ABSTRACT
What matters about Guantánamo has very little to do with what engages most legal scholars and social scientists. Law at Guantánamo—and especially the law of military commissions—is an extravagant irrelevance, of almost no substantive purpose except to distract from the reality of unfettered global American power in the war on terror and the plight of the remaining prisoners at the base. Law serves a symbolic purpose to the right and left that increasingly has nothing to do either with the reality of the Cuban prison or the scope of American hegemony. Sadly, however, most scholars have been slow to detect the difference between symbol and substance, and even less inclined to account for the chasm that separates the two.
