The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62399826

by rguiscard • 4 years ago

126 98 4 years ago

kiwih• 4 years ago

Until the end of 2017, Guantanamo detainees were allowed to take their art with them when they were released, or give it to their lawyers to take out.
The artists could bring their work to meetings with their lawyers, who would submit it along with their meeting notes to a "privilege team", which assesses everything leaving Guantanamo for classified material or national security issues.

...

Then in late 2017, under the Trump administration, it became clear that art was no longer being allowed out. Like lots of things in the world of Guantanamo, there was no official notification to the lawyers, no memo. Artwork was all of a sudden simply bounced back from the privilege team to the detainees.

...

Keeping his art in Guantanamo would be "the same as keeping me here", Qasim said.
"The art I made is me," he said. "If they keep my art here, my soul will stay here."

Sometimes it really does seem that "the cruelty is the point".

s5300• 4 years ago

Sometimes it really does seem that "the cruelty is the point".

Yes, this is very much as American as apple pie, as they would say.

jwilber• 4 years ago

Cruelty is worldwide. See: Rwanda, Yemen, former Yugoslavia, Mexican cartels, ISIS, etc. for a small sample of non-US cruelty in the twenty-first century.

erdos4d• 4 years ago

Sometimes it really does seem that "the cruelty is the point".

This extends very far beyond Guantanamo. I really wonder where all these sick fucks come from. I don't remember much of a psycho vibe from classmates or work colleagues. Yet the US makes them in sufficient quantity that they seem to pop up wherever authority is. Prisons, police, military, they all seem to have endless human garbage that enjoys being cruel if they can. How has this country produced these "people" and why do they achieve positions of power instead of failure?

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

I suspect they look for positions of power, sadly.

swatcoder• 4 years ago

Well, one answer would be that there’s no need for a “psycho vibe” on the road to heartless acts. It can look a lot more like complacency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banali...

PuppyTailWags• 4 years ago

It's important to acknowledge that there's a tendency to consider certain sets of people subhuman and deserving of anything bad thing that happens to them. Consider how America treats its poor and its sick.

rexpop• 4 years ago

Haven't you encountered "The Banality of Evil," yet? It doesn't take "sick fucks" to operate a detainment facility and/or concentration camp. The staff at these institutions are simply operating in accordance with handed-down procedure designed in abstract by remote administrators.

blacksmithgu• 4 years ago

Beauracracies can be extremely cruel without a single cruel person. All is takes is diffuse, disconnected decision making to produce ridiculous rules.

DigiDigiorno3• 4 years ago

I'm against prisoners in non-wartime being held without allegations or trials... I mean, Khalid was held pre-9/11...

That said, I do not care about the art, or even speech, of prisoners--of which who are properly convicted, beyond speech with their attorneys and allowed contacts (whom must be able to communicate on behalf of them). The bothersome part of this is Guantanamo's non-wartime use in-and-of itself.

crooked-v• 4 years ago

who are properly convicted

They haven't been. Legally speaking, the remaining detainees at Guantanamo are basically victims of indefinite government kidnapping, as the US government has specifically refused to actually put them on trial because there isn't enough admissible evidence to do so.

justin662• 4 years ago

“Like almost all the men sent there, he has never been charged with a crime.”

Nick87633• 4 years ago

When can we finally close this farce.

user982• 4 years ago

Obama will get around to that promise any day now.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

Seems he fell victim to that classic 'easy to make promises when you're running for office, difficult to follow through when you have access to state secrets you can't share with the public.'

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Guantanamo will exist until everyone involved in its creation and maintenance has been prosecuted for engaging in torture.

wahnfrieden• 4 years ago

the state isn't going to do that by following its own rules or acting in its own interest

kradeelav• 4 years ago

There's no word in the english language for how tragic this is. As a sister comment mentioned, the cruelty is the point.

It's a long shot, but is there any material way of helping these artists be able to take their art with them again? Making noise at specific people? Organizations that specifically target these broken freedoms?

