Writing in The Guardian, the estimable journalist Barbara Ehrenreich tells an astonishing story: a man named Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who was a British resident, has been held at Guantánamo, having been labeled a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ‘joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon. Mohamed says he admitted to having read the ‘instructions’ after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail. How or why it ever came up that he read the `instructions’ is still classified, but it turns out that the authors of the item were Ehrenreich, the noted movie critic and historian Peter Biskind and a physicist named Michio Kaku. They composed the piece after a newspaper called The Progressive published instructions on how to build an atom bomb. Ehrenreich and company wrote their instructions purely as a joke, as a humor article, a parody, for a classy weekly called 7 Days, which was edited by Adam Moss, and to which I contributed a handful of articles before its altogether premature and undeserved demise. The satire was not especially subtle; among the instructions: “Never make an A-bomb on an empty stomach”, and “Attach a six-foot rope to a bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235, which is lighter, will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream.” No one could ever have thought such instructions could have ever been taken seriously; now a man has been tortured and imprisioned because some true-believer in the Bush-Cheney regime was stupid beyond belief.
