Everybody knows the game is fixed
the poor stay poor and the rich get richer
so why you crying now, it’s not like anything has changed.
You’re an adult, playing the shell game.
In the basement, Stoya smoked a final cigarette, then placed a pink Marie Antoinette wig on her head. The stylist Isaac Davidson had created a miniature Zuccotti Park within its curls: the cops, the protesters, even the big red Joie de Vive sculpture. Stoya wrapped herself in her mink, then strode out into the crowd, shrugged off the coat, and stepped into the tub with a coy smile, naked save for heels, pasties, and a rhinestone thong. She frolicked in the cash, throwing it in the air, tossing it at guests, kicking her feet up as crowds stared through the window.
All my friends were there. Laurie had flown in from London for the opening, as had Paul Mason. Eleanor Saitta and Quinn Norton flew in from Berlin. Sarah Jaffe was there, as was the whole Occupy journalist crew. Katelan Foisy grinned, wearing a transparent lace dress, next to Melissa, in her gold miniskirt, glamorous even after weeks of making this damn thing possible. John showed up in his bespoke suit, flowers in hand. He grabbed me by the waist and whirled me around until I could barely stand.
I fell out of his arms and collapsed into the bathtub, sagging with exhaustion, grinning stupidly as Kim stroked my hair.
In his 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, the critic Ben Davis calls Picasso’s massive painting Guernica “an indubitably heroic example of political art.” The painting portrays the deaths of civilians under aerial bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. But what Davis finds heroic is not the painting’s content, but its effects. In 1937, the price to see the painting exhibited was a pair of boots to be sent to the Spanish front. The gallery collected fifteen thousand pairs.
Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they’re right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can’t take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.
Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I’m a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.
The month before I finished Shell Game, Paul Mason interviewed me in London.
“What are you going to do next?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I was overwhelmed with both the show and the news, and my voice shook with exhaustion. “I think I’ll go somewhere really fucked up and draw it.”
Two months after I finished Shell Game, I went to Guantánamo Bay.
In April 2013, I read a New York Times editorial by Samir Moqbel, who had been held for more than eleven years at Guantánamo without charge. In the editorial, Moqbel, who was in the midst of a brutal hunger strike, described the experience of being force-fed. Twice a day, guards shackled him to a restraint chair, beating him if he resisted. A nurse jammed a tube down his nostril and into his stomach, then a pumped a can of Ensure through the tube.
For Moqbel, worse than physical suffering was the torture of indefinite detention. Though a judge had cleared him to leave the prison years ago, he remained inside. A hunger strike was the last way he could assert his humanity.
Moqbel’s words haunted me. But I never suspected I’d soon visit his prison.
After our arrests at Occupy’s anniversary, I’d become friendly with John Knefel, the journalist and Radio Dispatch podcaster. In October 2012, he started making trips to Guantánamo Bay. At first I was incredulous, but it turned out that the world’s most notorious prison had biweekly flights carrying media and legal observers to see the hearings for the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Knefel gave me generous advice—and shared his contact at the military press office. After extensive badgering, I got a seat on a press flight from Fort Andrews.
Once the military gave me my clearance, I pitched my editor at Vice a Guantánamo story. The base was one of the most censored environments for photography, I said, but as an artist I might be able to draw my way around the military’s blackout.
Thinking of Samir Moqbel’s Times editorial, I told my editor I wanted to focus on a single prisoner. Guantánamo was a symptom of the War on Terror’s systematic violence: the military had erased prisoners’ humanity, turning them into bogeymen in orange jumpsuits. But no matter how many Americans knew about torture or force-feeding, they wouldn’t care until they saw what it did to an actual man.
at Vice (vice.com)
As the date for my flight drew closer, I poured over the websites of legal groups who represented detainees. The search for a main character resembled a perverse form of headhunting, but I wanted to find a prisoner with whom I had something in common. On the website of Reprieve, a British legal charity, I found the biography of a man named Nabil Hadjarab.
