Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, recently spoke about his experience at the facility through an Arabic interpreter. Regarding his experience in the growing hunger strike, he said: “I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it…

April 9, 2013:  U.S. government officials have begun contacting the attorneys of inmates at Guantánamo that are being restrained and force-fed with a rubber tube inserted through their nostril. U.S. officials are scurrying to quell the growing hunger strike by restricting media access, inmate’s access to water, and by force-feeding detainees to ensure the strike…

Particularly given its geographic remoteness and public inaccessibility, Guantánamo is both difficult to comprehend and easy to forget about. Before joining the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, I understood GTMO as a product of the ‘War on Terror’ and knew very little about its prior uses.  Over the course of the past year and a half,…

April 4, 2013: As hunger strikes continue to spread throughout the detainee population, foreign governments and international human rights organizations are attempting to send envoys to Guantánamo to ensure prisoners are being treated humanely. Some reports claim as many as 130 out the 166 detainees at Guantánamo are participating in the hunger strike. April 4,…

Nicknamed GTMO, the United States naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has a history that is infamous and yet unknown to most Americans. A new traveling exhibit running April 10 through May 12, 2013 at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Cultural Arts Gallery reveals that history. Developed by more than 100 students from the IU…

March 29, 2013: The International Committee of the Red Cross sent delegates to Guantánamo amid a growing number of protracted hunger strikes. In the past, inmates that protest by refusing have been force fed through a feeding tube inserted into the nose. March 26, 1992: International human rights and health organizations visited Guantánamo as makeshift…

Since its release, the controversial Zero Dark Thirty has been an ongoing source of contention. The film’s depiction of torture in the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has provoked a multitude of responses, largely inconsistent with party politics that have often framed discourse on the War on Terror. It is arguably Zero Dark Thirty’s…

An article recently published in Connection, a magazine of the University of West Florida, interviewed UWF students and former residents of Guantánamo about their involvement in the Guantánamo Public Memory Project. Professor Patrick Moore led the team of students as they collected stories from former GTMO residents to contribute to the Project. As Sarah McCartan, the author…

March 20, 2013: The U.S. military has acknowledged that 21 inmates at Guantánamo are protesting their detention by refusing food. One prisoner said the hunger strike was a result of detainees feeling like they are “living in their graves.” 111 of the 166 inmates at Guantánamo have been unanimously cleared for release or relocation to prisons in…

In 2012, students at 11 universities around the country joined together as part of the Guantánamo Public Memory Project and asked: what can GTMO’s history tell us about what’s happening now—there, and here at home? They dug through historical and visual archives; talked to people who worked there, lived there, or were detained there; and explored…