Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 4
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“Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent”: State Visions of Guantánamo Bay / Rebecca A. Adelman
Abstract: Over the course of its Global War on Terror, the U.S. government has become gradually less secretive about its detention practices and less restrictive in its management of the visual culture of this war, even drawing some kinds of attention toward itself. These displays, in which the state ostensibly opens itself up to public surveillance under the guise of greater transparency, are laudable in some ways, and preferable in many respects to their predecessors. But as the state makes its workings more visible, it also enmeshes spectators in relations of looking that are differently problematic, and in this paper, I use the example of the evolving photographic and video archive of Guantánamo Bay to trace them out. Beginning with a reconsideration of the recent visual history of the detention facility, I ask how the turn toward greater government transparency is enacted at the site, and on or by the bodies of the detainees there. I analyze the official images that the state produces of Guantánamo and the complex ways that surveillance operates in this archive, specifically the 2010 and the 2011 versions of the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) website. These images document how the mandate of transparency settles on the prisoners themselves, which necessitates a rethinking of critical and resistant spectatorship in this situation where the state permits, and even invites us, to look as long and as hard as we please.
Keywords: Photography;Guantánamo Bay; Citizenship; Spectatorship; Transparency
<1> For most of the early years of its Global War on Terror, the U.S. government was on the defensive about its detention practices, working to preempt or defuse the public relations problems that threaten to arise with every new irruption of their grim, corporeal details. However, in the intervening years since the most potentially damaging revelation—that of the torture at Abu Ghraib—threatened and ultimately failed to become a serious visual problem for the state, it has become far more dexterous in this regard, expanding its repertoire beyond repression and secrecy, revealing some of the aspects of its work that it had previously kept secret. These displays, in which the state ostensibly opens itself up to public surveillance under the guise of greater transparency, are laudable in some ways, and preferable in many respects to their visually restricted predecessors. But as the state makes its workings more visible, it also enmeshes spectators in relations of looking that are differently problematic. In this paper, I trace out the relations of looking made possible by the evolving photographic and video archive of Guantánamo Bay, which serves as an interface between the detainees, the nation-state, and its citizens as spectators, and apportions visual agency in a radically uneven way between them.
<2> The goal of this paper, then, is to trace out the various forms of coercion and complicity operative in and around the images themselves. I begin by providing a a brief history of Guantánamo visualities, attending specifically to the visual strategies employed by the Bush and Obama administrations, the often-overlooked continuities between them, even as the state has become more visually dexterous over time. This background frames my subsequent analysis of the official images that the state produces of Guantánamo, how they appeal to their viewers and position their subjects, and the complex ways that surveillance operates in this archive. I compare two iterations of it, the 2010 and 2011 versions of the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) website, which simultaneously promise and refuse to picture the detainees. Considering the kinds of gazes these images invite, I query the meaning of state transparency in this case, and ask who performs it, and how. The images reveal that the mandate of transparency settles on the prisoners themselves, who have no choice but to enact it on behalf of the state. We cannot know what the detainees think or feel about being photographed, or if they are even aware that their likenesses are being electronically circulated in this way. Despite this uncertainty, or indeed because of it, critical reflection on the act of looking at them is crucial because of the extent to which the state’s visual agenda saturates these photo galleries. Ultimately, I explore the question of how spectators might participate in a resistant form of looking in a situation where the state permits, and even encourages us, to look as long and as hard as we please.
Visualizing No Place and No One
<3> Guantánamo is perpetually ambiguous. Although it is technically located in southeastern Cuba on 45 square miles of land that the U.S. has leased since 1903, in practice, Guantánamo Bay has proven to be legal no-place. It is simultaneously proximate to the U.S. mainland (roughly 400 miles, by air, from Miami, Florida) and intractably distant from it (accessible only with specific and exacting permission). It is a place that only a very few Americans will ever see, but Amy Kaplan has demonstrated that Guantánamo is nonetheless at the very “heart of the American empire” (832). The detention complex there was originally constructed in the early 1990s to hold refugees from Haiti and Cuba that were intercepted while attempting to reach the U.S. Their legal status, much like that of the terror suspects being held there now, was never officially determined (Kaplan 841). Repurposed under the administration of George W. Bush as a repository for persons deemed ‘enemy combatants’ in the War on Terror, it became a place where rules alternately do and do not apply, “an arena,” in Kaplan’s terms, “only partially and indiscriminately subject to [U.S.] Constitutional restraints” (Kaplan 853).
<4> So it is that Guantánamo is a juridical no-place occupied by prisoners who, legally, might as well be no one. At the time of this writing (Winter 2013), there are 166 detainees and approximately 5900 “active duty service members, retirees, family members, D[epartment] o[f] D[efense] civilians and contractors” inhabiting Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO, “Community”). Thus, although the numbers are clear, nothing else is guaranteed. No meanings are stable; indeed, they are multiple and often conflicted. Here, and at Abu Ghraib, Anne McClintock detects an operative form of imperial power marked by a “deep and dangerous doubleness,” fantasized as omnipotent but also paranoid about its vulnerability (89). The radical uncertainty of everything at Guantánamo (the status of the people held there, their futures, whether or not they are subject to American law, or entitled to protection under international legal and humanitarian standards), saturates its visuality as well.
<5> I employ the concept of ‘visuality’ here as a way of naming the intersection of sight and ideology, a shorthand for the structures that determine who or what is visible (or invisible), the circumstances of spectatorship and display, and the operations of power that get articulated as relations of looking. Jens Andermann contends that the state is a “visual form," comprised of “a way of looking” and “the objects that command attention.” The form, he continues, is the politicized “relation that binds a certain gaze to a particular artifact,” a riveting that takes place through a “specific interplay between imaging technologies, compositional forms, and the objects they capture in a given time and place” (2) in accordance with the state’s needs, objectives, and desires. At Guantánamo, the state operates both through force, actual or threatened, and through more dispersed and subtle forms of power and control, including the maintenance of a visual system that alternately disappears prisoners or renders them publicly visible[1]. Consequently, in the archive of photos from the prison, some images feature military personnel handling the detainees (as by physically escorting them from place to place); others show guards tending to them (when distributing food or reading materials); still others capture no Americans at all but, in their display of the prisoners seemingly at ease, clearly document a subjection to state power so thoroughgoing that it need not be directly supervised.
<6> The visuality of Guantánamo links the state, the detainees, and American spectators in circuits of (in)visibility. These circuits mesh recursively with the legal and political systems in which the detainees are caught, and also with the domestic and international legal protections from which the detainees are systematically excluded, the forms of recognition that they are denied. The visuality of Guantánamo reinforces and is reinforced by those systems, evolving as they do. Because this environment is haunted and shaped by doubleness, the visual life of Guantánamo during the War on Terror has been fraught with contradiction, confounding the seeming opposition between secrecy and transparency, and thus necessitating a reconsideration of the relationships between the Bush and Obama administrations’ approaches to the prison, and the contiguities between them.
