Eric Fair, former Abu Ghraib interrogator, to speak at Villanova

The Nightmares of Interrogation

DATE: Wednesday, April 9
TIME: 4:30pm
LOCATION: Bartley 1001, 4:30 pm

Eric Fair will speak about his experiences while serving as an interrogator in Iraq at Abu Ghraib in early 2004. He will address the corrosive effects abusive interrogation has on those who wield it as a tool as well as the irrevocable damage it has done to our nation and its institutions. Ample time will be provided for questions from the audience.

ABOUT ERIC FAIR: In 2001, Mr. Fair was hired as a police officer in Bethlehem, PA. He left the department in 2003 in order to be a part of the war effort in Iraq. He was hired as an interrogator by CACI and worked in Baghdad, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah. He resigned this position in the summer of 2004, was hired by the National Security Administration (NSA), and returned to Iraq in 2005 as an intelligence analyst. Mr. Fair left government service in early 2006 and published an op-ed in The Washington Post in early 2007 about his experiences with coercive interrogation. He is currently a student at Princeton Theological Seminary pursuing an MDIV and seeking ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Sponsored by the Ethics Program, College of Liberal Arts, Villanova University 

Links to related info:
“An Interrogator’s Nightmare” – Eric Fair’s op-ed in Washington Post
CACI
Democracy Now! report on CACI

A sickening truth at Guantánamo

A gravely ill detainee I represent, never charged with a crime, has been neglected by military doctors. Will he be the next to die inside the notorious prison?

By H. Candace Gorman

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/03/14/sick_in_guantanamo/

The Torture Team

 Remarks delivered at the City University Law Review Symposium “Preventing Torture,” in New York City, March 28, 2008, by Scott Horton

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002745

 ”…Torture was introduced as a result of conscious decisions taken at the pinnacle of power in Washington. Vice President Cheney was a principal instigator; President Bush was certainly fully informed, and consciously lied about it in dozens of public appearances. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, was the principal legal architect of the torture system, and he was aided and abetted in the process by a number of senior figures in the Justice Department. John Yoo and Jay Bybee are two of the more central figures in the opening phase, but Alice Fisher, Michael Chertoff and Steven Bradbury each also played an essential role. Jim Haynes, now general counsel to Chevron, and then Rumsfeld’s lawyer in the Pentagon, was another. The story of this team and its dark enterprise pursued under the guise of national security remains lamentably underdeveloped….”

Good Friday

Good Friday

Today, like many Christians, I pause between noon and 3:00 to remember the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ. However, when I contemplate the crucified Jesus, I see the face of Guantánamo detainee #654.

An innocent shopkeeper, he was betrayed to the Northern Alliance by his neighbors for 5,000 pieces of silver and subsequently handed over to US forces. He was transported to Guatanámo Bay,where the members of his Combatant Status Review Tribunal washed their hands of him, though they found that he had committed no prosecutable offense.

His wrists and ankles bleed from the shackles that cut into his skin when his led from one part of Camp 6 to another. The biting pain in his side emanates from his liver, infected with hepatitis B. Afflicted with tuberculosis as well, yet denied proper medical attention, his cell has become his living tomb.

This Good Friday, the crucified Jesus has the face of Abdel Hamid Al-Ghizzawi.