Victims or Madmen? The Diagnostic Competition over “Terrorist” Detainees at Guantánamo Bay

Abstract

This article traces the pathologization of suspected terrorists held captive at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The occurrence of several reported suicide attempts among the detainees provided “proof” for their captors that terrorists are indeed fanatical madmen. These same reports of suicide attempts, however, were contradictorily diagnosed by human rights and humanitarian organizations as evidence of psychological deterioration induced by prolonged detention. What is notable in this diagnostic competition over what, exactly, afflicts the detainees is that both advocates and resisters to the detentions pathologized the detainees by chalking up the suicide attempts to their purportedly impaired psyches. This is significant because the pathologization of the detainees is one condition of possibility for their excision from the global body politic. Authoritarian practices, such as the incarceration of the “mad” and the detention of “suspected terrorists,” are theorized as integral to global liberal governance, which divides up populations, and subjects those deemed mad, deviant, or dangerous to coercive measures in the name of order, security, and liberty. The article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which international relations (IR) could be more attentive to the operation of the “psy” disciplines in the conduct of international affairs.

Lone‐Actor Terrorists’ Emotions and Cognition: An Evaluation Beyond Stereotypes

“…Yet despite innumerable efforts the psychology of terrorism remains “an enigma” (Ross, , p. 129). In their struggle to address the terrorist threat, but also because labeling terrorists as insane is politically convenient (Baele, ; Howell, ), policymakers and intelligence services have pressed hard to solve this enigma. Encouraging scholars to find “a fixed and unambiguous ‘terrorist profile’” (Crenshaw, , p. 407), they have only witnessed a persistent inability to do so.…”

Pathologizing Subjecthoods: Pop Culture, Habits of Thought, and the Unmaking of Resistance Politics at Guantanamo Bay

“…Although it was subsequently alleged that the men in question may in fact have been murdered under torture by their captors, the official claim that they took their own lives nevertheless exposes aspects of the rendering of political subjects whose importance can scarcely be gainsaid. As Ali Howell has shown in a previous issue of this journal, the deaths were placed within two competing narratives, one of madness and one of despair (Howell :30). Both of these narratives, however, deny the prisoners access to political agency.…”

The Uses of Psychiatry in the War on Terror

“…The diagnosis of PTSD has increasingly bestowed upon psychiatry the authority to legitimize emotional suffering (Sparr and Boehnlein 1990), and has created a form of Foucauldian technology to investigate individuals’ biographies for the twin purposes of therapeutic, clinical intervention and institutional, bureaucratic validation by the state (Fassin and d’Halluin 2007). The Guantanamo Bay trials epitomize “diagnostic competition” (Howell 2007:29) as the government seeks to quarantine those deemed dangerous and irrational from the rest of society while human rights officials interrogate the circumstances producing such illnesses, all the while reinforcing the pathologization of detainees and allowing for their indefinite detention. Despite the fact that both the prosecution and defense teams use a common psychiatric discourse as the medium through which their arguments are translated, the government remains the final adjudicator of the degree to which psychological suffering is permitted to influence legal proceedings – and, by extension, the medico‐legal treatment of detainees.…”