Guantanamo Bay

This article reckons with the figure of Blackness in the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, from captives who are racialized as both Muslim and Black to the invocations of racism and slavery in discourses incited by the prison. Broad continuities between the War on Terror and various forms of anti-Black state violence have long been observed by critical commentators, but this article aims to theorize these relationships with greater precision through the analytic of captivity. As a modality of racialization, captivity entails mobility across contexts as well as encounters of captivation through public narrative. This approach offers a distinctive vantage point on how the War on Terror's racialization of Muslims cross-cuts diverse geographies of Blackness, including in Muslim-majority societies. This essay follows the memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania) and Walid Muhammad al-Hajj (Sudan) and is informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and activist working to close the prison.

The examination of US counterterrorism policies and the US’s shift towards a preventive security paradigm routinely overlook the contributions of the Judicial Branch.  This dissertation addresses this oversight by introducing two new theoretical mechanisms, the invisible judicial hand and norm confirmation, to analyze how the judiciary influences policy.  Using these mechanisms and key judicial norms like the doctrine of precedent and deference on national security matters, the post-9/11 surveillance and detention regimes are critically deconstructed to show how they were molded by pre-9/11 judicial decisions.  This analysis concludes that post-9/11 US counterterrorism policies were path dependent because of judicial precedents dating back to the American Civil War, and that the focus on the Executive and Legislative branches may be misplaced.  This conclusion raises new questions about how international relations and security scholars study US national security policies, and suggests that the US judiciary indirectly influences global security norms.

Mintpress, May 29, 2019

https://www.mintpressnews.com/lee-camp18-ways-julian-assange-wikileaks-changed-the-world/258790/

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks revealed the American military’s war crimes, the American government’s corruption and the American corporate media’s pathetic servile flattery to the power elite.

Next week, Regarding Rights will publish Veronica Fynn’s analysis of the case of Canadian Omar Khadr. On 27 July 2002, 15-year old Khadr became the youngest prisoner since the Second World War to be prosecuted for war crimes by a military tribunal. Detained and tortured at Guantanamo Bay,  Fynn argues Khadr was abandoned by Canada, contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Supreme and Federal Courts Rulings, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Khadr was returned to Canada on 29 September 2012 to serve the reminder of his sentence after pleading guilty. Fynn examines the Khadr case as an illustration of the uneven and ad hoc nature of law in the so-called “War on Terror,” where one child (Khadr, born into what has been frequently characterised as a “Muslim terrorist family”) is underserving of state protection while another (e.g. former Sierra Leonean child soldier Ishmael Beah) warrants sympathy and compassion. In such cases, Fynn asks, is the phrase “all are equal under the law” a myth or fact?

My most comprehensive paper detailing the conception and initialisation of the 9/11 plot by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's terrorist cell in 1997 Yemen.

This is first-hand witness testimony - I was there, a CIA patsy in 1997 Yemen when the 9/11 plot began.

Ustavna demokracija temelji na načelu omejitve oblasti, kjer je delovanje državnih organov ustavnopravno omejeno s ciljem učinkovitejšega spoštovanja človekovih pravic in svoboščin. Čeprav je sistem omejitve oblasti vpet v različne in številne politične sisteme in ustavnopravne rede držav, ga znanstvena literatura proučuje v redkih primerih.

Z namenom zapolnitve te vrzeli z interdisciplinarno doktorsko disertacijo podamo izvirni prispevek k znanstvenima disciplinama politologije in prava v dveh korakih. V prvem koraku s kvalitativno raziskovalno analizo v luči predhodne proučitve zgodovinskega razvoja politične ideje in ustavnopravnega načela omejitve oblasti oblikujemo teoretični model sistema omejitve oblasti in opredelimo njegovo tipologijo. Sistemu omejitve oblasti določimo tri razsežnosti (stvarno-vsebinsko, funkcionalno-organizacijsko in vrednostno-vsebinsko razsežnost) in pet ustavnih prvin (načelo taksativno določenih ustavnih pristojnosti oblasti, načelo razmejitve pristojnosti v zvezni državni ureditvi, načelo delitve oblasti, sistem zavor in ravnovesij ter ustavne pravice). Tipologijo sistema omejitve oblasti opredelimo tako na ravni omejitve oblasti kot tudi na ravni prvin sistema omejitve oblasti, pri čemer na obeh ravneh izpeljemo relacijsko in obsežnostno tipologijo.

V drugem koraku z združeno oziroma kombinirano raziskovalno analizo empirično proučujemo vlogo delovanja ustavnega sistema zavor in ravnovesij v Združenih državah Amerike kot prvine sistema omejitve oblasti pri učinkovitejšem spoštovanju pravic ujetnikov v Guantánamu med letoma 2001 in 2020. Tem domnevnih mednarodnih teroristov ob premestitvi v taborišče v zalivu Guantánamo ameriška izvršilna oblast v sklopu tako imenovane vojne proti terorizmu, s katero so Združene države Amerike odgovorile na teroristični napad 11. septembra 2001, ni procesno uresničevala njihovih pravic. Ugotovimo lahko, da je imel sistem zavor in ravnovesij v proučevanem obdobju pozitivno vlogo pri obsegu formalnopravnega varstva in procesnega uresničevanja pravice ujetnikov v Guantánamu do sodnega nadzora zakonitosti odvzema prostosti in pravice do človečnega ravnanja, negativno vlogo pa pri obsegu formalnopravnega varstva in procesnega uresničevanja njihove pravice do dolžnega pravnega ravnanja in pravice do osebne svobode.

Ključne besede: politologija prava, ustavna demokracija, konstitucionalizem, ustava, omejitev oblasti, zavore in ravnovesja, ZDA, terorizem, vojna proti terorizmu, človekove pravice, ujetniki, vojaške komisije, Guantánamo.

On November 13, 2001, United States President George W. Bush signed a Military Order (66 Fed. Reg. 57,833) authorizing ad hoc military tribunals at the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to detain, interrogate, and try those providing assistance for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The detainees were designated “illegal enemy combatants” and did not have the right to a writ of habeas corpus, which would have given them access to United States civilian courts in wartime. As a precedent, the Bush administration cited Ex parte Quirin (1942) in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of military tribunals created by United States President F. D. Roosevelt for the trial of German saboteurs.
Over the period of both G. W. Bush presidential terms, the United States Supreme Court ruled on five high-profile military tribunal-related cases: Hamdi (2004), Padilla (2004), Rasul (2004), Hamdan (2006), and Boumediene (2008). In these cases, the United States Supreme Court made a decision whether the executive branch remained within its constitutional limits and whether it operated within the international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions, of which the U.S is a signatory.

In Hamdan (2006) the United States Supreme Court concluded that i) the President as Commander in Chief does not have inherent power to create military tribunals outside the existing statutory authority and ii) the Geneva Conventions, which are included in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, are applicable to military tribunals. In light of the Hamdan decision, President Bush appealed to Congress to adopt legislation that would address the court’s objections. In October 2006, the United States Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, authorizing military tribunals that were by this act exempt from following the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Subsequently, in Boumediene (2008) the United States Supreme Court ruled that Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was unconstitutional, since it suspended the habeas right for the detainees at Guantanamo, who under the United States Constitution had a right to petition federal courts for habeas corpus challenges.

An imperial presidency, which is observed when the constitutional balance of power is upset in favor of presidential power, is not built into the structure of the United States government. Nonetheless, just as the presidencies of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon were imperial, indeed so also was that of George W. Bush. With its rulings, the United States Supreme Court has on several occasions pointed out to United States Presidents that executive power is limited, even in wartime. Along with the rule of law, the notions of separation of powers and checks and balances are prerequisites for a strong government that protects human rights and limits the danger of tyranny. As James Madison expressed in Federalist Paper No. 51: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

Theories of sovereignty emphasizing states of exception, as elaborated by Giorgio Agamben and others, have become a regular fixture in critiques of contemporary U.S. empire. By tracing the circulation of Muslim captives in the War on Terror from infamous sites of detention like Guantánamo Bay to lesser-known prisons around the world, this article argues for a plural notion of sovereignty instead. U.S. empire is not only about unilateralism and overreach, but depends crucially on upholding the sovereignty of client states to legitimize itself and outsource responsibilities to others. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in an immigration detention center outside Sarajevo, Bosnia and informed by experiences litigating Guantánamo habeas corpus petitions.

This paper empirically examines the role of the separation of powers in safeguarding detainees’ rights within U.S. detainee policies and practices. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the U.S. government detained terrorism suspects indefinitely and without charge, denied them a right to challenge their detention and subjected them to “enhanced interrogation methods.” Relying on the empirical analysis of jurisprudence and legislation passed during the Bush and Obama presidencies, the paper argues that judicial and legislative checks on the Executive played both positive and negative roles in the U.S government’s protection of Guantánamo detainees’ rights within the U.S. detainee policies and practices, with the Supreme Court exhibiting predominantly a positive role and Congress predominantly a negative role.

