10 Sketches From Inside Guantanamo Bay’s Military Courtroom



Few artists in the world can boast that their work was critiqued by the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Janet Hamlin remembers the stare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave her to earn her that dubious honor.
It was 2008, and the man known as KSM was trying to plead guilty before a military judge. Hamlin, a freelance courtroom sketch artist from Nyack, New York, had taken her charcoals and oversize board to Guantanamo Bay to draw him for CNN. Her impression would amount to the first image the world would have of the infamous terrorist since his 2003 capture, when he was snapped in a ratty T-shirt that showed his back hair. And KSM cared about how he looked.
“He would turn and pose — a deliberate turn, facing me, holding very steady,” Hamlin remembers. Yet as she learned during a courtroom break, KSM didn’t like how Hamlin drew his nose. “Sure enough, he was holding [the sketch], frowning, in the window,” she continues. His lawyers mentioned to her that KSM wanted her to consult an FBI most-wanted photo. “That original nose,” Hamlin says, “is buried under layers of pastel.”
No one has seen the confusing, often-revised process for post-9/11 war crimes trials like Hamlin. Since 2006, she’s made the trek to Guantanamo Bay at least 25 times, all to sit in the secured courtroom for hours on end, providing almost all of the few images from Gitmo that the public sees. Even the few reporters who cover the so-called military commissions most often prefer to watch them over closed-circuit television at the decrepit airplane hanger that serves as Guantanamo’s media center. Hamlin is in the courtroom, sketching away. I first met her at Guantanamo in 2010, as she captured the pained expression on the face of Omar Khadr, Guantanamo’s youngest resident, while his prosecutors showed a video of him as a smiling young teenager in Afghanistan playing with a bomb detonator.
That sketch is one of around 160 contained in Hamlin’s forthcoming book, Sketching Guantanamo. Published by Fantagraphics, the book is more than just a series of drawings from one of the world’s most infamous courtrooms. It’s a visual log of the form of justice — or injustice — meted out at one of the world’s most infamous places.
“This is a very historic series of hearings to me,” Hamlin says. “To be capturing that visually feels very gratifying.”
Presented above is a preview of Hamlin’s work in Sketching Guantanamo, scheduled for publication in October. (The stickers on her sketches indicate that they’ve been approved for release by military censors.) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants face yet another round of pretrial hearings April 22. When next KSM steps into the courtroom, Hamlin and her sketchbook will be there with him. And by now, she knows how to draw his nose. LINK