When future historians search back in time to "Camp Justice" and the rigidly controlled, tightly censored terrorist trials in Guantánamo, Cuba, they will likely linger over the vivid courtroom sketches of Janet Hamlin. She is an artist who has doggedly drawn courtroom scenes for the past seven years as the lone sketch artist permitted for the news media, holding a kind of visual monopoly for one of the grimmest, most severely limited sources of pictorial information imaginable.
Fantagraphics Books, 2013
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in his camouflage vest.
Ms. Hamlin can only watch and compose from television monitors and windows at the back of the courtroom, far from the front-row seats routinely accorded her at big criminal trials on the American mainland. And every single sketch she makes — from the accused malefactors of 9/11 to the visiting family members of World Trade Center victims — is scrutinized by censors, and sometimes defendants, too, before the military allows public dissemination.
"A constant challenge," Ms. Hamlin says of the censorship that shifts unpredictably with each new team of watchful minders. Everything from a mundane doorway to vaguely silhouetted jurors can be ruled out by one censor, then later allowed by another. She doesn't complain about the difficult conditions, including her living quarters, which consist of a tent that is frigidly air-conditioned to discourage banana rats from invading. She is bolstered by the friendship of the few journalists like Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, who cover every single turn in the proceedings. Ms. Hamlin, who commutes from Brooklyn as the trials wax and wane, is grateful for her rare, if limited, perspective on what one Guantánamo lawyer terms "one of the most bizarre environments on Earth," where the rules and the players shift every day.
Working in pastels, the artist can blur a witness's face when censors require it or even redo a defendant's nose, as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the accused mastermind of 9/11 — demanded after viewing an initial sketch. Rules are vague, but defense lawyers sometimes object successfully. Ms. Hamlin accommodated Mr. Mohammed slightly as a necessary concession to get his image out to the public. She has since learned "what an extremely vain person K.S.M. is," capturing his shifting tastes in hair dye, from his gray beard's sudden turn to henna and later to "something like Hawaiian Punch red." Some defendants loll through the proceedings; K.S.M. seeks fresh opportunities to be heard, getting the judge's permission to wear a camouflage hunting vest to court as a "warrior" defending himself.
Critics of Guantánamo justice have noted that there was far more detailed coverage allowed at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Ms. Hamlin is carefully apolitical about it all in a new book, "Sketching Guantánamo." She is a "visual journalist," she notes, not a polemicist. She is focusing on her coming trip back for the 9/11 trials next year. She is politely begging the Pentagon to give her, finally, a seat inside the courtroom.
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