Law Commons^™

Linguistic Isolation: A New Human Rights Violation Constituting Torture, And Cruel, Inhuman And Degrading Treatment, Peter Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

Sunnat was placed in a cell among other detainees in the general prison population. He spoke neither Arabic nor English, the linguae francae of the prison and the only languages spoken by the detainees in neighboring cells. Consequently, for much of his time in Guantanamo, Sunnat talked to no one. He awoke each morning and cried. Sunnat could, of course, reach out and communicate through eye contact, hand signs and facial expressions. However, Sunnat never had meaningful conversations with his neighbors.

Absence of meaningful human contact is a characteristic of isolation and a source of suffering caused by isolation. Sunnat …

Inside Guantanamo, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

In May 2007 I visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. What I saw and experienced then are fading away and will soon disappear, now that two-thirds of the nearly 800 detainees have been released and President Obama will close the detention centers within the year. Consequently, this essay provides a historical account of one person's media visit to Guantanamo, when it was a fully-operational prison violating human rights, due process and international law.

The essay describes not only the visit but also the application process -- a bizarre experience. The military's application concluded with two quotes from the New Testament and included …

Chasing 'Enemy Combatants' And Circumventing International Law: A License For Sanctioned Abuse, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court made a major error in judgment. It ruled that the executive may forcibly remove over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and relocate them in American detention camps. In two recent Supreme Court cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court made similar errors in judgment by accepting the administration's term "enemy combatant." The Supreme Court's errors were compounded when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in October, 2006, statutorily defining the term enemy combatant for the first time. By acknowledging the term enemy combatant, the …