Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism

Human rights perspectives

Margaret L. Satterthwaite, Jayne Huckerby, Margaret L. Satterthwaite, Jayne Huckerby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415781794
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136173400
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

In the name of fighting terrorism, countries have been invaded; wars have been waged; people have been detained, rendered and tortured; and campaigns for "hearts and minds" have been unleashed. Human rights analyses of the counter-terrorism measures implemented in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 have assumed that men suffer the most—both numerically and in terms of the nature of rights violations endured. This assumption has obscured the ways that women, men, and sexual minorities experience counter-terrorism. By integrating gender into a human rights analysis of counter-terrorism—and human rights into a gendered analysis of counter-terrorism—this volume aims to reverse this trend. Through this variegated human rights lens, the authors in this volume identify the spectrum and nature of rights violations arising in the context of gendered counter-terrorism and national security practices. Introduced with a foreword by Martin Scheinin, former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, the volume examines a wide range of gendered impacts of counter-terrorism measures that have not been theorized in the leading texts on terrorism, counter-terrorism, national security, and human rights.

Gender, National Security and Counter-Terrorism will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the disciplines of Law, Security Studies and Gender Studies.

1 Gendered Erasure in the Global “War on Terror”

An Unmasked Interrogation

Ramzi Kassem¹

Rooting the Inquiry

Sakina Feltane had never allowed herself to cry. Not once in the six years and three months of her husband’s open-ended captivity in a US military prison on a distant Caribbean island. Not until my students and I telephoned to let her know that her husband, Mammar Ameur was aboard a plane bound for their North African homeland did she let her tears flood forth as she sobbed uncontrollably. The contrast with her steady composure in our years of collaboration on her husband’s case was stark, and it left me wondering about her tears.

In our conversations with the families of clients imprisoned at such sites as the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, and various prisons once operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it was apparent to my students and me that our clients’ wives endured ordeals that were comparable—and intimately related—to that of their spouses. It is a neither novel nor controversial observation that women and families bore a share of the brunt of enforced disappearances. Ample evidence has been collected in disparate historical settings documenting this fallout effect (International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 2006; Barrionuevo 2010; Amnesty International 2011). Yet women’s narratives remained conspicuously absent from the “War on Terror” discourse of rights advocates and legal counsel for directly affected men, including this author.

The extraterritorial US “War on Terror,” as recounted in reports that major human rights organizations issued after 9/11, is a story shaped and populated mostly by men (Human Rights Watch 2004; Center for Constitutional Rights 2007). In a universe of phenomena defined by erasure and disappearance, women were perhaps the least visible. This basic observation led naturally to an interrogation of the ways in which gender—read broadly to encompass sexual orientation, gender identity, masculinity, and related concepts— appears and disappears in the “War on Terror.”

In probing the absences, three principal missed encounters with women emerged. Where were women among (1) the populations indirectly affected by “War on Terror” policies and practices, (2) the groups who implemented those policies and practices, and (3) those whom the policies and practices directly targeted? This chapter attempts to record a preliminary (and therefore superficial) exploitation of this vast realm of inquiry.

Originally, I envisioned an exploration of the policies and practices, as well as their impacts, through a gendered prism, with no a priori framing theory for why these erasures existed, but only primary observations and descriptions of their existence and possibly other ways that gender manifested itself in this realm. My aim was to present an overview of the various ways gender was obfuscated where, on closer scrutiny, it was quite actively at play. Describing the modes of gendered erasure seemed far more feasible than isolating potentially vastly variegated rationales animating the different forms of erasure.

However, in the process, two focal points surfaced. The first is an object– subject duality cutting across all three examined populations. How erasure intersects with, and is informed by, this classic duality sheds important light on the mechanisms operating in each population. The other discovery highlights the risks of gender-blindness. Insufficiently internalized genderanalytical reflexes allow the often-subtle forms of erasure studied here to go almost unnoticed.

Scope and Terms

Owing to space constraints, this chapter does not engage with the full spectrum of counter-terrorism policy and practice, ranging from the domestic to the global, despite strong and significant continuities. Rather, it takes as its scope the rendition, detention, and interrogation practices deployed extraterritorially in the “War on Terror.” These include the network of post-9/11 US prison facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and various CIA-operated “black sites.”

Unseen Collateral Damage

Since being approved to leave Guantánamo almost three years ago, Mr. Ameur has done little but patiently wait to be reunited with his family in Algeria. Respondents have not offered any information about when or even whether he will be transferred. Meanwhile, Mr. Ameur continues to languish at Guantánamo.