<7> Certainly, the Bush administration managed the prison in accordance with its penchant for secrecy. This was elsewhere evidenced in its efforts to suppress photos from Abu Ghraib, of the flag-draped caskets of American military casualties arriving at Dover Air Force Base, and its restrictive approach to photography in general [2]. The Bush administration sought to prevent many crucial details of Guantánamo operations (about the ‘extraordinary rendition’ by which many detainees were transported to the base, the ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques applied to them there, and the identities of the detainees themselves) from becoming public. But if Gitmo was a secret during the Bush administration, it was a poorly and partially kept one. Visually, Guantánamo was something of a deviation from the Bush administration’s pattern of suppressing information. For example, early in the War, the U.S. Department of Defense released photos of kneeling, shackled detainees. Judith Butler described this flourish as a cruel publicity stunt, orchestrated to “make known that a certain vanquishing had taken place” (Precarious Life 77), whether as a way of offering comfort to the nation still reeling from September 11th or as a warning to its enemies who might be plotting another attack. Later, in the summer of 2005, the administration staged a publicity offensive, giving certain military personnel access to the prison and then dispatching them back to inform the press and public about the humane conditions and its importance in the War on Terror, normalizing what Elspeth van Veeren described as the “surreal goings on” there (“Guantánamo Does Not Exist” 194). Anne McClintock sets forth the haunting possibility that states utilize spectacular revelations of their excesses as “camouflage,” using them to acknowledgeminimal culpability while employing them as a screen behind which to commit even more egregious wrongs (101) [3]. Guantánamo’s status as a scopic exception to the policy of absolute state secrecy reveals additional levels of complexity in Bush-era visualities, and reminds us that this emphasis on secrecy coexisted with a widespread intensification of surveillance and what Louise Amoore characterizes as a society-wide visual ‘vigilance,’ upheld by the state and its citizens alike. This means that an objection or challenge to the visuality of Guantánamo requires more than a critique of government secretiveness, because an overemphasis or too-narrow focus on it establishes a problematic critical paradigm in which visibility is always cast as inherently good, always presumed to be aligned with freedom.
<8> Officially, the Obama administration has championed transparency, and the President has repeatedly averred that he has an exceptional commitment to it, evidenced, for example, in the sweeping and much-vaunted Open Government Directive. But along with its grudging inheritance of Guantánamo from its predecessor, the Obama administration has also demonstrated a similar appreciation for secrecy. In May 2009, for example, the administration coyly recanted on its position and blocked the release of additional interrogation photos from Abu Ghraib. Furthermore, on matters such as drone strikes, the assassination of American citizens, and questionable interrogation techniques, the Obama administration has repeatedly proven itself willing to withhold potentially damaging information (Friedersdorf; Junod). All in all, the Obama administration’s visual management results in a series of more complex erasures than the artless interventions of the Bush administration did.[4]
<9> Over time, the Obama administration has developed a sophisticated and flexible visual repertoire. Fundamentally, the state now seems less fearful of images, perhaps having learned that even the most potentially scandalous, like those released from Abu Ghraib, will actually have little effect on popular opinion; Judith Butler argued that the Bush administration acted to suppress the Abu Ghraib images because it “sought to limit the power of affect, of outrage, knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq, as indeed it did” (Frames of War 40). However, it seems that the Obama administration learned a different visual lesson from that series of events, discovering that the outrage would fizzle over time. After all, as Rosalind Morris contends, even the grisliest “news photograph has a short half-life and fades quickly” from the public imagination (109). Moreover, the Obama administration wagered that one way to expedite that process would be to stop treating controversial scenes like secrets, utilizing transparency as a way to defuse opposition. Accordingly, in October 2009, Obama managed to turn once-controversial Dover homecomings into a photo opportunity, presiding over the ‘dignified transfer’ of returning casualties.
<10> The Obama administration’s management of Guantánamo has been dexterous, after being bequeathed this prison (which, of course, it promised and then failed to close) and also its strange visuality. Elspeth van Veeren suggests that
JTF-GTMO’s continued existence is in large part due to the visual representations of Guantánamo produced and reproduced by the US State, which, in concert with verbal representations (generated during political speeches for example), created and maintained an ‘interpretive frame’ that privileged a reading of the detention sight/site as essential in the fight against terrorism and the security of the US (“Captured” 1724).
While the Obama administration has occasionally found Gitmo legally, politically, and militarily vexing, it appears to have mastered the prison’s visuality, transforming it into a key component of its image repertoire. This may explain why the administration defaulted on its promise to close the prison with so little remorse, and also why the prison itself has become less controversial over time.
Performing Safety, Humanity, Legality, Transparency
<11> The visuality of Guantánamo is continually evolving. Understanding the visual system that the state is now orchestrating requires attending to what Lauren Berlant describes as the “relationship between the normative affect of liberal optimism and ongoing structural violence” (16), and so seriously considering the possibility that even as the state makes itself more visible and transparent, it also gets better at shrouding its violence. These developments are not incongruous, but rather intricately predicated upon one another, and on the collusion of citizen-spectators. This suggests a need to reconsider the notion of transparency, to ask who performs it, under what circumstances, who benefits from those performances, and how it stands in relationship to surveillance as it is operationalized at the prison. Even as this visual archive purports to represent the detainees, it also abstracts them into beings that do not quite seem real. Therefore, even as I analyze the photographs and the spectator’s relationships to them, I want to attend to what Ariella Azoulay describes as the essential “was there” of the photograph, its facticity and indexicality, an awareness that Azoulay suggests might protect against otherwise “immoral viewership” (Civil Contract 16); in this case, that means remaining constantly aware that the people pictured in the photographs were actually detained at the prison, and may still be.
<12> Thus, rather than trying to excavate what is hidden in the prison, I focus instead on what is shown in the official photographs of it. The official visual archive of Guantánamo is rather small and carefully regulated [5]. The primary focus of my analysis is the website maintained by JTF-GTMO, in both its 2010 and 2011 iterations. JTF-GTMO, which is responsible for the day-to-day operations at the prison, characterizes its conduct as “Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent,” a mantra that recurs repeatedly on the website, a document which seems designed to document the JTF’s adherence to that very creed. Over time, it has illustrated these adjectives with fact sheets, a command video, and various photo galleries [6]. All of this content is hosted by the U.S. Department of Defense and is publicly available [7]. The website is meant to testify to the legality and necessity of what transpires at the base, while also demystifying it, making it familiar and uncontroversial. These images focus on the accoutrements of detention, the routines of daily life at Gitmo, the facilities where it unfolds, and the ‘comfort items’ offered to detainees to make it tolerable. They highlight the liberties afforded to the men and the pains taken to respect their religious beliefs. The easy accessibility of pictures documenting the minutiae (basketball hoops, slippers, playing cards, copies of the Koran) of detention seems to suggest that the state, now perhaps a little chagrined, has nothing left to hide.
