What do U.S government documents say about torture under the Bush Administration?
In partnership with Ryerson University, PEN Canada invites Larry Siems from PEN American Center to speak about what emerged from his review of more than 140,000 government documents relating to detainee abuse during the “global war on terror,” brought to light by Freedom of Information litigation.
Larry Siems directs the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, where he leads PEN’s ongoing efforts to defend writers facing persecution around the world and protect freedom of expression in the United States. He is the author, most recently, of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program, which draws on 140,000 pages of declassified U.S. government documents to construct a narrative account of what happened inside the CIA’s secret prisons and military detention facilities in Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
A poet and a nonfiction writer, Siems has also written extensively on immigration and cross-cultural issues; his publications include the acclaimed collection Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans and their Families and Friends. He has reported on human rights abuses along the U.S.–Mexico border for Human Rights Watch, and studied and written on immigrant politics in Orange County, California under a fellowship from the Open Society Institute. His poems have appeared in leading literary journals.