Among the pale, white walls of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum is a collection by Jenny Holzer titled “Conclusion.” The collection features six pieces, each defined by colorful squares of abstract expressionism superimposed over redacted government documents.
The words “SECRET/NOFORN,” followed by “terrorist group,” can be made out on one of the pieces. The rest of the text that should follow is obscured by a green square. The text on each of the other pieces are likewise obscured by colorful squares.
The collection explores an obvious theme of censorship, but it goes deeper than that too. The juxtaposition of the splash of color against the dark theme and background is reminiscent of American propaganda meant to distract the American people.
The collection’s clearer theme of censorship serves as a critique of the state-sanction censorship exhibited in the United States following 9/11. The aftermath of the attacks led to the rise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” also known as “EITs.”
These techniques refer to methods of torture developed and utilized by the CIA. Though the goal was to create intelligence that would help the United States prevent future terrorist attacks, these techniques simply led to bad intelligence.
To this day, there remains no verified instances of EITs leading to intelligence that prevented an attack. The reason EITs do not work is that a person being tortured will say anything to get the torture to stop, even if only for a moment.
In 2014, the United States Senate released a 525-page summary report on EITs. The report, which was the culmination of a six-year investigation into millions of pages of classified documents, concluded the CIA’s use of EITs were both ineffective and brutal.
