The detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station has been operative for more than twenty years now. Since 2002 prisoners have been force-fed as punishment for staging individual and collective hunger strikes in protest of indefinite detention. The oldest captive is in his seventies, but the majority are middle-aged. In 2019 Carol Rosenberg reported that with the aging of those incarcerated, the Pentagon is now in the early planning stages for “terrorism suspects” to grow old and die at Guantánamo Bay, necessitating the building of a hospice wing at the detention camp. This essay asks what it means to think of hospice care in a torture facility, arguing that the military is using the possibility of hospice as a curative, both politically and rhetorically, to disavow the effects of torture on the bodyminds of captives.

Guantánamo Bay, hospice, force-feeding, indefinite detention, torture, war on terror, humanitarianism, carceral

What does it mean to think about hospice care in a torture facility? This question first occurred to me after reading Carol Rosenberg's (2019) formative article, “Guantánamo Bay as Nursing Home: Military Envisions Hospice Care as Terrorism Suspects Age.” Rosenberg reports that with the aging of those incarcerated at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station and the Trump administration's plan to keep the camp open for at least another twenty-five years, hospice care is now on the horizon. According to Rosenberg's 2018 reporting for the Miami Herald, the oldest prisoner at Guantánamo is Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, who is in his late seventies and uses a wheelchair and walker after undergoing a series of spinal surgeries for a degenerative disc condition. Majid Khan is the youngest in his late thirties and lives with multiple chronic conditions after undergoing forced rectal feedings while held captive in a secret military detention site, also known as a “black site,” in the early 2000s. Many of the men who remain incarcerated at Guantánamo are prediabetic and will soon perhaps require dialysis. Others might eventually need hip and knee replacements and wheelchair assistance. Many already use assistive breathing devices during sleep due to sleep apnea. There are talks of building a small prison that would also provide “communal hospice care capacity” and care for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, joint pain, and diabetes (Rosenberg 2019). To do this, the military would need to make architectural changes, like increasing the width of the hallways as more and more of the men will soon be in wheelchairs, requiring that cells be bigger with ramps and grab bars.

The possibility of hospice at Guantánamo might be viewed as a welcome change for a detention camp that has come to be understood by many as a site where abject violence abounds with minimal oversight or legal accountability. Sitting outside US borders, Guantánamo Bay appears to exist beyond the reach of law and procedure generally and of the US Constitution and the reach of its courts specifically. Laleh Khalili (2012) argues that the law is essential to how the United States operates its detention centers, including Guantánamo and others. It is not a lack of law that makes Guantánamo possible but, rather, a proliferation of legal analysis and procedure. “The whole complex,” writes Khalili, “and the worldwide network of lawyers, legal scholars, advocates, military judges and prosecutors, human rights activists, and news reporters, attests to something else again: a space of legal dispute. Not of lawlessness, as it is claimed again and again, but of excess of law, rules, procedures, legal performances made by the government to legitimate control, and contested by those who seek to subject the detainees there to an alternate regime of legality” (2012, 74). If one considers Guantánamo Bay to be a separate place beyond the Rule of Law, then one may miss how its existence and techniques perhaps sketch the outline of the law. That is to say, the legal excess of Guantánamo Bay is precisely the point of departure for understanding how and why law, and the specter of it, creates paradoxical logics.

One such paradoxical logic at Guantánamo Bay, and one guiding my opening question, is that of care. In this essay, I explore how the legal excess of Guantánamo Bay defines the military's logic of care, or what anthropologist Saiba Varma (2020), writing on the imbrication between medicine and violence in Kashmir, has described as “militarized care.” Militarized care includes the “discourses and practices” mobilized by the state to “further an imperialist project, which is articulated in the language of 'protection' and 'national security'” (Varma 2020, 12). For example, the Enhanced Interrogation Program, orchestrated by the Bush administration post-9/11, justified torture and extreme force while insisting upon the sanctity of biological life, simultaneously and paradoxically. Such competing logics of care legitimate the practice of force-feeding hunger strikers over the course of two decades at Guantánamo Bay. The military frames force-feeding as an act of care because it facilitates the preservation of biological life. To this end, my interest is in the relationship between care and violence and how medical care is structured at the detention camps toward carceral and punitive ends. Such assemblages of care not only obfuscate the military's insidious regulation of life and death but also attempt to foreclose collective and relational practices of care organized by those held captive, such as hunger striking.

These logics are also apparent in the military's discussions concerning the eventual need for end-of-life care, which can encompass a wide range of care practices for patients near the end of life. End-of-life care may include palliative care, medical care meant to manage serious illnesses such as cancer, or hospice care, provided when a physician deems a patient unlikely to live beyond six months. Both palliative and hospice care centralize comfort, emotional support, and quality of life, but unlike palliative care, hospice is meant for patients no longer receiving curative treatment for illness. As long as Guantánamo Bay remains operative, end-of-life care such as hospice will become necessary. None of the prisoners have been diagnosed with cancer. Still, many now live with high blood pressure and diabetes, which has brought up questions for the military about how they plan on addressing these health concerns without geriatric or palliative care physicians (Rosenberg 2018).

