US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites by Mark Danner

[L. Coyote]

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites
By Mark Danner
ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody
by the International Committee of the Red Cross
Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009, 43 pp., February 2007
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

How should we begin to talk about this? Perhaps with a story. Stories come to us newborn, announcing their intent: Once upon a time... In the beginning... From such signs we learn how to listen to what will come. Consider:

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4m x 4m <13 feet by 13 feet>. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed....

A man, unnamed, naked, strapped to a bed, and for the rest, the elemental facts of space and of time, nothing but whiteness.

The storyteller is very much a man of our time. Early on in the "War on Terror," in the spring of 2002, he entered the dark realm of "the disappeared"—and only four and a half years later, when he and thirteen other "high-value detainees" arrived at Guantánamo and told their stories in interviews with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (reported in the confidential document listed above) did he emerge partly into the light. Indeed, he is a famous man .................



VIDEO: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites by Mark Danner = C-SPAN
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x285111

[L. Coyote]

1. VIDEO: Mark Danner = Iraq War and U.S. Torture = 59:47

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x285163

Series: "Conversations with History"
Conversations Host Harry Kreisler welcomes writer Mark Danner for a discussion of the Iraq War
and foreign policy in the Bush administration. Informed by history, Danner's analysis includes
comparison of Bush and Reagan, draws attention to change in U.S. policy on torture, and examines
the options for future U.S. policymakers.

[L. Coyote]

2. bump

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3. ditto