Link: https://archive.is/5QuDp#selection-143.5-143.117
Ahmed Rabbani, detained as part of America’s war on terror, was released in February. His artworks depict life in detention: a windowless cell, a man hung by his wrists, a force-feeding chair. | In the early days of America’s war on terror, U.S. authorities detained Ahmed Rabbani thinking he was someone else. They soon realized their mistake but later said he himself had facilitated terrorists. Rabbani denies that, and he was never charged with a crime.
● After 18½ years at Guantanamo Bay, he stepped off a plane in Pakistan in February—a free but broken man. Years of hunger strikes and force feeding have left him unable to eat most solid food. “I never, never, ever sleep at night,” he said. “If I fall asleep, I wake back up immediately.”
● Through it all, he said, his only means of escape was art. He began making paintings inside his cell, standing day and night at an easel, sometimes forgetting where he was and what had happened since he was detained in 2002. By the time of his release, he had made hundreds of paintings on canvas and scraps of fabric torn from old prisoner clothing or bedsheets. Art is among the few existing testaments to life inside the Guantanamo Bay facility, which opened a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hold foreign suspects in America’s war on terror. In May, 20 of Rabbani’s paintings were shown at a gallery in the Pakistani city of Karachi. U.S. authorities didn’t allow some works depicting torture and suffering to be taken from Guantanamo, but other artists re-created them from descriptions written by Rabbani’s lawyer.
● He was cleared for release from Guantanamo in October 2021, after a government review board determined he didn’t pose “a continuing significant threat” to national security—standard language accompanying prisoner releases. Rabbani’s lawyer says he should never have been held at all. He says his client was taken by Pakistani authorities who misidentified him and handed him over to U.S. intelligence officers for a $5,000 reward.