Algerian by birth, Nabil grew up in France, speaking French as a first language. He was arrested in 2002 in Afghanistan, at age twenty-two. Held on the flimsiest of pretexts, he’d been cleared for release five years ago.
So far, so typical. Then, my eyes stopped on one sentence.
In Nabil’s biography, a guard described him as a “great artist.”
I spent the next month on the phone with Cori Crider, Nabil Hadjarab’s lawyer at Reprieve. She told me more about his life: he was good with languages, enjoyed playing soccer, and dreamed of becoming a translator. As I had been in southeast Turkey, he’d been detained while in a war zone, but there the similarities ended. Whereas the Turkish police let me out after a few hours, Nabil had been tortured, forced to sign a false confession, and thrown on a plane to Cuba.
In June 2013, our plane touched down in Guantánamo. Soldiers ushered us off, past barbed wire and scowling, camo-clad guards. We lined up in the dust to be photographed, then presented with badges reading “Military Escort at All Times.”
Our pressroom was in a former airplane hangar. Soldiers watched our computer screens, reading our tweets aloud in mocking voices if they disapproved. The pressroom’s phones bore stickers reading “Use Means Consent to Monitoring.”
We slept six to an army tent, beds separated by plywood dividers, and showered in another tent. In the blinding heat, iguanas frolicked. An endangered species, they were the true kings of the island. Killing one would earn a soldier a ten-thousand-dollar fine.
It all seemed so cordial. Press officers went about their work monitoring us, joking while they helped journalists set up their Internet connections. On the other side of the wire, most of Guantánamo’s prisoners were on hunger strike, being force-fed through the excruciating process Moqbel had described. We wouldn’t be allowed to see these prisoners, but the press officers’ charm couldn’t make me forget they were there.
Once we set up our desks in the pressroom, military escorts led us to a press conference being given by the family members of those murdered on September 11. The family members had been chosen via lottery, with the winners being flown to Cuba to see the trial.
The press conference was an obvious propaganda attempt, but it did not go as the military might have hoped. One of the first to speak was the frail, elderly Rita Lazar. Her brother Abraham had died in 2 World Trade Center beside a quadriplegic colleague he would not abandon. Despite her loss, or perhaps because of it, Rita was a peace activist. She stood onstage and called KSM’s trial a travesty, then called for the closing of Guantánamo.
More family members spoke, in the Brooklyn accents of the people I’d grown up with. A firefighter described being buried in the towers’ rubble, surrounded by the moans of the dying. He told us how he’d tried to force his face into the ash, to breathe it in so that he’d die quickly.
Listening to him brought me back to that warm morning of 9/11. His words hit me with the harshness of a dream. I saw the wall of missing-persons flyers at Penn Station, as clearly as if I were standing in front of them. I saw the two thousand gone: dead from fire, building
collapse, or breathing smoke. I imagined pairs of office workers holding hands by their windows, then jumping together into that clear September sky.
I thought of the pain of the victims’ families—then imagined it spiraling outward, reverberating across America, shaped and mutilated by politicians to justify more wars. That pain was used to justify drone bombings, torture, and Guantánamo Bay itself. In Cuba, it came full circle. Family members of 9/11 victims relived their pain for the media, while uncharged men rotted in cells a mile away, their families’ pain unreported.
The next day, we went to court to see the 9/11 military commissions. I sketched next to Janet Hamlin, the resident courtroom artist. When I peered at KSM through opera glasses, a solider confiscated them, calling them “prohibited ocular amplification.” Like so many rules at Guantánamo, this seemed to have been improvised on the spot. He confiscated Janet’s stadium glasses for good measure.
Before I left the courtroom, a military censor flipped through my book to make sure I’d followed the rules of “operational security”: no doors, no cameras, no faces of guards. To make the censorship obvious, I replaced the guards’ faces with blank death masks. The censor laughed, then added a sticker to each page, stating that this art was approved by the United States Military.
at Vice (vice.com)
Nabil Hadjarab, like most Guantánamo prisoners, lived in a camp modeled on an American Supermax prison. The military took a baffling pride in these camps, bragging about the ice cream detainees ate, or the books they were allowed to read. Yet we weren’t allowed anywhere near the prisons during the 9/11 commissions. As a substitute, the military permitted me to visit Camp X-Ray.