<13> The website appears to be aimed at two primary audiences, which may overlap: American military or allied personnel getting ready to deploy to Guantánamo, and people who are concerned about what transpires there. For the former group, the website provides information about the logistics of life at Gitmo, like basic procedural details about where and how to report for duty and lists of restaurants and recreation sites available on the island. To the latter group, the site offers a range of textual and visual information. The website will likely do nothing to convert those who have already made up their minds to condemn Guantánamo, but rather is addressed to the more open-mindedly skeptical, those curious citizens who might be persuaded about the legality, acceptability, and necessity of this kind of detention. The site engages the inquisitive by offering pictures and information that feel candid but are also tantalizingly partial. The images can either signal that everything is fine (vouching for the safety/humaneness/legality/transparency of the prison by showing that the detainees are dangerous but held securely in reasonably comfortable accommodations) or by revealing that this is not the case, but assuring spectators that it does not matter.
<14> One of the challenges in analyzing this visuality lies in determining precisely how it does matter. Typically, we think about prison visualities in terms of discipline, power, and the regulation of behavior. Foucault’s seminal analysis in Discipline and Punish is exemplary of this approach to carceral visualities. Describing the development of institutional ‘observatories’ for various deviant (or potentially deviant) populations, he asserts that:
the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation, an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible (Discipline 170-171).
The objective of systems like these and later institutions modeled on the panopticon, is to use the constant threat of surveillance to produce self-regulating subjects; it is a project of reform. In this instance, however, it is likely and widely acknowledged that the vast majority of these detainees will die in captivity because they can neither be proven guilty nor safely released, and they are not held with an eye toward eventual return to society. Indeed, the people who work at Guantánamo often remind visitors that these are “detainees” not “prisoners”: they have not been (and likely will not be) tried, and so they are not exactly being punished for a crime.
<15> The visual system in place at Guantánamo keeps order there, but not only or even primarily this. Foucault writes that “what defines a relationship of power is that it is a node of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions …” (“The Subject and Power,” 789). This indicates that the photographic systems that capture and circulate images of the detainees need not impact them directly to condition them as subjects. Relatedly, Lauren Wilcox argues that detention practices at Guantánamo are designed to produce certain kinds of subjects, claiming that the violence that attends detention: “is best understood as expressive: the violence serves to create and reinforce subjectivities and relations of power between the U.S. military and the prisoners through the exercise of sovereign power on the bodies of the prisoners” (Wilcox 103). The visuality of detention also serves an expressive function, and adds an additional set of relations of power by serving as a relay between the prison and the spectators who might want to see it or the people who are held there.
<16> Four types of detainee images do the visual work of testifying that the prison is indeed “Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent,” and that the detainees are treated accordingly. However, there is a crucial and telling paradox embedded in the JTF-GTMO visual lexicon: a relative absence of humans. First, there are the detainee photographs that are not detainee photographs at all, but instead show only empty spaces where detainees could be or might appear. Secondly, there are the photographs that represent the detainees metonymically through tableaus made of the objects given to them at the prison. Third, there are photos in which the detainees are actually pictured but turned away from the camera. Finally, there are the photographs that seem to represent the detainees most directly, picturing them frontally but with their faces obscured. My initial research was based on the 2010 version of the website; the 2011 update introduced changes to the content, but these patterns and the larger visuality that they scaffold remain in place.
Structuring Absences in Empty Rooms
<17> The first way in which detainees are not-pictured is by picturing instead the spaces or facilities meant to house them. The structuring absence of the photos of the empty facilities is evocative of a haunting, apropos of the detainees’ status as what McClintock calls “legal ghosts” (104), hidden from the outside world but utterly exposed to the prison’s surveillance mechanisms. But whereas the metaphor of the ghost implies a pastness, a trace of someone who once was there, in this particular archive, there is a different temporality, an orientation toward the future instead. In her 2011 study, van Veeren writes that pictures of the uninhabited cells represent the spaces as “emptied and cleansed, even sanitized,” as if to remove traces of detainees that had once occupied them (“Captured” 1742). However, I suggest that as the future of the prison is being reimagined, the pictures take on a different temporal orientation. Now, the facilities are pictured as sterile, anticipatory. Any empty space that looks like a place where a detainee had been would visually hint at a variety of untenable possibilities: of a detainee who had died in custody, of a detainee who had been unjustly detained and subsequently freed, of a detainee who had been erroneously released and deported and was now beyond the reach of the state’s gaze. Rather than evoking the past, these images provide a look to the future, a promise that the necessary enemies will be detained, and also that everything will be safe, humane, legal, transparent throughout the remainder of the endless war.
<18> One way that the JTF-GTMO visualized this was in its “Command Video” on the 2010 version of the website, which provided a brief history of the prison, discussion of the JTF’s mission, and a short tour of the facilities. This includes a pan around an empty operating theater in which the detainees receive “unsurpassed medical care” akin to what U.S. military personnel are entitled to. The room is devoid of human habitation, but clearly equipped to handle a patient at any time, a preparedness evidenced by the racks of monitors and screens, the wrinkled sheet on the narrow table, the bright overhead lights that promise full illumination. The explicit attention to medical care and facilities whispers the possibility that something could go wrong, that a detainee might be injured or fall into poor health at the prison. However, the emptiness of the space suggests that such things have not happened, assures us that they likely will not, but that if they do, the medical staff is prepared for any contingency.
<19> In the 2011 version of the website, detainees were not-pictured in a different kind of space. The fact sheet titled “Intelligence” features a photo captioned “Detainee Interview Room.” The high-angle shot was taken from a corner of the room, so that the perspective is oddly distorted. The scene captured by the camera looks like an institutional version of a living room, akin to a dormitory common area or an office waiting room: generic brown leather couches, a wooden coffee table, both positioned on an area rug, a microwave and coffeepot, a small flat-screen TV mounted on the otherwise bare white wall, a door open to a nondescript hallway. This is the only fact sheet with a captioned photograph, perhaps because the meaning of the picture would otherwise be unclear, as the scene diverges so far from what one might reasonably imagine about the spaces in which detainees have been ‘interviewed’ [8]. The photo, undated and with no further elaboration in the text of the fact sheet, re-envisions the process of information-gathering by relocating it into a cozier setting, the sort of place where one might spend hours or even days comfortably if not contentedly.
