Exactly four months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, a photographer held a camera above a brand-new barbed wire fence and snapped a photo of 20 inmates on their knees, wearing orange uniforms, handcuffed, masked and headfirst. low.
The image sparked a heated discussion about what the United States was doing in a prison at the naval base at Guantanamo, which continues to operate to this day. And it has become one of the most enduring and damaging symbols of American detention policy in the 21st century.
But an important element was lost over time in the collective memory: the photo was not leaked, revealing a torture that was not intended for the public eye. It was taken by a US Navy photographer and intentionally released by the Department of Defense.
“I did exactly what I was told to do,” says Shane T. McCoy. “I was tasked with documenting Guantánamo. I had to photograph it. And I couldn’t help but publicize the photo.”
It was January 11, 2002. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, allies had detained hundreds of suspected al Qaeda fighters and members and turned them over to US forces. The CIA had not yet created its network of secret prisons. The abuse scandal of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq would take years to erupt.
And a US Air Force cargo plane had taken the first prisoners to the base in southeastern Cuba — the “least worst place” for the mission, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. McCoy, then a noncommissioned officer in the Navy, was tasked with photographing for the elite Combat Photographers unit the opening day of the so-called Camp X-Ray.
Over time, the US would end up holding around 780 prisoners at the remote base. In a matter of months, after the first 300 prisoners had been moved, the Pentagon had erected rows of crude cells made out of shipping containers. Later, the Armed Forces built an air-conditioned prison that now houses the last 39 inmates.
To the chagrin of a succession of military commanders, the image of those first 20 men on their knees has not been forgotten.
Newspapers and magazines regularly publish it again in articles about the prison, the Guantánamo base and the war on terror. Protesters reenact the photo. Islamic State fighters dressed hostages in orange clothes before executing them.
The image has become something so ubiquitous and emblematic that not everyone knows it was taken at Guantánamo, a prison that the George W. Bush administration turned into a model detention operation.
In a recent episode of the “60 Minutes” program about a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked a government document, the photo released by US forces occupied the screen to illustrate the idea that the government has resorted to secrecy “to hide wrongdoing – for example, the use of torture in the war on terror”.
“[Como cada pessoa vê a imagem depende] his political stance, his awareness of Guantánamo and what happened there, and his empathy. It depends on whether someone in your family has been in prison at some point,” says Anne Wilkes Tucker, former curator at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
“It will likely be played and reinterpreted forever. It’s so rich in content, capable of prompting totally opposing interpretations, from ‘we got them’ to ‘more than half of them are likely to be innocent’.”
McCoy, 47, is now a photographer for the Department of Justice. He remembers that January 11 was a long one. He’d shared the job with another Navy photographer and, after a coin flip, ended up documenting the men waiting in a makeshift outdoor complex to be registered. In the end, he chose about a hundred images, wrote captions for each one, and sent them to Washington.
A week later, requests from the press arrived at the Pentagon asking for transparency in the detention operation in Cuba, still in its initial phase. Grainy footage, taken with night-vision cameras, had been broadcast from Afghanistan showing American soldiers leading ragged, hooded prisoners.
“The problem was that the Geneva Convention specifically prohibits detainees from being exposed to ridicule or public humiliation,” Donald Rumsfeld’s spokeswoman Victoria Clarke wrote in her memoir “Lipstick on a Pig.” ), 2006. To “calm down some of our critics,” she obtained permission and released five photos.
People at the Pentagon saw the photo of anonymous prisoners being held safely, an image that met the requirements of the Geneva Convention. In the world, she was perceived by some people as cruel; they saw degradation, subjugation, and sensory deprivation.
“It was a case of visual illiteracy on the part of the military,” says Fred Ritchin, a former professor of photography at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and dean emeritus of the International Center for Photography. “It seems that an effort was made to show the good guys arresting those who might have been considered the bad guys, thinking they were doing it in a dignified way. Other people didn’t see it that way.”
Both McCoy and Clarke said the Pentagon was silent because it didn’t better explain what was happening in the image.
“The photo showed a very small slice of what was happening at Guantánamo, without revealing the whole cake,” says McCoy. “It was like taking a few words out of context” and creating an alternate narrative.
He said the prisoners were kneeling with their legs crossed “so they couldn’t get up quickly and run away. McCoy adds that he has seen officers place detainees on the floor in that same position.
Hats and gloves were used to protect prisoners from the cold on the cargo plane used to get them out of Afghanistan, where it was winter. The fully shaded glasses and earmuffs were there to keep would-be enemies from communicating and possibly plotting attacks. Blue masks were supposed to protect them against the possible transmission of tuberculosis.
Without a proper explanation, McCoy says, you just see “an image that made people angry.”
“I am of the opinion that people should always be able to see most of what the government is doing,” says the photographer. “The fact that I recorded a little piece of that history doesn’t bother me. If things have changed for the better, wonderful. I’ve never witnessed mistreatment of any kind.”
At the time, Donald Rumsfeld tried to repair the damage by saying that the detainees were in transit and were not being held in those conditions. He said the release of the images was “probably unfortunate,” and the Pentagon stopped distributing them — but the major news outlets had already done so.
McCoy learned of the reaction to his photos and called his mother. “I told her that I had caused an international incident. She said, ‘I’m proud of you.’ She knew I was just doing my job.”
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