Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

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Book Awards by Years Awarded

3/24/2010
The beautiful brain of Sherman Alexie: War Dances wins 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award

3/13/2010
It's terrible to be possessed by brittle things: Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version wins the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry

2/28/2010
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell

2/5/2010
Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died: An extract from A Scattering by Christopher Reid, the 2009 Costa Book of the Year

12/19/2009
The wedding guests look upon the cracked, pink lips of Rosie's bridegroom - an extract from Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award winning book

11/22/2009
Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

10/10/2009
I've had to learn to live by writing, not the other way round. Herta Müller wins Nobel prize in literature

9/23/2009
I knew I had no hope of winning: Simon Van Booy wins Frank O'Connor Short Story Award for Love Begins in Winter

9/15/2009
I saw my soul become flesh: Jean Valentine wins Wallace Stevens Award

7/5/2009
Philip Hoare wins 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan

6/24/2009
R. Bruce Elder wins 2009 Robert Motherwell Book Award

5/12/2009
Jane Mayer wins 2009 Helen Bernstein Award for The Dark Side

5/7/2009
Cormac McCarthy wins lifetime achievement, PEN/Saul Bellow Award

4/26/2009
Louise Erdrich's 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winning book: The Plague of Doves

4/15/2009
Climatologist David Archer wins 2009 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for The Long Thaw

3/26/2009
Avi Sharon wins Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for C. P. Cavafy's Selected Poems

3/22/2009
Thomas G. Andrews wins 2009 Bancroft Prize for Killing for Coal

2/27/2009
2009 PEN/Faulkner Award to Joseph O'Neill for Netherland

2/21/2009
Stephanie E. Smallwood wins Frederick Douglass Book Prize for Saltwater Slavery

1/28/2009
2008 Costa Book of the Year Award to Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture

1/11/2009
MLA Awards First Book Prize to Dana Luciano for Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

1/6/2009
Costa Book Award to Diana Athill, aged 91

12/9/2008
Guardian First Book Award for The Rest Is Noise

11/27/2008
National Book Award winner Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello

11/3/2008
Mohammed Hanif on Guardian First Book Award for A Case of Exploding Mangoes

10/18/2008
Indian writer, Aravind Adiga, wins 2008 Man Booker Prize

10/10/2008
French novelist J. M. G. Le Clezio wins Nobel Prize for Literature

9/3/2008
Edward Alwood wins Tankard Book Award for Dark Days in the Newsroom

8/24/2008
Britian's oldest book prize to Rosalind Belben for Our Horses in Egypt

8/10/2008
Michelle De Kretser wins New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year Award for The Lost Dog

7/30/2008
Kay Ryan announced as new Poet Laureate

7/16/2008
Salman Rushdie knighted as Best of the Booker Prize winners

7/4/2008
No consolation prize for Tom Bullough whose book, The Claude Glass, was mistakenly announced as the 2008 Wales Book of the Year

7/2/2008
Wales Book of the Year to Dannie Abse for The Presence

6/28/2008
Margaret Atwood wins Prince of Asturias Award for Letters

6/19/2008
Royal Society Prize for Science Books goes to Mark Lynas for Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

6/13/2008
Rawi Hage wins wins the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for debut novel De Niro's Game

6/9/2008
Rose Tremain captures Orange Broadband Prize

6/2/2008
Red House Children's Book Award to Derek Landy for Skulduggery Pleasant

5/5/2008
Graham Robb wins 2008 Ondaatje Prize

5/2/2008
Raja Shehadeh wins Orwell Prize for Palestinian Walks

4/22/2008
2008 Krasnza-Krausz Book Awards announced

4/12/2008
Francis Parkman Prize to Jean Edward Smith for FDR

4/3/2008
Michael Billington wins Theatre Book Prize for The State of the Nation

4/1/2008
Marcus Rediker wins the 2008 Merle Curti Award for The Slave Ship

3/27/2008
Indra Sinha wins the South East Asia and South Pacific regional Commonwealth Writers' Best Book Prize for Animal's People

