MIAMI _ The idea of incinerating artwork made by wartime captives at Guantanamo Bay has stirred such alarm that the U.S. military is now discussing keeping and cataloging detainee art rather than burning it.
Army Col. Lisa Garcia of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the 41-captive prison and its 1,500-member staff, said Tuesday that Southcom is recommending to the prison that the staff archive detainee artwork. A lawyer quoted a captive as saying that military officials at the prison in southeast Cuba said that artwork of detainees who leave the prison would be incinerated.
For years the prison had permitted attorneys for the captives to take their clients' art off the U.S. Navy base _ after a security screening that, among other things, sought to analyze it for secret messages. In the instance of some model ships ingeniously made by a Yemeni, troops went so far as to make and study an X-ray of it. Some of the more than 700 captives who were resettled or repatriated were allowed to take some of their artwork with them.
But an ongoing exhibit at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice featuring paintings and other works by current and former captives _ "Ode to the Sea" _ caught the attention of the Pentagon because the exhibit's website offered an email address for people "interested in purchasing art from these artists."
Department of Defense officials "were not previously aware that detainee artwork was being sold to third parties," and ordered the prison to stop releasing it, Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Ben Sakrisson said. He called the artwork property of the U.S. government.
The prospect of burning art prompted comparisons of the United States to its enemies.
"Let's see who can destroy works of art and culture faster, ISIS or @DeptofDefense at #Guantanamo," long-serving detainee attorney J. Wells Dixon tweeted Nov. 16, after the Miami Herald broke the news of the ban. "Next it will be burning books," the attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights also tweeted. An online petition started by the curator of the John Jay exhibit _ which as of Tuesday morning had just 878 signatures _ declared: "Burning art is something done by fascist and terrorist regimes _ but not by the American people."
Attorney Ramzi Kassem, whose clients include some of the prison's most prolific artists, described the idea of archiving rather than destroying the works of art as a cynical move.
"They're still going to redact the art out of existence. They're just not going to burn it because that looks bad," he told the Herald.
"But if no one gets to see the art, they might as well be incinerating it," he added. "Guantanamo has always been about dehumanizing its prisoners and erasing them. This is only the latest example."
In contrast, Federal Bureau of Prisons policy lets inmates mail "arts and hobbycraft" to family, give it to certain visitors and sometimes display it in public space, if it meets the warden's standard of taste.
At Guantanamo, art classes were among the first programs offered to the captives in the later years of the Bush administration as commanders explored ways to distract detainees who had spent years in single-cell lockup, taunting or throwing filth at their guards. Students would be shackled to the floor by an ankle inside a cellblock and draw still-life displays or copy a picture set up by an Arabic linguist tasked to teach art.
Commanders called it the prison's most popular, best attended program and would display copies of original art in a prison storage facility for books. Some showed seascapes and scenes from the home countries of the captives because, their attorneys said, the detainees knew it would be forbidden to show life at Guantanamo.
Two different paintings on display at the John Jay exhibit showed the Titanic. A lawyer said the detention center had permitted prisoners to watch the 1997 disaster epic whose theme song is "My Heart Will Go On," a source of inspiration for the captive artists.
The art program had been such a point of pride at the prison that instructors posted copies of the work on the walls of a library storage facility, and journalists being escorted through the prison were encouraged to photograph it.
Before this month's prohibition on releases, the practice of clearing works of art for lawyers had become so common that Guantanamo prison staff recently printed a form for attorneys to submit each piece, and were issued a tracking number.
Earlier this month prison spokeswoman Navy Cmdr. Anne Leanos would not confirm that detention center management was intending to incinerate the art, or how. At Guantanamo through the years, documents that were considered classified or containing personally protected information were routinely stashed in an official Department of Defense "Burn Bag" and incinerated.
Leanos would not say whether any detainee art had been destroyed in light of the new policy.
"Detainee art is all accounted for and cataloged in accordance with procedures," she said via email from Guantanamo. The art is "processed in accordance with policy guidance and operational requirements."
