‘It’s a legal black hole’ - Marking the anniversary of Guantanamo Bay

NOT all birthdays are celebrations. The tenth anniversary of the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay might have gone unnoticed altogether were it not for human rights campaigners keen to draw attention to the fact that it still exists. Opened in January 2002 to house those suspected of being connected to terrorism, it has long been criticised for holding prisoners without trial.

Since it opened, the detention centre, on a US military base in Cuba, has seen 779 men pass through its doors. It currently holds 171 prisoners. In most cases, we don’t know the reasons why they are detained there. In some, we don’t even know their names.

Guantánamo Bay is a fortress of secrecy and silence. But this weekend in Glasgow there will be a rare chance to hear the voices of some of the prisoners. As part of the Arika12 festival, a group of artists will stage a public reading of transcripts of tribunals at Guantánamo, read by members of the public. Combatant Status Review Tribunal pp 002954-003064 has previously been staged at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Tate Modern in London.

“We were interested in how people talked about the war in Iraq, what it was possible to say and not possible to say,” says Katya Sander, one of the group of five international collaborators. “We became very interested in the people who were kept at Guantánamo. In relation to being able to speak about war, their silence was very loud.”

The work has already provoked strong reactions. Protesters outside the reading in New York were angered that the artists were giving voice to people who “had killed Americans”. The reading offers no conclusions or value judgements, but simply presents the transcripts, verbatim. The MoMA reading was recently awarded the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts 2012.

Guantánamo Bay exists in a legal loophole. The Bush government argued that since it was not on American soil, it was not subject to American law, and justified the holding of prisoners without trial, sometimes for years, on the grounds that they yielded information important to the “war on terror”. Former prisoners have spoken of abuse, sleep deprivation, and tortures such as waterboarding. Many are never told the charges against them.

In January 2009, Barack Obama pledged to close the detention centre within the year, but the issue quickly became mired with his political opponents. Some of the men at Guantánamo have been cleared for release but remain imprisoned because they cannot safely be returned to their country of origin.

“It’s incredible, unbelievable that people are put in the position of not knowing what they are charged with or how to defend themselves,” says Sander. “Some of the tribunals are very moving – a lot of the detainees know that what is happening is very wrong, that they have no human rights. People try to navigate through it, fight for their own existence.”

The detainees have little access to the due process of law. The substitute is the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, based on an internal military procedure, and at which no legal representative needs to be present. It is intended to determine the prisoner’s status: if they are classified as military personnel, they need to be treated as prisoners of war, with the attendant rights. But as “enemy combatant”, they can be detained indefinitely.

“It’s a figleaf of legal process, while in substance it is nothing of the sort,” says Tony Kelly, a human rights lawyer who will be one of the Glasgow readers. “This was a construct to enable Amerca to say some form of process had been carried out to review their detention.

“People in Guantánamo have fallen into a legal black hole. If you’re detaining someone on suspicion of committing a crime, you can’t detain them indefinitely, you have to detail the charges being put to them. I think the performance will lay bare exactly what’s involved, bring the tribunal process into the light and show some of the ridiculous things that go on.”

In 2004, in response to Freedom of Information questions about Guantánamo Bay, the US Department of Defense made transcripts of CSRTs available on their website. “They released thousands of pages but it was really difficult to find them on the website, and each page was filed as an separate image so it was impossible to navigate,” says Sander. “They did everything they could to make it opaque. We downloaded them and printed them out and started to read, we had many boxes of pages.”

For the performance they simply selected a block of 100 pages, a random sample. “We wanted to try to make visible this inaccessibility. That was our artistic challenge, how we deal with this and not promote it as if it were some kind of witness from the inside. It has something to do with what happens, but there are many inaccuracies, sections blacked out, problems with translation.”

She said that the problems inherent in the transcripts will become evident during the reading. “You can tell when people are reading it that some of it doesn’t make sense for them either. It’s not a re-enactment, it’s reading something aloud that we found and trying to find out what it might be about, doing that figuring out along with the audience and the readers.”

Another reader, Judith Robertson, the head of Oxfam in Scotland, says: “Anything that keeps the whole story of what happens in Guantánamo Bay alive is a good thing to do. I think it will bring out more universal issues too. Guantánamo is an extreme example of how rights are being abused but there are many others acrosss the world.”

Sander says the aims of the project have shifted since they began working on it in 2003. “When the war was on virtually every front page, we just wanted to create a space for reflection. The way the war was talked about, you could be either for or against, there was no room for doubt or grey areas, no room for discussion. This reading does open up a moment of trying to understand a little bit of what is going on.

“Now it is more to do with the fact that the detention is still ongoing. Even as we are speaking, some of those people (whose words we are reading) are still in Guantánamo Bay.”

• Combatant Status Review Tribunal pp 002954 to 003064: A Public Reading, organised by artists David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer, is at Tramway on Saturday, 7pm-11pm, admission free, as part of the Arika12 festival.