The thing is, Guantánamo is also a naval base, and they're under the delusion - especially the people on the naval side who are not dealing with the prison - that they can just pretend this is an ordinary Caribbean naval base. For them, it's: "Why are you making such a big deal out of the most notorious prison in the world?" It's like if people living near Buchenwald said they wanted to talk about the other lovely things in the region besides the camp.

Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.

Innocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world.

You start like a white blanket and you have to preserve that, and each year that you live chips away at your essential value.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.

I had difficulty being friends with women who hadn't worked in either the sex or beauty industries. I felt like other women sometimes overvalued beauty and sexuality, when in actuality, they're just parts of a job.

The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence.