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Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the Guantánamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I. The State of Exception
1. War Bodies 29
2. War Crimes 60
Part II. The Bird and the Lizard
3. Native Assailants 89
4. Native Murderers 116
Part III. The Military Colony
5. Japanese Traitors 149
6. Japanese Militarists 181
Conclusion 215
Notes 225
Bibliography 269
Index 283
About the author
Keith L. Camacho
Summary
Keith L. Camacho examines the U.S. Navy's war crimes tribunal in Guam between 1944 and 1949 which tried members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro community and Japanese nationals and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property.
