Global and Insurgent Legalities. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. xii, 295 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0634-3.
This is a theoretically dense account and analysis of some of the ways the United States military, or more specifically, the US Navy and Marine Corps, dealt with prisoners of war (POWs) captured during and after their invasion and reoccupation of Guam. It focuses in particular on a small but salient subset of these captives. The Japanese military, when it invaded and captured the US colony in the days immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, brought to Guam a group of native Chamorros from what was at the time a part of the Japanese mandated (by the League of Nations) territory of the Micronesian islands—that is, the Northern Marianas Islands. These Chamorros, from Saipan and Rota, were bilingual in Japanese and Chamorro and were ordered to work as interpreters for the occupying forces on Guam. Some were required to serve simultaneously as police officers and in this capacity some of them brutalized Guam’s Chamorros.
Author Keith Camacho is especially interested in developing an analysis of law, justice, incarceration, and punishment in colonial situations—informed by the work of Giorgio Agamben—and in weaving this theoretical apparatus into the longer and larger history of US colonial rule in both North America and abroad. I want to focus especially on his well-documented portrayal of the US military’s torture and abuse of these Chamorro POWs on Guam.
As a US Navy aviator during the Vietnam War, in daily danger of being shot down and taken prisoner, I was subjected to POW training before deploying to the Tonkin Gulf; that is, I was held in a mock POW camp where I was systematically tortured and interrogated. In the years since the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq it has come to light that prisoners of the American military have been systematically tortured and interrogated, and that many of the specific techniques it employs were developed and refined using troops like me in those Vietnam-era mock POW camps. I was, in simple terms, a guinea pig for torture. I note this because for me the most revealing portions of this book have to do with the brutal treatment of the Chamorro prisoners on Guam in the wake of World War II. As Camacho demonstrates, aspects of torture that have more recently been uncovered at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and numerous CIA “black sites” scattered around the globe are not sui generis. They were practiced by the US military as official policy, not as random individual cases.
The US Navy’s attempts to put some of these Chamorro men from Saipan and Rota on trial and to punish them were characterized by a welter of legal confusions. Were they were serving in some capacity as Japanese troops and therefore entitled to the protections afforded by treaty to prisoners of war? Were they simply following orders and therefore not responsible for their actions, as German captives argued at the iconic war criminal trials, an argument that came to be known as the “Nuremburg Defense?” Could their service be considered analogous to the Navajo code talkers who served with the Marines, or with the Japanese Americans who fought as US Army combat troops in the European theatre?
Camacho digs deeply into the Guam Chamorros’ testimony against the Saipan and Rota Chamorros, and much of this testimony parallels reports from throughout all the Japanese-held lands during the war. Shared ethnic identity did not shield anyone from torture. At the same time, however, it is clear that at least some of those on trial offered the classic defense of alleged collaborators everywhere—that is, that they had tried hard to mitigate the harm the Japanese troops were inflicting.
Classified as civilian detainees or internees, the prisoners on Guam were without any legal status that would protect them from abuse. They were without rights. In handling them this way, the Navy’s civil administration presaged the treatment of the many prisoners the US has taken in its so-called war on terror. It is important for us to understand that what gets portrayed as haphazard and thrown-together policy in the treatment of these twenty-first century prisoners was in fact worked out and well-rehearsed long ago. It is indeed, as Camacho argues, a thoroughly imperial way of doing things.
We have been told that these cases, and particularly the decades-long debacle at Guantanamo, are aberrations. But there is, as Camacho makes very clear, little or nothing new here. In both colonial situations and military occupations, the high degree of self-regard that characterizes the US military leads it to believe that it is invariably righteous and justified in whatever it does (“Honour Bound to Defend Freedom,” reads the sign at the entry to the Guantanamo base). As this path-breaking work amply demonstrates, however, there is, finally, nothing new under the sun.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York