A disco ball spins slowly, speckling the enormous, vaulted roof. Combined with a throbbing guitar reverb, the moving lights are disorienting. At the end of the hall glows a monolithic figure that, when you get closer, reveals itself to be a man sitting on an enormous white chair with his knees forward, like the colossal statues of Egyptian pharaohs or the Lincoln Memorial.
But this statue is in color, in a T-shirt and khakis, glasses, and sneakers with neon laces, a digital watch on his wrist. This statue scrunches his mouth, interlaces his fingertips, and taps his foot.
This is not a statue in the usual sense. It is an image of Mohammed el Gharani, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, that is being live-streamed from a studio in West Africa onto a giant plaster-and-styrofoam chair, the central work of art and agitation in “Habeas Corpus,” a remarkable installation by Laurie Anderson at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this weekend.
Every hour, the statue speaks. The real and silent Mohammed el Gharani takes a break and is replaced with an earlier recording of him talking about his ordeal at Guantánamo. During the clip I saw, he broke down and put his head in his hands, breaking his upright position and exposing the ghostly white chair behind him.
Nearly 14 years since the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo, we have a tremendous volume of words about the more than 700 detainees — from leaked Pentagon documents, voluminous court records, and their own testimonies, most notably Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s bestselling memoir, Guantánamo Diary. But these words can be fraught and confusing. Statements were extracted under torture. There are mistranslations. Some documents are so redacted as to be unreadable. Detainees’ accounts of their lives often bear no resemblance to the government’s.
We have far fewer images of Guantánamo inmates, and, in the United States, no physical appearance of them, because by law, they may not enter the country. There are 114 men left in the prison, and the military does not allow them to be interviewed or photographed. Every detainee’s statement and almost every scrap of information from Guantánamo passes through military censors. In many cases, the only pictures available of detainees are mug shots from leaked military records. Despite the vast amount of information about these men’s lives readily available online, they remain stigmatized forever by Guantánamo.
Images can humanize, but physical presence does even more. Even in this age of digital immediacy, the power of the physical is undeniable. Bringing Gharani to New York as a three-dimensional livestream, Anderson portrays distance and intimacy all at once, an apt metaphor for the American public’s relationship to Guantánamo.
There’s no denying the outsized symbolism of Guantánamo, and the fact that its remaining prisoners have become outsized political problems. The Obama administration has been transferring people out of the prison at a trickle, while Republican politicians continue to portray them as dangerous terrorists who cannot even be safely brought to high security prisons in the United States — despite the fact that 53 of them have been cleared for release by the U.S. government.
In this context, “Habeas Corpus” is startling and effective. What better answer to this persistent censorship and political morass than a larger-than-life, speaking, smiling, living man?
In an essay about the project, Anderson wrote that she originally envisioned the work as one of “silent witness.” In the late ’90s, she once projected the wordless image of a convicted Italian bank robber. But for her Guantánamo project, Anderson (who I met with earlier this year to discuss the legal and ethical dimensions of the installation) decided that Gharani’s persona was too remarkable to keep silent.
The son of Chadian camel herders who had immigrated to Saudi Arabia, Gharani went to Pakistan looking for work and schooling in 2001, at the age of 14. Pakistani forces arrested him and handed him over to U.S. forces, who sent him to Guantánamo in 2002. He would remain there for seven years. Despite the fact that he was only a child, the U.S. government accused him of having been an al Qaeda fighter and member of a terror cell in London. A federal judge rejected those claims in 2009, dismissing the government’s evidence as a “mosaic of allegations” based largely on dubious statements by other detainees, and ordered Gharani released.
Gharani’s story stands in for hundreds of voiceless Guantánamo prisoners and the uncounted silent casualties of the American wars since 9/11. He speaks on their behalf in the way that Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that slave narratives “came to be a communal utterance” that “at once testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate.”
Scott Korb made the connection between Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Gates’ writing on the great American slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and others. Slahi himself wrote that he “often compared myself with a slave.”
And in a series of short video clips in a side room at the armory, Gharani also talks about the slave trade. He describes visiting ports on the West African coast where slaves were sold and shipped to the Caribbean. “It’s a similar story,” he says. “They shackled us with similar shackles, you know, and it was terrible.”
Like those early African-American authors, Slahi and Gharani tell their stories in language learned from their captors. Just as Slahi’s memoir was full of slang and colloquialisms picked up from military guards, Gharani’s English is fluent and American in its cadences. (He has said that among the first words he learned were “the ‘F’ and the ‘N’ words, because that’s what the Americans called me.”) Gharani, in the installation, speaks directly to the society that shackled him.
The installation is notable even for the building where it is located. The military origins of the armory, where visitors are directed into “the drill hall,” did not escape Gharani when he saw photos of the space; he says in a video clip that it reminds him of a hangar in Afghanistan. As he sits in the chair, Gharani will see live video playback of visitors wandering around the room.
