While discussing the arrests made in connection with the Bombay blasts, Siddhartha Mitter at Sepia Mutiny has provided a link to an old Slate story about “truth serums” being used in the interrogations after September 11:

Four suspected terrorists refuse to talk about what they know about Sept. 11 and Al Qaida’s plans for the future, the Washington Post reports: Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan who wanted to learn how to fly jets but not how to land them; Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, the two Indians who deplaned in St. Louis on the morning of Sept. 11 when all flights were ordered to land and were detained the next day in Fort Worth, Texas, after they were found with box cutters, hair dye, and $5,000 in cash; and Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cabdriver thought to have ties to Al Qaida. A former senior FBI official proposed that investigators could use a “truth serum” to get the four suspects to talk. Does truth serum work?

The article made me think of the CIA’s black sites about which, as far as I know, it was Dana Priest who broke the story (excerpt below). One would imagine that a taste for methods of torture much more rigorous and painful than the mere administration of the “truth serum” lies behind the Bush-Cheney administration’s highly questionable commitment to off-shore sites.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

If you are a teacher or a student in the US, please consider getting involved in the Guantanamo teach-in this Thursday.

(Photo caption: In Afghanistan, the largest CIA covert prison was code-named the Salt Pit, at center left above. Photo Credit: Space Imaging Middle East)

Rob Nixon writes about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun:

Both “Half of a Yellow Sun” and Adichie’s first novel, “Purple Hibiscus” (which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), explore the gap between the public performances of male heroes and their private irresponsibilities. And both novels shrewdly observe the women — the wives, the daughters — left dangling over that chasm.

When does loyalty flow from love, and when from shared adversity or heritage? “Half of a Yellow Sun” explores these questions through the twins’ uneasy relationship. Like Nigeria’s postcolonial peoples, their lives are involuntarily joined; both they and their nation must choose between a fractious unity and a fraught secession.

The Biafran War has exercised a powerful hold over Nigeria’s literary imagination, animating almost every notable Nigerian writer from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo to Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Adichie, who was born after the war, belongs to a new generation of talented young Nigerian writers: Helon Habila, Uzondinma Iweala, Helen Oyeyemi and Chris Abani (whose “Graceland,” about a shantytown Elvis impersonator, is one of the most astonishing metropolitan novels of our time).

Teju Cole provides link to a BBC radio interview with the Nigerian writer.

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