<20> Both of these images of detainee facilities, bare and tidy, are suggestive of preparations made, bodies expected. Certainly, there are differences between these two scenes, with the 2011 photo offering a far more pleasant, far less carceral vision of the prison, but in the end, they both invite a similar gaze from the spectators, an anticipatory imagining of what sorts of bodies might be doctored or interviewed in each. Sarah Ahmed suggests that surveillance of presumably dangerous others operates in the future tense; that anxious and uncertain “‘not-yet-ness’” means that defense is always necessary, and that constant vigilance is required to catch them in their inevitable transgression (135). And so we are invited to look, and to wait.
Comfort Items, Untouched
<21> The detainees are also regularly not-pictured via metonymic representation in the ‘comfort items’ and other goods and objects that comprise the orbit of their everyday lives. These items are meant to verify and visualize safety, humaneness, legality, and transparency, to make these abstract phenomena concrete and objectified in intimate tableaus of flip-flop sandals, combs, and Korans. Comfort items figure prominently, for example, in the “Gitmo Photos” gallery on the U.S. Department of Defense website, linked from the JTF-GTMO site. Always in those images, the objects are arrayed perfectly. They are (as yet) untouched; the soccer ball rests inert against the fence, the board games look dusty from disuse, the Korans are unopened, the clothes are folded and stacked on the cots.
<22> In the 2010 “Command Video,” the medium-security facilities of Camp Delta are visualized in rows of clothes and hygiene products neatly arranged on a blue rubber mattress atop the frame of a metal cot, with another just like it partially visible in the background. The camera zooms in quickly, narrowing our view to an unlabeled bottle of some kind of liquid, but before we can gather any additional details, the scene changes to guards’ backs in a hallway of cells. The gaze invited by the video is furtive and also frustrated; the camera promises us, momentarily, an intimate view into the life of the detainees, their bodily practice, and then denies it almost immediately.
<23> The 2011 update of the website relies less on this mode of (not) representing the detainees. In the latter version, humane-ness is visualized as the work of tending to the most elemental bodily needs of the detainees, as on the “Detainee Program” fact sheet. The illustration for this sheet is a full side view of an American guard crouched, apparently at mealtime, to address a detainee who appears only as a pair of disembodied hands, holding what appears to be a piece of bread and a cookie taken from a styrofoam container [9]. While the detainee here is active in selecting food for consumption, our view of him is incomplete. We have a fuller view of the guard, and in him a partial face with which to identify, eyes through which to look vicariously. But he wears a clear plastic mask to cover his face, the screen through which he will see and communicate with any detainee, and while his view is already telescoped through the narrow slot in the door, its solid brown metal finally and fully deflects ours.
<24> These objects make detention seem familiar, or at least knowable. Spectators will recognize the objects, vaguely, and can fill in the blanks around them, imagining what sort of habitat they encompass, if not the people that would use them. On the one hand, this opens up a narrow space of possibility through which the spectators might identify with the detainees. But on the other, these photographs also erase the detainees and reduce them only to bodies that use these objects, that wear these jumpsuits, or shuffle around in these sandals, or wash themselves with whatever these little bottles contain, rather than subjects possessed of interiority, thoughts, feelings, desires, or opinions. In short, these are forms of existence like those that Butler describes in Frames of War, those who can be apprehended as ‘living’ or being alive but who are not recognized as having a life that is meaningful (7). Consequently, without ever picturing the detainees, the photos simultaneously underscore and undermine their human-ness.
Acting Naturally, Unaware, in Captivity
<25> Eventually, some detainees do appear in the frame, but imperfectly and incompletely, facing away from the camera and the viewer. The photos seem to be taken surreptitiously, as the pictured detainees look oblivious to the work of photography happening around and upon them, betraying no awareness of the camera. They thus appear passive before the device and its operator, and disengaged from the spectator as they go about their detainee business. We cannot know whether they are actually as oblivious as they appear to be (it is possible, for example, that they choose to ignore the camera as a strategy for managing the relentless visibility that characterizes their captivity), but content of the photos makes it easy to believe, if we are inclined to do so, that they are candid. When I visited Guantánamo in September 2012, part of the tour of the facilities included a stop behind a one-way mirror, where we were invited to watch the detainees during their art class, and then at prayer. While we were assured that the detainees would not know they were being watched, they must certainly have been aware, by the presence of the mirror itself, that it was possible there were spectators behind it. This may have had the effect of disciplining their behavior, panopticon-style, but it is also possible that the detainees were ignoring it purposefully, whether because they could get in trouble for appearing to communicate with outsiders or because they did not deem the outsiders worthy of their attention or acknowledgment. In any case, the outward appearance is the same, and we simply have no way of accessing their thoughts or feelings on the matter.
<26> Like their live compatriots under direct observation, the detainees in these photos never seem to be doing anything, an idleness suggesting that their captivity is benign, if perhaps a little dull. When the detainees have their backs to the camera, spectators can look without consequence, guilt, or impingement. The photographs invite a looking that is anticipatory and speculative, perhaps akin to the way someone on a stakeout might watch, unobserved and apparently unobtrusive. Seemingly ignorant of or unconcerned about the camera, the detainees look, therefore, like they are acting naturally, and so the photos imply that this is how the detainees ‘really’ are. Photos of this sort, and the next (in which detainees are shot from the front, with their faces obscured) are governed by a 2002 regulation stipulating that detainees can only be photographed partially or in a way that shields their identities (van Veeren, “Captured” 1727). Ostensibly, this is a gesture of compliance with the Geneva Conventions, but when considered as a part of the overarching visuality of the prison, the strategy serves to reveal and hide at once.
<27> The 2010 homepage for the JTF-GTMO website featured a slide show that cycled through various scenes from the prison in a disjointed loop akin to that of a closed-circuit television system, with the JTF’s articulated commitment to the “safe, humane, legal, and transparent care and custody of the detainees” positioned almost as a caption to them. One of the photos captures a detainee’s back, from the waist up, the fingers of his left hand woven through the wires of a greenish fence, his right hand resting on his white cap. The strangeness of his pose suggests an unguardedness about the photograph. It was apparently shot from outside the fence, and through it; the bright, unblemished whiteness of his garments draws our eyes immediately, and in the process, threads our surveilling gaze through the openings between the wires. The portrait is strangely compelling, but remained unexplained as it was replaced quickly with the next image in the rotation, looking without understanding.