The show tries not to be too severe. It leaves out the worst of Gharani’s experience; we do not hear extensively about torture and abuse by guards. And each evening, Anderson will perform at the armory with other musicians, turning her installation into a dance party. Anderson wrote in an essay this week that she sometimes found efforts to “humanize” and personalize the Guantánamo detainees grating, because of the implication that the whole affair couldn’t still be an outrage if the people were not friendly, not painters or poets or charming youths like Gharani.
In fact, Gharani keeps the project and its visitors anchored in the present political reality. In one of the videos in the show, he addresses President Obama directly, asking him to free the “brothers” who still remain at Guantánamo. “If I was him, he still has time” Gharani said. “You still have time.”
Caption: Segment from “Mohammed el Gharani: My Story,” part of HABEAS CORPUS by Laurie Anderson in collaboration with Mohammed el Gharani at Park Avenue Armory.
This sounds great and thanks for writing about it.
I’m sorry that the whole comments section thus far has been dominated by right wing guy who finds willing sparring partners (this uses up anywhere from 30-70 percent of most comment threads here) and the Intercept Purity Defenders who complain about absolutely every article that is found to be insufficiently righteous and on-message.
Then there’s me. Adding sunshine and cheer myself, I know. But best to you, Cora Currier.
I was at the Saturday night performance. What a sorry, empty spectacle. This is why Americans are doomed. What starts out as an indictment of Guantanamo in the (projected) person of Mohammed el Gharani devolves into a dance party hosted by Adventures of Tintin caricature Omar Souleyman. The message: “You are Liberal New Yorkers, fans of Laurie Anderson. You are not unjust. You are not guilty. You get to boogie.” Wait a minute. What? Didn’t we just hear that Guantanamo continues? Men are suffering there this very hour. WHY are we dancing? “I get it,” I said to my partner. “This is the third act: as we leave the Armory, we all get beaten with sticks, for being such assholes. The longer we take to exit, the harder they hit us.” Alas, no. But THAT would have been well worth the $52 ticket of admission.
What is “remarkable” is your complete avoidance of both the circumstances of Mr. Gharani’s capture and his affiliation with AL Qaeda. Also missing in your review is the stark reality that by bringing a former detainee to the United States, albeit in video form, is at least against the spirit of the law that prohibits former detainees from being in the United States. Mr. Gharani’s DoD rap sheet is ten pages long. DoD lists his birth date as 1981, making him 20 years old when he arrived at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on February 8, 2002. I know this because I was there, and fully aware of who I described as a man/boy about 6’2″ tall, thin and more darkly skinned than the other unlawful combatants brought in to Camp X-Ray that day. Mr. Gharani is a trained Al Qaeda foot soldier, suicide bomber in waiting, and courier who was involved with Usamma bin Laden himself. Gharani was involved in hostilities with U.S. and Coalition forces and captured in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. Gharani is a bad guy enemy and should never have been released. This show shocks the senses in its insensitivity towards the victims of terror, their loved ones and family, veterans, members of the military, and to the memory of those who gave their lives so that people like Laurie Anderson can enjoy freedom of speech. Shame on her, and shame on you for telling only one side of this very disturbing story. What’s next, candlelight vigils for the 19 hijackers from 9/11/01? Her lack of loyalty is on par with (Hanoi) Jane Fonda’s when during the Vietnam war she visited Hanoi in North Vietnam while American soldiers were being killed in the jungles of South Vietnam. Some would call that treason. God forbid this expression of art inspires our enemies to commit additional acts of terror on our citizens because of the lies told by Gharani.
Having read your comments, it is with
a great lack of belief ( I don’t know if you are being sarcastic or if you really are
so lacking in legal principles)
that I am responding
to your cognitive dissonance.
I realize that you, like a possible majority of “americans”
need to believe that you are “exceptional” among all of life.
This is the same kind of thinking which was typical of the Nazis and every
other imperial perversity created by nationalistic arrogance.
The Bill of Rights of the US constitution and the Geneva Conventions
(of which the US is a signatory) do NOT limit these rights to
ANY nation’s citizens, but the corporatized government of the US
and its military juggernaut have decided
(in violation of both its own constitution and the Geneva Conventions)
that they can limit human rights in whatever means necessary.
As the article makes clear, this is just one more degrading illegality in a line
which has great similarity and probably some ancestry
in the perverse capitalism of the slave trade.
The fact that we were told that the majority of 9/11 attackers were from
Saudi Arabia and that the fact of the matter is that
the majority of monetary support for the Taliban and al Qaida
came from Saudi Arabia and the United States (in the 1980’s) doesn’t
seem to give you or the majority of “americans” and their allies any pause.
In fact, the US has gone out of its way to protect the Saudi elite from
being held responsible and has even decided to INCREASE the
amounts of money and weapons it provides to Saudi Arabia since
they have promulgated the spread of “terrorism” which the US is
using as an excuse for ever greater militarism and the abandoning
of its own constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
Using DoD paperwork as anything other than an example of how deviant
the path of the militaristic juggernaut can be is simply pathetic.