In the immediate present, however, ongoing medical care for prisoners' chronic conditions, which are linked to torture techniques practiced throughout the Enhanced Interrogation Program, is of most concern. A 2019 Physicians for Human Rights Report, Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo, states that torture techniques such as “walling,” whereby the prisoner is slammed repeatedly up against a wall, are a leading cause of many chronic conditions that are physical and mental such as complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The report also states that medical caretakers at Guantánamo are not allowed to ask prisoners about the history behind their injuries or illness if it is suspected that there is a direct link to interrogation and torture (see Physicians for Human Rights 2019, 8, 20). My interest, then, is how the military's bourgeoning rhetoric of hospice and palliative care at the camps shifts attention away from torture techniques deployed throughout the Enhanced Interrogation Program, giving Guantánamo Bay the semblance of being a site now separate from warfare, a site of new, more humanitarian practices enacted by the US military.

And so, what has been framed as the early planning stages for “terrorism suspects” to grow old and die at the detention camp is perhaps also the military's attempts to erase the brutalities of the war on terror's Enhanced Interrogation Program (Rosenberg 2019). Indeed, assistive technologies and mobility aids, such as wheelchairs, are meant to offer reprieve to the very wearing out of the captive's body that the military made possible. The rhetoric of hospice obscures the conditions giving rise to the disability and debility of those held captive; the rhetoric suggests the cause for the need for ongoing medical care is aging, not decades of torture and confinement. If, as international relations scholar Colleen Bell argues, the military presents the war on terror's counterinsurgency efforts as more empathetic, humane, and culturally aware, then the Pentagon's consideration of hospice at the detention camp follows a method of counterinsurgency that attempts to “disempower the enemy through indirect means by focusing on protecting and managing the life of the population” (2011, 232). Such a humanitarian logic of war that centralizes care and biological life produces the possibility for both sets of medical practices—force-feeding and hospice— to exist simultaneously at the detention camp (see Terry 2017).

With this unfolding present in mind, I argue that the military is using the possibility of hospice as a curative, both politically and rhetorically, to disavow the effects of torture on the body. By suggesting hospice as politically curative, I mean to develop a more robust view of cure, one that understands cure as an ideology informed by military and medical-industrial-complex logic and practice that invests in medical experimentation. To this end, the state experiments with the possibility of hospice care, even if only rhetorically, as a way to attest for disability/debility by pointing to the prisoner's age or even past without ever accounting for the US military's role in the torture, isolation, and disability of these individuals. Rosenberg quotes a senior medical officer speaking on prisoners' health as stating, “a lot of these folks had hard lives before they came here to Guantánamo Bay” (2019). Here, this military officer implies the prisoner's lives before Guantánamo explains their illness, and as such, willfully ignores how existing disability/debility are caused by both torture and incarceration. How might the possibility of hospice at Guantánamo function as a silencing tool that prevents prisoners from testifying about the torture they experienced?

The Physicians for Human Rights report Deprivation and Despair describes how the military prohibits prisoners from confessing verbally, to medical staff, about what abuses they have experienced at the hands of guards. To this end, the only “evidence” for the torture is the self-evident markings, such as scars, broken bones, and mental illness, on the prisoners' bodyminds.¹ I'm suggesting that the broad rhetoric of hospice and the more specific rhetoric of care for chronic conditions recast those induced corporeal deformations as natural formations of the physiological body during aging. Put another way, hospice and the push for more comprehensive medical care is not just a method of disavowing the effects of torture on the bodymind, but rather it is a process of evidence destruction by which (1) prisoners lose their right to speak about the torture they've endured and (2) a prisoners' bodymind that bears the self-evident effects of torture is no longer self-evident—care for chronic conditions creates the plausible deniability that those (de)formations are due to aging rather than torture. The possibility of hospice as a curative, then, should be understood as a way to obscure the afterlife of torture on the bodyminds of captives.²

Following my previous work on the use of force-feeding at the naval station as a medicalized mode of living death or suspended animation (see Velasquez-Potts 2019), hospice care is similarly a liminal space where the past harms of the Enhanced Interrogation Program no longer exist. Hospice becomes an endless present marked by slow death, or what disability studies scholar Alison Kafer calls “curative time” (2021). Here, cure demands the present be marked by waiting—the waiting for a future without disabilities and illness. In the context of Guantánamo, curative time takes place in the biopolitical interval between the enforcement of biological life through force-feeding and the facilitation of death and dying by way of hospice.

In what follows, I continue to speculate on what it means to think about hospice care in a torture facility. I rely primarily on Rosenberg's 2018 and 2019 reporting about the state of medical care and the military's envisioning of hospice at the detention camp. Here I consider how the coercive use of the feeding tube and hospice take on a technoscientific meaning at Guantánamo Bay, mobilized toward carceral and humanitarian ends. I then turn to Mansoor Adayfi's 2021 memoir Don't Forget Us Here, which chronicles the fourteen years he spent captured at Guantánamo Bay before his release in 2018. Adayfi offers a counternarrative to the carceral and militarized care enacted by the state by highlighting forms of relational care and refusal throughout his detention. I conclude with a discussion about temporality, drawing from Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of “slow death” to consider the political stakes of both force-feeding and hospice at Guantánamo Bay and beyond.

