Screening

A public reading of transcripts selected from the 558 Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005.

The five-hour reading will feature approximately 110 pages of tribunal transcripts—a small fraction of the total— as a gesture of making these tribunals public, with all their fabrications, inconsistencies, and contradictions. It will be recorded live and will become part of a collaborative project called Scripts by Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, the 2006/2007 Vera List Center Fellows at The New School.

Featuring multiple media, Scripts responds to the new questions and changed conditions that have arisen since March 2003. The project, of which this reading is just one element, considers the processes by which we become, are placed into and/or refuse to be certain kinds of “individuals”—artists, soldiers, students, journalists, prisoners, detainees, citizens, Iraqis, Europeans, Americans, and so on. The entire project will be exhibited at Documenta12 in Kassel/Germany.

The Combatant Status Review Tribunals:
After the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that prisoners held at Guantánamo had certain minimal rights, the Department of Defense set up The Combatant Status Review Tribunals, or CSRTs as they are known. The tribunals were additionally designed by the Department of Defense to address Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions and to create a forum for detainees to contest their status as “enemy combatants.” During each tribunal, the U.S. government presents unclassified accusations against the detainee, and the accused is then permitted to rebut these specific charges. The detainee is given personal representation but not standard legal counsel; he is not allowed to see, and therefore rebut, classified information, and since usually the bulk of the evidence that provides the basis for “enemy combatant” designation is classified, prisoners are effectively kept from making their cases.

Readers
Kyle de Camp
Kouross Esmaeli
Patricia Hoffbauer
Dan Hurlin
Jesal Kapadia
Lloyd Porter
George Sanchez
Suhail Shadoud