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Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Americas - US drops 'enemy combatant' term - 0 views

  • The administration of Barack Obama, the US president, has dropped the term "enemy combatant" as its basis for holding terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay
  • the new detention policy does not rely on the president's powers as military commander in chief to hold terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.
  • Instead, the justice department said: "It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. "It provides that individuals who supported al-Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial.
Ed Webb

The Pulitzer Problem | Rafia Zakaria - 0 views

  • Taub’s article was published in 2019, slightly more than four years after Salahi himself published his best-selling Guantánamo Diary, which notably did not win a Pulitzer Prize. Large parts of “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret”—awarded a Pulitzer this week in the Feature Writing category—particularly those that deal with Salahi, rehash with the customary “he wrote” what had already been written. Yet while the content may be mostly the same, the purpose is different. Taub, unlike Salahi, is out to deliver absolution to his American reader: casting Steve Wood as an integral player is one part of this; leaving the still-constrained reality of Salahi’s present (he cannot leave tiny Mauritania) to the very end of the piece is another.
  • Credibility and journalistic heroism, as each year’s prizes show, reside in the pages of prestige publications; the New York Times and the Washington Post are mainstays, and since the prizes were first opened up to include magazines in 2015, The New Yorker is as well. No truth is really a truth, particularly a courageous truth, until it appears in their pages. The brown man, the accused terrorist, the actual torture survivor Mohamedou Ould Salahi may have written a great book. But the definitive story about “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the one penned by Taub.
  • Such hefty institutional backing has a relationship to truth-telling and to truth creation. It doesn’t matter that Taub, per his own admission, did not speak Arabic, that he seems to have rehashed a large chunk of his Pulitzer-winning article from an already published book, or even that he spent only a week in Mauritania where Salahi now lives. His article legitimizes a process through which the Western liberal frame is conflated with the lack of any frame at all and applied to foreign places or people through the roving foreign correspondent. Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him. In a story about how a system of silencing allowed the most shameful cruelties to happen, considering the architecture of truth and silence seems important.
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  • Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.
  • “If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”
  • Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.
Zach Hartnett

Freed Guantanamo detainee says U.S. behind his torture | Reuters - 0 views

  • I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways -- all orchestrated by the United States government."
  • he was tortured and abused by Pakistani intelligence officers in the presence of a British intelligence agent.
    • Zach Hartnett
       
      At least we know we can count on Pakistan.
  • Morocco on a CIA flight
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  • Morocco has denied holding him and the U.S. government has denied that he was subjected to "extraordinary rendition."
  • I realized in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence," he said. "I had met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I had hoped would come to my rescue, I later realized, had allied themselves with my abusers."
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