"Abid"

earlier this week, Digby wrote:

A week into Mowhoush's detainment, according to classified investigative documents, interrogators were getting fed up with the prisoner. In a "current situation summary" PowerPoint presentation dated Nov. 18, Army officials wrote about his intransigence, using his first name (spelled "Abid" in Army documents):

"Previous interrogations were non-threatening; Abid was being treated very well. Not anymore," the document reads. "The interrogation session lasted several hours and I took the gloves off because Abid refused to play ball."...

from "Effective Interrogation"

(referencing this Wash. Post article.)

here's the message I sent to Digby regarding this post:

Digby, my Arabic is not super fluent, but I can tell you this: the prisoner was most emphatically NOT named "abid".

In Arabic the proper term for someone of African decent is, phonetically, either "eswed" (meaning simply black) or "Afriqi"(which is probably self-explanatory.)

abid("abeed") is a derogatory term for someone dark-complected or of African extraction. It means "slave."

They're torturing people, except we can't call it torture. And there's a purpose to all this not-torture, except apparently they get a little sidetracked, and maybe the details and the supposed intelligence-gathering isn't really that important after all.

Abed Hamed Mowhoush, with his grandson, courtesy ccmep.org