José Ramón Sánchez Leyva --poeta de Guantánamo, Cuba-- ha estado pensando y escribiendo sobre “Gitmo” desde hace varios años. En esta entrevista él discute su fascinación con la base naval estadounidense,  las perspectivas de los cubanos y algunas de sus esperanzas para el futuro.

Guantánamo has served as a potent site for ideological production at various points in U.S. history, but more significantly since 2001. Nearly 800 Muslim men and teenagers have been imprisoned at Guantánamo in the 21st century, but no new prisoners have been sent to the prison since 2008, and more than 700 have been released, most with no charge.  In the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, Trump promised to fill the prison with “bad dudes,” including Americans accused of terrorism. Post election, his administration announced that no additional prisoners would be transferred out, and drafted an executive order allowing ISIS fighters to be brought to Guantanamo. This paper examines the shifting ideological discourses that shape conceptions of Guantánamo, of the Muslim prisoners who have been held there, ideas about Muslims in America, and ultimately American attitudes about Islam.

""""Whether they articulate fears about freed slaves, Jews, freemasons, communists, civil rights, the federal government, the “New World Order”, or “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG), conspiracy theories have always been central to the American extreme-right. The extreme-right is a diverse group of right-wing movements, most notably white supremacists, white nationalists, white separatists, and neo-Nazis such as the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, National Alliance, Aryan Nations, and others who hold racist and/or anti-Semitic views, ideologies, and conspiracist interpretations and theories of history and power.  Such extreme-right movements and organizations have emerged and proliferated at different points throughout American history whenever they perceive social, political, or economic developments as detrimental to the white race and/or America, from Reconstruction in the 1880s through civil rights in the 1960s and the farm crisis in the 1980s to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Conspiracy theories have provided a vehicle for the expression and representation of the extreme-right’s fears about threats to white supremacy and America and served as justification for their political mobilization, activism, and violence. While the conspirators in such theories have included internal and external enemies or threats, there has been a consistent stable of usual suspects that relate to America’s racial, political, ideological, and regional fault-lines. Even though there have been both internal enemies and allies in such theories, external forces are rarely portrayed as anything but a threat. Following 9/11, al-Qaeda, Islamist Extremists, the Middle East, and the wider Muslim and Arab world began to feature more prominently in extreme-right conspiracy theories and literature. While the mainstream right feared the threat posed by this region and people, the extreme-right saw them as potential allies in the war against the American government and Zionism. In response, watchdogs, academics, and other commentators have made a great deal about the link between extreme-right and Islamist conspiracy theories and potential alliances between the two movements, not just post-9/11 but retrospectively throughout the post-war era.

In this chapter , I examine American extreme-right conspiracy theories concerning the Middle East and the Muslim and Arab world, attempted alliances with Islamists and the relationship between such theories and alliances, as well as work by  commentators who attempt to establish links between the extreme-right and Islamists based on their shared penchant for conspiracy theories and efforts towards alliance building.  I argue that in spite of claims about overlap and alliances, attempts to forge alliances between the extreme-right and Islamists have been unidirectional, originating with the extreme-right, and largely unsuccessful.  Moreover, they have tended to occur during (and thus reflect) periods of movement realignment or crisis, when the extreme-right is seeking political direction and relevance. These are periods which correspond to developments and realignments in American foreign policy and international relations that concern the Middle East and Islam. In Part One, I examine attempts by commentators to establish links between conspiracy theories, extremism  and political alliances and between the extreme-right and Islamists. This is followed in Part Two with an examination of attempts by the extreme-right to form alliances with the Arab and Muslim world, as well as conspiracy theories about them, in five specific periods of realignment or crisis in the post-war period: post-World War II, post-Civil Rights, post-Cold War, post-9/11, and following the election of Barack Obama.
""""

