Victims or Madmen? The Diagnostic Competition over “Terrorist” Detainees at Guantánamo Bay
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces the pathologization of suspected terrorists held captive at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The occurrence of several reported suicide attempts among the detainees provided “proof” for their captors that terrorists are indeed fanatical madmen. These same reports of suicide attempts, however, were contradictorily diagnosed by human rights and humanitarian organizations as evidence of psychological deterioration induced by prolonged detention. What is notable in this diagnostic competition over what, exactly, afflicts the detainees is that both advocates and resisters to the detentions pathologized the detainees by chalking up the suicide attempts to their purportedly impaired psyches. This is significant because the pathologization of the detainees is one condition of possibility for their excision from the global body politic. Authoritarian practices, such as the incarceration of the “mad” and the detention of “suspected terrorists,” are theorized as integral to global liberal governance, which divides up populations, and subjects those deemed mad, deviant, or dangerous to coercive measures in the name of order, security, and liberty. The article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which international relations (IR) could be more attentive to the operation of the “psy” disciplines in the conduct of international affairs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it