Closed in 2002, Camp X-Ray was a complex of outdoor cages surrounded by barbed wire. For hygiene, prisoners had had two buckets: one for water, one for shit. When prisoners weren’t being tortured by interrogators, they endured insects and the Cuban sun. The cages held early detainees like Nabil for months.
The sun burned so hot that the military would let me visit X-Ray only before dawn. My escort’s name was Sharon. She had a lovely, windburned face, and her bun was the color of crème brûlée. Before we left the hangar, a moth landed on her collar, its wings blending with her camo. She stroked it gently with one finger. It was an incongruous gesture, an appreciation for beauty in a place that had none.
Sharon was in her thirties, but she’d joined the army at eighteen to escape rural poverty. Once a mechanic in Iraq, she now shepherded journalists like me around Gitmo, repeating lines meant to convince members of the press that detainees were just spoiled children—lines I could not bring myself to think she believed.
“Don’t ask me to talk about the hunger strike,” Sharon warned as she drove me out to Camp X-Ray. The words hung sharp. When she spoke, she often seemed to have truths caught in the back of her throat. Despite myself, I liked her each time I heard that ache, though I cautioned myself to shove that fondness back down inside me. In Guantánamo, the military wanted to win our sympathy by any means necessary.
We wandered into the huts where interrogators once raped and tortured detainees. They were collapsing now, packed with moldy Victorian chairs, like decommissioned dollhouses. Dead lizards lay rotting in the weeds. Butterflies fluttered. Sparrows nested in the razor wire. The overgrown grass made Camp X-Ray feel like a relic, as if nature could take back the horror.
At X-Ray, Sharon watched for hours as I drew. As brutal as the sun burned me, Sharon, in her army uniform, had it worse. She took her dress shirt off, sweating through her khaki T-shirt.
“I don’t know why the media focuses on Camp X-Ray,” she said, looking at the cages. “That was so long ago.”
Guantánamo has a gift shop. There, Jamaican contractors sell banana rat plush toys, and T-shirts reading “It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This.” You can buy pink tank tops decorated with glitter skulls and the legend “Guantánamo Bay Little Princess,” and postcards boasting the Gitmo motto: “Honor-Bound to Defend Freedom.” These American trinkets were made in Honduras or Indonesia, and they’re sold with the obliviousness it would take to hawk commemorative beer steins at Buchenwald.
at Vice (vice.com)
On my last day, I ran into the young Truthout journalist Adam Hudson at the store; it was like we’d found each other at a child brothel. To avoid each other’s eyes, we stared at the piles of Guantánamo Bay–branded toy iguanas.
Then a German reporter burst out, grinning, his arms laden with T-shirts, laughing at the crazy kitsch he’d found.
Why shouldn’t he? America wasn’t his country.
That night, we journalists gathered together our remaining liquor on a picnic table outside our tents. One reporter had covered Guantánamo since the first detainees arrived, and she had been responsible for revealing some of its worst secrets. In her fifties, she had a sarcastic grimace that belied her terrifying dedication to the island. I got the sense that she didn’t like me, or anyone else who came to Guantánamo once and then bragged about it for years at parties, but that night she deigned to speak to me. This whole press tour is to keep us from remembering those men locked in camps five and six, she said, tossing back her whiskey in one gulp.
We drank till we could no longer see the stars.
At six o’clock the next morning, we took the ferry back to the airport. As the sunlight glittered off the bay, I thought of Nabil Hadjarab, shackled to a force-feeding chair. This was not right. America had done something unforgivable. And, because of our refusal to admit that crime, we would never be redeemed.
A reporter who works the disaster beat once told me that journalists are meant to be sieves for the trauma of others. Yet despite myself, Guantánamo stayed in me.