Hospice derives from the Latin hospes, meaning both “guest” and “host.” As a medical philosophy, hospice first gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s due to the work of British physician Dame Cicely Saunders. In Dr. Saunders's philosophy, hospice reformed medicalized approaches to terminal illness death. Hospice centers palliative care—care that offers relief from pain, thus improving one's quality of life—instead of solely treatments that seek to cure or eliminate disease or illness. Hospice prioritizes a patient's comfort instead of medicalized approaches that prioritize curative treatment at all costs, even death. If one's death is imminent, hospice seeks to facilitate that death as comfortably as possible. This is what journalist Anne Neumann (2016) refers to as a “good death,” emphasizing how modern medicine seeks to alleviate pain and suffering as much as possible.

Neumann's conception of the “good death” is relevant to the bionecropolitical, or the nexus between life and death, entanglements constitutive of Guantánamo Bay (see also Mbembe 2003; Bargu 2016; Puar 2017). In 2018 Rosenberg reported that US military commanders at the naval station appealed to Congress to fund a wheelchair-accessible prison wing that would include a hospice-care cellblock at a cost of $69 million. Navy Commander Anne Leanos, a spokesperson for Guantánamo, stated, “Picture in your mind elderly detainees, brothers taking care of one another. That is the humane way ahead” (Rosenberg 2018). The vision behind the new prison is to create four areas: two wheelchair-accessible wings, another wing for hospice care, and an attorney-client meeting room. The attorney-client meeting room would replace the military's current practice of restraining prisoners and transporting them to a remote site for such visits (Rosenberg 2018).

Medically, the goal of hospice is to provide the maximum level of comfort to the dying patient and to root medical decision-making in the patient's autonomy. Although past and present prison commanders have been vocal about the need for end-of-life care at the camps and the growing urgency to provide complex care for prisoners with chronic ailments, it remains unclear how the military will navigate hospice care necessitating patient autonomy (see Rosenberg 2019). Law saturates Guantánamo Bay but even it doesn't provide an easy solution to the conundrum of patient autonomy when the patient is a captive. The paradox of hospice care at Guantánamo Bay invites questions worthy of consideration. For example, how might the military navigate the legalities of actually delivering a “good death” to captives? Will captives be allowed advanced directives, medical proxies, or even a will? This seems unlikely given disagreement on what basic medical care captives are allowed and how it should be delivered at the camps.

Rosenberg (2019) writes that since at least 2019 military personnel must travel from the military base to Jacksonville, Florida to receive more complicated medical care and prisoners with non-routine needs must have a specialist come to the camps. Although there are at least 140 doctors, nurses, and mental health providers at Guantánamo, all of whom attend to both prisoners and the assigned troops, there is still no physician specializing in hospice and geriatric medicine (Rosenberg 2018). As such, the military has begun researching how the Federal Bureau of Prisons handles hospice care.

In the US context, prison-based hospice dates back to the 1980s when, in the wake of HIV, many prison clinicians refused to care for prisoners dying of AIDS. As such, it was other prisoners who became caregivers to each other and acted as “health aids” with a focus on clinically based palliative care. The first prison hospice program was conceived in 1987 by prisoners at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. Hospice programs are now found in a wide range of carceral institutions such as jails, prisons, and minimum- and maximum-security facilities. Volunteers in hospice programs may help with caretaking duties such as feeding and bathing, while other programs consist solely of bedside companionship (see Sharp 2022, 177-81).

Anthropologist Lesley Sharp's work on end-of-life care in a US men's prison is illuminating here. In an ethnographic study investigating what Sharp names “death by incarceration” (2022,177), a group of trained prisoners work as hospice volunteers, or caretakers for other prisoners who are at the end of life. The experience of caretaking, details Sharp, is complicated inside a men's facility, where demonstrating emotional and physical care to other prisoners is sometimes viewed as antithetical to survival inside. Highlighted in Sharp's analysis is how prisoner-led hospice care is in opposition to what she calls “punitive care.” Punitive care extends beyond the structural disenfranchisement of the prison itself to encapsulate the “deliberate harmful acts that pervade carceral medicine” (Sharp 2022, 184). The militarization of care at Guantánamo, and Sharp's punitive care, each speak to a continuum of liberal carceral violence that seeks to belie existing tensions between hospice and medical neglect, respectively.

The hospice volunteers Sharp collaborated with all attest to the transformative power of caring for other prisoners at the end of life, yet nonetheless maintain that there is no such thing as a “good death” inside of prison, only a “good enough” death (2022, 179). Similarly, at Guantánamo Bay, the military employs hospice to describe a set of architectural reforms that ultimately maintain captivity and delimit choice and bodily autonomy. Such carceral reforms are arguably antithetical to the goal of hospice, which is self-determination and patient autonomy (see Neumann 2016). Given the lack of adequate medical care for captives and military personnel alike, the military's description of the care prisoners give to one another takes on additional meaning and elides the point that prisoner's care for each other is at least in part in response to the sustained power of punitive care at the detention camps.

