ABSTRACT
The detention of persons in Guantanamo Bay is potentially indefinite, contingent on the duration of the ‘war on terror’, a ‘war without end’. There is mounting evidence that detainees are being tortured (for evidence of torture in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison, Baghdad, see Hersh 2004a,b). The decision on whether the ‘life’ of a detainee in the ‘camp’ will be mediated by civil law is ostensibly determined by whether US Federal Courts have jurisdiction to grant the writ of habeas corpus.2 This chapter considers the abject condition of the detainee as part of the complex relation between an ‘emergency’ or ‘exception’ determined by a sovereign at ‘war’, and the juridical structure of a ‘life’ mediated by law. In several habeas corpus cases brought on behalf of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, this relation has been reduced to a question of jurisdiction.
