Between Past and Future: The Slow Death of Indefinite Detention

Abstract

The detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station has been operative for more than twenty years now. Since 2002 prisoners have been force-fed as punishment for staging individual and collective hunger strikes in protest of indefinite detention. The oldest captive is in his seventies, but the majority are middle-aged. In 2019 Carol Rosenberg reported that with the aging of those incarcerated, the Pentagon is now in the early planning stages for “terrorism suspects” to grow old and die at Guantánamo Bay, necessitating the building of a hospice wing at the detention camp. This essay asks what it means to think of hospice care in a torture facility, arguing that the military is using the possibility of hospice as a curative, both politically and rhetorically, to disavow the effects of torture on the bodyminds of captives.