Category: News and Reviews

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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]

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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]

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From The New York Times Editorial Board, 7/2/2011

Unsung Heroes Who Opposed Torture (Editorial endorsing campaign to honor the heroic dissenters)

New York Times Editorial Board, July 2, 2011–A small gesture can mean a lot. That is the simple but compelling idea animating a drive to gain official honors for the patriots, both civilian and in uniform, who stood up against the Bush administration’s immoral torture policies.

The idea of bestowing honors on these heroes was raised in an April 28 Op-Ed article in The Times by Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union and Larry Siems of the PEN American Center. They said that while senior Bush administration officials approved egregious interrogation and detention practices, [more]