Indeed, the reconfiguration of the “terrorist” to “brothers” caring for one another in what's been called the “communal nursing home style” (Rosenberg 2019) might be indicative of a new form of masculinity meant to cure the sexualized and racialized practices of interrogation and torture that have proliferated throughout the war on terror. The sexualized abuse of captives held at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib results from “an orientalist understanding of what is considered honorable or shameful in 'Muslim culture' and presents this culture's notions of indignity and abuse as exceptional” (Khalili 2011, 1480-81). Although the gendered sexual violence central to war sites and torture techniques are arguably more brutal and abject than hospice, each function as coercive forms of carceral domestication and discipline.

But the rhetoric of “communal living” and end-of-life care is indicative of another gendered aspect of counterinsurgency: the promise of a more domestic and dignified experience of indefinite confinement. This shift signals an attempt to replace violent interrogation tactics, sexual and otherwise, with practices of non-coercive medical care. In doing so, the military presents a humanitarian, gendered norm for guards at the camps who are now committed to comfort, domestication, and collective care, and no longer interrogation and abuse (see Khalili 2011, 1483). Here, my use of the discourse of humanitarianism is less about intervention usually associated with aid and relief provided by NGOs, for example, and more akin to Didier Fassin's concept of humanitarianism as a politics of life whereby humanitarian intervention produces “public representation of the human beings to be defended (e.g., by showing them as victims rather than combatants and by displaying their condition in terms of suffering rather than the geopolitical situation)” (2007, 501). The possibility of hospice at the camps serves the dual function of continuing to “protect” US empire and its borders from the external threat of terrorism while also domesticating, civilizing, and “making live” its captives. The military's insistence on hospice, instead of simply closing the camps, ultimately functions to both contain and exclude the “other.”³ The state justifies torture and sempiternal captivity, in part, by the underlying assumptions and ideologies of the so-called Muslim terrorist extremist's race, sex, gender, and religiosity and the existential threat that such “extremists” posed to American domestic bliss.

The military's rhetorical move toward hospice and brotherly care cannot mask Guantánamo's imperialist ethnoracial projects, even when hospice is presented under the guise of progressive, humanitarian reform. Further, the insistence on bringing advanced medical care to the camps eclipses the brutality inherent to interrogation techniques; the supposed distance between the interrogator and the interrogatee's body enables the military to figure interrogation as a craft that departs from the laboratory's experimentation on the body.

Indeed, the body does not always make visible the inscription of its abuse, as is often the case with psychological torture techniques. Political scientist Darius Rejali (2007) argues that after the Cold War, there was a proliferation of human rights reports documenting and exposing torture. The reports sought to hold state actors accountable, and in response, torturers invested in less visible, and hence harder to document, techniques. These methods are referred to as “stealth torture” or “clean torture” (Rejali 2007 4) So long as the body does not bear the physical marks or traces of torture, the lasting effects of the method can remain debatable and legally sanctioned. The implication of stealth torture is that it blurs traditional notions of what, exactly, constitutes violence and evidence of such. It raises concerns about how to make such violence intelligible if one can't visually decipher it.

The military's interrogation techniques, such as force-feeding, are legacies of this stealth torture. Force-feeding is aimed squarely at the body and is then presented as a tactic that avoids injuring the flesh. Notably, the move from primarily psychological research to the use of biotechnologies suggests that pseudoscientific justifications are no longer a sufficient rationalization but that medical techniques, and the rhetoric of comfort and dignity that inform calls for hospice, may still be used to overcome a captive's agency while holding the appeal of progress and reform. What Commander Leanos describes as the “humane way ahead” highlights the centrality of care to carceral logics. As medical anthropologists Vincent Duclos and Tomás Sánchez Criado have argued, “care can also be conveniently mobilized as part of reactionary responses, aimed not so much at the betterment of life as at its mere protection, if not its negation” (2019, 159). Hospice, as a standalone approach to death and dying, isn't the object of my critique. Rather, I am critiquing how the military invokes the language of hospice to extend indefinite detention and thus how it masks the ongoing death-making of captivity.

More, the military's interest in end-of-life technologies distracts from how captivity and the afterlives of torture have become quotidian and ordinary at the camps (see Hajjar 2019). Feminist science studies scholar Jennifer Terry notes that biomedical logics propagated by the military and state necessarily associates medicine with an ethic of care in order to obfuscate the effects of violence (2017, 27). At the cultural level, there is an affective investment in care that also sustains, what Terry calls, the biomedical war-nexus“ (27). The deep imbrication between national security and medicine relies both on rhetorics of care and rehabilitation, and on practices of technological innovation.

For instance, the military's coercive use of the feeding tube suggests that the increased technologization of torture prioritizes mere biological life through the elevation of medical techniques and rhetoric. In understanding the feeding tube as not only a medical prosthetic but also a torture instrument, I suggest that the military's tactics demonstrate that the war on terror depends on an increasing militarization of care and on legitimating itself through the use of biotechnologies. What is exceptional about Guantánamo Bay and the biopolitics of force-feeding is how the US military weaponizes technology in the name of care and life itself. The prison hospital is the site par excellence of the ideological battle between biological life and political life. To this point, Terry writes, "biomedicine is militarized through the use of medical metaphors for describing various kinds of combat operations, which function to sanitize or euphemize acts of violence and their effects" (2017, 35). This form of bio-inequality is evident in war itself; some lives are to be taken and some are protected (50). Indeed, this is the case at Guantánamo where likewise, "domestic and national security, counterinsurgency operations, and allegories of medical intervention are part of a larger disciplinary corpus to remake societies and manage populations according to a technocratic investment in 'advancement,' through which new kinds of proper citizens are supposed to be produced" (50-51).

