Part of 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, 19 August 2007, 1 pm, documenta 12 Halle

On 19 August 2007 documenta 12 presented Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064, a five-hour public reading of fifteen tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005. Featured are approximately 110 pages of tribunal transcripts, a small fraction of the material generated by 558 tribunals. This performance is part of the artwork 9 Scripts from a Nation at War by David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer, which is on view at the documenta Halle.

After the United States 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, to provide the appearance of a habeas corpus procedure while, in accordance with Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, allowing 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 legitimate legal counsel; he is not allowed to see, or therefore to rebut, classified information, and because the bulk of the evidence that provides the basis for “enemy combatant” designation is usually classified, prisoners are effectively kept from making their cases.

The sheer volume of transcripts released on the Internet by the Department of Defense has effectively obscured them from public view. Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064 stages an excerpt of these proceedings as a gesture of making these tribunals public, with all their fabrications, inconsistencies and contradictions.

Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064 was originally performed on 11 March 2007 at Judson Memorial Church in New York, presented in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at the New School, New York.

The reading in Kassel is part of the installation 9 Scripts from a Nation at War and was held in German, according to the translation by the team of translators {Grozdana Bulov, Anna Burjak, Margarethe Clausen, Michaela Ripplinger, Katharina Tappeiner, Aurelia Batlogg (editor) and Professor Michèle Kaiser-Cooke (advisor)} of the original CSRT transcripts released by the Department of Defense. The reading took five hours, including breaks.

Readers in Kassel included René Buschow (Amnesty International), Aziz El Berr (language teacher at the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V.) , Thomas Hammer (criminal law attorney), Susanne Jakubczyk (Evangelisches Forum Kassel and art educator at documenta 12), Gudrun Meier (criminal law attorney), Rafaela Pax (Amnesty International), Axel Selbert (labour law attorney) and Dr. Jürgen Sojka (judge).

9 Scripts from a Nation at War is a collaborative project developed over the past two years by David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer. Featuring multiple media, the work responds to the new questions and changed conditions since March 2003. The project 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.

We thank Amnesty International Germany for its friendly support.

Listen to excerpts of this reading in the HR-Podcast here.

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