Commenting on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) and the U.S. occupation of the Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this Article argues that anomaly on the base heavily influences "War on Terror" detention jurisprudence. Anomaly is created by agreements between the U.S. and Cuba in 1903 and 1934. They affirm that the U.S. lacks sovereignty over Guantanamo but retains "complete jurisdiction and control" for an indefinite period; while Cuba has "ultimate sovereignty." Gerald Neuman labels this an "anomalous zone" with fundamental legal rules locally suspended. The base was chosen as a detention center because of this anomaly, with checks in constitutional and international law perceived to not apply. This Article makes three arguments about what legal norms apply on Guantanamo. First, the base's legal anomaly is not an aberration, but instead is a precise objective of U.S.-Cuba relations, evident in the Platt Amendment and international agreements. Second, four legal objectives frame this anomaly, historically and presently. They are that the U.S.: avoids sovereignty abroad, limits incidents of Cuban sovereignty, avoids constitutional limits for its overseas authority, and protects strategic overseas interests. Using these objectives, Boumediene addresses this current anomaly. To hold that detainees have access to the writ of habeas corpus in the Constitution's Suspension clause, the Court finds that the U.S. exercises de facto sovereignty over the base and that the Constitution has extraterritorial application. Third, tracking legal similarities in base occupation and base detention, post-colonial analysis illuminates how current doctrine evades individual rights protections with overseas authority. These three points illuminate how in the future U.S. law may determine what legal norms check (or not) overseas authority, whether on Guantanamo or in other extraterritorial settings.

Whilst a growing body of literature working at the intersection of security and visual studies recognizes the value of studying images, how these visualities are produced is less theorized, especially with respect to materialities and their capacity to compel meanings. Analysing the tours of Joint Task Force Guantanamo arranged by the US military for VIP visitors since the site opened, this article argues that the selective organisation and presentation of specific matter was image-making and therefore meaning-making. Through efforts to produce a spectacle of detention, Guantánamo was deliberately constructed as ‘safe, humane, legal, transparent’, in the process shifting the meaning of these very concepts. Guantánamo’s tours as visual and material practices were therefore used to produce meaning in the debate over the future of the site and over how best to secure the US state post-9/11. They were part of the constitution of the war’s legitimacy leading, ultimately, to certain understandings of security. Guantánamo with its ‘object lessons’ and ‘concrete messages’ is therefore a useful case study for understanding security meaning-making as produced by the interaction of linguistic, visual and material domains and their elements.

Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and the publication of related images. This chapter considers two of these images together (one from Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay, in January 2002, and the other from the 'Abu Ghraib archive' made shortly after), in order to argue that the 'spectacle of the scaffold' famously identified by Michel Foucault did not disappear completely as he claimed, but was transformed. Foucault could not countenance this possibility due to a methodological aversion to representational-juridical power. But his account can nonetheless help us, I argue, to think through the fraught relationship between images of torture emanating from a liberal democratic state that disavows torture, and such a state's strategies for maintaining its governmental power.

Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.

When Dan Mori, in June 2003, found he was likely to be David Hicks' lawyer, he had not taken much interest in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan. His life for the next four years was a journey of discovery of the manner in which the United States and its ally, Australia, had launched a war on the rule of law, a war that has not ended.
Mori manages to tell the story of this journey in a way that deals with the legal and political complexity without ever diminshing the human story.

Please support the book and journal of original publication, see URLs:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/684770
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-social-work-of-narrative/9783838209586

This is the last draft of the essay submitted for publication.

In the context of our contemporary memoir culture of injury and survival, it has become something of an inspirational mantra to maintain that every life has a story. In fact, we have become so used to thinking in terms of “life stories” that the humanistic equation between life and narrative (that sees life as the source of narrative and narrative as the sustenance of life) can seem like a simple truism, rather than, say, a political commitment or a moral imperative. It becomes easy to overlook how contingent and recent a generic phenomenon the “life-story” itself is. Because the equation between narrative and life may not be at all inevitable, it is striking how close narrative is to life—not in a mimetic sense, or even in a humanistic metaphysical or moral sense, but in an even more mundane spatial and temporal sense: the mere proximity of the words “life” and “narrative” in so much writing and speaking on law and violence. The juxtaposition of life and narrative appears commonly in law review articles, human rights reports, humanitarian appeals, journalistic news stories, medical and psychological treatment guidelines, and military field operations manuals.

Introduction available at https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=24702&i=Introduction.html

No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.

Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.