<28> A 2011 exemplar of this subgenre offers a less inscrutable narrative. The photo illustrating the “Detainee Medical Care” fact sheet straightforwardly tells the story of a detainee getting his blood pressure checked [10]. We see the patient from behind in quarter profile, his braid hanging between his shoulders, his bearded chin upturned toward the medical technician fitting him with the cuff. Just over her shoulder, unobtrusive and scarcely visible, another person in camouflage stands apparently idle, arms hanging at his sides, thus bringing the total number of people in the room to at least four, including the photographer [11]. The photo thus makes a promise of transparency that is even more thoroughgoing, casting it as a tactic that can reveal hidden bodily truths about the detainees. Simultaneously, the presence of many bodies content of the photograph tells us a bit about the circumstances of its creation, which themselves reveal that transparency is not merely a condition but rather a feat, something that is accomplished only with very careful orchestration.
<29> In the transition from the 2010 to 2011 versions of the website, something got lost, or disappeared: the fact sheet titled “Detainees.” The title was somewhat misleading, as the document described the facilities and environment at Guantánamo far more than the detainees themselves. But the subsequent omission of this information (and the people to whom it pertained) suggests a wish to downplay the ongoing presence of detainees at the prison long after it was supposed to be closed. Roughly a quarter of that now-invisible fact sheet was occupied by a photo of an older detainee, hands behind his back, clasping the prayer beads that trailed from them as he walked, apparently aimlessly, toward a high fence. As in all pictures of this subgenre, his ‘natural’ appearance lends the photo the air of documentary truth; this, in turn retroactively constructs the category of the ‘detainee’ and the subject-position that such a being occupies [12]; that figure, because he has no face and no apparent volition, seems to be no subject at all.
Both Human and Captive
<30> Writing about the tendency of news organizations to reprint photos from Abu Ghraib with the prisoners’ faces blurred, Wendy Kozol argues that “the result is that Iraqi prisoners appear in many of these pictures without faces, identities, or other markers of subjectivity.” Although the ostensible reason for obscuring their faces was compliance with the Geneva Conventions, in effect these edited photos reduce the prisoners to “only victims without agency, subjectivity, or citizenship” (Kozol, “Battlefield Souvenirs” 31, 32). The Guantánamo photos that show detainees frontally but faceless function in a similar way. Photos in this subgenre are shot from close-up, often showing detainees actively doing something, like studying or praying, and thus intimating that the detainees are people who have routines and schedules, albeit constrained ones. Compared to those that capture the detainees from the back [13], these photos provide a more active, dynamic, human view. Given this, the excision of the detainees’ faces is the trace of a more violent form of editing, and places spectators in an even more complex visual and ethical relationship with the detainees at whom they look online.
<31> On the 2010 “Detainee Programs” fact sheet, we see (partially) a detainee choosing materials from a cart full of library books, as a guard holds them open so that he might peruse the materials through the window of his cell door. The detainee’s face is visible from the bridge of his nose to his chin, as is part of the right side of his chest, and he looks intently through the glass at the book held up before him. In this instant, he appears as a discriminating subject as he decides what to read from the small selection on the cart [14]. Photos like this give us the clearest view of the detainees’ subjectivity, but they also raise complicated questions about the practice of photography at Guantánamo. The closeness and angle of the pictures mark a proximity between the detainee and the photographer and suggest that the detainees in the pictures must have known they were being photographed.
<32> One cannot plausibly characterize their participation as entirely consensual, but neither should we assume that the photographed detainees are wholly devoid of agency in this instance, that they had no thoughts or feelings about the fact of their being photographed or the idea that strangers would view those photographs later, even if they betrayed no such response visibly [15]. Urging a reconceptualization of the photographic event, Ariella Azoulay has argued that “photography is an event that is not conditioned by the eventual production of a photograph” (“What is a Photograph?” 12). This suggests that the significance of the photographic ‘encounter’ cannot be reduced to the photograph thus created nor, by extension, its circulation but rests instead in the relationships inaugurated by the camera. Foucault emphasizes the dual meaning of the term ‘subject,’ and hence the dual nature of the experience of subjectification. A subject is a being “subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (“The Subject and Power” 781). In this instance, the unmasked practice of photography serves both functions.
<33> Elsewhere, Azoulay asserts that the willingness to be photographed while one is suffering or otherwise under duress “presumes” that there will be a spectator inclined to care about that suffering (Civil Contract18). Looking at these photos, one can only wonder who the detainees envisioned would later view their likenesses when they saw the camera or heard the click of the shutter. The compellingly intimate view of the detainees distracts us from such questions [16], however, while their passivity before the camera seems to suggest that they did not object to being pictured, that they were willing to make themselves visible in this way.
<34> Compared to the three other photographic subgenres, this one evolved most abruptly from the 2010 to 2011 versions of the website, and the 2011 version of the site does not include any photos in which the detainees appear in this way. This subgenre of photos has been replaced by courtroom sketches of the detainees during their military commission proceedings. If present, sketch artists are guaranteed a courtroom seat in the lottery that otherwise determines media access to the hearings, which suggests that this is a form of visual representation deemed officially valuable. In fact, the commissions process affords detainees fuller access to and control over their visibility and legibility. Unlike in the photographs, sketched detainees have their faces restored to them, and are identified by name in the accompanying captions. Janet Hamlin, a New York-based illustrator, has produced some of the most iconic sketches of the Guantánamo proceedings. Her November 2011 sketch of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri on the stand portrays the alleged mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole with an expressive face, wearing headphones, his hand resting contemplatively against his jaw. Her 2012 drawing of Majid Khan depicts the accused man with his eyes cast downward, raising his hand to swear before a pile of documents. Hamlin recounted a story in which Khan, after registering a guilty plea, briefly refused to allow her to publish her sketches of him (Theispot.com). While the “Media Ground Rules” for Guantánamo emphasize the right of the victims’ families to approve courtroom sketches before publication, and prohibit sketch artists from producing any likeness of people on the commission panel (United States Department of Defense 9), in this instance, Khan was able to exercise some control over the terms of his appearance. Although it is unclear how that happened, and how Hamlin finally obtained his permission to release the sketches, the contestation reveals a complex politics of visual agency at the prison.
<35> While courtroom sketches have the potential to offer spectators a fuller view of the detainees [17], and humanize them with expressions and mannerisms, the genre itself relocates them within the juridical sphere of the state. Rendered in pastels, they are caught and domesticated, made abstract and distant by this non-indexical form of visual representation. At the same time, the genre of the courtroom sketch itself visually implies an equivalence between these questionably lawful military commission proceedings and due process in U.S. courts; the sketches legal-ize the process, another visual burden for the detainees to bear. These sketches thus appear radically different than the first ‘vanquishing’ photos to be released from the prison. Indeed, with the visual work of vanquishing completed, the state can safely move on to a new visuality of detention.