3/8/2008
2008 National Book Critics Circle Award to Harriet A. Washington for Medical Apartheid

3/5/2008
2008 Lionel Gelber Prize to Paul Collier for The Bottom Billion

3/1/2008
Robert Kirsch Award to Maxine Hong Kingston

10/21/2009 Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

Dark Days tells the story of a Canadian national security investigation gone wrong through the eyes of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. The book chronicles how all four men were accused of terrorist links, detained overseas and subjected to brutal torture while being interrogated with questions from Canadian agencies. No evidence was ever produced to back the allegations against them and all were eventually released and returned to Canada.

"Most Canadians know about Maher Arar, but few know the extent to which there was a pattern behind his case -- that what happened to him happened to at least three other Canadians too," said Pither.

"All of these men are still working for justice, to clear their names and move on with their lives. For Arar, it's waiting for the Obama administration to accept responsibilty for its role and clear his name, and for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin it's about waiting for an apology from the Canadian government for its role in their ordeals," said Pither. "And for all of us, it's about ensuring the changes are made to stop this from happening again." - from the Dark Days Book Launch

The lock slid open and the door swung into the cell. Ahmad had to jump out of the way. The guard ordered him out and led him back upstairs into a room, where he tied a piece of rubber over his eyes.

Then the interrogation started. Someone said they’d received information about him and read out the names and addresses of his family in Toronto, the make and colour of his car, and its licence plate number. They knew his address, the man said, and read it out to him. He had the wrong apartment number, so Ahmad corrected him.

Then the beating started. Ahmad was punched in the face and kicked at. The men in the room screamed insults at him, his family, and his faith.

One of the interrogators leaned in and told Ahmad that they were going to bring Rola, the woman he’d been going to Damascus to marry, in and rape her, there, in front of him.

Ahmad was terrified — did they have Rola? He knew this kind of thing happened in Syria. He pleaded with them, saying that he had told them the truth.

“No,” the man yelled. “We need to hear something new!”

“I can’t invent something,” said Ahmad.

“No,” the man replied. “You can invent something.

Then things got worse. Ahmad was ordered to strip down to his shorts and lie on his stomach on the floor. In pain from the beating, he moved slowly. The men yelled at him to move faster as he struggled out of his shirt and pants. When Ahmad was lying down, the men grabbed his hands and handcuffed them behind his back, then lifted his feet up and tied his wrists to his ankles with a rope. He was like a sheep ready for slaughter, Ahmad says.

Ice water was poured all over his body, then he was whipped on his feet, legs, knees, and back with a thick metal cable. The pain was sharp and fierce, but the first strokes were the worst. After a few lashings, Ahmad’s feet and legs went numb, but that was what the dousing with ice water was for – to bring the feeling back. He could see the interrogators’ shoes from under the blindfold. The ones without the cable kicked him in the face and his back and legs.

Ahmad begged the men to stop, asking why they were doing this to him. They just laughed. “They were asking me to repeat my story, and I kept repeating what happened, and they said, ‘That’s not what we want to hear.’ They kept threatening me and mocking me and said they were going to inflict permanent injury – they said I wouldn’t be able to have kids later on.”

Ahmad lost track of how often he was taken down to his cell and back up for more torture but remembers that eventually he couldn’t walk and had to be dragged up and down the stairs. In his cell, without the blindfold, he saw his legs were covered in blood. His feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes.

“After I just couldn’t take it any more, I told them, ‘I’m willing to say whatever you want me to say,’” Ahmad recalls.

The men asked him about people he knew in Canada – including Abdullah Almalki and Maher Arar. - excerpted from Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror by Kerry Pither (read a longer excerpt at kerrypither.com).

Dark Days
Kerry Pither
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Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program
Stephen Grey
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Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture
Jennifer K. Harbury
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A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror
Alfred McCoy
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Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
Mark Danner
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