The sudden silencing of Guantanamo's artists
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
> 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".
Yes, this is very much as American as apple pie, as they would say.
Also, whether a country is a superpower has no obvious connection to whether it commits human rights violations.
If it’s not fair to compare the US to Yemen, then it’s not fair to compare it to Norway either. It simply is what it is.
* The US is doing better than you might expect from an influential, powerful country, that could be abusing its power much more (but that's how empires fall, and the US has learned from the lessons of history)
* The US is doing worse than you might expect from a prosperous and stable country, one that doesn't need to be driven by desperation and genuine threats to survival
Also, apples and oranges. Cartel violence is a failure of the state but at least not a systemic cruelty by the state itself.
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?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banali...
No matter how valuable we were perceived to be or treated as (by some folk at least) prior to our illness (and subsequent "poor-ness"), or how valuable we're capable of being if only we could get one tiny shred of help or luck dealing with our medical needs, we're treated like worthless garbage and kicked to the curb to suffer miserably the moment we're no longer able to continue as a functional part of the money-producing machine for the rich and powerful. That's the truth of life on a planet where money is literally God to most people.
It boggles the mind how these prisoners and others can remain even remotely sane during their times in literal holes and figurative holes of bureaucracy while being mentally and physically assaulted and tortured.
While I do agree about the bureaucracy, I believe that these bureaucracies don't have to be this way. But what it requires is that the people in charge of the bureaucracies care about finding deficiencies and fixing them, assuming they aren't the ones directing the non-niceties in the first place.
I know the feeling, having been involved with the US immigration process since the start of covid & living here through the last couple Trump years.
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.
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.
Remember: military bases are US soil and subject to the Constitution. Except for when they’re not.
Unlawful combatants, by contrast, are not entitled to a trial, and can even be executed on the spot if it seems advisable.
Being a lawful combatant requires, among other things, that the combatant wear a uniform or other insignia recognizable at a distance.
No uniform -> no POW rights has been the rule for a very, very long time.
It's fine to say you wouldn't but let's not go projecting.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/18/uk-student-miles-routledge-fli...
If "Miles Routledge" is on a "shooting trip with the Taliban", he deserves anything he gets.
And if you make a habit of visiting "spicy jurisdictions", you deserve anything you get.
I say this not out of animus for you or Routledge, but if you knowingly and intentionally engage in risky behavior, you don't get to whine when something goes wrong.
Edit: I smoke cigarettes, which I know to be risky behavior. If I get lung cancer, I won't be whining about it.
Similarly, if Routledge's Taliban buddies decide they don't like him any more, and take a notion to saw off his head on video (a rather more likely risk than him accidentally being sent to Gitmo, IMO), that's on him.
Being buddies with the Taliban exposes you to the risk of them sawing off your head, or being taken prisoner as an unlawful combatant.
And no, imprisoning unlawful combatants indefinitely is not "illegal", neither under United States law nor under the international laws of war.
If you claim otherwise, I'm going to have to ask for a citation.
And it gets a downmod, rather than a citation. Hint: that means you lose.
And for very good reason. The states power should always be checked, at home or abroad.
This is especially important as these days wars don't end.
So far what I've got is a broader perspective so thank you.
Unlawful combatants are not entitled to a trial.
It is a grievous error to assume that civilian law applies in a military context.
As stated, a large number were delivered to the US in exchange for bounty and were alleged to be working with terrorists, allegations that were taken at face value, not looked into for years, if ever, and often lacking evidence.
Attempting to slide out of this via a false binary (ie. either lawful or unlawful combantants) is simply sleazy.
When you write these things, imagine how they work when your simply replace names of countries involved.
You are saying it's right and proper when a Russian soldier executes a Ukrainian civilian putting up resistance? Or a civilian that looks like the guy that was putting up resistance?
Either you are a combatant, or you are a criminal. If you are a combatant, Geneva convention applies. If you are a criminal, system of justice applies. There isn't some sort of third subhuman category you can just execute willy-nilly.
Civilians can and do take up arms to defend their homes. They do not have uniforms just for such an occasion and Geneva convention recongises that.
Only if you are wearing a uniform and otherwise abiding by the laws of war.
Look it up.
Edit: Read it yourself.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xs...
Note that even resistance forces are required to wear insignia.
It doesn't have to be a fancy uniform, even an armband of a specific color will work.
What you cannot do is engage in hostilities while hiding among the civilian population.
Oh, right, the United States government told us. How convenient.
Truth is, in many cases, those people weren't combatants at all. But when you're denied due process because of the presumption of being an "illegal combatant", it's kinda hard to prove otherwise.
> Oh, right, the United States government told us. How convenient.
Yes, the United States government has kept them prisoner for 20 years, at great inconvenience and expense, because they just want to be meanies. You bet.
> But when you're denied due process because of the presumption of being an "illegal combatant", it's kinda hard to prove otherwise.
"Due process" is a feature of United States civilian law.
Not international martial law.
So there are no political prisoners in China?
Well, no, they took them prisoner and held them there initially for a variety of bad reasons, and then they were kept there subsequently largely because of intrabranch squabbles, radicalization because of long unjust confinement, and foreign reluctance to help resolve the problem (in large part due to the preceding point) making it difficult to find a resolution to the problem created by the initial bad decisions.
(Anthropomorphizing the US government as if it were an individual with general consistence of interest is... not consistent with political reality, often, or on this point in particular.)
Sorry, you are not arguing this point in good faith.
Your "prisoners aren't entitled to due process" point doesn't matter - even if true, if we are the good guys, we should embrace the process that conclusively establishes guilt or innocence for everyone to see, not lock people up in special you-have-no-rights prisons.
You can't have it both ways.
Unlawful combatants are not entitled to a trial. That doesn't mean you can't give them one if you feel like it.
You can basically do anything you want with them, including giving them a trial or even simply shooting them on the spot.
Unless "you" accidentally transport them to the United States like any other prisoner of the US government, in which case they are entitled to legal due process. It's a very principled system that we should all feel great about.
I just don't care about the art angle.
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
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Francis#Thought_and_...
>Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law.
Are there any actual examples of this happening? The link doesn't cite any.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...
Recalling a DA is firm rejection of his vision for a more-permissive justice system:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chesa-boudin-san-francisco-da-r...
In terms of total collapse, see Venezuela (“Public Opinion” subsection highlights ineffective courts and weak rulings):
The “anarcho-tyranny” idea is orthogonal to Francis’s other and later views, and has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism. Here it used in a Newsweek article by Hispanic conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez:
https://www.newsweek.com/president-bidens-anarcho-tyranny-op...
It’s evidence of something, but not a too-high bar of criminal conviction.
> has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism
This says bad things about modern mainstream conservatism, not good things about Francis.
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.
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...
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...
"Don't throw out the rulebook in a fit of passion. You'll regret it. We did" - Dan Fried
It's part of why the whole thing is rotten and can't be fixed from within the system by the system's own rules. Too many skeletons in too many closets.
The truth is probably closer to "there were a lot of people who sabotaged the attempt"; Republicans, Democrats in swing states, Pentagon officials. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/why-obama-has-...
> 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?
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.
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
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.