(Amended Petition for Writ of

Habeas Corpus, Mammar v. Bush, 2008)

Legal briefs often relate how difficult it is for imprisoned men to be separated from their families without knowing how their loved ones are faring, particularly in the context of indefinite imprisonment without charge or process that has become a hallmark of the “War on Terror.” Indeed, prisoners do not know if they will ever see their families again. However, court filings rarely mention the concomitant effects on the families themselves, or on the women who usually have to sustain those families, often with little or no support.

This omission might be consistent with a conventional, narrow understanding of the role of pleadings in formal advocacy before a US court of law. This view posits the primacy of standing and a consequently tight focus on the petitioner or plaintiff without much regard to individuals or groups beyond. Many in the legal community do not uncritically accept such strictures and, while this particular debate is best left to others, it is nonetheless important to remember that under international human rights law, affected women would enjoy standing to bring their own claims in an international forum. The absence of women remains more conspicuous in the pages of human rights reports that are not bound by such strictures. Although organizations such as Cageprisoners and Amnesty International have shed some light on the plight of families, they are the exception (Masood 2010; Amnesty International 2011: 1–2).

Although it has been largely invisible, “War on Terror” rendition, interrogation, and detention practices that ensnare men have a concrete and indisputable impact on women, especially spouses. From the outset, prisoners’ wives struggle with the deep uncertainty that detention practices impose on their lives. Sometimes these women are present as their husbands are apprehended, and they share fully in the trauma, terror, and anxiety of that experience (United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur 2009).

Mammar Ameur, whom my students and I represented was abducted from his home late one night by Pakistani officials acting on orders from an apparent CIA operative leading the raid. His terrified family witnessed the event. The Pakistanis told our client’s wife “that her husband would only be gone for two days.” That was the beginning of a six-year ordeal.²

More frequently, even when they do not witness the actual abduction, women are the first to realize and report their husbands’ disappearances. From that moment on, often for many years, they must cope with not knowing how their husbands are doing and whether they will ever see them again. For eight months, Salwa Othman, a then-resident of Khartoum, did not know why her husband, Sudanese national Adel Hamad, had vanished in Pakistan—or even if he was still alive. Because Hamad was the sole provider for their family, Othman and her four daughters endured dismal living conditions in his absence, sharing a single room and extremely limited income (Wax 2008; UN Special Rapporteur 2009).

US authorities have lately granted families increased access to imprisoned loved ones at sites such as Guantánamo and Bagram, which has blunted this uncertainty somewhat (ICRC 2009), but at its core it remains intact. No amount of remote communication can answer the fundamental question of whether a family will ever be reunited when one of its members is a prisoner in the global “War on Terror.”

The fallout on women is not only emotional, but also financial and practical. The sudden and unexpected burden of single parenthood is not easy to bear, particularly when the missing male was the sole or principal wage earner in a household. As Pakistani activist Amina Janjua explains, “(a)s the fight for release of my illegally detained husband grew tougher and tougher, so was my pocket becoming emptier and emptier” (Masood 2010: 1). A former CIA “black site” prisoner poignantly bemoaned this particular consequence of his imprisonment: “During the time I was held in secret detention, my father died, leaving my mother without financial support” (Center for Human Rights and Global Justice 2007: 62).

These testimonials poignantly illustrate the unacknowledged objectification of a class of women and their erased status as passive victims of the “War on Terror.” Yet, amidst the overwhelming responsibilities they must face alone, some women play a central role in the advocacy around their husbands’ plights. The importance of such efforts cannot be overstated. First, they are often critical components in the advocacy battle around detention issues, galvanizing support and crystallizing abstract injustices in ways seldom matched by human rights reports, press releases, and advocates’ conferences. Moreover, by publicly registering their protest, prisoners’ wives contribute to breaking the silence around their husbands’ plight as well as their own, thereby reversing, at least in part, the process of gendered erasure.

A prominent example is Nadja Dizdarevic, the Bosnian wife of Algerianborn Al-Hajj Boudella. Along with other Algerian Bosnians, Boudella had been rendered from Bosnia–Herzegovina to Guantánamo. Dizdarevic mounted a supremely effective campaign to raise the profile of her husband’s plight, staging public protests and hunger strikes, lobbying her government, addressing the media, and appearing at conferences (Cageprisoners 2005; Amnesty International 2005). By intervening as active subjects, women such as Dizdarevic counter their objectification, thereby resisting erasure and, to an extent, victimization.

