BRUSHES

WITH
BARBED WIRE
Locked up for years, prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay paint landscapes they
can only dream of. One man was given
unprecedented access to their work.
Words and photographs: Tim Fitzsimons

T
hey are images of seascapes, landscapes and ‘This galleon looks too
rambling Middle Eastern lanes in pastel and accomplished to have
crayon. A study of a sliced watermelon in oil pastel, come straight from
a lesson in vanishing points in coloured pencil. The pieces the imagination. It’s
hanging on the wall would nicely span the range of skills more likely to have
present in an amateur art class. Except that this exhibition been copied,’ says the
of student work took place at the world’s most notorious Sunday Times art
maximum-security prison, Guantanamo Bay. ic Frank Whitford. ‘The
The collection includes a number of tropical landscapes, subject, a burning
but they are drawn from memory: there is no view from the ship about to founder,
cells at Gitmo.The authorities do not want detainees to have invites a psychiatric
any inkling of the layout of the place for fear that somehow interpretation’.
they might manage to escape. Locked away on a bluff on Above: prisoners pray
24 the southeastern corner of Cuba, prisoners at Camp a by a fence before dawn
Subject here Feature
 Delta can hear the Caribbean, but not see it. When they are
transported around the island, they are blindfolded.
MOVE THIS PAR? The self-styled “Dean of Gitmo U”, Lt
Rob Collett, director of detainee programming, said that art
courses keep the detainees busy. “If you spend nine years
in a detention facility, there’s not a lot to do.” The courses
take “their focus off the negativity”.
Prisoners are not the only ones whose views are
restricted. The public is also prevented from seeing what
Gitmo really looks like; it is meticulously hidden from view.
But the rules are modified all the time, and a series of
sudden changes allowed me, quite unexpectedly, to take
photos of the pieces from Gitmo’s art course.
I’d gone to Guantanamo to report on the trial of Omar
Khadr, the 24-year-old Canadian who is the prison’s
youngest and last western detainee. It was a sweltering day
and I’d chosen to wear shorts for my trip.
Khadr was only 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan,
before being allegedly tortured in American custody, and
his controversial trial was just gearing up when the public
affairs office began to schedule press trips to the prison.
The drive from Camp Justice, the temporary military-
tribunal complex, to Camp Delta took us down Sherman
Avenue, Gitmo’s main street. We drove past the Navy
Exchange (essentially a tax-free Wal-Mart with a large
liquor selection) and Gitmo’s branch of McDonald’s, where
CREDIT

Cuba’s only plastic Ronald McDonald is bleached from

26 years of waving jovially under the scalding sun. We went by
 Feature

Left: prisoners’ art in the

library, mostly pastels of
the sea and boats. Of the
landscape, right, Frank
Whitford says: ‘Like all
the pictures, this is
strikingly depopulated, a
product perhaps of
solitary confinement.’ His
top marks go to the
building on a rock and
the watermelon slices
(bottom left and right)

‘BEFORE, PRISONERS TOOK OUT A LOT OF THEIR FRUSTRATION ON THE GUARDS.

THERE WAS AN ADVERSARIAL MINDSET WE HAD TO CORRECT.
ART COURSES WERE PUT IN PLACE TO HELP ACHIEVE COMPLIANCE’
the Bay View restaurant and the Tiki bar, and past a small
development of surprisingly suburban-looking homes.
We turned right and wound slowly south between steep
brown hills. As we approached Camp Delta, our military
minder reminded us of the rules: no photos of multiple-
guard towers, no photos showing the layout of the camp, no
photos of prisoners’ faces. When we finally neared the
entrance, I quickly scanned the rules on a sign next to the
gate and stopped abruptly at one particular line: no shorts.
Looking at my bare calves, I realised I had blown my
chance of photographing the prison complex.
oldiers divided our group into two — the covered, and
a second copy of every newspaper is censored, Taliban-style:
images of women are scratched out so as not to offend the
more pious prisoners, who would otherwise modify the
newspapers themselves.
Getting ready to leave, we noticed a collection of paintings
and drawings hung on a wall of the library. The art had been
put up only after being screened for “hidden messages”,
we were told, but Commander Bradley Fagan, chief of the
public affairs office, refused to say what guidelines the
censors use. The library guards speculated that images with
any text or reference to violence would have been banned.
None of the artists were identified, but it is unlikely that
any were high-value detainees, who are very restricted. “The

