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Vol. 81/No. 47 December 18, 2017
Guantánamo prisoners’ art brings threats
from US gov’t
BY EMMA JOHNSON
NEW YORK — A fascinating exhibit here of 36 paintings, sculptures and
drawings made by detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo has
so incensed the Pentagon that officials there have decided to confiscate
all the inmates’ artwork, claiming it’s government property. They have
forbidden moving any more artwork outside the prison and detainees who
are released are not allowed to take their art with them.
The crackdown comes after the exhibit by eight current and former
inmates began getting national and international attention. In addition
to making the art public, the exhibit also puts the spotlight on
Washington’s brutal and dehumanizing treatment of the prisoners.
“Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay” opened at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice Oct. 2 and will be up until the end of January. The art
was created at Guantánamo between 2010 and today. Four of the prisoner
artists have since been released. I urge readers to go see the display.
The art program at Guantánamo started in 2009. The Pentagon hoped it
would distract prisoners from protesting the abuse they suffered and
conflicts with guards.
When inmates were moved from their cells to take art classes they were
shackled and searched. After arriving they were searched again. They
then had shackles taken off their hands, but kept on the legs.
In 2013, as a hunger strike against their oppressive conditions spread
to about 100 of the then 166 detainees, Washington ordered an armed raid
on the camp. Soldiers seized artwork and legal documents from the cells.
Documents were eventually returned, but artwork never was.
The mesmerizing sea
As with much of the art produced by workers behind bars, the majority of
the paintings made at Guantánamo show scenes of the outdoors. A big
majority of the items exhibited at John Jay are related to the sea —
showing storms, boats, bridges, beaches, shipwrecks, waterfronts and
lighthouses. An essay in the exhibit catalog by Mansoor Adayfi explains
why. Adayfi is a Yemeni citizen who was imprisoned at Guantánamo from
2002 when it opened until 2016. He was then sent to Serbia.
He describes how when the detainees first arrived they were ferried from
the aircraft to Guantánamo, gagged, blindfolded and shackled. They had
no idea where they were. But they could hear the sea all around them.
Some of them were Afghans, who had never seen the sea. All that they
knew was that “it was a lot of water that kills and eats people,” he
writes. We “tried to explain” but “that made them even more afraid.”
Their interrogators used this fear to threaten them, saying, “When we
finish with you here, you will be taken to the sea and you will be
thrown there.”
Detainees who came later told them they were at the Guantánamo Naval
Base in Cuba, on territory occupied by the U.S. against the will of the
Cuban people and their revolutionary government.
The barbed wire fences that ringed the prison camp were covered from top
to bottom with green tarp to stop prisoners from seeing the sea only a
few hundred feet away. They tried lying on the ground to get a glimpse
in the little space below the tarp. Then guards closed that space. They
climbed to see above the tarp, and guards built the fences higher.
In 2014 news came that a hurricane was heading towards Cuba. The camp
administration decided they had to take down the tarp.
“We all faced one direction — toward the sea. It felt like a little
freedom, to look at it,” Adayfi writes.
The tarp remained down for four days and the detainees started making
art about the sea. Some wrote poems. And everybody who could draw, drew
the sea.
Some began making sculptures of boats, using debris they found around
the camp.
“Most of these drawings took months to complete and months to get
approved. They were searched, scanned, and detained. Like us,” Adayfi
says. “These drawings had a long hard journey to get to you. To meet
you. Let the sea remind you we are human.”
A total of 780 people have been detained at Guantánamo. Of those, 731
were never charged or convicted but remained incarcerated in subhuman
conditions for many years, some more than a decade. Of the 41 men held
there today, overseen and guarded by 1,500 soldiers and staff, only 10
have ever been charged or convicted.
Major Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesperson, told the New York Times
Nov. 27 that the brass found out about the exhibit from the media. News
reports said the Pentagon threatened to destroy the art and order the
exhibit taken down. This brought further attention and media coverage.
On Nov. 28 Army Col. Lisa Garcia of the U.S. Southern Command, which
oversees the prison, told the Miami Herald that the command now
recommends the prison “archive” the artwork rather than destroy it.
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