The Chasm Between Two Presidential Peace Prize Winners

Published on Thursday, June 28, 2012 by Common Dreams - by César Chelala

“The lead interrogator at the Division Interrogation Facility (DIF) had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.” Thus wrote Eric Fair in the Washington Post in 2007, regarding his experience as a contract interrogator in
Iraq in 2004.

As terrible as his experience was, we now know that even greater abuses against prisoners took place not only in Iraq but in Guantánamo and all other places holding prisoners from the so-called “war on terror.” Those abuses show human beings at their worst.

Predictably, Fair’s admission drew an equally abusive response. Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Fair mentions the following, “Eric, I still have a .45 caliber 1911. I suspect you know the firearm. I’d loan it to you gleefully if you get really depressed. And I’d happily take whatever legal consequence might come my way for having done so. You’d be doing the world a favor by removing yourself from the gene pool. With revulsion at the subhuman you and others like you surely are.”

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Fair’s admissions are particularly relevant after given former President Jimmy Carter’s recent opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “A Cruel and Unusual Record.” A former Nobel Prize winner, Carter makes a strong criticism of the United States human rights policies, particularly of President Obama’s approval of legislation that makes legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces”.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/28-4