S those, like me, in shorts — and led the rule-breakers

towards Camp Delta’s library. I grumbled to myself
as I walked tantalisingly close to the prison, where signs
warned: “Detainees in vicinity. Maintain silence.”
At the library, we were greeted by Lt Collett. He cheerfully
showed us around rooms packed with books on gardening,
health, Islamic theology, animals, résumé-building and
more, as well as Harry Potter books in many languages.
Then, holding up an issue of USA Today, Collett told us that
prisoners responsible for the art work would belong to
Camp 4. Most have been cleared for eventual release,” says
Clive Stafford-Smith, the British lawyer who represents
30 Guantanamo inmates. Camp 4 prisoners live communally.
“It’s very rare for art like this to be allowed out of the
camp or even photographed. Many prisoners have sent
me birthday cards, but they’ve been blocked by censorship,
in case their squiggles contained some hidden meaning.”
Why, then, was I allowed to photograph the paintings? a 27
 Feature

Right: ‘This conventional

drawing of a tree beside
a river is not what you
would expect from a
terrorist prepared to
commit suicide for
his convictions,’ says
Frank Whitford.
Below: ‘The best of all
the illustrations, this
looks as if done from life
— though could the cell
doors at Guantanamo
really be so primitive?’

“The cynic in me,” says Stafford-Smith, “suggests that the
Americans may want to indicate that Guantanamo Bay has
become some sort of benign hobby-craft centre. Or it may
be that the guards were simply more relaxed that day.”
The next day, Khadr’s defence attorney, Lt Col Jon
Jackson, collapsed in court from complications following
surgery. Within days, I and the rest of the press corps were
back on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. At least I had
been given the chance to see something unexpected at
Gitmo. Khadr’s trial has been rescheduled for October 18.
ow has Gitmo changed? The entire prison cannot
The authorities claim that detainee programming is part of
a successful overhaul of prison life that has led to very high
levels of “compliance”. “Previously, prisoners took a lot of
their frustration out on the guards,” Collett said. “There was
an adversarial mindset, and we wanted to correct that.
Programmes like this were put in place to help achieve
compliance.” Since programming was introduced in 2006,
he added, the men “have settled in a little bit”.
Apart from art, courses on offer include Arabic, English
and Pashtu, maths, personal finance, writing, typing,
computing and health. (Instructors are all native speakers

H be judged from the art classes alone, but the

authorities say that they are just one aspect of an
overhauled system that brings the prison more into line
with the rest of the US penitentiary system.
Stafford-Smith is unconvinced. “I started going there in
2004 and there was no difference in 2006,” he says. “By
2009 things had got a little better in terms of the prisoners’
physical treatment, but their mental health has been in
steep decline. The problem has been the false promises.
Obama said he would close the place and did not.
“The prisoners have almost all been held without trial for
more than eight years. They’ve never seen any friend from
outside, and the uncertainty and continued deprivations
have had a devastating impact. I’ve been to most death rows
in the US, and the conditions in Guantanamo are worse.”
Certainly many of its most noxious aspects remain. Since
2002, some 600 men have been released. There are
currently 176 prisoners, but several dozen of these are still
being held indefinitely, with no plans to try to release them,
and others have been cleared for release but are stuck
CREDIT
‘THINGS GOT A LITTLE BETTER IN TERMS OF PHYSICAL TREATMENT BUT
MENTAL HEALTH HAS BEEN IN STEEP DECLINE.
THE MEN HAVE ALMOST ALL BEEN HELD FOR MORE THAN EIGHT YEARS’
brought in from Iraq or Afghanistan.) Noting that many
courses are very basic, Collett said they are tailored to
prisoners’ education level: “Before you teach people
percentages, graphs and charts, you might want to teach
them long division. We need to offer some sort of skill set
that gives them options for work when they go back home.”
The hope is also that skills might prevent released
prisoners from getting into “certain types of mischief”.
When he took office, Barack Obama said he would close
the camp within a year. That deadline has passed, and very
few of the artists know whether they will be transferred to a
US prison or sent home. For the moment their environment
is a palette of military fatigues, taupe tents and grey concrete
structures.At this point they can only imagine the landscape
outside — mist-shrouded hills and the teal-and-blue swirl of

until an appropriate place is secured for their resettlement. Guantanamo Bay — and how it might appear on canvas s 29