Media, secrecy and Guantanamo Bay

This contemporary comment emerged out of our interest in how issues of extraterritoriality, media and secrecy are interconnected in the case of Guantanamo Bay.1 As many commentators have noted,2 spatial organization reproduces conditions of state power. We seek here to analyse the inscription of state power in and through the spaces of extraterritorial detention facilities through an analysis of the ‘public space’ of media representations. Secrecy surrounding Guantanamo Bay has been highly organised and all consuming. We suggest that paradoxically this has heightened the media salience of Guantanamo Bay. The David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib stories in particular — as the localised Australian personifications of an international media frame — have produced contradictory media and public responses, particularly the recent Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) documentary (2004). The increasingly vigorous public debate surrounding Guantanamo Bay in Australia also dovetails with debates around national sovereignty, the US alliance and the nature of justice. The reporting of Guantanamo Bay, as an extraterritorial site of state power and control, has seen a number of key contradictions in state-media relations come to the fore. First we will turn to representations of Hicks and Habib in the media; second to generalised reporting of Guantanamo Bay; and finally to how we can come to understand the role of extra-territoriality in the orchestration of public consent