Feroz Ali Abassi, speaking with the Rule of Law Oral History Project about his experiences being imprisoned and tortured at Guantánamo Bay.
This morning, Mary Marshall Clark and TAVP Executive Director Gabriel Solis presented “Guantánamo: Seeing into the Dark Archive and Why It Matters,” as part of the Oral History Association’s 2021 Annual Meeting. The presentation discussed their work building the Rule of Law Oral History Project, which explored the uses of Guantánamo Bay as a detention center in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The project collected the stories of a variety of people who had important perspectives to share, including, crucially, prisoners who were tortured by U.S. interrogators and later released.
This work has influenced the approach we take to building our own archive at TAVP. As Gabe puts it, “Working on the Guantánamo project was very formative for me, not just in terms of what I learned about how to do memory work of state violence, but also a recognition of how forms of state violence may seem distinct and unrelated but in many ways actually overlap and reinforce one another. When I returned to TAVP a few years after working on the Guantánamo project, I understood that we couldn’t just document and archive stories about the death penalty but must also document overpolicing and police violence, in-custody deaths, mass incarceration, and the criminalization of homelessness.”
For those who are interested in learning more about Guantánamo Bay and Mary Marshall Clark and Gabriel Solis’s work on the Rule of Law Oral History Project, we’ve collected a list of resources. Please note that these resources discuss torture and other violence:
“Selections from the Rule of Law Oral History Project.” This short video features interviews with Moazzem Begg and Feroz Ali Abassi, both of whom were imprisoned in Guantánamo; Cageprisoners Executive Director Asim Qureshi; and attorney Gareth Peirce. It features artwork by Lucy Edkins illustrating Abassi’s narrative of torture.
Rule of Law Oral History Project website. Selected interviews from the project are collected here, including those excerpted in the above video.
“Guantánamo: Seeing into the Dark Archive,” by Mary Marshall Clark. Marshall reflects on her work on the archive and in creating the video: “And yet, as we explore the more porous boundaries of the digital world, especially in the context of oral history, some questions remain. Are not there still boundaries—of the imagination—that limit the transfer of the experience of trauma, as well as of torture?”
“Can the U.S. shield a ‘state secret’ that’s not a secret? Supreme Court to decide,” Oct. 6, 2021, Los Angeles Times. Writer David Savage discusses the case of Abu Zubaydah, who was wrongly accused of being “a close associate of Osama bin Laden who could reveal the next plot to attack” the US. Savage writes of the torture Zubaydah has endured at the hands of the US government: “He lost an eye and since 2006 has been locked up at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, facing no charges but given no opportunity to speak about what happened to him.” He has been described by US officials as someone they will hold “incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” His case speaks to the fact that “state violence resists documentation,” as Zakiya Collier has said, and the urgent necessity to document it regardless of the difficulty this work presents.