<36> The ground rules governing the conduct of members of the media reporting from Guantánamo prohibit photography that depicts “Frontal facial views, profiles, ¾ profiles, or any view revealing a detainee’s identity” and “Identifiable JTF-GTMO personnel, without their consent” (United States Department of Defense 4). These guidelines make no reference to detainee consent (which is either presumed, or withheld by the state on their behalf). Certainly, the detainees must have been aware that the photographs were being taken and the sketches were being made, but it is unclear whether they had any power at all over the circumstances of their imaging. The official nature of the portraiture and the reasonable assumption that the detainees were cognizant of it opens up peculiar opportunities for spectators. The official imprimatur of this government authorization to look can occlude awareness of the various visual and political decisions we make in the process of doing so. And since the looking is both legitimated in this way and apparently not totally clandestine, spectators can gaze without feeling guilty. At the same time, these polyvalent images are composed in such a way as to afford spectators the frisson of seeing the detainees as both human and captive.
Surveillance and the Command Performance of Transparency
<37> All four types of Guantánamo photographs invite spectators to partake of and participate in a common surveilling gaze. It is crucial to remember that no matter how critical we are of Guantánamo or what transpires there, we as distant spectators are always more powerful than the detainees, being granted more visual access to the prison than they are. That differential is built into the systems of citizenship and dispossession that are Guantánamo’s conditions of possibility; Wendy Kozol has forcefully argued that no matter how hard I, or any American, might try or how badly I might want to, I “cannot simply distance myself from the privileges of citizenship that structure how I look at sites of violence and suffering” (“Looking Elsewhere” para. 26). Even before surfing to the JTF-GTMO website, we are already placed into certain visual relationships with the detainees who are pictured (or not), which then delimits the ways that we can engage with the images, while also enticing us to make certain demands upon them, positioning the detainees as objects of scrutiny, surveilling them under the guise of holding the state to account.
<38> Contemporary American understandings of transparency are based on the belief that it can either prevent or correct for government abuses or excesses [18]. This is essentially a fantasy that the state will behave itself if there are witnesses. Over time, in fact, the state and its agents have adopted the rhetoric of transparency. Despite the ease with which states can reappropriate the rhetoric of transparency, advocates of transparency tend to characterize it as a thing that citizens demand, unilaterally, of their government. Conceptualizing it in this way implies that transparency is different from or unrelated to surveillance. Against this view, Jordan Crandall queries the ways that surveillance becomes pervasive, multi-directional. Crandall observes that surveillance is no longer the purview of the state or corporations, but rather takes the form of “collective tracking, “a social matrix” in which nearly everyone is caught, which nearly everyone works to maintain. Furthermore, he notes that “it is never quite clear who is controlling whom and to what degree we acquiesce, or take pleasure. What is the difference between observation and surveillance? When does seeing become policing? When does control turn into surveillance?” (21, 24). These musings suggest that the valorization of transparency might be misguided. In the case of Guantánamo, the discourse of transparency reifies the visuality of the state, rather than undermining it, a relationship evident in the ease with which JTF-GTMO adopted transparency as the climactic final term of its motto.
<39> A full account of transparency as it is practiced at Guantánamo must include a consideration of who performs it, under what circumstances, and how the nation-state and its citizens might benefit from these enactments, and necessitates entertaining the possibility that transparency can be coercive [19]. Sunaina Maira has written about the state’s efforts to make certain ‘bad Muslims’ discursively visible to “justify its assault on civil liberties” and “prove the threat to national security” that they pose (640). Here, that process is made corporeal and photographic. The visibility of the ‘bad Muslim’ (the website is replete with reminders that these are dangerous men, but also emphasizes that the U.S. military nonetheless permits them to practice their religion freely and takes pains to honor their needs and customs) serves to align the gaze of the citizen with the visuality of the state at precisely the liminal site and over precisely the liminal bodies where that connection might break down.
<40> These photographs invite a surveilling gaze at the detainees, which helps to ensure that transparency will be no enemy of the state, but will instead shore up loyalty by using a particular form of transparency to vouch for the safety, legality, and humaneness of its detention practices. Sharon Sliwinski writes that photographs of suffering remind spectators of their “utter inability to prevent” such suffering (155). In this case, the photographs, which depict both an absence of suffering and a lack of subjects there to suffer, suggest that someone has already acted humanely on our behalf, so there is nothing left for us to do but supervise from afar. In this way, the photographs give spectators the satisfaction that comes with the feeling of having performed a civic duty (by observing the state in action, verifying that all is well) and access to the pleasures of surveillance, as there is never any chance that our gazes will be returned by, or even be known to, the detainees at whom we look. Their apparent lack of concern for the camera, and their seeming disengagement from the visuality of the prison, means that they do not become legible as subjects, and so our clandestine looking at them does not seem shameful or invasive; they do not seem to have anything to hide. Consequently, the state, in addition to earning a visual allegiance from its citizens, also derives the benefits that accrue from the appearance of transparency while dodging the controversy that might otherwise follow from resisting it. Rachel Hall, in her analysis of the ways in which transparency has been subsumed into the U.S. state’s prosecution of its war against terror, writes of the way it ‘puts on’ transparency as a way of persuading citizens that it is acting justly [20]. When spectators look at the Guantánamo images, they abet the state’s claim of having nothing to hide.
<41> The state appears transparent because the detainees are made visible, but this achievement requires that they also be stripped of authority over the circumstances of their visibility. Either they appear at the behest of the state and for its purposes, or they are deprived of access to exposure they might desire, for example, that which contact with the media might provide. Azoulay writes that “when a photograph turns into a grievance, whoever articulates it becomes its civic subject” (Civil Contract 132). Here, the mechanisms by which photographs might convey such grievances are short-circuited. The guidelines for visiting media personnel prohibit any kind of contact between journalists/photographers and detainees, and also stipulate that if detainees become agitated (or appear to be playing to the journalists in some way), the media representatives may be asked to leave. Although the earliest ‘vanquishing’ photos were certainly dehumanizing, deeply and irredeemably problematic, they preserved something of the truth of the detainees’ situations; this is perhaps why they became iconic for critics of the prison, and also why the subsequent administration has worked so hard to revise Guantánamo visuality away from them. Now, the detainees are either erased or camouflaged into the facilities that house them, so there does not seem to be any urgency about their plights.
