Poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. who won a National Book Critics Circle Award and who is professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush.
Here’s her letter of explanation to Mrs. Bush, published by The Nation.
Here is a story from (from the New Yorker) called "The Black Sites"
A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070…
"Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were detained in “black sites”—secret prisons outside the United States—and subjected to unusually harsh treatment. The program was effectively suspended last fall, when President Bush announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s prisons and transferring the detainees to military custody in Guantánamo. This move followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found that all detainees—including those held by the C.I.A.—had to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and torture. In late July, the White House issued an executive order promising that the C.I.A. would adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva standards. At the same time, Bush’s order pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would likely be found illegal if used by officials inside the United States. The executive order means that the agency can once again hold foreign terror suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in black sites, without notifying their families or local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel."