Nitwit jailers at Guantánamo Bay? — now art is evil

© 2017 Peter Free

 

28 November 2017

 

 

Autocratic pettiness

 

For years, the American prison at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base has been an embarrassment to the tiny portion of the United States that remains civilized.  Militantly lawless, unconstrained arbitrariness is the detention facility's only theme.

 

For those unfamiliar with this saga in lunatic tyranny, a noticeable portion of the alleged terrorists held (or once held) at Guantánamo are innocent of even trivial wrongdoing. And the US government knows it.

 

By way of laughably telling example of our now institutionalized barbarity, consider the following instance.

 

To wit, after John Jay College exhibited 36 paintings by eight Guantánamo prisoners, the United States' militarized plutocracy decided that future such art would not be allowed to leave the prison. Not even if (i) the prisoners who created it were freed — in tacit admission that they should not have been imprisoned in the first place — and (ii) their art contained not even a whisper of terroristic import:

 

 

“My clients were told that their art would no longer be processed for release,” said Ramzi Kassem . . . whose legal clinic represents three men being held at Guantánamo Bay.

 

“And then one of my clients was told that, even if he were ever to be released, that he would not be able to take his art with him, and that it would be incinerated.”

 

Maj. Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesman, said . . . that “items produced by detainees at Guantánamo Bay remain the property of the U.S. government.”

 

“The idea of trying to dispirit someone by destroying what they’ve made, even if the subject is, on its surface, innocuous, is very common in warfare,” added Ms. Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College.

 

© 2017 Jacey Fortin, Who Owns Art from Guantánamo Bay? Not Prisoners, U.S. Says, New York Times (27 November 2017) (excertps)

 

 

The moral? — Proud of ourselves, aren't we?

 

US militarism impresses the world with its never-ending supply of pig-headed paranoia.