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Looking at the Other in the Midst of War
Two students were in the classroom when I arrived early to rearrange the chairs, from rows to a semicircle, so we could have a discussion. One elbowed the other. Tell her, she said. Miles shook his...
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The Photographer Who Recorded Assad’s Torture
Caesar “I am Caesar. I used to work for the Syrian regime. I was a photographer with the military police in Damascus. I will describe my work before the Revolution and during the first two years of the...
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Guantánamo Mixtape: This Would Be the Soundtrack to Hell
Advocates for prison reform have lobbied actively for the elimination of solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days in American prisons. Political detainees have far fewer advocates and little...
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The Straight Line From Slavery to Private Prisons
A white man on horseback, holding a rifle, looked out over an expanse of cotton that stretched beyond the horizon. Four packs of bloodhounds lay on the edge of the field. One dog had gold caps on two...
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A Brief History of Guantanamo Bay, America’s “Idyllic Prison Camp”
One day, our dispatch-boat found the shores of Guantánamo Bay flowing past on either side. It was at nightfall, and on the eastward point a small village was burning, and it happened that a fiery light...
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America in Mosul: An Account of the Occupation of an Iraqi City
During the battles for Ramadi and Fallujah, those cities emptied out, their residents leaving for camps or fleeing to safety in other parts of the country or world. The Mosul operation was vastly more...
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Life Inside Guantánamo: An Oral History
“Guantánamo saved my life,” Uighur Adil Hakimjan said to us when he sat down in Stockholm for an interview in 2014. We had never heard those words from anyone before, nor had I expected to ever hear...
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To Understand America’s Fear-Driven Response to Terrorism, Look to Chicago
The following is from The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence, by Laurence Ralph. * In the last letter I wrote to you—all the future mayors of Chicago—I offered the analogy of the torture...
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Waiting in Darkness: My Time At Guantánamo
I waited in darkness for death. The interrogators were done with me. You aren’t valuable enough to keep alive, they said. I didn’t have the intelligence they wanted on al Qaeda’s chain of command. They...
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Concerns arise that a Uganda novelist imprisoned for Tweets has been tortured.
In a grim reminder of the ever-tenuous position of truth-telling artists (the world over), Ugandan novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija appeared in court today—via video feed from prison—to answer charges...
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