Artistic freedom in particular is a very near and dear subject to me, and would greatly appreciate pointers here if there's any existing work done here.

unknownaccount• 4 years ago

Its not hard to see why. The novelty of being "made in Guantanamo" could turn these into sought-after collector items that wealthy buyers, primarily in the middle east, would easily pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, if that isnt already the case. It doesnt seem fair to the victims of terrorism that the perpetrators/conspirators gets to make hundreds of thousands of $ while in custody and then live a lavish life once released.

Karunamon• 4 years ago

Reminder that the remaining detainees in Guantánamo have never been convicted of a crime; the government explicitly refuses to put them on trial. This makes them political prisoners at best.

vector_spaces• 4 years ago

A few weeks ago, Khalid Qasim got some news he'd been waiting 20 years for. He had been cleared for release from the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
By that point, Qasim had been in Guantanamo nearly half his life, aged 23 to 43. Like almost all the men sent there, he has never been charged with a crime.

Most people at Guantanamo haven't been charged with anything, and about a quarter of the rest have been cleared of any wrongdoing. It's a travesty that the place continues to exist and has ever existed.

Your "primarily in the middle east" comment is also really confusing to me -- first, citation needed? Second, even if true, so what? Why should it be worse that wealthy buyers of these pieces would be "primarily in the middle east" than anywhere else?

iJohnDoe2• 4 years ago

Maybe unpopular opinion - the people held at Guantanamo are responsible for killing humans via cowardly terrorists attacks, either indirectly or directly. The “art” they make while being held is simply their coping mechanism. If they truly want to be released, then worrying about what happens to their art should be the least of their worries. Their art should be a trivial concern in the grand scheme of things when compared to their potential freedom. They weren’t concerned about the innocent lives of men, women, and children they killed or plotted to kill. Why should anyone be concerned about their art?

VictorPath• 4 years ago

the people held at Guantanamo are responsible for killing humans via cowardly terrorists attacks, either indirectly or directly.

The people held at Guantanamo Bay are not considered POWs by the US, nor have they been given a trial. They're held in violation of even US law. The US has let some go saying they picked up the wrong person. Who determined they are responsible for what you say they are responsible for? Even the US doesn't agree as they say they picked up some in error and let them go.

On top of this - for over half a century the country of Cuba has demanded the US withdraw its military base from Cuban territory. As US presidents piously intoned about Russian troops in Donetsk, that a sovereign nation wants US troops out of its territory is considered so unimportant it is practically unknown.

ClumsyPilot3• 4 years ago

Westerners don't seem to realise how much damage shit like Guantanamo bay have done to the image of US and to the idea of International law.

It indicates that ther is no such thing as justice, only rule of the strong.

These failures to live up to the standards we set is the first thing out of the mouth of any 'patriotic' Russian when you point out the cruelty of war in Ukraine.

It is big reason why in countries like India do not trust Europe and the West, and did not go along with recent sanctions

umanwizard4• 4 years ago

the people held at Guantanamo are responsible for killing humans via cowardly terrorists attacks, either indirectly or directly

Surely if there’s compelling evidence that this is true, we can put it in front of a judge and jury and have them sentenced properly.

landryraccoon• 4 years ago

The prisoners at Guantanamo haven’t even been charged. How can they be guilty if you can’t even say what they’re allegedly guilty of?

nafizh• 4 years ago

Some people here are asking why should someone care about people who killed innocent men, women, and children. It's a question worth answering.

Since 2002, nearly 779 Muslim men and boys have been held at Guantanamo, nearly all of them without any charge or trial. Of those, 532 were released by the Bush administration itself, and 197 later by Obama [0]. Today the number of detainees is 39.

Almost all of them had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack.