<42> In the early part of 2012, the JTF-GTMO website underwent another redesign, another restructuring and refinement of the visual landscape thereby made available to the public. The newest version spotlights the military personnel at the base: their stories, activities, needs, and recreation. Gone are the text-heavy fact sheets. This version of the website prominently features a large photo archive, which is searchable by date and begins with photos from December 2008. Each month provides glimpses of life at the base, often in photographs that depict construction at the site, various ceremonies, and activities designed to keep the military personnel entertained like concerts, softball games, and 5-K runs. At the top of the list of headings, there are two sections labeled not by date but by place—“Camp 5” and “Camp 6”—in which photos of the detainees appear. Photos of the military personnel are arranged chronologically in a reflection of their evolving missions and their regular rotations through the facility. Photos of the detainees typically include dates in their captions, but these subsections leave them temporally mired in place, a visual timelessness that mirrors the interminable (indefinite) time of detention itself.
<43> While new photos of the U.S. military are added regularly if not frequently, all 22 of the “Camp 5” and “Camp 6” pictures posted remained the same while I was researching the website, and all of them date from October 2011. All are accompanied by this explanation:
JTF Guantanamo provides safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees, including those convicted by military commission and those ordered released by a court. The JTF conducts intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination for the protection of detainees and personnel working in JTF Guantanamo facilities and in support of the War on Terror. JTF Guantanamo provides support to the Office of Military Commissions, to law enforcement and to war crimes investigations. The JTF conducts planning for and, on order, responds to Caribbean mass migration operations.
This reiterated text, always much longer than the very brief descriptions of the photos themselves is the only context offered by the otherwise scanty captions, which tend to describe rather than explain the photos. These photos abide by the same general rules that governed their visual predecessors; they alternately leave the detainees invisible or visualize them only incompletely.
<44> Elsewhere in the archive, there are photos of the detainees interspersed with those of the military personnel at the base. These images do seem to offer a richer view of the detainees and their lives than previously afforded. They photos fill in some of the details by developing a fuller account of how the detainees spend their time. In these images, they play soccer; walk or jog around recreation areas; “relax”; pray; peruse books; hang their linens; get their beards trimmed and their teeth cleaned; converse with one another; learn how to type; eat breakfast; get x-rays; prepare meals; watch horse racing on television; are escorted from place to place; read the newspaper; and sometimes just “gather” in common areas. Watching from more and more vantages, we learn their little stories through the brief textual vignettes that accompany these stills from their captivity. The detainees become more and more visible, seem more and more familiar.
<45> But this sense of familiarity, even as it makes their detention more visible, may also render it less controversial or extraordinary. In many of the photos, the detainees seem so much at ease, able even to relax with their feet up, or sprawled on a couch. Detention starts to look reasonably safe, relatively humane, legally comprehensible, and obviously, self-evidently, transparently natural. Jacques Rancière has written extensively about the bald lie that defines the state management of perception, the police assertion that there is ‘nothing to see here’ when citizens know otherwise (n. pag.), because they can sense or actually see that something is happening. This is a lie intended to keep citizens moving past the scene of violence, to coercively restrict their sight. While the Bush administration often (though not always at Guantánamo) seemed enamored of the power of this utterance, the Obama administration has been saying something else. It has confirmed, often with a flourish, that there is indeed something to see here, and has often (especially at Guantánamo) made a spectacle of granting the public visual access to it. By authorizing certain public visualizations of Guantánamo, the Obama administration has reaffirmed the status of the visual as the “sovereign sense,” the sense by which state power is consolidated [21]. A certain form of transparency has been achieved, and whether this is cause, effect, or both, Guantánamo has become largely uncontroversial.
<46> Yet even as the Obama administration has distanced itself, rhetorically, from the visual practices of its predecessor, the ability of this administration to show more scenes from the prison is largely indebted to the Bush administration’s refusal to do so, insofar as that preceding refusal enables this administration to claim a victory for transparency while managing the visual even better. The visual field overlaid on the prison is pervaded by and patterned on state power, even in the instances where it seems to suggest a rupture or a weakness. The surveilling gaze that these photos invite can become habitual and indiscriminate; by partaking of it, spectators shore up their identities relative to the detainees, and establish complicity with the visual regimes that govern them, their mechanisms of subject-formation and their violences. Don Pease has argued that in our consumption of images from Guantánamo, the American “people ratified the power of the state to declare itself an exception to its own rule by participating visually in the construction of persons who were construed as exceptions to the human condition” by agreeably consuming images from the prison. These images, to which American spectators were “bound as witnesses,” captured likenesses of prisoners divested of their status as human beings and represented them accordingly (Pease 175). This suggests a need to reconceptualize the notion of transparency as the stark opposite of secrecy and the best corrective for state overreach. A new paradigm for spectatorship would take note of the gaps, omissions, and blind spots built into the state’s preferred visuality of detention, but would not rush to fill them.
<47> Ultimately, the official visual archive of Guantánamo demands an intellectual and critical move beyond the fantasy of holding the state visually to account, a move toward a differently critical vision, lest we as spectators be unknowingly conscripted as its proxies in the process. Looking differently at the official images of Guantánamo begins not so much with a focus on the photos themselves but rather with an analysis of the practices of spectatorship they invite. This entails asking a series of questions about our visual desires and the objects set out to satisfy them, and about the politics and implications of our spectatorship. Fundamentally, this means querying why we are looking and what we hope to see. What are the conditions of possibility for the making-visible of Guantánamo and its inhabitants? Who permits us to look? For what purposes? At what points are our gazes frustrated? How does it feel to be thwarted in this way? What obligations do we have to the detainees, and how might they be enforced? What do we imagine about the detainees? What, in the process, do we come to believe about ourselves, or the state that permits us to look at these captives?
<48> Even if the detainees don’t seem to care that they are being photographed, if they are unaware that those photos are being circulated, if they will never know who looked at them and how, we still cannot say that our spectatorship has no effect on them. By looking, we are participating—albeit distantly and in a very different way than the people who authorize their detention—in the state system that created and sustains Guantánamo, fulfilling our uniquely appointed role. Reframing spectatorship through these questions and reinterpreting it through the lens of the entanglements they reveal complicates the familiar paradigm in which the choice to look is figured as an act of resistance. In that model, the spectator’s choice to look is understood as a clear, favorable, and more politically consequential alternative to not looking. However, given the way that the visual field of Guantánamo is saturated by state power, the relationship between looking and not looking at these images is almost a matter of indifference relative to the much more meaningful choices that the spectator makes subsequently by posing and responding to these questions.
<49> In this context, looking at the pictures in this carefully tended visual archive is not necessarily an act of resistance, but neither is not looking a meaningful refusal of state power and visuality. Whether we look or not, the photographs have already been taken; that element of state visuality has already been secured. In most cases, we do not (and likely cannot) know who the photos depict, anything about them, whether they are still detained. Not looking at the photos leaves the detainees to languish in visual oblivion. However, even when we look, the archive is not designed to let us actually see them in a radical way; as van Veeren notes, such looking merely “(re)inscribes the identities of the detainees as terrorists and the U.S. as humane” (“Captured” 1748). On the one hand, it may be that the Guantánamo archive, as it is currently configured, is a failed version of transparency; alternately, however, if it is indeed an emblem of transparency’s triumph, it starkly reveals the flaws and problematics foundational to the notion of transparency itself.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the organizers of the 2011 Cultures of Surveillance conference at University College, London for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper and my co-panelists and members of the audience for their thought-provoking comments and questions. Jason Loviglio helped me think through the complexities of transparency. Tara Jones at the Office of the Secretary of Defense coordinated my seamless visit to Guantánamo in September 2012, and everyone I met there patiently provided detailed answers to my many questions; at UMBC, Etoy Hamlin graciously handled the other logistics of my travel. The anonymous reader for Reconstruction returned a generous and incisive report that continues to influence my thinking on these issues.
Endnotes
[1] In her analysis of the practice of force-feeding hunger strikers at Guantánamo, Wilcox describes the “uneasy” (103) but durable coexistence of sovereign and biopolitical exercises of power; often theorized as incommensurable, they converge violently on the bodies of the prisoners who the state will torture but will not allow to die.
[2] On the final point, see Palmer and Whyte.
[3] McClintock sets forth the possibility that publicizing the Abu Ghraib photos served to distract the public from torture at so-called ‘black sites’ or places like Guantánamo. W.J.T. Mitchell made a similar argument about the hypervisibility of the handful of images that came to define the torture at Abu Ghraib, surmising that “Perhaps the most powerful weapon on the side of secrecy has been, paradoxically, a fetishizing of the already publicized images themselves, and those who appear in them, as radically exceptional” (129).
[4] In her critical history of the U.S. government’s approach to torture in the Global War on Terror, Lisa Hajjar characterizes the problematic ambitions of the Obama administration in the following terms: “Initially … the Obama administration imagined that it was possible to reconcile the commitment to unaccountability with the promise of greater transparency” (32). Her argument is predicated on the assumption that those objectives are incommensurable; I suggest that the visual management of Guantánamo proves otherwise.
[5] There is no ‘unofficial’ photographic archive of Guantánamo, insofar as every press photograph of the base and the prison must be approved by JTF-GTMO personnel before it can be published. For more on this, see van Veeren (“Captured,” 1729).
[6] As van Veeren notes, Guantánamo has been the “subject of extensive mediation” throughout the War on Terror, no matter what the specific policies governing the prison were (“Guantánamo Does Not Exist,” 199).
[7] Previously, visitors to the site were warned that their navigations around it might be monitored. Potential visitors had to ‘OK’ this prominent warning before proceeding into the site. On my recent visits to the site, no such warning appeared.
[8] The only other image with a caption is a 1910 painting of an early naval encampment at Guantánamo on a fact sheet about the history of the base.
9] van Veeren (“Captured,” 1734-1735) observes that guards’ faces are often visible in pictures from Guantánamo, but that they never return the gaze of the camera, giving the impression of being totally occupied with their work. The photo recurs in the 2012 version of the website, with the following detailed caption:
NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba – (Oct. 19, 2011) – A guard at Joint Task Force Guantanamo ensures that a detainee from Camp 5 is satisfied with the food being offered for lunch. JTF Guantanamo provides safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees, including those convicted by military commission and those ordered released by a court. The JTF conducts intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination for the protection of detainees and personnel working in JTF Guantanamo facilities and in support of the War on Terror. JTF Guantanamo provides support to the Office of Military Commissions, to law enforcement and to war crimes investigations. The JTF conducts planning for and, on order, responds to Caribbean mass migration operations. (JTF Guantanamo photo by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kilho Park) UNCLASSIFIED – Cleared for public release. For additional information contact JTF Guantanamo PAO 011-5399-3589; DSN 660-3589
[10] The same photo, but in a lower resolution, illustrated the 2010 “Medical” fact sheet.
[11] Here I am reminded of Azoulay’s analysis of the photo of a poorly-equipped and makeshift Palestinian clinic, which she says was met with public indifference. She argues that “the fact that nothing in the image is scandalous enough to be news-worthy or capable to interrupting the routine of well-protected citizens is the scandal of this image” (Civil Contract 69).
[12] John Tagg describes a similar phenomenon in the late 19th- and early 20th-century state uses of photography: “the power transmitted in the unremitting surveillance of these new disciplinary institutions generated a new kind of knowledge of the very subjects they produced, a knowledge which, in turn, engendered new effects of power and which was perceived in a proliferative system of documentation—of which photographic records were only a part” (259).
[13] For more on the bodies of catastrophe as the things that must and cannot be seen, see Buettner.[14] Incidentally, the photographer that created this picture also captured another one at work; over the shoulder of the man holding the book, we see the hands and camera of another photographer, shooting the same scene but from a different angle.
[15] In a different, but related context, detainees at Abu Ghraib, in their subsequent statements, regularly reflected on the practice of photography at the prison (“Sworn Statements”).
[16] Elsewhere in the visual culture of the War on Terror, the state and media alike often displayed the faces of terrorists (especially Osama bin Laden, when he was alive) to symbolize terror itself, a visual shorthand of difference and threat (Engle 78ff.). Here, however, it is the facelessness of the detainees that marks as ineluctably other.
[17] When Salim Ahmed Hamdan saw the sketch that Janet Hamlin had made of him during his trial, he responded with “a big smile and a double thumbs-up.” Williams surmised that his enthusiasm “might have reflected [his] appreciation of a rare chance to let his family in Yemen get a glimpse of him after a nearly seven-year absence.”
[18] For an insightful critique of the Left’s moral and ideological investments in transparency, see Birchall.
[19] The example of Abu Ghraib is instructive here. Jasbir Puar, for example, reminds us that part of the motivation for photographing the torture at Abu Ghraib was to create a corpus of images that might be useful in blackmailing the detainees.
[20] Her more detailed account of this process is as follows:
First,the federal government puts on transparency in order to guard itself against the charges of domestic surveillance and racial profiling; second, images of transparency instruct global citizens in how to maneuver through perpetually transparent screening procedures and acts of image capture; third, images of transparency demonstrate ‘good’ global citizenship and compel foreign visitors to the U.S. to become legible (i.e. transparent) security images (323).[21] On the sovereign status of the visual, see Amoore (218).
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