Dawoodi Bohra Forum

‘Guantánamo Diary,’ by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

On or about Sept. 11, 2001, American character changed. What Americans had proudly flaunted as “our highest values” were now judged to be luxuries that in a new time of peril the country could ill afford. Justice, and its cardinal principle of innocent until proven guilty, became a risk, its indulgence a weakness. Asked recently about an innocent man who had been tortured to death in an American “black site” in Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not hesitate. “I’m more concerned,” he said, “with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.” In this new era in which all would be sacrificed to protect the country, torture and even murder of the innocent must be counted simply “collateral damage.”

“Guantánamo Diary” is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be that collateral damage. One fall day 13 years ago Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist, received a visit at his house in Noakchott, Mauritania, from two officers summoning him to come answer questions at the country’s intelligence ministry. “Take your car,” one of the men told him, as Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and his aunt. “We hope you can come back today.” Listening to these words, Slahi’s mother fixed her eyes on her son. “It is the taste of helplessness,” he writes, “when you see your beloved fading away like a dream and you cannot help him. . . . I would watch both my mom and my aunt praying in my rearview mirror until we took the first turn and I saw my beloved ones disappear.”

That was Nov. 20, 2001. Slahi’s mother has since died. Her son has never returned. He had begun, that fall day two months after 9/11, what he calls his “endless world tour,” courtesy of the various American national security bureaucracies, traveling, after a week of interrogation in Mauritania, via “extraordinary rendition” to a black site in Jordan, where he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, for eight months; thence he is flown, blindfolded, shackled and diapered, to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, for two weeks of interrogation; and finally, to Guantánamo, where he suffered months of strictest isolation, weeks of sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and sound, and other elaborate tortures set out in a “special plan” approved personally by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — and where he remains to this day. He composed these memoirs in his isolation cell in the summer of 2005, and a six-year legal battle has finally brought them to us. Written in the colloquial if limited English he picked up during his captivity, its pages disfigured with thousands of pitch-black “redactions” courtesy of the American intelligence agents who play such major parts, the work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humor that the Dostoyevsky of “The House of the Dead” would have recognized and embraced.

READ FULL ARTICLE :-

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/books ... below&_r=0

‘Guantanamo Diary’: An Account of Justice Detained

Casualties in the wake of war on terror and blind apprehensions in the name of detaining ‘terrorists’ have started to come out in the form of first person narratives. What makes Mohammsdou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary stand out from similar titles like My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (2008) is its autobiographical nature, though author’s sketches have undergone editing by Larry Siems.

Therefore, Guantanamo Diary’ can be termed as the first narrative to be written by a detainee. Hailing from Mauritania, Mohammsdou Ould Slahi had been held in Guantanamo Bay since August 2002. It was from the detention center that he wrote the book. The book, diaries to be specific, narrates the story of Slahi’s experiences of torture, threats and humiliation that he encountered in his detention for almost thirteen years. It recounts the journey of detention from Mouritania to Senegal, from Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan to Jordan and finally to Guantanamo.

Though the book was written in solitary confinement in 2005, the manuscript was held in Washington for seven years before it was released to the public.

The book narrates a story when a new interrogator was authorized to ask him about what he knows of another terror suspect’s travel to Iraq in 2003. When he told the interrogator that he was held in prison since 2001, so it is unlikely that he could have such information. Having heard this, the interrogator smiled and said that she was ordered to ask this question. The attention given to Mr Slahi’s memoir owes to his narration of suffering during a special interrogation which lasted for months in 2003 and was sanctioned by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the then secretary of Defence. The treatment meted out to him included sleep deprivation, loud music, fettering for days in a freezing cell, drowning in ice water, beatings, threats etc.

Mr Slahi narrates how he was forced to take a decision to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear in order to escape from ruthless torture.

Guantanamo Diary is not just a record of a denial of Justice, but an intense personal memoir, a document of great historical importance.

Full Article :

http://interactive.net.in/guantanamo-di ... -detained/

American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says

WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists.

The report is the first to examine the association’s role in the interrogation program. It contends, using newly disclosed emails, that the group’s actions to keep psychologists involved in the interrogation program coincided closely with efforts by senior Bush administration officials to salvage the program after the public disclosure in 2004 of graphic photos of prisoner abuse by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program,” the report’s authors conclude.

The involvement of health professionals in the Bush-era interrogation program was significant because it enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret opinions that the program was legal and did not constitute torture, since the interrogations were being monitored by health professionals to make sure they were safe.

The Bush administration relied more heavily on psychologists than psychiatrists or other health professionals to monitor many interrogations, at least in part because the psychological association was supportive of the involvement of psychologists in interrogations, a senior Pentagon official explained publicly in 2006.

The American Psychological Association “clearly supports the role of psychologists in a way our behavioral science consultants operate,” said Dr. William Winkenwerder, then the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, describing to reporters why the Pentagon relied more on psychologists than psychiatrists at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “The American Psychiatric Association, on the other hand, I think had a great deal of debate about that, and there were some who were less comfortable with that.”

By June 2004, the Bush administration’s torture program was in trouble. The public disclosure of the images of prisoners being abused at the Abu Ghraib prison earlier that year prompted an intense debate about the way the United States was treating detainees in the global war on terror, leading to new scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s so-called enhanced interrogation program, which included sleep deprivation and waterboarding, or simulated drowning. Congress and the news media were starting to ask questions, and there were new doubts about whether the program was legal.

On June 4, 2004, the C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet, signed a secret order suspending the agency’s use of the enhanced techniques, while asking for a policy review to make sure the program still had the Bush administration’s backing.

READ FULL ARTICLE :-

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/re ... -news&_r=1