Gitmo Turned Its Inmates into Artists

Gitmo Turned Its Inmates into Artists. Now, They Want to Send a Message.
A story about the prison that will never close. The men who became artists inside it. And some uncomfortable truths about America.
ADAM POPESCU AND PETER SAVODNIK
SEP 11
Photo illustration by The Free Press.
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — In September 2002, police in the well-to-do neighborhood of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, in the Pakistani city of Karachi, arrested a man named Ahmed Rabbani.

It had been a year since the September 11 attacks, and the Pakistanis, with the Americans, were rounding up people suspected of al-Qaeda ties.

Rabbani, then in his early thirties, appeared to be connected to Osama bin Laden. When the Pakistanis later arrested Rabbani’s driver, he suggested they check out another address, where cops found Rabbani’s brother, a few other people—and Sega game consoles that had been turned into detonators for explosives, plus passports for twenty members of bin Laden’s family.

Fast-forward to 2004: after bouncing around several CIA black sites, Rabbani was sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The Americans believed he had worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed architect of the September 11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing in 2000—running safe houses, organizing travel plans, tending to wounded al-Qaeda operatives, and building explosive devices, among other things. (Both KSM and al-Nashiri are awaiting trial in Guantanamo.)

But for the next eighteen and a half years, Rabbani was stuck in limbo at Guantanamo—with prosecutors unable to show the military court that he had played a role in September 11 or any other terrorist attacks, and his lawyers unable to convince the court he wouldn’t do so in the future.

It was while he was at Guantanamo that Rabbani discovered his inner artist, as it were.

Back home, he had been (depending on who you asked), a lowly taxi driver or a well-connected operative who spoke Urdu, Arabic, and English. He definitely was not a burgeoning Monet.

But while he was in prison, something happened.

“In the beginning,” Clive Stafford Smith, Rabbani’s lawyer, told The Free Press, “he wasn’t an artist.” Then, slowly, he developed into one. “His art benefited from his suffering,” Stafford Smith said. “That’s true of most artists.”

For years, the prisoners at Gitmo had been dabbling in artwork—etching floral designs on the sides of styrofoam cups with the help of spoons, pebbles, apple stems, and their fingernails. (Iraq War veteran and anti-war activist Aaron Hughes told me he’d heard Guantanamo guards showed intelligence analysts the etchings to make sure the designs were not actually secret messages between prisoners; they were not.)
Rabbani’s painting of his Guantanamo prison cell. (Ahmed Rabbani)
By 2009, prison officials had determined the artwork had a calming effect on prisoners, and the informal etchings and (later) drawings turned into a formal art program.

This was how Rabbani, while at Guantanamo, wound up in front of an easel with a paintbrush and a palette, while chained to the floor.

Over the years, he painted pictures that captured different chapters of his life in captivity. There was the painting of Rabbani, hooded and wearing a jumpsuit and in a wheelchair. Then there was the painting with the more abstract-expressionist bent that was supposed to represent the lightless, hopeless void where he spent two years of his imprisonment. “No blanket, no shoes—nothing,” he told me over the phone.

Other paintings were more graphic: one depicted Rabbani with his hands tied behind his back and suspended by a rope attached to his wrists; that happened, Rabbani later said, while he was at a CIA black site in Kabul.

A Pentagon press release announcing the “repatriation” of Rabbani and his brother, Mohammed Rabbani, who had also been detained, did not mention how many years he had been imprisoned or the fact that he was never convicted of anything. “The United States appreciates the willingness of the Government of Pakistan and other partners to support ongoing U.S. efforts focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantanamo Bay facility,” the release said.

On the flight home with Rabbani were most of his 252 paintings and 5 sculptures—minus those that depicted his torture, which U.S. officials prevented him from taking. (According to Stafford Smith, Rabbani’s lawyer, the military doesn’t want anyone learning about its “methods of interrogation.”)

In May, the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi put on an exhibit of Rabbani’s works, introducing the 53-year-old driver-turned-painter to the art world.

The exhibit was called The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantanamo Bay, and there was something defiant about it. Moon is badr in Arabic; it’s also the nickname Rabbani’s mother gave him when he was little, and it was the way he signed all his paintings. Not with Arabic characters, but with a Latin alphabet script: BADR, in capital letters.

It was as though he were insisting that Badr—Rabbani—had never been forgotten by the outside world. Or, perhaps, it was that Badr hadn’t forgotten himself.


Rabbani with Natasha Malik, the curator of his recent art show in Karachi, Pakistan. (Ahmed Rabbani)
It’s been more than 20 years since George W. Bush opened Guantanamo and 14 years since Barack Obama (on his second full day in office) issued an executive order that it be closed.

But 30 men—of the 780 total who have been detained there—still remain, mostly from Yemen, a few from Libya and Tunisia and elsewhere. Of that, only a dozen reportedly pose any serious national security threat. (The Pentagon, in its statement announcing Rabbani’s release, noted that 18 of the remaining Guantanamo prisoners are eligible for transfer.)

A few months ago, The Free Press visited Guantanamo to attend the pretrial hearing of one of the last few truly dangerous men at Gitmo, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected orchestrator of the USS Cole attack, which left 17 sailors dead and 39 others wounded.

The hearing took place in an air-conditioned trailer behind layers of barbed-wire fencing, and it was guarded by soldiers who looked like they hadn’t been born when 9/11 happened, 22 years ago.

That disconnect reflects the surreality that is Guantanamo: while time has moved on outside the island fortress, inside it can feel like we’re stuck in the early aughts. The site of the Twin Towers is now a memorial; the Pentagon has been patched up; the field in southwestern Pennsylvania where Flight 93 went down is grassy again. But at Guantanamo, the military judges, the prosecutors, the guards—to say nothing of the last few prisoners—are still battling over who did what and when and how immediately before or after the worst terrorist attacks in American history.


The grounds of Guantanamo. In the background is Camp X-Ray, the first place detainees were held on the island. (Photo by Adam Popescu for The Free Press)
That just four prisoners have ever been successfully convicted—while nine have died in custody—only deepens this sense of timelessness. This feeling that nothing ever really happens at Guantanamo, that Guantanamo is stuck where it’s been for more than two decades.

As lawyers argued in front of a military judge, reporters and the father of a sailor killed on the USS Cole watched the proceedings from behind a thick pane of glass.

It was at the hearing that Rabbani’s painting of himself with his hands tied behind his back and strung up from a ceiling came up.

When he’d left Guantanamo a few months before, that was one of the paintings Rabbani had been forbidden from taking. But he had described the painting—and the torture, called strappado—to Stafford Smith, who had another artist recreate it. At the hearing, a copy of that secondhand drawing was passed around. Al-Nashiri had been subjected to the same treatment.

During his testimony, Bruce Jessen, one of the two psychologists behind the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” was asked whether the drawing accurately depicted what prisoners had endured. Jessen, looking a little shaken, said, “It was worse.”