Excerpt:

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — In September 2002, police in the well-to-do neighborhood of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, in the Pakistani city of Karachi, arrested a man named Ahmed Rabbani.

It had been a year since the September 11 attacks, and the Pakistanis, with the Americans, were rounding up people suspected of al-Qaeda ties.

Rabbani, then in his early thirties, appeared to be connected to Osama bin Laden. When the Pakistanis later arrested Rabbani’s driver, he suggested they check out another address, where cops found Rabbani’s brother, a few other people—and Sega game consoles that had been turned into detonators for explosives, plus passports for twenty members of bin Laden’s family.

Fast-forward to 2004: after bouncing around several CIA black sites, Rabbani was sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The Americans believed he had worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed architect of the September 11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing in 2000—running safe houses, organizing travel plans, tending to wounded al-Qaeda operatives, and building explosive devices, among other things. (Both KSM and al-Nashiri are awaiting trial in Guantanamo.)

But for the next eighteen and a half years, Rabbani was stuck in limbo at Guantanamo—with prosecutors unable to show the military court that he had played a role in September 11 or any other terrorist attacks, and his lawyers unable to convince the court he wouldn’t do so in the future.

It was while he was at Guantanamo that Rabbani discovered his inner artist, as it were.

Back home, he had been (depending on who you asked), a lowly taxi driver or a well-connected operative who spoke Urdu, Arabic, and English. He definitely was not a burgeoning Monet.

But while he was in prison, something happened.

“In the beginning,” Clive Stafford Smith, Rabbani’s lawyer, told The Free Press, “he wasn’t an artist.” Then, slowly, he developed into one. “His art benefited from his suffering,” Stafford Smith said. “That’s true of most artists.”

...

It’s been more than 20 years since George W. Bush opened Guantanamo and 14 years since Barack Obama (on his second full day in office) issued an executive order that it be closed.

But 30 men—of the 780 total who have been detained there—still remain, mostly from Yemen, a few from Libya and Tunisia and elsewhere. Of that, only a dozen reportedly pose any serious national security threat. (The Pentagon, in its statement announcing Rabbani’s release, noted that 18 of the remaining Guantanamo prisoners are eligible for transfer.)

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That just four prisoners have ever been successfully convicted—while nine have died in custody—only deepens this sense of timelessness. This feeling that nothing ever really happens at Guantanamo, that Guantanamo is stuck where it’s been for more than two decades.

As lawyers argued in front of a military judge, reporters and the father of a sailor killed on the USS Cole watched the proceedings from behind a thick pane of glass.

It was at the hearing that Rabbani’s painting of himself with his hands tied behind his back and strung up from a ceiling came up.

When he’d left Guantanamo a few months before, that was one of the paintings Rabbani had been forbidden from taking. But he had described the painting—and the torture, called strappado—to Stafford Smith, who had another artist recreate it. At the hearing, a copy of that secondhand drawing was passed around. Al-Nashiri had been subjected to the same treatment.

During his testimony, Bruce Jessen, one of the two psychologists behind the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” was asked whether the drawing accurately depicted what prisoners had endured. Jessen, looking a little shaken, said, “It was worse.”

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Guantanamo, in other words, is a kind of frozen place—a place that had to be but shouldn’t be, a place for stowing the world’s most dangerous people, and a place that was morally repugnant and becoming even more repugnant the further we drifted away from September 11. It presented America with an existential challenge: what kind of people do this to other people?

...

When I finally spoke with Rabbani—he was in Karachi—he couldn’t believe that, after all these years after his release, no one in Washington so much as acknowledged what he had endured.

“They didn’t apologize, but it’s my right to ask for an apology,” Rabbani told me. “I missed my family’s life, my son’s life, my life—21 years.”

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In late 2017 and early 2018, John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York hosted the first known exhibit of Guantanamo artists. The exhibit, titled Ode to the Sea, featured Rabbani and seven other artists. (In response, President Trump barred detainees from taking their art with them when they were released, arguing the art was U.S. government property.)

In late 2022, some former and current Guantanamo artists sent President Biden an open letter demanding he lift the ban on Gitmo artists taking their art upon release.

In February 2023, days before Rabbani was let go, the White House did just that—but the Defense Department says detainees can take only a “practicable quantity,” whatever that means, and insists the art is still U.S. government property.

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