Barbara Ehrenreich: My unwitting role in acts of torture

[muriel_volestrangler]

I like to think that some of the things I write cause discomfort in those readers who deserve to feel it. Ideally, they should squirm, they should flinch, they might even experience fleeting gastro-intestinal symptoms. But I have always drawn the line at torture. It may be unpleasant to read some of my writings, especially if they have been assigned by a professor, but it should not result in uncontrollable screaming, genital mutilation or significant blood loss.

With such stringent journalistic ethics in place, I was shocked to read online a Mail on Sunday article headed "Food writer's online guide to building an H-bomb ... the 'evidence' that put this man in Guantánamo." The "food writer" was identified as me, and the story began: "A British 'resident' held at Guantánamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a 'joke' website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night. Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker - who has in recent weeks become the subject of an ongoing political and judicial controversy in Britain - admitted to having read the 'instructions' after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail."

While I am not, and have never been, a "food writer", other details about the "joke" rang true, such as the names of my co-authors, Peter Biskind and physicist Michio Kaku. Rewind to 1979, when Peter and I were working for a now-defunct leftwing magazine named Seven Days. The government had just suppressed the publication of another magazine, the Progressive, for attempting to print an article called "The H-Bomb Secret". I don't remember that article and the current editor of the Progressive recalls only that it contained a lot of physics and was "Greek to me". Both in solidarity with The Progressive and in defence of free speech, we at Seven Days decided to do a satirical article entitled "How to Make Your Own H-Bomb," offering step-by-step instructions for assembling a bomb using equipment available in one's own home.
...
Enter Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian refugee and legal resident of Britain who had found work as a janitor after drug problems derailed his college career. According to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan in 2001, attracted by the Taliban's drug-free way of life. War soon drove him out of Afghanistan and to Karachi, from where he sought to return to Britain. But, as a refugee, he lacked a proper passport and was using a friend's, which led to his apprehension at the airport. Stafford Smith says the Pakistanis turned him over to the FBI, who were obsessed at the time with the possibility of an al-Qaida nuclear attack. After repeated beatings and hanging by the wrists, Mohamed "confessed" to having read an online article on how to make an H-bomb, insisting to his interrogators that it was a "joke".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/21/barbara-ehrenreich-guantanamo

[eridani]

1. Read a science parody; go to Gitmo for torture. n/t