Liminal Documents: Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is a book based project in two volumes. The first, gray volume contains documents establishing the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) process for Guantanamo detainees, the CSRT transcript of detainee ISN 100BZ, and a series of fourteen classified and unclassified government exhibits lettered ‘R.’ The second, orange volume holds documents pertaining to detainee ISN 100BZ— a fabricated Guantanamo detainee of an uncertain, never quite clarified name or nationality— and exhibits labeled with the letter ‘D.’

Over 500+ detainees have gone through the CSRT process since it was first established in the summer of 2004. A few detainees with lawyers have also had public, U.S. court cases and some censored documents from those cases can be found on the internet. The majority of the CSRT case records are not easily, publicly accessible because the actual CSRT process is largely secretive, ostensibly because of its reliance on classified evidence. In the spring of 2007, the Department of Defense placed 14 “high-value detainee” CSRT PDF files and audio recordings on its public website, www.defenselink.mil. Four images of a tribunal room (or tribunal rooms?) accompanied that web posting. Although the files were all REDACTED and the photographs visibly contained no one, they provided a rich resource for previously unknown or unverified information and valuable clues about the internal workings of the CSRT process and its participants.

Those transcripts and four photographs formed the basis for this project.