Although not all of the images of the abuses at Abu Ghraib have been made public (the US government has appealed a federal judge’s ruling to release the withheld photographs and videos, for which the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2003), the ones that were have led lawyer Susan Burke and Daniel Heyman, an artist and RISD faculty member, to seek justice for Iraqi detainees who were tortured and abused in US custody.
Many have come to associate the torture at Abu Ghraib with one image in particular: a hooded man standing submissively on a box with his arms mercifully raised and electrical wires attached to his wrists. There are actually two different photographs of a hooded man on a box. Haj Ali Shallal Abbas has said he is the man in one of them. Burke — the lead attorney in a class-action lawsuit for Haj Ali and more than 1000 Iraqi detainees against two US corporate contractors — confirms this. The companies, CACI International and Titan Corporation, were named in a military report as having employees working on translation and interrogation contracts at Abu Ghraib and other prisons and detention centers in Iraq. Both deny the suit’s allegations of conspiracy to profit from the torture and mistreatment of detainees in Iraq.
Burke will be in Providence on Sunday, January 22 (from 2-4 pm at 30 North Main Street, Room 212, above the RISD Campus Store) to speak about the case. Also slated for discussion is an upcoming fact-finding trip to the Middle East that she’ll be making with Heyman, who will observe her interviews for an ongoing series of paintings and prints about the torture scandal. Heyman says his work is a vehicle to express the distress he feels about the US occupation of Iraq, and to encourage people to think more closely about the administration’s policies.
The prospect of meeting the people behind the Abu Ghraib photographs — including Haj Ali, whose iconic image features in several of Heyman’s works — is something Heyman says he doesn’t know how to fully prepare for. “These people are famous for something incredibly horrible that happened to them,” he says. “Basically, it’s about me going there to listen [to their testimonies]. It forces me to put my artwork where my mouth is.”
Heyman also sees his work as part of the larger tradition of artists bearing witness to the issues of their times. “Sometimes,” he writes in an e-mail message, “the actors in events are not in the best position to bear witness to their own distress; the view that an artist can bring from the outside can help clarify issues that those in the middle may not be able to see.”