If we compare American and European legal systems, differences are essentially due to the different way of dealing with the culture of security and the relationship between politics and law. Today, that gap is narrowing because Europe is changing its approach to security and, in the field of migration, its political quest for more security also involves the limitation of the judicial check and a more formalistic approach to interpreting and applying the law, i.e. two legal solutions that are typical of the US approach to security. Following decades of strong and wide protection of human rights in any situation, States and the European Commission are seeking for a new and different balance between human rights and security and are ready to trade some political idealism and legal functionalism in the field of migration and human rights for more political pragmatism and legal formalism in the field of security

This article examines the behavior of the Guantánamo detainees in terms of collaboration and disobedience and how it influences their chances of getting a release recommendation. Joint Task Force Guantanamo–authored memoranda on 765 detainees are used to create a network of accusations between detainees and an attribute data set, which are analyzed using multivariate regression and Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests. It is found that while the distribution of incriminating statements obeys a power law, 62.6 percent of all detainees do not incriminate anyone. Yemenis and Saudi Arabians heavily overcontribute regarding incriminating statements and disobedient actions, whereas Afghans and Pakistanis undercontribute. Disobedient behavior does not affect the likelihood of getting a release recommendation, except for hunger striking, which has a negative effect. By releasing information, detainees don’t improve their own chances of getting release recommendations but impair those of the detainees they implicate. Three different groups of detainees are identified whose behavioral patterns seem to follow distinct logics.

The narrative turn in the social sciences and the ethical turn in the humanities that occurred in the 1990s converged in the study of human rights and social justice. Human rights, it was argued, were about and dependent upon modes of storytelling; torture was often cited as a paradigmatic example of the ways in which narrative and human rights were co-implicated. The centralization of torture in the prosecution of the “War on Terror” and the recent declassification of documents authorizing the use of torture by U.S. personnel offers an important occasion to reconsider some of the tenets of the arguments about human rights and narrative. This essay considers the problem of declassification as a process of un-narration and examines some of the ways that art and literature have attempted to deal with the stories of torture that are actively untold.

Since 2002, prisoners at Guantánamo Bay detention camp have been force-fed as punishment for hunger striking, prompting the question of at what point the medical clinic becomes a site of punitive suffering. This essay examines force-feeding as an instantiation of the tension between authority, visuality, and pain. Through a detailed analysis of prisoner testimonials, the policy manual Medical Management of Detainees on Hunger Strike, and a video project by human rights organization Reprieve featuring artist Yasiin Bey simulating the “proper” techniques for force-feeding, the author argues that pain becomes the basis of not only political subjectivity but also relationality between those held captive and the spectator.

Manus Island in Papua New Guinea is called “Australia’s Guantánamo” by critics of its use as a detention site for refugees, including Behrouz Boochani, a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and refugee imprisoned there by the Australian government for almost six years. This essay explores the usefulness and limitations of Guantánamo as a metaphor to describe Manus and other sites in Australia’s offshore detention regime. In addition, it argues that Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) counters dis-placement and the dehumanization of refugees through literary language. Moving beyond testimony, Boochani produces a poetical, critical, and embodied response to Australia’s silencing and erasure of refugees.

La isla de Manus en Papúa Nueva Guinea se conoce como "el Guantánamo de Australia" por las personas que critican su uso como lugar para la detención de refugiados, entre ellos el poeta, periodista y cineasta Behrouz Boochani. El gobierno australiano mantiene a Boochani preso en la isla, por casi ya seis años. Este ensayo explora la utilidad y las limitaciones del uso de Guantánamo como metáfora para describir Manus y otros lugares que forman parte del régimen de detención ultramarino de Australia. Además, sostiene que el libro No Friend but the Mountains (2018) de Boochani rebate el desplazamiento y la deshumanización de los refugiados mediante un lenguaje literario. Más allá del testimonio, Boochani responde a la invisibilización y al silenciamiento de los refugiados por el gobierno de Australia con una obra poética, crítica y empoderada.

Despite the vast amount of research available as to why America and Cuba had a terrible relationship in the past – not many resources went into great detail about the three specific events that occurred after the introduction of the Platt Amendment. This report encapsulates the true reasons and feelings that were felt during this time and even now in the present. It will cover the Platt Amendment and critique, displaying reasons as to why Cuba thought it was unnecessary, whilst the United States thought it was absolutely a requirement. It will analyse the significance of Havana and it’s corruption under the hand of the United States and how Cuba had to manipulate and adapt their ways to make sure that they were still financially viable since the United States had tried to grind their journey to capitalism to a halt. This report will go into abundant specifics about the situation involving The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis – whilst simultaneously invoking the thoughts of Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro. It will argue that the acquirement of the naval base, Guantanamo Bay, was signed away on shaky terms that were abused and manipulated to the United States’ pleasure. This report will analyse the relationship between the United States and Cuba after 1901 and beyond – it will provide evidence as to why the US believes they are entitled to things that are not theirs, and then abuse that power.