As soon as I got back from Cuba, I had a text from Eleanor Saitta asking me to lunch with her fellow hacker Morgan Marquis-Boire. The two traveled the world using tech to protect dissidents from adversaries, including the US government. They were always good for stories.
I showed up half an hour late at a restaurant on Chambers Street. The two sat by the window, draped in black, their fingers weighed down with menacing silver rings. Morgan had long dreads, and Eleanor wore her hair in a ponytail above an avant-garde black coat.
At first, I couldn’t speak. I sat there trembling, feeling the same nauseating dread I’d felt on that ferry leaving Guantánamo. They ordered me liquor, then urged me to drink.
Then, suddenly, the words came out in gulps: Nabil, the razor wire, the force-feeding chair, the Kafkaesque prison through which eight hundred men had passed, and the shame I’d felt. Eleanor embraced me. I shrank into her arms.
After lunch, I got down to work on my Guantánamo piece for Vice. I flipped through the dozens of drawings I’d done there—of Camp X-Ray, soldiers with their faces replaced with masks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed adjusting his beard—then worked up the best into detailed scenes. The writing came hard. Every edit felt like a betrayal; each sentence seemed like a halting step toward a truth hidden behind government redactions. But when I finished, I was proud.
By the time the article ran, Nabil was free. The army had thrown a bag over his head, shackled him to the floor of a private jet, and dropped him off in an Algeria he hadn’t seen since childhood. A few months after his release, Nabil emailed me to thank me for my article. I stared at his email address. Once I’d seen him only through the dark mirror of censored documents. Now his words flashed bright on my computer screen. He could speak for himself.
Nabil wrote that he was looking forward to starting his life again. His note was witty and optimistic. But he apologized for one thing: he no longer drew pictures.
at Vice (vice.com)
In the year that followed, I wrote more pieces, from New York and the Middle East, letting the ink of my words fuse with the ink of my drawings.
In July 2013, I covered Chelsea Manning’s verdict for The Guardian. It took four minutes for the judge to declare her guilty. In the Fort Meade courtroom, Manning’s supporters sat dazed. For the l
ast year, they’d held signs outside the base, ignoring slurs screamed by passing motorists, spurred on by love for the whistleblower. Now the trial was over, and Chelsea condemned, as they always knew she would be. I drew until the guards forced us out.
Though my Guantánamo article hadn’t exactly endeared me to the military, I returned to interview blithe army nurses as they showed off their force-feeding chair. Zak, Gitmo’s Muslim cultural consultant, told me that the prison taught its captives to “think for themselves.” Defense lawyers had accused Zak of working with the CIA to devise religiously specific tortures, but he dismissed all stories of abuse with an ingratiating grin. He, and those like him, were the real victims, he implied, since they were unjustly eviscerated by the press. Forbidden to show Zak’s face, I drew the ceramic bald eagle that dominated his desk. I saw the detainees for seven minutes through a one-way mirror. When I drew them, my military escort demanded I scribble out the outlines of their faces.
The New York Times sent me to Lebanon, where a local journalist, Rami Aysha, introduced me to snipers in Tripoli. They loved my gold-tipped Nat Sherman cigarettes, but they objected to my drawings so passionately that Rami had to assure them I’d make them look prettier using Photoshop. In Beirut, I interviewed gay and trans refugees fleeing the Syrian war.
Months later, at a town on the Turkey-Syria border, I drew murals all over the walls of a school for Syrian refugees. Using black markers, I made a universe of antiauthoritarian mice banding together to scare off their feline overlords. As in Shell Game and my work for the Box, I used animals to tell subversive stories.
In Istanbul, when covering the post–Gezi Park protest movements, I dove to the front of a soccer hooligan demonstration to photograph a masked young man holding up a flare. My friend Ahmet dragged me off just before riot cops fired their water cannon into the crowd. In Dubai, I asked Donald Trump why he paid his workers two hundred dollars a month, and in Rikers Island, I scratched out my interview with the Occupy Wall Street protestor Cecily McMillan on the back of a bus pass. Visitors weren’t allowed to bring pens.
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