By Colleen Coveney and Denise Shapiro

The Guantanamo Bay detention center is considered a “legal black hole” because it is not on sovereign United States territory, which has allowed the military to illegally detain, torture and degrade prisoners, says Lisa Hajjar, a UC Santa Barbara sociology professor.

UC Santa Barbara sociology professor Lisa Hajjar was the speaker at the Center for Middle East Studies’ most recent “Spotlight Series” event, where she discussed the government failures at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

“The public had no way of knowing what was actually going on. Everything was secret,” said Hajjar, at a Center for Middle East Studies (CMES) virtual event last week, part of its “Spotlight” Series. (See video excerpts below).

Last week marked 20 years since the United States military began using Guantanamo Bay as a detention center for “unlawful enemy combatants.” A total of 779 people have been detained in the military prison in Cuba over the last 20 years, Hajjar said, and 39 detainees remain. Only a quarter of one percent have been convicted of any crime. 

Hajjar is author of the upcoming book The War in Court: The Inside Story of the Fight against Torture in the “War on Terror.” She spoke about Guantanamo’s history and described her 14 visits to the Guantanamo Bay prison while researching her book. 

A lack of reliable intelligence after the September 11 attacks led the George W. Bush administration to justify the use of interrogational torture on individuals captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention on human rights, she said.

The first prisoners brought to Guantanamo Bay 20 years ago were tortured from the outset, shown here undergoing sensory deprivation. UC Santa Barbara Middle East scholar Lisa Hajjar spoke of human rights violations she researched for her upcoming book on how international and U.S. law was interpreted in Guantanamo Bay. Photo by Shane T. McCoy, 2002.

Many of them had no knowledge of terrorist activity, Hajjar added, but were detained in an attempt by the United States government to uncover intelligence in a stroke of luck.

“It was a combination of fear, ignorance, and hubris… anyone who came into US custody made them an unlawful combatant,” said Hajjar. “If they weren’t giving actionable intelligence up, the idea was that they were sneakily keeping it and therefore coercion must be used against these people.”

Now, the remaining 39 detainees are trapped in a Catch-22. Those who confessed to participating in the events of 9/11 did so while being tortured, so their confessions cannot be used as evidence in United States courts. Many have been cleared for release but are stuck in the prison until the Biden administration determines where to send them. 

The deliberate government policy choices that got the detainees to this point make justice impossible, according to Hajjar, but the United States should still attempt to make amends where it can. 

“If we think about the legal terrain as a battlefield, there are places where battles can be won, and places where you can’t even fight,” she said. “But if we lose sense of the importance of justice, then we might as well give it all up.”

After the presentation, anthropology Ph.D. candidate Gehad Abaza said that Hajjar’s book shows why Americans should care about the futures of the 39 remaining Guantanamo Bay detainees, who have become human reminders of the failure of torture as an intelligence tool. 

Hajjar has been devotedly working on this book for 20 years and the event was a kind of pre-launch, according to Center for Middle East Studies director Sherene Seikaly, who moderated the event. 

The Center’s spotlight series was developed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when professors had to halt their research and stay away from conferences, Seikaly said. Her goal is to take care of UCSB faculty and graduate students by giving them a space to speak about their academic pursuits at their home university.

Hajjar said her book can teach us about more than the injustices committed at Guantanamo Bay; it represents an opportunity for citizens to recognize their responsibility to check the power of a presidential administration.

“We should learn that this was an unmitigated disaster, a self-inflicted wound,” said Hajjar. “This was all a battle for narratives, and this is where enlightened and informed citizens have a great role to play.”

The reporters who co-wrote this article and produced the videos are both Web and Social Media student interns for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.