Kangaroo Courts as Wingnut Welfare?

Bryan Finoki writes at BagNewsNotes and in more depth at his own blog, Subtopia, about the militarisation of public life and public space.

His latest post is about the US’ “Expeditionary Legal Complex”, aka ‘Camp Justice’.

Camp Justice is a moveable, tent-city courtroom and jail complex that can be dopped down virtually anywhere to dispense American ‘justice’ on the spot, presumably at the barrel of a gun.

Judge Roy Bean would be proud.

It’s currently located at Gitmo and is primed and ready to convict innocent and guilty alike for offences they’ve never been properly charged with using coerced evidence in order to retrospectively justify their kidnapping and detention in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a handy imperial posession now reinvented as a legal black hole for the purpose of hiding and torturing foreign citizens for political purposes. As Bryan puts it:

“In a frighteningly lucid and surgical essay The Vanishing Point geographer Derek Gregory describes the war on terror as a “war on law”, or a “war through law” – through the suspension of law. While emergency is the state’s tactic it is ultimately the law itself that is the most critical site of political struggle, he contends. If I recall correctly, Derek explains how Guantanamo Bay was established as a purposefully ambiguous political space camouflaged in the folds of legal uncertainty. In short, the U.S. left Cuba while still claiming jurisdiction over the base but not official territorial sovereignty, which allowed it to exist in between a place of law and lawlessness – essentially a place of “indeterminate time” and “indefinite detention.” He calls it a “site of non-place” created for a “site of non-people” located on the peripheral edge – or the “the vanishing point” – of the legal spectrum where international law is no longer enforceable (and therefore non-existent), and where American sovereignty has no application. It is the ultimate space of legal oblivion, you might say.

It is neither a legal nor an illegal space and in all juridical dimensions is neither existent nor non-existent: it is – as far as I can make of it – the production of a convenient and sub-legal nowhere.

If that isn’t Kafkaesque and terrifying enough (and we’re only talking about Gitmo here: we haven’t even touched secret prisons in Diego Garcia, Afganistan and elsewhere) now this criminal administration has created a convenient and sublegal nowhere that can go travelling.

This is not the first Camp Justice.Here’s the permanent one on Diego Garcia: there’s one in Baghdad and more are planned:

… let me remind you, according to an older Times story additional complexes have been planned for various regions in Iraq, and I’d be willing to bet that if we took a closer look we might even find similar justice-in-a-can deployments in Afghanistan, Libya, the West Bank, etc. I don’t think it would be difficult to predict the future geographies of portable justice, if you know what I’m sayin’.

I know what you’re sayin’, Bryan.

But what also interests me is who will be dispensing this ‘justice’. There is known to be dissent amongst top-ranking military lawyers about the administration’s continued illegal outrages and I also wonder, on a practical level, if JAG even has enough military legal staff to run these camps, even if military lawyers were prepared to co-operate.

If they’re not willing, then that means outsourcing.

Cue the traditional handing over of plum posts to right-thinking associates of the administration. I predict a rush of applications to be prosecutors, not only from the Bush government’s favourite fundy law school, Pat Robertson’s Regent law school, but also from those good germans fron the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty law school – which is conveniently producing its first graduating classes just at the right time. Even the necessary ancillary staff are being trained as I type, at a Department of Homeland Security sponsored hugh school. The Camp Justice buildings may look temporary, but they’re thinking long-term and long-range here.