Hospice and force-feeding are two examples of the militarization of biomedicine that have come to be considered progressive and even non-violent forms of intervention. Writing on the biomedical aspects of force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners, historian Nayan Shah argues that "biopolitical knowledge and therapeutics are marshaled by prison medical care to mitigate and calibrate pain and humiliation through the medical management of the body and justify its procedures through the constraint and carceral control of the body and vitality" (2018, 173). The use of force-feeding at Guantánamo demonstrates the limits and possibilities of corporeal refusal and protest inside of confinement. Former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, whose memoir I turn to in the following section, describes his experience being force-fed at the detention hospital. His testimonial is worth quoting at length:

The guards carried me to...a solitary confinement cage where a group of nurses and corpsmen was waiting for us...Beside the nurses was a thinly padded chair with a body harness, armrests with restraints, and a high back with restraints for the head. It was the same chair Americans use in executions. Next to that chair was a six-foot wall of Ensure cases. Guards pushed me into the chair. They tightened the chest harness so that I couldn't move, then strapped my wrists and legs to the chair. Every point of my body was tightly restrained—I couldn't move at all. One of the male nurses stood in front of me holding a long, thick rubber tube with a metal tip. Another nurse grabbed my hand and held it tightly while the male nurse forced that huge tube into my nose and throat. Pain shot through my sinuses and I thought my head would explode. I screamed and tried to fight but couldn't move. My nose bled and bled, but the nurse wouldn't stop. (Adayfi 2021, 205)⁴

Despite similar testimonials by other prisoners, medical officials at the camps maintain that force-feeding is "not that painful...not that excruciating" and that such accounts are "ridiculous" (Rosenberg 2013). I argue, however, that the procedural shifts at the camp and prisoner testimonials, such as Adayfi's, underscore how the medical clinic at Guantánamo Bay has become a site of suspended animation—the zone of liminality produced by pointedly medicalized punishment that maintains the body between life and death, biology and relationality.

The coercive functions of the feeding tube point to the increasing technologization of torture that prioritizes mere biological life. Or, in Shah's framing, physicians "assert a biomedical monopoly over care and treatment of the prisoner that is justified by crisis intervention and in the mandate to save life" (2018, 173). To this point, a military medic interviewed by Rosenberg expressed confusion over the view that force-feeding is painful and unethical. The medic stated, "I never felt like I would be that person who would be persecuted for keeping a detainee alive." This is not to say that medics and nurses do not hold genuine subjective beliefs that they are legitimately providing medical care when they administer the feeding tube. Rather, my point is that force-feeding as that which literally negates the expression of political life in the act of hunger striking at the camps is better understood as an insidious form of medical violence mobilized by the military through the rhetoric of the sanctity of biological life.

Force-feeding relies on biomedical logic that observes, examines, and documents the hunger-striking prisoner in an attempt to rehabilitate him into a subject who eats rather than refuses (see Shah 2018). The military maintains that force-feeding is in line with an ethics of care. Adayfi's testimony tells another story and prompts those of us on the outside to reconceptualize relationality and care. In the following section, I engage more closely with Adayfi's memoir to disentangle the carceral care I've detailed thus far from more radical and collective forms of care. Listening to those inside narrate and articulate political struggle is another site for imagining freedom and care beyond accessible prison cells to facilitate a more comfortable death for prisoners.

Introducing a hospice care cell block at Guantánamo wouldn't be the first instance of communal living at the camps. Soon after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the military began using Camp VI as a communal living camp on the base. As former prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi describes in his memoir Don't Forget Us Here, communal living evoked complicated feelings. In communal living, Adayfi experienced more direct contact and relationality with other prisoners and attended art and computer classes. Adayfi and others gained access to technology such as television and video games. With communal living came a more explicit relational form of life inside the camps. Adayfi states, “We had been friends and brothers for years—since the beginning. We had forged deep bonds fighting and resisting the camp admin and interrogators. But we had still experienced the worst of Guantánamo alone, in our cages or in interrogations. In these casual conversations where we sat around drinking coffee, we processed what we had been through, and that somehow made us feel like we hadn't been alone” (2021, 296-97). Following Duclos and Criado's problematization of care, Adayfi describes one way to conceive of an ecology of care that moves beyond the terror of militarization and the normalization of carcerality. The collective care that Commander Leanos imagines facilitated only by hospice and death is articulated by Adayfi as inherent to the social bonds and family he had created with the other men imprisoned. “We had grown older together,” Adayfi writes, “we had become our own kind of family” (297).

