Today, marks the 20 years since the US opened the extralegal military prison and torture facility at Guantánamo.
As many of you know this is an issue that has been dear to my heart for a long time. With this in mind, today, I am humbled and excited to share Remaking the Exceptional a six episode podcast Amber Ginsburg, Nate Sandburg, and I have been working on for the past year and half.
Through the voices of torture survivors and activists, the Remaking the Exceptional podcast highlights connections between policing and incarceration in Chicago and the human rights violations of the Global War on Terror, while also celebrating the struggle for justice and reparations.
The setting for this first episode, “Tea, Tenderness, and Torture” is inside current Guantánamo Prisoner Badr Ahmed’s drawing of a table set for tea with no one there. We enter Ahmed’s drawing to join an imagined gathering of Chicago police torture survivors and Guantánamo torture survivors over tea. Connections emerge as Anthony Holmes, Moazzam Begg, Kilroy Watkins, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Ronnie Kitchen, Sabri al-Qurashi, La Tanya Jenifor-Sublett, and Mansoor Adayfi introduce themselves and speak about their experiences.
Listen on the Tea Project website or Soundcloud.
Image caption: Badr Ahmed, Untitled, 2015
