fled Mosul for his life in February. In August, as the U.S. was resuming airstrikes in Iraq, he helped me understand ISIS and what is happening in his home city. Granta has my interview with him here.
Anyone concerned about government surveillance
should watch this riveting debate before the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the ACLU’s challenge to the NSA’s dragnet collection of our telephone call records.
NPR All Things Considered, 5/4/2013
It’s time to honor those who refused to torture.
Jameel Jaffer and I have an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times urging President Obama to recognize the men and women in the military and intelligence services who refused to torture. The op-ed appears here, and was reprinted in several publications including Stars and Stripes. If you like this idea, please pass it on.
The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post 9/11 Torture Program
“Indispensable in this time of affliction when torture is justified and even celebrated by those who were elected to uphold the law rather than to flaunt it. Indispensable because of the array of precise information this book includes, but especially because Larry Siems stays true and bears witness to the heartache and devastation that torture creates not only among victims but also among those who interrogate and will be haunted forever by what they did, by what so many bystanders allowed them to do.” — Ariel Dorfman
“I thought I knew the account of American torture post 9/11. I didn’t. Don’t think you do until you have read Siems’ book. He threads together strands from thousands of official documents and gives the reader a compelling, page turning story of illegality at the very top and the cruelty imposed on victims at the very bottom. You will come away from this book knowing what Siems learned: the excuses, justifications and claims of legality for torture were an immoral fraud and that torture begets torture. The Torture Report forcefully reminds us that cleansing our country from torture’s inhumanity is an absolute imperative.” — Michael Ratner, president, Center for Constitutional Rights
Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 government documents relating to abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the “war on terror,” brought to light by Freedom of Information Act litigation. As the lead author of the ACLU’s report on these documents, Larry Siems was in a unique position to chronicle who did what, to whom and when. This book, written with the pace and intensity of a thriller, serves as a tragic reminder of what happens when commitments to law, common sense, and human dignity are cast aside, when it becomes difficult to discern the difference between two groups intent on perpetrating extreme violence on their fellow human beings.
To order The Torture Report, click here.
From The Guardian, 8/12/14
Guantánamo prisoner to publish ‘harrowing’ memoirs
Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s diary is set to lift the lid on treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba
by Alison Flood, Tuesday 12 August 2014, Guantanamo Bay, Behind barbed wire–Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who has been detained in Guantánamo since 2002 despite never having been charged with a crime by the US, is to publish an account of his experiences next year, detailing the multiple forms of torture to which he has been subjected and “shatter[ing]” the secrecy that surrounds the Cuban prison.
Slahi’s book, which has just been acquired at auction, is the first diary to be released by a still-imprisoned Guantánamo detainee, said publisher Canongate. Written in 2005, in his segregation cell, it started out [more]
From The Los Angeles Times, 8/12/14
A ‘terrifying’ Guantanamo prison memoir coming in 2015
by Hector Tobar, August 12, 2014–Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been described by one former Guantanamo prosecutor as the “Forrest Gump” of the Guantanamo detainees. A slight and frenetic man, he seems to have known, or met, or crossed paths with key Al Qaeda figures. But it isn’t clear that he’s ever done anything wrong.
Slahi turned himself in to the authorities in his native Mauritania in 2001, was later handed over to the United States, and has been in custody ever since, though never charged with a crime. He’s still being held in Guantanamo–where he has [more]
From the Christian Science Monitor, 8/12/14
‘Guantanamo Diary,’ the first Gitmo account by a detainee still imprisoned, will be published
By Husna Haq, August 12, 2014–Canongate has just announced that it will publish “Guantanamo Diary,” the prison memoirs of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the first Gitmo account to be released by a detainee still imprisoned at the camp.
“Guantanamo Diary” will be published simultaneously around the world on Jan. 20, 2015 as part of an international campaign to free Slahi, who has been held at the camp since 2002 despite never having been charged with a crime. Little, Brown has acquired the US rights to the book, the Bookseller has reported.
The memoir details the harrowing conditions to which Slahi was subject, including [more]
CBC, “Q,” 5/8/13
From The Nation, 8/13/12
For Real: Torture American Style (Review of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program)
by Peter C. Baker
On October 7, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents related to post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. The request was filed simultaneously with the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. By the following May, no response had been issued, so the ACLU filed a second request, and in June took the government to court in hopes of forcing it to comply. Three months later the ACLU prevailed, and by the end of 2004 the documents were beginning to flow. Since then, well over 130,000 pages have been released and posted to a searchable database on the ACLU website.
The database contains, of course, the now infamous “torture memos”: the arguments, crafted by George W. Bush’s closest legal advisers, that waterboarding and the like were neither torturous nor illegal—and that [more]