What could've been an inspired piece of damning satire turns out to be another back-door psyops bomb: a little bit of light criticism of Guantanamo, "not interested in the details of Guantanamo," keeping it light and fluffy in the final outcome...Duuuude.
Guantánamo, Evil and Zany in Pop Culture
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
This spring, the stoner screwball movie of 2004, “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” will get a sequel. This time, because of some unfortunate confusion on an airplane between a “bong” and a “bomb,” our slacker antiheroes are shipped off to the moviemakers’ idea of the worst prison imaginable.
On April 25, on a screen near you: “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantánamo Bay.”
Seriously, dude.
Six years after the detention camp opened on Cuban shores, officials in Washington continue to consider its fate. The charges filed last Monday against six detainees in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks are renewing international focus on the prison and the policy discussion about whether it is part of the solution or part of the problem.
But in popular culture, the debate about Guantánamo is largely over, as suggested by a look at a growing number of novels, nonfiction books, movies, plays and other forms of expression.
“Whether it’s America’s Devil’s Island or not, that’s how people are going to keep thinking about it,” said Dan Fesperman, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who set his 2006 mystery novel “The Prisoner of Guantánamo” at the base.
Harold and Kumar’s escape is only the latest cultural road trip through the detention center on Cuba’s southeast corner. And in most of them, Guantánamo is an eerie outpost, with scorpions, five-foot iguanas and banana rats — rodents the size of small dogs.
The image of a forbidding prison camp is not entirely false. But it is not the picture Bush administration officials would prefer to emphasize. They portray Guantánamo Bay as a clean and modern detention camp, where humane treatment of terror suspects is the rule.
But Guantánamo is no longer just a naval station or even just a detention center. It is an idea in worldwide culture — in more than 20 books and half a dozen movies and plays, with more coming out every month.
It has become shorthand for hopeless imprisonment and sweltering isolation. “The strange new Alcatraz,” one writer calls it, “the gulag of our times.”
The portraits of Guantánamo run the gamut, including sober lawyers’ books and contentious accounts by former inmates, military insiders and other critics, and literary novels, a book of detainees’ poetry and farce.
The routine of an Irish comedian, Abie Philbin Bowman, assumes that if Jesus were to show up before American immigration officials, as a Middle Eastern man with a beard and no real job, he would be hustled off to Guantánamo.
“Putting Jesus in Guantánamo was the ultimate symbol,” said Mr. Philbin Bowman, a graduate student who has taken his Guantánamo act to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and to London, Massachusetts and Lahore, Pakistan.
“The beard and the hair,” Mr. Philbin Bowman continued, “and the orange jumpsuit and the wire mesh, which is optional I suppose; you put those elements together and people see it and they get the idea.”
Whether the approach is comedic or grave, like books that describe documented interrogation techniques including having a detainee perform dog tricks, much of the work is bleak and negative.
In some portrayals, some of the men and women stationed there drink too much. In others, guards are doused in urine and feces thrown by the inmates. These descriptions, too, are not necessarily false.
But it is a matter of emphasis, said Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, who runs the camp for the Pentagon. In an interview, Admiral Buzby said that countering what he called preconceptions about Guantánamo was “probably the biggest challenge that I face.”
The focus on Guantánamo as a creative subject can lead to distortions, Admiral Buzby said. “It’s as if someone turned up the gain on our life to make it sound really bad.”
Some writers say it may be too late for anyone to change perceptions. “That one word — Guantánamo — has come to symbolize so much,” said Michelle Shephard, a reporter for The Toronto Star, whose book “Guantánamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr,” is scheduled to be published next month. Mr. Khadr was first detained when he was 15.
In retrospect, it was probably inevitable that Guantánamo would be an irresistible subject. It is an international cause set on a secretive, fenced military base next to the shimmering Caribbean. Echos of the cold war practically bounce off the arid Cuban hills.
Dorothea Dieckmann, a German writer whose novel “Guantánamo” was released in English last year, said she felt compelled to write about the detention camp as soon as she learned of it.
“You have a bizarre and surrealistic place in the heart of an enemy’s country. You have the Caribbean,” she said. “It is already a novelistic setting. It’s half fantasy. It’s half horror.”
The voices of the detainees seem to have special impact, in part because the men held at Guantánamo are cut off from much of the world, with the Pentagon controlling most of what is known about their time there and their reasons for being held.
H. Bruce Franklin, a cultural historian at Rutgers University at Newark who has written about American prison literature, said writing about confinement often had a “subversive effect.”
The stories of prisoners, Professor Franklin said, can challenge the institutions that hold them by transforming them from abstractions to flesh-and-blood characters.
In her freshman seminar at the University of Denver this fall, Cecily Pirozzoli, an 18-year-old business major, read “Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak,” a slender volume edited by one of the detainees’ lawyers, Marc Falkoff.
Mr. Falkoff said his goal was partly to humanize the detainees. One poem asks: “What kind of spring is this, where there are no flowers?”
Ms. Pirozzoli said the book gave her insights into Guantánamo that she had not gained from news coverage. “I could feel what these people were feeling,” she said.
Pentagon officials simmer at the portrayals of Guantánamo, calling some of them propaganda. But that message has a difficult time catching up to the works themselves.
Sometimes, the efforts to counter the impact of literary accounts do little more than provoke new disputes over what the elusive truth at Guantánamo may be.
In Germany, the memoir “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo” has made Murat Kurnaz, a detainee who was released in 2006, something of a celebrity.
“Nothing in the camp is what it seems,” says the English translation of Mr. Kurnaz’s book, due to be published April 1. “Nothing is the way the U.S. Army says it is and as it has been reported, filmed and photographed by journalists.”
The claim undercuts one of the Pentagon’s main assertions about Guantánamo. Officials say it is as open as possible — “transparent,” is a favored description. Hundreds of reporters from around the world have participated in military tours.
Mr. Kurnaz wrote that reporters were shown fake cells and playgrounds littered with soccer balls that guards collected as soon as journalists departed.
When read Mr. Kurnaz’s assertions, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon dismissed it as a deception of its own.
“Al Qaeda operatives,” Commander Gordon said, “are trained to make false accusations about the conditions of their detention, in order to garner public sympathy.”
Mr. Kurnaz’s lawyer, Baher Azmy, called that an “Alice in Wonderland” response.
Mr. Azmy provided a recently declassified 2006 memorandum by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “There is no information that Kurnaz received any military training or is associated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda,” it said.
In the real world of public policy and news accounts, the truth may be less clear than either side claims.
But when it comes to the cultural image of Guantánamo, that often-inconclusive sparring is frequently treated as yesterday’s news.
The “Harold and Kumar” writer-director team, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, suggested in an interview that their script did not worry too much about Guantánamo’s actual details. [note: The writer & director have no prior credits to determine their political leanings]
Mr. Schlossberg said their portrayal of Guantánamo involved darkness and dirt. They filmed at an abandoned prison in Shreveport, La., which Mr. Schlossberg described as “really creepy.”
“Our vision for Guantánamo,” he said, “was a place that doesn’t even feel like America.”
by yathrib » Fri Feb 15, 2008 9:06 pm 
