In creating our digital exhibit (entitled “GTMO in MSP”) that will accompany the Guantánamo Public Memory Project when it comes to St. Paul, MN, my group focused on the surveillance and detention of immigrant populations in Minneapolis and St. Paul as a way to connect the local context to the issues surrounding Guantánamo. One of…

As a current graduate student in History at the University of Minnesota, my friends and family from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York often ask me what it’s like here in the Twin Cities. I find myself thinking of the Chain of Lakes a few miles from my apartment; my favorite local places to study…

A few weeks ago, as I was standing outside Target on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, an elderly woman approached me and shared her life experiences in the Twin Cities. She told me something that has been troubling me since our conversation. I asked the woman how she likes living in the Twin Cities and her…

Earlier this year, we heard an incredible story about a circus troupe that had visited the base at Guantánamo to entertain the families stationed there. Members of the troupe had filmed much of what they encountered at GTMO, and this footage had become the basis of a documentary film. The producers of this film, Christina…

  As calls for an end to force-feeding at Guantánamo persist with the start of Ramadan, Human Rights organization Reprieve and award-winning director Asif Kapadia released a four-minute video of U.S. actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (also known as Mos Def) experiencing the procedure, which is based on military instructions for force-feeding detainees. Click here…

In 2007 Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil were awarded a MacArthur sponsored residency at BAVC (Bay Area Video Coalition) as part of their New Media Producers Institute to create Gone Gitmo, an installation of Guantánamo Prison in the virtual environment of Second Life.  They built an interactive experience, integrating Defense Department footage of…

Like most people, I’d heard of Guantanamo – the home of the most notorious prison in the world.  But I was intrigued when told a circus had gone to a side of the base almost no one has ever reported on – the side where military families, civilian contractors, support staff, and more than a…

In 2009 I published a scholarly history of the Guantánamo naval base entitled Guantánamo USA: The Untold History of America’s Cuban Outpost.   It took six years of research and writing to produce and can be found in college and university libraries across the United States.  Yet today I confess that I do not understand why our political leaders…

Today in 1993, Federal Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the United States District Court in Brooklyn ordered the closure of a refugee camp at Guantánamo that was being used to detain Haitians who tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In his ruling, Judge Johnson wrote: “Although the defendants euphemistically refer to its Guantánamo operation as…

The Atlantic has published a timeline of Barack Obama’s efforts to change U.S. detention policy at Guantánamo. The timeline begins on June 24, 2007, when Obama, then a junior senator and presidential hopeful, exclaimed: “We’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. We’re going to lead by example—not just by word but…