The whole scheme of a militarized “prison” at Guantanamo is an
attack on the constitution of the now-supposed USA.
It is an affront to the idea of the rule of law and thereby it is a proof that
the “terrorist” threat is coming from both outside and inside the
now-fake USA.
The only thing which is consistent is the growth of monetary profits
by weapons manufacturers in the fake-USA and its allies.
So, whether these comments of yours are out of a desperate need to believe
in a state known for huge abusiveness on a global scale or are out of
sheer arrogance, I foolishly did not think they should stand unchallenged.
p.s.
Speaking of Osama bin Laden,
the whole of the execution of bin Laden has the smell of
a Hollywood production which was meant to promote
celebration of lawless murder.
It was proudly celebrated at the democrats convention in 2012.
He could have been taken into custody and tried in a court of law,
but instead all that remained of him (we are led to believe)
was violently extinguished and dumped in an unknowable location
in the ocean.
It is just as likely as not that the reason for that ending of his story
is that he might have produced evidence in a court which would
clearly have shown the real truth about how the Saudis and their
NATO allies had help him become their excuse for greater
militarized corruption.
There is pretty much no likelihood that any legalities will arise
from his execution because those legalities
might get in the way of the real agenda of corporate imperialism.
The celebration of wanton murder reached its most perverse recent
level in the “Shock and Awe” aggression in Iraq and it was based upon
a number of lies which included the lie that Osama and Saddam
were allies. Now they have both been executed so that they can’t
possibly challenge the lies and possibly affect the ever-growing
militarized juggernaut of corporate profits from warmongering.
We will never know and apparently THAT is how the fake-USA
wants us – unknowing.
Laurie Anderson didn’t release him. A federal judge did. That judge said the only evidence against him was given by two other detainees and that NONE of what they said was credible. The judge said one accusation, that Gharani was connected to a London-based Al Qaeda cell when he was 11 years old, was ludicrous on its face: He wrote, “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is — at best — unknown.”
Many detainees have been proven to be totally innocent of the charges against them and released by the federal government or the military.
Imprisoning and torturing innocent people and repeating unproven lies about them is anti-American and doesn’t protect anyone from anything.
To the contrary, it potentially radicalizes people who might want to get back at the Americans who decided the most democratic way of treating an innocent fake enemy combatant was to touch his penis and threaten to cut it off. Gharani has been out for years. He’s in an art show. Not Al Qaeda.
There’s also this: “There are still innocent people there,” Republican Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-secretary of state Colin Powell, told the Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”
Wilkerson said he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.
“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog.
He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”
Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate “who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”
Mr. Granger, I don’t believe you even read the above article. Yours is the typical aggrieved knee-jerk response of a pointy hat wearer: you just KNOW that Gharani was in Al-Quaeda, was bin Laden’s right hand man, was probably also a Taliban and and and and but without a shred of proof.
If Gharani was 11 at the time of his capture how the hell did the US forces think he was capable of being a terrorist? And you claim you were there? So you are probably one of those US armed forces twats, with the intelligence of a cardboard box and the gung-ho and weapons to ‘put you on the right side ‘.
I hope, sincerely, that people of your ilk burn in whatever version of hell you currently espouse.
Yours, a european who thinks you lot are frigging nutjobs.
@Ross The torturers are doing ‘no wrong’, legislative acts and appealed cases have repeatedly been concluded in favour of the govt, contravening how the judicial system operates in all other matters. This says it all –
‘In 2010 the D.C. Circuit Court began requiring federal judges to stop submitting the government’s evidence to such rigorous examination. The appeals court said judges must embrace a pro-government presumption that the Guantánamo evidence is reliable. Government lawyers had argued that such a presumption was justified because much of the evidence against the detainees was collected under battlefield conditions amid the “fog of war.” Specifically, the US appeals court required federal judges hearing Guantánamo cases to accord a special presumption of accuracy to US intelligence reports being used to justify continued detention.’
What’s missing is giving “legal standing” to torture victims and blacklistees plus subpoena power to their attorneys.
The UN Convention Against Torture (supported by Ronald Reagan) “mandates” that the United States investigate and prosecute cruel & unusual punishment of any kind – from Chicago police corruption to blacklisting of Americans by state and local police through “Fusion Centers” to immigration centers. It’s time for holding torturers accountable.
“Legal standing” must be earned. Mr. Gharani and his Al Qaeda colleagues were/are unlawful combatants. In other words, because of their behavior and appearance on the battlefield, and their lack of association with an entity that was a signator to the Geneva Conventions, they are entitled to no extra legal privileges. They have no rights. Geneva was created to protect innocent civilians and property in war. It was not created to protect those who PRETEND to be civilians in order to murder them. In any case, a decision was made by the Department of Defense for us to treat detainees “within the spirit of Geneva.” Apparently there are those out there who confuse this benevolence with full rights of citizenship in the United States, which is absurd. They are all lucky to be alive.
Could not really take anything you said seriously. I doubt anyone else will either but keep spreading nonsense and manipulation lies. What Americans really do best.