cultural background that would have given them easy political or media
experience. But after an initial period of shocked silence, all were notice-
ably empowered by their dissidence and refusal to accept the authorities’
briefings to them that nothing could be done. Inside their families, at their
work, and in relation to officials, they are stronger, more confident women
than before the heavy blow of their brothers’ incarceration in Guantanamo.
The same phenomenon of empowerment for some of the grieving moth-
ers is true for families in other places with more traditionalist cultures, such
as Kuwait. For instance, the mother of Fawzi al Odeh has lobbied to the top
of the Kuwaiti government and traveled to London attempting to see the
foreign office on behalf of her son.
And Mrs. el Banna, Palestinian wife of Jamil el Banna, who was kid-
napped by the Americans in Gambia and is still in Guantanamo despite
even the interrogators telling him, “We know you are innocent,” is one of a
number of women who have impressively held large families of children to-
gether in incredibly difficult circumstances. Mrs. el Banna, a schoolteacher
in Jordan before her marriage, is from a devout Palestinian family. In ten
years as a refugee in London, she learned English well enough to negoti-
ate the bureaucracy of an alien culture but maintained a modest lifestyle
completely unaffected by the consumerism and brashness of contemporary

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 British culture. She has five children, the last one born while her husband
was in Guantanamo. The oldest boy, still only ten years of age, fasted with
her in Ramadan, and the smallest girl watches Palestinian children’s videos
in the mornings when the others are at school. To spend time in her house
is to be transported into the female culture of resistance to Israeli occupa-
tion expressed in houses in Gaza or the West Bank, with the hospitality;
endless cooking of homemade food; polite children, with the oldest helping
with the youngest; and impeccable cleanliness. The female strength that is
the cultural norm among women under occupation in Palestine has carried
Mrs. el Banna through three years without her husband, and at one point
nearly one and a half years with only one letter. In a common demonstra-
tion of spite, the Americans held the letters, and only in early 2005 did they
release thirteen letters together. In these circumstances, the bubble of hap-
piness that Mrs. el Banna has created for her children in a London suburb,
while safeguarding their privacy, is a heroic female achievement.3 In late
2005 she and her older boys began to speak in public, in a brave break from
all her previous cultural traditions.

Aftermath

A generation of Muslim children, especially those living in Western socie-

ties, have been deeply affected by what has happened at Guantanamo. From
personal experience, or that of friends and neighbours, or from Al Jazeera
television, they have seen deep injustice carried out against Muslims, by
Americans: Guantanamo is a symbol of other gross injustices they know
well, such as the occupation of Palestine or the invasion of Iraq. They have
seen too few Westerners with any power protest publicly. They have seen the
rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment in Western media and many
Western societies.4
The urgent need to change this new generation’s dangerous sense of
violent destiny is felt by a global grassroots movement. It is led, partially, by
Arab women and supported by women of many cultures. Its focus is against
the U.S. male militarism that has taken the world into a pattern of terrify-
ing destructiveness, against the leadership and media that have taught the
politics of fear and the rejection of the Other (West 2004), and against the
consumer capitalism that has captured the minds and morals of many in
the West and debased its creativity.

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 notes
1. Records seem to back the Canadian on rendition.
2. Fawzi was one of more than one hundred detainees who went on hunger strike
in mid-2005 in protest at the lack of legal recourse. Many were brutally force-
fed with large tubes up their noses, a practice denounced by several of their U.S.
lawyers, shocked by their clients’ worsening situation.
3. Mrs. el Banna has had the courage, too, after three years of separation from her
husband, to confront British officials in a meeting.
4. Notably in Britain since the terrorist attacks in London of 7 July 2005.

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Danner, Mark. 2005. Torture and Truth. New York: Granta Books.
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———. 2004b. “The Gray Zone.” New Yorker, 15 May.
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