Erik Saar, a clean-cut, former Bible-college student dressed in a white shirt, looks like someone who’s just left the Army and still kind of misses it. Saar, 30, speaks nostalgically about his days as a sergeant and Arabic linguist — right up to the moment when he was sitting in an interrogation room at Guantanamo […]
Tara McKelvey
Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at the Prospect, is a research fellow at NYU School of Law’s Center on Law and Security and the author of Monstering: Inside America's Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.
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War Requiem
Marla Ruzicka always knew how to get people’s attention, Lieutenant Lars Ewing told the hundreds of people crammed into Room 325 of the Russell Senate Office Building for her memorial service on May 14. Plainly struggling to retain his composure, Ewing — after turning his head to the side, scrunching up his face, and uttering […]
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Morgantown Firebrand
Wearing a lilac sweater, crushed velvet pants and a star necklace, Asra Q. Nomani hardly looks like a revolutionary. But she’s helped shake up a mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, — and, indirectly, mosques everywhere — with her demands that women take on leadership roles and, at the very least, be allowed to sit near […]
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Marla in Baghdad
Seven weeks before she was killed, Marla Ruzicka promised me she wouldn’t leave the hotel in Baghdad. She had called me about an article on female detainees at Abu Ghraib I’d written for The American Prospect. As the founder of an organization called Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, she was eager to help the […]
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Ritual Abuse
The walls and ceiling were painted black. Acid rock blared around the clock. It was cold in the tiled room, located in a building outside Baghdad International Airport, on January 1, 2004. But despite the chilly temperature, Mohamed (he asked me to use a fake name), a 36-year-old sound engineer from the al-Bunuk district of […]
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Unusual Suspects
On the morning of September 24, 2003 — five weeks after the suicide bombing of a United Nations compound in Baghdad killed 23 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, signaling an intensified phase of Iraqi insurgency — a group of American soldiers burst into Selwa’s villa near the banks of the Tigris River […]
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Vanishing Bipartisanship
Warren Rudman has spent years perfecting the art of bipartisanship. Called a “consensus-forging leader” by Senator Olympia Snowe, Rudman, who served two terms as a U.S. senator from New Hampshire (1980– 92), is well-known for his role in bipartisan deficit reduction and, more recently, for his work on the United States Commission on National Security, […]
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Don’t Bank on It
The flurry of changes in Washington is not going to end anytime soon. Besides nominating new secretaries of state and agriculture, a new national security adviser, and filling other top-level positions, President George W. Bush will soon turn his eye to the World Bank. While it may not have the muscle of the Department of […]
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Of Human Bondage
On August 6, Christina Arnold found herself in Svay Pak, Cambodia, an area full of wooden shacks, bars, and brothels 11 kilometers from the capital city of Phnom Penh. Arnold, the 29-year-old director of Project Hope International, a nonprofit organization committed to assisting survivors of human trafficking, had traveled there to visit with social workers, […]
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Domestic Abuse
PICKSTOWN, S.D. — Sandy wade was 6 when she was sent away to St. Paul’s Indian Mission, a boarding school overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on the Yankton Sioux reservation. At first, things weren’t so bad. She got three meals a day — a welcome change from home, where she and her […]
