Reflections on Guantánamo: How Do We Deal with Willed Amnesia?
By Terri Tomsky, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta
Like a bad smell, Guantánamo Bay continues to linger in the public consciousness. It’s always there, but it’s mysteriously unplaceable. Sometimes, it’s not clear where the smell is coming from; while, at other times, it is unmissable. Currently, we are in one of those moments when the smell hits you, which means that the US is paying attention to Guantánamo. Why is this important? First, Guantánamo’s temporary notoriety draws attention to the fact that we haven’t, as a rule, been thinking regularly about Guantánamo in our political discourse. Whether by design or accident, this is a serious problem. For politicians and policy experts, Guantánamo plays a central role in managing perceived threats to national security in a globalized world. The novelty of its structure continues to pose fundamental — and some would say existential — challenges to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
If we recall, the notorious prison at the US naval base in Cuba has been holding prisoners for 18 years, with some of them labelled “forever prisoners” who will never be released and never be brought to trial. We don’t often think of that, yet, in these last few months, Guantánamo has been at the forefront of the news. On January 22, we had the testimony of Dr. James Mitchell at Guantánamo, one of the two psychologists who devised the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” (a.k.a. torture) program. In November 2019, Amazon Studios released the film, The Report, starring Adam Driver, which dramatizes the US Senate inquiry into the CIA’s use of Enhanced Interrogation on terrorist suspects. Following this, Carol Rosenberg published a feature in The New York Times which built on some of the same first-hand testimonies of torture investigated by the Senate and dramatized in the film. Entitled “What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured,” the article reproduces and analyzes Abu Zubaydah’s ink and paper drawings of his experiences as the first person to undergo Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, including waterboarding, walling, short shackling, sleep deprivation, and stress positions in “black sites,” the secret network of C.I.A.-run prisons. A day later, the Times published an Editorial Opinion, entitled “Don’t Look Away” expressing horror in response to Abu Zubaydah’s sketches (https://tinyurl.com/ujfg4ce).[1]
As suggested by the imperative in its title — “Don’t Look Away” — the editorial counsels:
“The sketches should be seen only by adults, but they must be seen. Drawn by a victim of torture, they show, in raw and agonizing detail, the methods that Americans — soldiers, psychologists, spies, women and men — have devised to break down prisoners through pain, panic, brainwashing and other barbaric and illegal tools” (emphasis added).
Research has repeatedly shown that torture fails to generate actionable intelligence; in fact the unreliability of forced confessions actually works to increase insecurity. Moreover, the reputational damage to US national interests is substantial, and carries over to diminish liberal democracies worldwide. Even within the armed forces, there is opposition from officials who know that this practice jeopardizes the security of their own captured soldiers who may no longer be able to expect the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Yet, viewing these drawings highlights the representational challenge of depicting torture. In his 2007 study, Torture and Democracy, political scientist Darius Rejali characterises the practices endured by Guantánamo inmates as clean torture. This phrase names specific torture techniques used to break the prisoners’ bodies, but designed to be invisible. Rejali explains that clean torture” involves “painful physical techniques of interrogation” which are used precisely because they leave no trace on the body. Examples of clean torture abound at Guantánamo.
Abu Zubaydah’s sketches represent the experience of clean torture explicitly, revealing in images suffering that would otherwise be concealed. They suggest not simply the malice that operates behind euphemism, but also the possibility that words are inadequate; words sometimes falter when describing traumatic experiences of torture. Here, the visual can recover something of an experience that fails to be communicated verbally and for which, few are held responsible.
Clearly, the emergence of these new representations, now detailed across different mediums — a film, the news, a legal report, and artwork — is important. Yet, will it change anything for the men incarcerated at Guantánamo? How long until it recedes from public attention once more?
These questions, as well as the onset of what legal scholar Jonathan Hafetz calls “outrage fatigue,” prompt my interest in the cycle of attention and inattention, particularly when it comes to the many things that we prefer not to know about. The deliberate, wilful desire to ignore Guantánamo’s bad smell constitutes a kind of amnesia. In the case of Guantánamo there are literally reams and reams of accessible information available. Yet, somehow, apprehending the thing we call “Guantánamo” remains elusive. We are alienated from it; and — what is troubling — we seemingly prefer to stay alienated from it. We prefer not to think how counterterrorism measures, in illegal and immoral forms, empower the state and its transgressions, and so threaten our national security, eroding our civil liberties.
In his study of mining in northern England, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell famously wrote about this preference, describing it as a willed forgetfulness that accompanies the fossil fuel economy. In his time, coal was the vital energy source for the economy, sustaining “everything we do.” Despite this, Orwell observed, most people “would prefer to forget” the gruelling labour conditions of coal extraction. Similar kinds of amnesia operate in today’s economy. For instance, consider the processing of so-called “ethical oil” from Alberta’s bitumen sands, the production of which remains remote in my consciousness, despite the fact that I have lived in this province for ten years. There are many other examples, such as the mining of minerals like coltan in central Africa or the seasonal agricultural labour of migrant workers in North America.
Most of us know the awfulness of their facts; yet like the conditions that persist at Guantánamo, there is something that makes it easy to turn away from them. How can we rupture this willed amnesia? My hope is that writing and art will continue to insist that we look to the truth — the truth of what torture means, for instance. And, that these creative works will inform public debate on defence and security issues, ongoing reminders that the smell is not going away any time soon.
[1] The sketches were originally published in a 94-page report by law professor Mark Denbeaux, which is open access: https://tinyurl.com/wz7nkuk.
Terri Tomsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research is situated within postcolonial studies, cultural memory, and human rights literary studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript about human rights advocacy and cultural mediations of the Guantánamo prison. She is the co-editor (with Eddy Kent) of Negative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship After Globalization (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017).
