ENEMY COMBATANT: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar

Mozzam Begg (with Victoria Brittain). Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar. New York: New Press, 2006.
HV6432.B44 2006

Review by Chris Gaunt

I rarely purchase books, but I bought this one in mid-December last year. I read it in early January 2007 as I was traveling to D.C. with fellow peace-loving Iowans. We were protesting the five year anniversary of the January 11 opening of the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Moazzam Begg, a British citizen, was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and accused by the United States of being a terrorist. He was finally released in 2005 without explanation or apology. He tells his story.

I cried when he told about his undeserved torture and its effects, mental and physical. It is obvious that he did not let the experience turn him into a hater. He lived to tell his story and have it published. Good for him. Good for us.

The torture issue resonates with my soul, magnified when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out in 2004. I know from my involvement with the movement to expose and close the SOA/WHINSEC at Ft. Benning, Georgia, that a Freedom of Information Act in 1996 uncovered torture manuals used at that school. It is a dirty little secret that the U.S. military still wants to keep secret.

I recently served a prison sentence and endured on a very small scale the demeaning treatment that is routinely extended to those sucked into one of our U.S. jails or prisons.

For me, torturing comes down to this: the effects on the torturer as well as the victim.

I cannot believe that I will soon travel to Washington D.C. again, to mark the 6th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. What a disgrace.

recommendations for winter break

Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections, 2001. PS3556.R352 C67 2001
(a family epic)

Jonathan Lethem. Motherless Brooklyn, 1999. PS3562.E8544 M68 1999
(An unusual crime novel)

Jonathan Lethem. As She Climbed Across the Table, 1998. PS3562.E8544 A9 1998
(Very funny!!!)

Anne Tyler. Digging to America, 2006. PS3570.Y45 D47 2006
(has a very funny scene involving a bicycle helmet)

Anne Tyler. The Accidental Tourist, 1985. PS3570.Y45 A64 1985
(A beautiful novel about love and death)

Kazuo Ishiguro. The Unconsoled, 1995. PR6059.S5 U53 1995
(Kafkaesque and very funny in a dark way)

Bakopoulos, Dean. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, 2005. PS 3602 .A593
(a moving novel about our changing society especially in the rust belt)

Jonathan Raban (another Jonathan!). Wax Wings, 2003. PR6068.A22 W39 2003
(the boom and bust of the 90's in Seattle)
Recommended by Rebecca Stuhr

...books by Milton Friedman

Search the library catalog by clicking on his name: Friedman, Milton, 1912

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Naomi Klein mounts a frontal assault on the madrassa of Bolshevik privatization better known as the Economics Department at the University of Chicago. The recently expired Milton Friedman was the theory-giver for a generation and a half of economists who have come to embrace the aftermath of catastrophic events such as war and natural disasters as the basis of “exciting market opportunities.” The Friedmanite ideology that is the foundation of the “Shock Doctrine” holds that “reconstruction” finishes the job of the original disaster by eliminating the public sphere. At the core of this neoliberalism is the belief that profit and greed practiced on a mass scale create the greatest benefit for society.

The Shock Doctrine is a work of political economy following in many ways the tradition established by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. Both works challenge the idea proponed by Friedman and Hayek et al that free markets and free societies are part of the same historical process. Klein argues that liberalized markets not only do not require a free society but often serve as the catalyst for crushing democracy e.g. Tiananmen Square in 1989.

For Klein the danger posed by the “Chicago Boys” is the human misery that is created as a byproduct of their squalid utopianism. “The Marxists had their workers’ utopia, and the Chicagoans had their entrepreneurs’ utopia, both claiming that if they got their way, perfection and balance would follow.” Wherever these corporate conquistadors have worked their magic, 25 to 60 percent of the population lives in poverty. At the end of the day an unfettered capitalism enforces the idea that, indeed, freedom is not free.

Burling Library 2nd Floor HB95 .K54 2007
Also by Naomi Klein:

No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador USA, 2000

Burling 2nd Floor HD69.B7 K58x 2000

For other contributions, search the library catalog: