On January 6, the Pentagon announced that it had “resettled” 11 Yemeni men to Oman after detaining them over two decades without charge at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Notice of this repatriation was given back on September 15, 2023, to Congress by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Their removal from a facility made notorious in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States brings the number of those still detained at Guantánamo to 15.
They are reminders about what the German jurist and Nazi enthusiast Carl Schmitt called a state of exception, a rather sinister way of saying that states, and leaders, can behave…