Information Design: Guantanamo
Posted on May 10, 2008, under Design, Uncategorized.
Gauntanamo Airlines, originally uploaded by BlackLabel251.
So this past semester I took a class called “Visual Explanations and Information Graphics”….yes its wordy…I know. We covered everything from the bane of powerpoint presentations (I will never be able to look at one seriously again) to the perplexity of making gender neutral bathroom signs that are understood by a broad audience. The classed proved to much more interesting than I thought. I came out of it with a different outlook on the way that information is presented to us and I began to realize that there is something beyond bar graphs and pie charts.
For the final project we had to focus on Guantanamo Bay and the questionable/controversial practices and politics involved. I could talk for hours about Guantanamo but I am going to focus on something called “Extraordinary Rendition.” Which is something few people have probably heard about but happens much more often than one would expect.
Extraordinary Rendition allows for the abduction and indefinite detention for persons with suspected ties to terrorism, no matter how unconfirmed or dubious. While in detention, detainees are subject to harsh treatment and interrogation, without the rights of representation, habeas corpus, or those afforded to Prisoner’s of War in the Geneva Conventions.
Prisoners are arrested, forced on to “private” charter planes, and then flown to several different countries and eventually to Guantanamo. Flight plans and routes are obviously kept secret. The only way that we know certain flight paths is through eye witness accounts of tail numbers that were seen at several different airports.
For our project we created a poster that detailed several recorded flight paths in 2003. Countries that have known flight paths are filled in with orange and countries that are involved in rendition but with flight paths that are unknown are filled in with blue. The map illustrates that rendition has many more players than just the United States and Iraq. Countries include The United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Italy, Libya, and Azerbaijan to name a few. Its hard to say how much the leaders of these countries are involved, if even at all. The actual scope of rendition is much larger than what we have shown here, there are many more countries involved that we dont know about.
The final result was 5 feet long and 20 inches high. I will post pictures of it in context in the gallery soon. For more information on rendition check out the wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States
Here you can find links to several investigations.
For a bigger version of the map click here:
