Guantánamo. The name alone conjures up the Cuban-Spanish-American War and its aftermath, the island under the Platt Amendment; it is a reminder of the military presence of the U.S. in one of its many hundreds of bases all over the globe; a flashpoint in relations between Cuba that flared up during the insurrection (1953-1959), as bargaining point during the Missile Crisis, as an avoided conflict in 1963 and 1964, refugee center in the 1990s, and, finally, as prison for “unlawful combatants” in the so-called War on Terror, a kind of legal no man’s land that has become emblematic of juridical absurdity and human cruelty. Guantánamo has also filtered into the public consciousness in a rather nefarious way, with shows like “24”, where protagonist Jack Bauer, thrust into the “ticking bomb scenario” engages in acts of torture to presumably save lives.
The post 9/11 political climate of exploiting fear led to what former Vice President Cheney called “exploring the dark side” in the attempt to stymie terrorism. That dark side was not exactly something new: the CIA had been exploring for decades with ways of inflicting pain and breaking prisoners that would not show physical scars. They tried drugs, isolation, sleep deprivation, manipulation of noise levels, a whole gamut of techniques that post 9/11 became known as “enhanced interrogation methods”. In 1963 the CIA brought together its findings and published it in a manual, known as the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook. The manual was used in the counterinsurgency efforts around the world, and to deadly effect in Latin America, especially in the Southern Cone in the seventies, where tens of thousands of people in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia were brutally tortured and, in many cases disappeared under the banner of anti-communism or the establishment of national security states. The same held true for Nicaragua pre-1979 and Guatemala and El Salvador in the eighties. In Vietnam, the Kurbak manual was the backbone of the Phoenix Program (1968-1972), causing the death of between 26,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese; the CIA was also instrumental in setting up Iran’s notorious SAVAK (1957-1979), responsible for the torture and death on tens of thousands of Iranians under the Shah.
This “re-cycling” of the Kubark manual became fashionable post 9/11 and has led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other black sites, and to what art historian Stephen Eisenman has called “the Abu Ghraib effect”, also the title of his book on the subject. Eisenman, in analyzing the photos that were released documenting the abuses at the Iraqi prison, draws on representations of pain, suffering, and humiliation from the Western art tradition: Greek sculptures, crucifixions or martyrdom of saints, Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra, scenes of violence and war, in order to draw parallels between these amateur photos and works of art. He also references torture and cruelty in cinema from James Bond movies to “24” to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), all which engage in a kind of torture porn. In discussing the sexual nature of the humiliation towards Iraqi prisoners, Eisenman says that the “Abu Ghraib effect” induces a kind of “moral blindness” that “allows [viewers] to ignore, or even to justify, however partially or provisionally, the facts of degradation and brutality manifest in the pictures”. The Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April-May of 2004, an election year, and surely should have meant either the impeachment of the President, his resignation, or a loss in the election, none of which happened.
The U.S. electorate largely backed this exploration of the “dark side”. In 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney insisted that waterboarding was not torture and backed “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Four years later, Donald Trump has enthusiastically endorsed waterboarding (and worse) as important tools in combating terrorism.
Work from the Abu Ghraib series by Fernando Botero on exhibit.
In what follows I want to briefly discuss two artistic responses to the “Abu Ghraib effect”, one by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, the other a novel by one of the best-known science fiction writers, Brian W. Aldiss. At first, Botero seems like an unlikely candidate to execute a series of paintings and drawings based on the released photos of Abu Ghraib: he is famous for his paintings of rotund people that are often whimsical and humorous. Despite the often light-hearted approach, even Botero’s early work has a social edge to it. Paintings like “Dead Bishops” (1965), “The Presidential Family” (1967), and “Official Portrait of the Military Junta” (1971) are undeniably satirical in their portrait of these “pillars of society”. His “Gate of Heaven” and “Gate of Hell”, both from 1993 are both a loving and scathing look at Catholicism. Even works that do not have overt societal references can have social overtones, like his “Picnic in the Mountains” (1966) and “Man Going to Work” (1969). Botero, though, was quite aware of his country’s violent past (and present) and he portrayed this violence unflinchingly, as in “Car Bomb” (1999), “The Death of Pablo Escobar” (1999) and a series of paintings he did from 2000 to 2002 depicting massacres, people suffering, kidnappings, and the like. One of his most chilling paintings is titled “Río Cauca” (2002), which shows dead bodies floating on the river with vultures perched on the bodies as well as circling in the skies.
Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings were done from 2004 to 2006 and are clearly based on the released photos. Their power is undeniable: the figures are ample, the colors bright and the forms are well-defined. In this sense they differ remarkably from the photos, which, for all their horror and degradation, suffer from an image quality that is more than amateurish. Botero’s recreation of the photos is devastating: what looks sordid and sleazy in the photos becomes almost majestically painful in the paintings and drawings. Some of the paintings are in a large format (4ft. x 7ft., the drawings are mostly in a 16” x 12” format) and the large scale enhances the pathos depicted. In one painting a standing man is tied with rope against prison bars, his arms in a “L” position. He is dressed in red-colored women’s underwear and blindfolded: although his arms are not totally outstretched in a crucifixion position, the work references crucifixion or martyrdom, such as the many depictions of Saint Sebastian or Ribera’s “Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew”, or Goya’s sketches of prisoners in captivity. Another painting, simply titled “Abu Ghraib # 55” (2005) shows two prisoners, one on all fours, the other straddling the one on the ground. The prisoner on the ground is blindfolded, the one standing is hooded, with his hands tied behind his back. The prisoner on the ground has a broken broomstick in his anus, from which he is bleeding. It would be difficult to find a work of art that depicts sexual humiliation, cruelty, and utter domination as rape more powerfully than in this painting.
Botero removed the narcissism mixed in with sexual humiliation that one sees in the photos. In several of the shots the viewer sees Lynndie England, in others Charles Garner and Sabina Harman posing with the humiliated bodies with smiles on their faces; they are a cruel, sadistic versions of a selfie. Botero completely eliminates this possibility, focusing on the pain of the prisoners. In a few paintings or drawings we do see the torturers, but their faces are grim, and menacing. Most of the time, though, we just see an arm, a boot on a prisoner or a stick used for striking the prisoner; the anonymity of the torturer seems to suggest both an impersonality and indifference, mixed in with being a cog in a vast machine of repression. Indeed, in several paintings one sees the humiliation of the prisoners and from out of the frame a stream of urine falling onto huddled and battered inmates who are bound. Botero’s ability to both augment and focus on certain details is both devastating and compassionate with regards to the suffering he is depicting.
Prisoner B does not even know what country he is in (Syria? Uzbekistan? Guantánamo? the UK?) . . .
Shortly after Botero released his Abu Ghraib paintings, British author Brian Aldiss published a novel titled Harm (2007). Aldiss is one of the premiere science fiction writers around, with a career stretching back to the mid-50s, and is best known for his Helliconia trilogy (1982-1985). His Frankenstein Unbound (1973) was made into a film and his short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” was the basis of Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence. Aldiss’s novel is set in current times, in a post 9/11 political climate: “There had been a carefree time for foolishness, but that time was gone. This was the time for seriousness, for a war against terror. A nation’s security was at stake. Certain liberties had to be curtailed— such as foolishness and satire and freedom of speech. They belonged to a bygone epoch. ‘Every man must brace himself against the hidden enemy among us’.”
