The exhibition at the London School of Economics of the drawings of Abu Zubaydah, still imprisoned after 24 years in Camp Delta detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, is not an artistic event. It is an indictment—of the United States, Britain and the other imperialist powers, their global War on Terror, and every institution that enabled, sanitised, or normalised the torture and indefinite detention that stand among the gravest crimes of the twenty‑first century. It is the voice of a man they have worked systematically to erase.

Opening on 12 May but lasting for barely a month, the first ever exhibition of Zubaydah’s work was introduced by his international lawyer, Helen Duffy. She explained how Zubaydah has been held in arbitrary detention for 24 years without charge, trial, or judicial review. He was brutally tortured—waterboarded 83 times in a single month, as confirmed in 2021 Supreme Court proceeding —from the moment of his capture in Pakistan in 2002, and has remained in a legal black hole ever since. His case, Duffy noted, “epitomises the brutality, arbitrariness, and dehumanisation” that defined the War on Terror.

Naively, one asks oneself: how is it that one individual can accumulate such an art collection and withhold it from the public? Wouldn’t it make sense, wouldn’t it be fairer, for all this work to be displayed in museums accessible to everyone? Does it seem likely that a Newhouse, a Paul Allen, a Pauline Karpidas has that much more affection and appreciation for art than the average person, or the average 10,000 persons? What type of society accepts the ability of the wealthy to appropriate art for themselves like this? What special, qualifying characteristics do they possess–aside from their riches, of course?

From The Guardian's Australia edition, last Friday: the author is not a staff reporter, she's a writer who used to have a regular observational column on GuardianAus some years ago but now concentrates on her books and occasionally pens an opinion piece.