Anticipatory witnessing: military bases and the politics of pre-empting access

ABSTRACT

As part of their newsgathering process, journalists often seek access to places owned or controlled by the government, such as military bases. In the United States, the military has rigorously limited journalists’ access to military bases, operations, and personnel, but the logics invoked by the government actors who decide whether journalists should be allowed, for the sake of a story, to see what happens on military bases often remain unknown. Drawing on archival research, I introduce what I call anticipatory witnessing, the use of analytical techniques to identify a priori certain people, such as media practitioners, whom state actors foresee will draw on specific elements of professionalism, credentialism, and objectivity in conveying what they have seen to their audiences. The notion of anticipatory witnessing encompasses a form of organizational vetting that is attuned to the specific social, cultural, political, and legal dimensions of those who see and subsequently speak. To engage in anticipatory witnessing is therefore to attempt to limit not just what is seen but who sees it. By analyzing practices adopted by military servicemembers at Guantánamo Bay, I demonstrate the ways in which cross-institutional communications preceding journalists’ arrival reveal elements of anticipatory witnessing, including efforts to imagine how specific rhetoric, technologies, modes of address, and partnerships might damage the reputation of the US security state. Anticipatory witnessing thus considers the logics invoked and constellations of stakeholders responsible for limiting access to tightly controlled spaces, such as military bases.

KEYWORDS:

• Freedom of information
• military
• archive
• journalism
• anticipatory witnessing
• media witnessing
• war‌
• national security
• global news
• detention‌

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for having had the opportunity to present and receive feedback on an earlier version of this research at the International Communications Association’s annual conference in May 2020; I want to extend my especial thanks to the Journalism Studies Division, which best owed upon my work a top student paper award. Throughout the writing of this piece, Sharon Black and Min Zhong at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Library provided essential support. Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt read and engaged with previous drafts. Thanks are also owed to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Bharathi Ramachandran and Matthew Seccombe helped me get this piece to the finish line. Though there are too many to name, I would like to recognize the work of the thousands of journalists, who have covered Guantánamo. It took Marco T. Villalobos, the United States Southern Command FOIA Manager, 1277 days to process my public records request; my hope is that future scholars and journalists will not be scared away by that number.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As of now, at Guantánamo, images of detainees’ faces are not permitted, and photography of soldiers is only allowed with express consent of the military command.

2 This same field of actors also dictates whether detainees are sent to government facilities and what modes of communication (i.e., snail mail, speaking with lawyers) they can leverage to share what they have seen and endured with civilian audiences.

3 In March 2015, in response to my first request to visit in my capacity as an academic researcher, I received word from Captain Jonathan S. Leigh, the Deputy Media Relations Officer at the Joint Task Force Guantánamo Office of Public Affairs, that such a request would not be possible. In his email message to me on 16 March 2015, Captain Leigh stated, ‘Because this is an operational military facility, we cannot accommodate visits by academics at this time.’

4 I include one such profile as an example in Appendix A. The archive of profiles as provided to me by the U.S. Southern Command is available upon request.

5 Ellipses in brackets designate places where military actors’ statements were abridged for brevity.

6 Anticipatory witnessing does not fall under the conceptual framework media witnessing, as it would include the act of giving certain state actors (i.e., prison guards, who might someday become veterans) non-disclosure agreements in order to limit what they might share with future imagined audiences once they leave the control and boundaries of the government-controlled property.

Additional information

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Muira McCammon

Muira McCammon (@muira_mccammon) is a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Master in Law from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a Master of Arts in Translation Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include military policy, detention reporting, administrative law, and the US First Amendment. Prior to her doctoral studies, she covered Guantánamo as a journalist.