Yet Adayfi also understood the homier and more domestic aspects of communal living as a detractor. He writes, “the US government knew that they couldn't close the camp, so they made just enough improvements to distract us from demanding our freedom. Our bodies were very weak from so many years of protests and fighting, and our health had gotten worse. Some of us had diabetes now, or heart conditions, high blood pressure, or kidney problems” (278). The health conditions that the US military now seeks to remedy with accessible technologies and more sophisticated medical care have been concerns for prisoners since the opening of the camps in 2002. Further, the suggestion of hospice as a solution obfuscates how the military itself created the conditions of possibility for the deterioration of the captives' health. The military might conceive of hospice and palliative care as central to the afterlife of the war on terror, but Adayfi and the thirty-five men who remain captive understand Guantánamo in much more liminal terms. For the US military, the possibility of hospice marks the end of Guantánamo being understood as a site that aids in the war on terror and now it is a site to be managed more humanely in the afterlife of war. The question at the beginning of the war was how to extract intelligence by any means necessary. Now the question is how to facilitate a legitimate and perhaps even more dignified death for those who remain. Both of these logics are facilitated by coercive logics of care and the military's commitment to stretching out the temporality of punishment to its limits. The objective of hospice may be to domesticate, or make comfortable, the detention camp but captivity is ultimately the antithesis of comfort. Domesticity in captivity becomes another site of waiting, a contained space in which the captive must “do time.”

Adayfi links temporality with the effects of torture on his bodymind but also with the quotidian nature of violence at the camps:

Life at Guantánamo had become a job for all of us—the interrogators' job was to torture us; the guards' job was to kick our asses every day; and a brother's job was to fight back and give the guards as much work as possible. It was like a factory job for us, doing the same thing every day. Day after day. We woke, we prayed, we were tortured, we ate, we fought, we slept, and then we started the cycle all over again. Some of us had suffered serious injuries that never fully healed. Guards had broken my ankle, my wrist, my fingers, and my nose several times. It was the same for other brothers—some had their backs broken...their teeth knocked out, and even worse. The pain became routine, but that didn't lessen the pain. (234-35)

Adayfi's testimony draws our attention to how the military's reading of the captive's ailments as merely effects of aging necessarily erase the physical and psychic evidence of torture inscribed on the bodymind of the prisoner. These practices obscure the underlying causes of what is being framed as aging and disability while also distorting and relying on temporal relations between aging and disability. The military's proffered rationale is that advanced care for chronic conditions is necessary because the prisoners are aging. But given Adayfi's account, it is clear that medical intervention and eventually palliative and hospice care are also necessary because of the disabling effects of the military's daily torture.

The stakes of such erasure resonate with disability scholar Eunjung Kim's concept of “curative violence.” Curative violence describes the uncertainty of gains and the possibility of harms associated with cure that then create a liminal existence in subjects (Kim 2017, 10). For Kim and other disability justice scholars such as Eli Clare, cure always operates in relation to violence and “elimination of some kind—of a disease, of future existence, of present-day embodiments, of life itself” (Clare 2017, 28). Both Kim's and Clare's work highlight how cure is mobilized, medically and socially, to eliminate disability. Here cure is compulsory, and the disabled and sick bodymind is excluded from the fold of normativity. More, cure is then used to justify a multitude of violence enacted against people who are ill or disabled (Kim 2017, 14). In its desire for a future without disability or illness, Kim argues, cure ignites a range of transitions and crossings, often “leaving bodies in borderlands” (11). At Guantánamo, the military's political and rhetorical uses of cure have sought to remedy the past harms of torture by emphasizing intentions of medical comfort and betterment. Meanwhile, prisoners remain captive in the borderlands, coerced into accepting the inevitability of hospice.

Adayfi's testimony about his time spent at Guantánamo is important for how he demands recognition of the effects of militarized logics of care and cure on the bodyminds of the men held captive. Adayfi's reflections open up the possibility to consider hospice, in this militarized context, as yet another form of extra-legal violence and abuse. I read Adayfi's narration of the pain and suffering endured at Guantánamo as both a practice of care and a study in its competing logics at the camps. Adayfi's memoir clearly describes how the US military leveraged coercive forms of care by subjecting those held captive to a multitude of quotidian and extravagant forms of violence. And yet, the collective forms of care that persisted between Adayfi and the men he came to recognize as family exist alongside the extravagant violence.

Anthropologist Darryl Li's proposal that we read captivity as an analytic is useful in expanding out both abolition and relationality as framework and practice, respectively. “Captivity is a relation of holding,” writes Li, “one that entails both immobilization and forced mobility together in the passage from one context to another. And captivity breeds its own form of relation with those not captive, among the most important being narrations that hold audiences in captivation” (2022, 21, ). Thus, captivity functions as an incapacitating technique while also performing something beyond state terror. Li goes on to write that “captivity cannot be understood apart from its contexts of narration, through the spectacle of captivation and the spectacle of freedom. Narration produced inside captivity posits freedom as an interiority; narration from the outside, the afterward (or afterword) of captivity, presupposes freedom but also queries its own tenuous conditions” (24). I quote at length because the above suggests that the tenuous conditions of Guantánamo Bay facilitate the possibility for more collective and relational care. This is the kind of care I read in Adayfi's testimony and his opposition to the militarization of care at the camps. Adayfi highlights radical hope as predicated upon care for the other and investing in relationality. Ultimately, his narrative refuses the military's aim to disappear those who remain held captive while also highlighting how the temporality of captivity—how waiting—is a slow form of punishment with seemingly no end.