0. https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/detention/guan...

brettermeier• 4 years ago

Unfortunately there are racist, inhumane a*holes everywhere...

iJohnDoe2• 4 years ago

You’re assuming everyone at Guantanamo has something to do with 9/11. There have been many planned attacks against the the US, UK, and other countries since 9/11. Like, the planned attacks against airplanes full of people in the UK. Lives were saved due to information obtained from detainees.

hosteur• 4 years ago

I am sure you have sources to back up this claim.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

There’s a special place in hell reserved for torturers.

stackbutterflow• 4 years ago

Some comments in this thread are appalling.

Even if every single person held hostage at Guantanamo was directly involved in a terrorist attack they should not be tortured and detained forever without a proper trial. Revenge achieves nothing but more suffering. What has been done can never be changed but we can ensure that no more innocent will be hurt by setting the bar high enough so that even people proven guilty are not treated like sub humans. How we treat the worst people in our society sets the bar for the innocents inadvertently caught in the cogs of the judicial system.

It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

deepdriver4• 4 years ago

It is better than 10 guilty persons escape than 1 innocent suffers

What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism. Maybe works for petty thievery, not so much crimes of great bodily harm.

nojonestownpls2• 4 years ago

What if the escaped guilty persons cause more than one innocent to suffer? Seems like an obvious flaw in this aphorism.

It's a principle of justice that was arrived at through a lot of thought and experience. It of course takes into account that the guilty people that slip away due to this principle will cause harm of their own.

But a justice system without this principle, one that does not place a high bar for what makes one guilty, one that isn't very careful about labeling innocents guilty, will cause far more suffering. It makes systematic abuses of power more likely, and affects far more innocents ultimately. This only becomes more and more true as the power and reach of the state gets higher and higher compared to that of an individual who might be a potential criminal.

jrmg• 4 years ago

The acts of 9/11 should have been considered a crime, and the remaining planners and perpetrators - and those planning and training for future actions - brought to the USA and tried.

That’s what a country the USA aspires to be in its best moments would’ve done. It would’ve been a shining example of what a liberal democracy could be.

UberFly• 4 years ago

Explain, for instance, where you would have the captured leaders of ISIS tried? In a US court? Where then when they are found guilty? Into a US prison? Returned to their country of origin? There is a reason that after all the talk that Obama did about closing Guantanamo, he didn't even try.

arcticbull5• 4 years ago

A bunch of them are literally on trial at Gitmo right now. [1]

It shows quite a lack of can-do attitude to think that in the last 20 years we couldn't have come up with something. We did come up with Nuremberg after all.

If only there was an international criminal court set up specifically for "trying individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression" [2] in which folks could seek justice. Nah, that'd never work, which is why the US is helpfully not a signatory. Even though, and this is true, the US played a central role in its creation.

The issue isn't lack of venue clearly it's lack of due process.

[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/19/the-inter...

[2] https://www.icc-cpi.int/

c3534l• 4 years ago

If everyone is so sure this is where we're housing dangerous terrorists, why not charge them with a crime and allow them legal defense? If the evidence is so air-tight, so obvious we should deprive them of basic human rights, why not put them in prison instead of "detaining" them forever?

notch656a2• 4 years ago

I think it's a two-fold problem. One is they may not be so guilty as they claim. The other is they may be so guilty as they claim, but the methods and torture they were put through are not things the government wants discovered by the public during trial.

goldenkey2• 4 years ago

I wouldn't call it a problem for anyone else but the government officials who should instead be in prison. Perhaps the problem is that these officials aren't in prison..? Seems more like the true problem.

arvindamirtaa• 4 years ago

I'll just leave this here:

"Don't throw out the rulebook in a fit of passion. You'll regret it. We did" - Dan Fried

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DMhb1FWHso

boomboomsubban• 4 years ago

To keep it fair, can we burn Bush's paintings of him in the shower? Why should he be allowed to publish his paintings and not these detainees?

jeisc• 4 years ago

Habeas Corpus and Due Process are the first step to human rights >> https://www.virginialawreview.org/articles/habeas-corpus-due...

The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists

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