The Act of War

Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani — both Saudi — and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, Yemeni, were found dead in their cells on June 10, 2006. They had made nooses from sheets and clothing. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the facility's commanding officer, held a press conference and delivered the institutional verdict: "This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us."

Sit with that sentence for a moment.

Three men, held for years without charge, in a facility engineered to exist outside every legal framework the United States normally deploys — died, apparently by their own hands, in the only space the institution hadn't yet claimed. And the response was to classify their deaths as an enemy attack.

This is not a historical curiosity. This is a load-bearing structural pattern.

i · the architecture of the exception

Guantanamo Bay was not chosen by accident. The Department of Defense selected it precisely because its legal status was genuinely uncertain — sitting in Cuba under a century-old lease, technically not US soil, and arguably (the argument lasted years through the federal courts) outside the jurisdiction of constitutional protections and habeas corpus rights.

The pattern has a name. Legal theorist Carl Schmitt described the "state of exception" in 1922 — the moment when sovereign power suspends normal law in the name of an extraordinary threat. Giorgio Agamben traced its twentieth-century iterations in 1995, following the logic from colonial penal regimes through the Nazi camps to the contemporary security state. The structure is always the same: a zone created outside normal law, justified as temporary, necessary, exceptional. The zone persists. The exception becomes infrastructure.

Guantanamo in June 2006 held over 400 detainees. Most had not been charged with anything. Some were captured on actual battlefields. Others were swept up in the chaotic aftermath of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, sold to US forces by local informants collecting bounty payments — a few thousand dollars per body, no verification required. The Seton Hall University Center for Policy and Research spent years analyzing the government's own detainee data. Their findings: the majority of those assessed had not been captured on any battlefield and were classified as threats largely because they had been captured. The logic was circular by design. A system engineered to bypass normal evidentiary standards will produce evidence that requires bypassing normal standards.

Yasser al-Zahrani had been captured at seventeen. He spent most of his adult life in Guantanamo. He was never tried.

ii · when the body is the only instrument

There is a long history of people held in conditions of total institutional custody — prisons, camps, colonies — using the body as the only remaining instrument of political action. The form persists across centuries because it is structurally available even when every other means has been foreclosed. The state can control movement, communication, legal access, food delivery. It cannot fully own the choice about whether to continue.

Guantanamo detainees had been running coordinated hunger strikes for years before June 2006. At various points, hundreds were participating simultaneously. The military's response was force-feeding — detainees strapped into "restraint chairs" while nutrients were delivered through nasal tubes, a procedure condemned by the International Committee of the Red Cross as inhumane and by the American Medical Association as a violation of medical ethics. The military called it medical care.

In this context, Harris's framing makes a precise kind of institutional sense. It closed an otherwise open loop. If hunger strikes were manipulation and suicide was warfare, then every act the body could perform was reclassified as aggression. The institution assigned itself the position of victim. The men being held without trial became, in the official record, combatants even in their deaths.

The Bobby Sands parallel runs directly through this period, though no one in the Bush administration would have welcomed the comparison. In 1981, ten Irish republican prisoners died on hunger strike in HM Prison Maze. The British government under Thatcher refused at every stage to treat their deaths as political acts. The international response was a diplomatic catastrophe that altered the landscape of the Northern Ireland conflict for years. The pattern: institutions that create prisoners with no legitimate instrument of protest, then refuse to acknowledge the political content of their deaths, do not close the loop they think they're closing. They open a different one.

What Harris's framing accomplished, operationally: it gave Guantanamo's continued existence an internally consistent justification. If the detainees were so dangerous that dying was warfare, then holding them indefinitely was not evidence of institutional failure — it was evidence of the threat's persistence. The suffering was reclassified as the enemy's weapon, not the system's product.

iii · the version that keeps shifting

There is a complicating layer to the June 10 deaths that the official account never absorbed.

In 2010, journalist Scott Horton published a report in Harper's Magazine — based on interviews with former Guantanamo guards, a parallel NBC News investigation, and documentary evidence — suggesting the three men may not have died in their cells. The reporting pointed to a separate facility called "Camp No," a black site outside Guantanamo's main perimeter that did not appear in official records, apparently used for interrogation sessions that the base's formal accounting didn't log.

Former guards described finding the men's bodies in conditions inconsistent with death by hanging — injuries and ligature marks in wrong locations, rags stuffed in their throats that the official narrative didn't explain. They reported being pressured to change their accounts. The NCIS investigation concluded suicide by hanging and produced a report that the Seton Hall researchers identified as containing significant inconsistencies.

The Justice Department reviewed the Harper's findings. The review lasted several months and produced no public findings. The Pentagon did not contest the existence of Camp No; it declined to comment on it. No independent investigation was ever conducted.

Twenty years later, the factual record is exactly as murky as it was in 2010. This is also a structural feature, not a coincidence: when institutions create legal black holes, the evidentiary rules that normally govern investigations don't apply inside them. The exception doesn't just suspend legal protections for the people held there. It suspends accountability for what happens to them.

iv · the loop at twenty years

Guantanamo Bay detention facility is still open.

As of 2026, it holds approximately thirty detainees, down from its peak of roughly 780 in early 2003. Multiple presidents have pledged closure. Multiple Congresses have blocked the attempt, attaching riders to defense appropriations bills prohibiting the transfer of detainees to US soil. The political economy of its continued existence is not mysterious: the facility has been running long enough that it has accumulated a constituency — contractors, career personnel, politicians who voted for its construction and can't afford the re-examination that closure would invite. Exceptional spaces, once built, develop maintenance lobbies.

The military commissions system created to try Guantanamo detainees has produced a handful of convictions in twenty-four years of operation, several of which were overturned on appeal. The legal architecture has been challenged, modified, reauthorized, and challenged again. The facility's original justification — that normal courts couldn't handle terrorism cases — was repeatedly contradicted by federal courts that successfully tried such cases while Guantanamo's commissions stalled. The system wasn't designed for efficiency. It was designed for a jurisdiction where normal rules didn't apply.

Harris's framing of the June 10 deaths never became official doctrine — too obviously embarrassing on its face, and the State Department spent weeks walking it back in international forums. But its structural logic persisted. The men died. The institution classified its response as defense. The facility remained open, the commission system ground forward, and the legal exception that produced both the deaths and the cover extended another two decades.

Three men died here twenty years ago today. The institution called it warfare, and kept running.

Pattern recognition is not resignation. It's the minimum precondition for anything else.