Throughout this essay, I've interrogated how hospice and force-feeding function according to logics of both care and coercion. I suggest that discussions about the eventual necessity of hospice are also a means by which the military can figuratively and literally erase the psychic and corporeal residues of torture. More, hospice is an opportunity to undo the ethnoreligious description of the irrational “jihadists” developed and reified by military psychology throughout the war on terror and replace it with “brothers taking care of one another.” Thus, hospice offers the possibility of transforming Guantánamo from a notorious torture site to one of homey domestication and caretaking. Refusing narratives of humanitarian reform at Guantánamo, then, is crucial in order to better disaggregate militarized care from the communal care described by Adayfi.

Time moves forward and with it the US military attempts to erase the brutalities of the war on terror's Enhanced Interrogation Program with new life-preserving technologies and rhetorics meant to offer reprieve to the very wearing out of the captive's body that they inflicted. Lauren Berlant describes this as “slow death,” which they define as the “physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (2011, 95). Berlant makes clear that their interest is in the applicability of slow death to spaces of ordinariness that animate late capitalism. Guantánamo appears to eschew the ordinary and to be aligned with the unfolding of a traumatic event. Yet Berlant's notion of “slow death” articulates how indefinite detention is precisely the technology that slowly wears out its population. Here I'm using slow death to describe the medical-political power operations of indefinite confinement. The temporality of slow death is related to suspended animation in that the military's use of force-feeding and hospice care are so terrifying precisely because they transform exceptional spaces into ordinary ones.

Similarly, hospice, like force-feeding, hinges on the slow debilitation of the bodymind over time. Indeed, both practices are predicated on the temporality of waiting. Ultimately, such emerging technologies of war deployed throughout open-air prisons and detention centers, among other carceral sites, debilitate subjects over time disrupting a number of dualities having to do with life, death, and temporality (see also Puar 2017). The aging body in detention, like the aging body outside of confinement, becomes disabled and with it a distinct type of incapacitation emerges—an incapacitation that is both the physiological response to getting older and what the space of detention facilitates and over time necessitates.

Adayfi's words are resonant here as he recounts the toll of force-feeding on his body and that of other hunger strikers:

Our bodies had aged and become more fragile with time and we were too weak to resist like we did in the days when we fought guards every day, but we could still make the guards work. This was a lot of work: they had to pick us up and put us on our stomach, restrain us, then pick us up again and carry us back to our cells. Then we refused to get up for each feeding after that. We refused to come back from the rec yard. We refused to come back from the showers. With each passing year the fight got harder; but we couldn't stop, especially not with hope on the horizon. (2021, 254)

Adayfi's temporal description of indefinite detention demonstrates what political theorist Banu Bargu names as “sovereign time,” that is, a time that is “abstract and detached, and characterized by compulsory repetition” (2014, 17). There is no evidence of hours or days passing in sovereign time, only the repetition of violence. There are certainly ruptures to sovereign or biopolitical time, yet the military's insistence on force-feeding perhaps marks its repetition through its constant transformation of the protesting prisoner into a medicalized patient. War and indefinite detention make it so that time and waiting are forms of punishment. Yet, even as Adayfi identifies the pain of waiting, he also points toward openings for refusal. Indeed, the corporeal modes of refusal mobilized to counter sovereign time, such as hunger striking, continue to unfold in prisons and detention camps around the world (see Bargu 2016; Ajour 2021; Shah 2022).

Similar to how military officials at the detention camp have maintained that force-feeding captives is in the interest of preserving life, such officials now maintain that hospice care is also in the interest of facilitating a good death for the men who may never be released. With the feeding tube already used to sustain life and the possibility of hospice to facilitate death, the detention hospital at Guantánamo Bay will have engaged in a set of tactics that use the rhetorics of care to ultimately manage life and death. Guantánamo psychiatrist Dr. Stephen N. Xenakis states, “It is paradoxical...But we don't let people just die in this country. It violates all of our ethics and medical ethics” (Rosenberg 2019). The irony here is that hunger striking underscores one's own morbidity as the ultimate risk and commitment to one's cause. It is an ethical statement and is an agential death. At Guantánamo this possibility has necessarily been foreclosed since the first hunger strikes in 2002. Yet now, a new kind of death, the pretense of a good death, looms over Guantánamo's horizon. The US military doesn't just let people die. It controls when and whether captives are ever allowed to die. Indeed, the state continues to expose just how much it has invested in the regulation of death, deciding its breadth and scope.

Slow death, for Berlant, is about the reproduction of predictable life. The space of detention is one of ongoingness, getting by, and living on even as it is a space in opposition to autonomy and sovereignty where life becomes one of maintenance, not self-fashioning. At Guantánamo, technologies of maintenance and care reproduce and reconfigure a violent past into a normative future where the physiological process of aging is ultimately what takes biological life and not torture by the state. Dying in indefinite detention, then, becomes coextensive with the ethical facilitation of the end-of-life.

