Beyond Guantanamo

We are glad to see that the anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo has mobilized people around the world to protest.

As the world focuses its energies on Guantanamo, points out spy novelist Frederick Forsyth, the US still has a free hand to kidnap people across the world, through its "extraordinary rendition", and increase secrecy of its various other hidden facilities across the globe, including those in Afghanistan.

President Bush claimed last year that the US has shut down its "secret prisons", but this is an absurd claim, given that the very nature of a "secret" prison does not allow for checking or confirmation. And what is to stop the US from opening newer, more secret prisons, and using this "closure" as a ruse?

How will the public ever really know what happened, for example, in the "Salt Pit" secret prison in Afghanistan, or on Diego Garcia, the small island atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean owned by the British?

In order to shed more light on these issues, we would like to draw attention to two projects:

Cage Prisoner's latest work on compiling a list of secret facilities across the world. Their preliminary report details over 120 secret detention facilities. The list includes every continent minus Australia. The map is basic but gives an idea of the extent of the network of secrecy.



Artist/Geographer Trevor Paglen's projects related to militarism, secrecy and specifically rendition are exceptional. After getting an MFA, he enrolled in a Geography PhD at UC-Berkeley, where he has compiled a fascinating body of "surveillance" of the US government's secret military activities. First he began using spectral photography to take legal landscape photos remote North American military bases. His newest projects are related to the extraordinary rendition activities of the CIA. In one installation he calls "Missing Persons" he has put together a list of bogus signatures signed by fake companies the CIA created to transport kidnapped prisoners.



He was also involved in the project called "CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006", which consisted of a gigantic billboard-sized mapping of all of the kidnapping by the CIA since the "War on Terror" "began" in 2001.