Inside the Wire:
An Interview With Erik Saar
Interviewed By Onnesha Roychoudhuri
May 24, 2005

In 1998, Erik Saar, a marketing major fresh out of college, signed up to become a military linguist. Four years later, having been trained in Arabic and intelligence work, he volunteered to work as a translator at the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where, over a period of six months, he translated for guards and interrogators. Proud to be working, as he saw it, to defend his country from terrorism, Saar quickly became alarmed and disgusted at the incompetent running of Guantanamo and the inhumane treatment of the detainees there, an evolution he traces in his recent book, Inside the Wire, co-written with Viveca Novak.

Despite the Pentagon's initial insistence that Guantanamo holds the "worst of the worst," it's become common knowledge that most of the detainees held there are innocent of terrorist activities and of limited intelligence value--not least because those suspects deemed to possess critical intelligence have by and large been sent to other countries or bases for interrogation. Even so, thanks to an ineffective vetting system, in many cases it's not entirely clear, even to those working at Guantanamo, who the prisoners in the camp are and how they came to land there.

In Saar's telling, the combination of inept management, insufficient training, purposely loose interrogation guidelines, a refusal by the US government to abide by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and political pressure to wring intelligence, any intelligence, out of the detainees, made abuses inevitable. Saar spoke with Mother Jones about his experience working at Guantanamo and why he thinks the camp is an affront to American values and is undermining the goals of the war on terror. >>>continued

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/05/saar.html