George Bush's Paintings Aren't Funny

[ismnotwasm]

Writer Teju Cole twittered that if paintings of war are hot, those of the War on Terror are cold. Bush’s palate is as icy as Lucian Freud’s. Inside the cellblocks at Gitmo, where men have languished for more than a decade, not charged with any crime, the palette is cold too—fluorescent bulbs on concrete. I wonder if Bush ever sketched there. Abu Zubaydah did. He was rendered by the CIA, tortured and locked forever in the secretive Camp Seven. Documents obtained through recent Freedom of Information requests reveal that Zubaydah drew the torture inflicted on him. The drawings, however, are classified.

I recently gave a lecture on Guantánamo at Rutgers University. I shared the podium with James Yee, Muslim chaplain to detainees at the prison from 2002 to 2003. After objecting to torture, Yee was held in solitary confinement on a naval brig for 76 days, subjected to the same shackles and sensory deprivation he’d seen used on detainees. The government told the media he was a spy for al Qaeda. He was later released without charge.

Since last November, Yee has been drawing. He works as an outreach coordinator for Combat Paper, a series of workshops by and for veterans, who pulp their old uniforms into paper. On this paper, they grapple with their military experiences. Eighty percent of them served in Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Carefully, Yee showed me the paper. It’s rough, heavy, colored like grass and sand. “This was a battle dress uniform,” he said. “This was a dress shirt.” “This was desert camouflage from Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He wants to make paper out of an orange jumpsuit from Guantánamo.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/george-bushs-paintings-arent-funny-105664_Page2.html#ixzz2ys3Wcis7