In 2020, Carol Rosenberg, Charlie Savage, and Eric Schmitt reported for the New York Times that Congress had rejected the military's request to expand Guantánamo to include a new hospice wing. Presently being built, however, is a “$124 million dormitory-style barracks for about 850 prison guards” (Rosenberg, Savage, and Schmitt 2020). It remains unclear whether Guantánamo administrators continue to make appeals for support in providing end-of-life care in the form of physicians and facilities. While some military officials maintain the importance of planning for the inevitability that remaining captives will grow older and eventually die at the detention camp, there is also continued speculation about whether President Biden will close Guantánamo, especially with decades of war in Afghanistan having come to an end under his administration.

As military personnel at Guantánamo imagine what life might look like beyond the war on terror at the detention camps, thirty-five captives remain waiting. And while my interest is in how the rhetoric of hospice functions as a discursive project for the afterlife of torture, even its proposal highlights the military's investment in the detention camp and its potential for a range of carceral uses. And so, if we accept that hospice can't erase the brutalities of the war on terror's Enhanced Interrogation Program, what can we imagine for those who remain captive at the detention camps? The answer, in part, might lie in reconceptualizing relationality and care as they relate to our abolitionist imaginaries that refuse carceral reforms (see Hwang 2019).⁵ Disentangling carceral care from radical and collective care is imperative if we are to remain critical of military reforms at the camp.

My aim throughout this essay has not been to oppose hospice and adequate medical care. Rather, it is endless captivity that must remain central to ongoing anti-carceral struggles. To this end, I am questioning how the military is using the possibility of hospice and humanitarianism to actually further the imperialist aims of Guantánamo Bay. In light of the rise of international usage of force-feeding across geopolitical sites such as Palestine and US detention centers, the specificity of Guantánamo Bay might illuminate broader connections between violence, care, and reform in prisons and detention. The possibility of hospice at Guantánamo, then, provides a necessary site of refusal precisely because it illuminates ever-expanding carceral reforms and how the state leverages medicine, scientific rationales, and biotechnologies to serve its death-making imperialist ends. This approach to hospice at Guantánamo Bay pushes us toward more fundamental questions about why anything less than the immediate closure of the detention camps will always be insufficient. Importantly however, modes of refusal such as the care and solidarity that the men at Guantánamo created and continue to create for one another is also a site of ongoing struggle—one beyond capture and recuperation by the military and carceral state.

Thank you to Jennifer Terry, Xan Chacko, Diana Pardo Pedraza, Astrida Neimanis, and the Catalyst editors and reviewers for your labor on this special issue. Many thanks to Zsuzsanna Ihar, Natalia Duong, and Gabi Kirk whose workshop comments and suggestions helped reshape the essay. Similarly, gratitude to the Violence and the Body working group at UC Santa Cruz: Banu Bargu, Vanita Seth, Gina Dent, Althea Wasow, and Natalie Levin Schwartz. Your feedback and encouragement on the first draft facilitated a way forward. Thanks to Kel Montalvo and Brett Glasscock for talking through ideas and to A.D. Lewis for reading, commenting and reading again.

¹ The term bodymind, used commonly within disability studies, is a holistic approach to embodiment that refuses Western hierarchization and the tendency to understand the mind and body in isolation from one another. Feminist disability studies scholar Margaret Price writes that the term is preferable “because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other—that is because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two—it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term” (2015, 269). Also see Kafer 2013; Clare 2017; Schalk 2018; Kafai 2021.

² Although I use the terms captive and prisoner interchangeably at times, I nonetheless prefer captive as it is most precise to the coerced liminal space, or what anthropologist Darryl Li (2022) writes of as an “enforced stillness,” that those held captive at Guantánamo Bay have been made to endure. Li writes further that “captivity implies mobility; someone is taken, often across great geographical and cultural distances, transported in the grip of another” (24).

³ In her essay, “Manifest Domesticity” (1998), Amy Kaplan conceives domesticity in terms of structural oppositions. The nation-state projects its image as a home that must protect itself from all external threats. The domestic, for Kaplan, “has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home” (581). Indeed, domesticity is central to humanitarian narratives of care precisely for how the domestic sphere, in all its connotations of the familial, is always necessarily a gendered and racial project. Like the household, domesticity is a historically fraught site associated with comfort and femininity as well as surveillance, servitude, and discipline. In the context of empire, home is as much about comfort as it is about the delineation between inside and outside, public and private.

⁴ Restraint chairs were introduced at Guantánamo Bay in 2005 after three consultants from the Federal Bureau of Prisons visited the camps. Here we can see further connections between the traffic of carceral technologies between US domestic prisons and detention camps (see Ibrahim and Howarth 2019).

⁵ Writing on the relationship between carceral care and reform in the context of US prisons, Hwang's generative concept of “deviant care” attends to the “liberal impulse, seduction, and conditioning of wanting to make better, to heal or fix, particularly through the confines of carceral spaces” (2019, 562).

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Michelle C. Velasquez-Potts is an educator and writer working at the intersections of feminist and queer thought. Her first book project, Suspended Animation, examines how state power makes specific use of the feeding tube and the practice of force-feeding to control both bodily life and death among incarcerated people. Presently, Michelle is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.