With this warning Aldiss immediately immerses the reader into the world of Prisoner B, hooded and shackled, and being subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Prisoner B does not even know what country he is in (Syria? Uzbekistan? Guantánamo? the UK?), and at first does not even know with what crime he is being charged. Prisoner B’s name is Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, a South Asian (Indian) who was born in the UK and married to an Irishwoman, Doris. He is a writer, and in his novel (titled The Piped Piper of Hament) he makes a joke about assassinating the Prime Minister (in the voice of one of the characters). The authorities see this novelistic reference as a serious threat to the P.M. and have him jailed and tortured. The institution that has captured Paul is called the Hostile Activities Research Ministry (or HARM, hence the novel’s title), and the interrogators are unambiguously British and American. Because of his name, Paul is assumed to be Muslim, which he is not; in fact, he is a non-believer, but that does not spare him beatings, waterboarding, and electroshock. To perhaps underline the continuity of the CIA’s cold war interrogation strategy and the current “war on terror,” Aldiss mentions the 1963 Kurbak manual as the handbook the interrogators use to guide their questioning of Paul.
Aldiss’s novel then takes an unusual turn: the narrative switches to a planet Stygia, where Paul is known as Fremant, where he works for a harsh dictatorial leader named Astaroth. The humans who have settled on Stygia are in fact downloads that were then implanted into artificially-grown bodies since the planet was many light years away. Aldiss structures the rest of the novel as alternating between Earth and Stygian realities. Given his condition as a prisoner one could interpret Fremant’s life as an escape from his Guantánamo-type existence, that all the Stygian reality is merely in his head. However, the Stygian narrative is no mere escape to an utopian alternate reality, since Stygia shows dystopic qualities as well. Fremant is one of the inner circle of guards of a dictator, the climate of the planet is somewhat inhospitable, and the original humanoid inhabitants of the planet, known as Dogovers, have been exterminated by the humans who escaped earth.
The implants were not entirely successful in that many of the humans on Stygia make errors while speaking and have not conserved all their memories from back home. As a result, “those who remember politics make themselves dictators; those who remember religion establish harsh, puritan communities; those who remember science introduce an immoral, unfeeling scientism,” as Paul Kincaid says in a review. Because people have such partial memories it is easy for them to be manipulated; only Fremant has his memory world intact. As the novel continues the two worlds start to become more enmeshed, or at least begin to share similarities.
The doctors examining Paul speculate as to whether he has a split personality and the possibility that he has been programmed, but Paul’s interrogator, in a humorous moment replies “Someone must have been watching a DVD of The Manchurian Candidate too many times!” Aldiss peppers the novel with these continuities between Cold War paranoia and that of post 9/11 as Paul struggles to overcome his captivity, either through his imagination or in sheer resistance to his captors. His interrogators at one point finally admit that he is most likely innocent and that he should be let go, which happens towards the end of the novel.
Fremant insists: ‘But we are guilty’, and Tolsteem replies: ‘Forget it my boy!’
Also towards the end, Freman decides he wants to go in search for the last survivors of the Dogover humanoids. He feels guilty that the re-constituted Earth humans with their faulty memories (and language) have committed an act of genocide and he wants to make amends for the atrocity. In a telling conversation Tolsteem, a scientist, tells him: “What you think you perceive as guilt, the rest of us see as survival”. Fremant insists: “But we are guilty”, and Tolsteem replies: “Forget it my boy! We have to. It’s only the strongest who survive. That’s the way the system of existence works.” This kind of Social Darwinism is dangerously close to fascist or authoritarian forms of government and Aldiss suggests that even democratic forms of government can succumb to these dangers.
Aldiss’s novel is a meditation on cruelty, one that can be justified by ideology, politics, religion, or science. Before 9/11 one could somewhat naively view terrorism as a somewhat external issue in that seemed to thrive in faraway places, not in Europe or the U.S. (Where does that leave Timothy McVeigh?) But since then, and in the wake of Orlando, San Bernadino, and Paris, “ ‘[e]very man must brace himself against the hidden enemy among us’.” But before an Orlando or a Paris there is a Guantánamo, an Abu Ghraib, a drone attack that wipes out a family, dictators that receive large amounts of U.S. military aid to suppress their own people. And possibly our own. In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag says: “Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.” In the spirit of Botero and Aldiss, it’s time to think.
Featured above: “Los Desastres de la guerra” by Francisco Goya, Nos. 36 and 37, and work by Fernando Botero on exhibit.