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Much of the research for this essay was done when, as a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, I participated in the 2006-7 workshop "Cultural Reverberations of Modern War," led by Nancy Cott and Carol Oja. I am grateful to Professors Cott and Oja, to my workshop colleagues Alan Braddock, Susan Carruthers, Susan Geiger, Beth Levy, David Lubin, and Kimberley Phillips, and to student participants whose names I never knew for their comments on my work. An early version was delivered at the conference "Music, Gender and Justice" organized at Syracuse University by Amanda Eubanks Winkler, 14-15 September 2007. Conversations with Vita Coleman, Martin Daughtry, Harlene Gilbert, Alexander Karsten, Margaret McFadden, Martha Mockus, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Stephen Oleskey, Judith Tick, Holly Watkins, and Elizabeth Wood helped me clarify my thoughts, as did the editorial queries of Ellie Hisama and Ben Piekut. I am grateful for the many courtesies of Maryam at Cageprisoners.org. Above all, I gratefully acknowledge the courage and generosity of Moazzam Begg and Donald Vance, both of whom agreed to talk with me by phone about their detention experiences.
On 10 May 2003, an Algerian aid worker in Tanzania named Laid Saidi was arrested by unidentified men. Taken to an airfield near the border with Malawi, he was outfitted with a blindfold, sound-suppressing earmuffs and an anal plug, shackled, and flown to what he later described as
a "dark prison" filled with deafening Western music. The lights were barely turned on. . . . [O]ne man shouted at him through an interpreter, "You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you." 1
His is not the only account of a US-run "dark prison." A report released by Human Rights Watch late in 2005 included the accounts of eight detainees at Guantánamo who had given their attorneys consistent accounts of their detention in a place they, too, called the "dark prison. 2 They, too, were "chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap or heavy metal blaring for weeks at a time." One detainee, known only as M.Z., reported that...