BAN ON RELEASING DETAINEES’ ART LIFTED

The Defense Department has lifted the Trump administration’s ban on the release of artwork made by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, in a recent policy change that allows departing detainees to take their work with them.

Under the new policy, detainees are allowed to take “a practicable quantity of their art” when they leave Guantánamo Bay, Lt. Col. Cesar H. Santiago, a Pentagon spokesman, said by email.

He declined to define “practicable quantity” but said the Defense Department still considers the artwork to be “the property of the U.S. government.”

Santiago also declined to say when the new policy was adopted.

The prison imposed the ban in late 2017, after an art exhibit in New York called “Ode to the Sea” struck a nerve at the Pentagon. It featured seascapes, model ships and other works by current and former Guantánamo detainees, and its website offered an email address for people “interested in purchasing art from these artists.”

The Defense Department, for the first time, declared the artwork government property. A spokesman said officials “were not previously aware that detainee artwork was being sold to third parties.”

Before that, the prison had permitted lawyers for the detainees to take their clients’ art off the U.S. Navy base — after a security screening that analyzed it for secret messages with national security implications. In the instance of some model ships made by a Yemeni, troops went so far as to make and study an X-ray of it. Some detainees transferred off the base had also been allowed until then to bring their works of art with them.

Defense lawyers protested the ban but never mounted an intellectual property challenge in federal court to resolve it.

The Pentagon’s concession comes at an important moment. Of the 34 men who are currently held at Guantánamo, 20 have been cleared for transfer with security arrangements. None of them have been charged with a crime. Among them are many men who spent their later years in custody painting, drawing and creating sculptures, some in art classes with one ankle shackled to the floor. Some have amassed huge collections of their work.