At the same time, juggling painstaking, time-consuming human rights campaigning alongside the challenges of unexpected single motherhood is a considerable burden, compounding the already heavy toll of these uniquely trying circumstances. Signs of deteriorating physical and psychological health are not uncommon in women coping with and responding to the sudden disappearance of a spouse. One Guantánamo prisoner’s wife reportedly told a journalist how “there is no color in life” since her husband’s disappearance (Cahalan 2010: 1).³ She detailed the damage this had wrought on their children, but also her own psychotic episodes, which began two years after her husband’s arrest and recur “every three or four months,” involving hearing voices in the night, including her husband’s and those of religious figures (Cahalan 2010: 1; Verkaik 2010).

The notable absence of women’s experiences and voices from many “War on Terror” narratives, even those advanced by rights advocates and representatives of directly affected men, illustrates the risks and tangible costs of advocacy strategies and critical approaches that do not incorporate a gender-conscious perspective. The story of post-9/11 events has been shaped and populated mostly by men. While there has been no dearth of human rights reports and releases regarding the ordeals of men caught up in the global “War on Terror” dragnet (Center for Constitutional Rights 2007, 2008), little to no direct attention has been paid to women who find themselves within the rings of suffering rippling out of those ordeals (Center for Constitutional Rights 2008; UN Special Rapporteur 2009; Reprieve 2009).

This particular manifestation of gendered erasure is not deliberate or malicious. Focused on directly affected individuals, advocates who may not have embedded in their analytical approach a deliberate, quasi-reflexive reflection about gender were more likely to miss the gendered impacts of the policies and practices being examined. My students and I drafted many legal briefs that hemmed closely to the narratives of immediately impacted men, to the exclusion of the attendant stories of women who were also affected. Innocent though the oversight may have been, its effect is nonetheless grave. Women who are affected by the rendition and detention of Muslim men become unseen, unheard collateral damage, suffering in silence.

Some commentators have started noticing this erasure, recognizing the impact of detention on communities and families. A recent report notes that “(a)s with other counter-terrorism measures that impact third parties (e.g., disappearances), women in these families often bear the weight of these stresses” (Akbar et al. 2011: 74). Cyra Choudhury writes that Western feminists should not think “that they can work for Muslim women’s rights while turning a blind eye to the violence perpetrated by Western forces that sunders women’s communities and families” (2010: 17–18). She connects the “punitive measures” taken against Muslim men to the “immiseration of their dependents,” and speaks broadly of how “(t)he therapeutic violence that is visited upon Muslim men has far-reaching consequences for Muslim women and children” (2010: 25, 28).

But that is only a start. The stories and suffering of women who have been erased from this facet of the post-9/11 narrative should be told and honored fully. The voices of women who have overcome that erasure by asserting their agency deserve to be further amplified by the advocacy and rights communities.

Operational Elements

From the outset of the “War on Terror,” female guards and interrogators were an integral part of the effort to humiliate, dehumanize, and deliberately target the perceived masculinities of Muslim male prisoners. The women involved in these interrogations were themselves erased from the public narrative about what was taking place at US military prisons that were effectively being used as intelligence factories. Well after the launch of the “War on Terror,” owing mostly to scandals and lawsuits under US Freedom of Information laws, the hidden role of women began to be revealed. At the very least, it should “arouse our feminist curiosity” (Richter-Montpetit 2007: 50) that women took part in an enterprise calculated to destabilize and undermine the perceived bases of prisoners’ sense of security in their own gender, that women were chosen to play this part in their capacity as women, and that women’s roles were then carefully expunged from the public narrative.

To be sure, the methods detailed here were mostly authorized and, whether viewed as a whole or in isolation, constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment—and, more specifically, gender violence. A US Army investigation into Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) allegations of abuse at the Guantánamo Bay facility—including some of the methods most relevant to this inquiry—found most allegations to be true, but also concluded that many techniques were authorized, which led to few recommendations of disciplinary action against responsible personnel (Army Regulation 15–16 (Schmidt– Furlow Report) 2005). Reading these abuses as a form ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors and editors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Gendered erasures in counter-terrorism
• Part II: Gender narratives in counter-terrorism
• Part III: Toward a gender account of counter-terrorism
• Index