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Bloomington, Ind.
Judith Butler's April 1 "Guantánamo Limbo" intelligently discusses the failure of the Geneva Conventions to take account of "prisoners of the new war" and links this failure to its flawed premises regarding states. Butler's insistence that we need to rethink the premises of international law and global politics is correct, and recalls Hannah Arendt on "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man" in The Origins of Totalitarianism. But Arendt's primary concern was the fate of stateless people--refugees, civilian noncombatants in war zones--who are in all moral and legal respects innocent yet are rendered rightless and vulnerable by harsh geopolitical realities.
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