Buzumab

Rushan, please explain how your views on the human rights of Muslims internationally have changed since 2002-2003, when you willingly involving yourself in unconstitutional operations at Guantanamo Bay which stripped rights from and tortured Muslims.

Rushan Abbas brings over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America. She also has extensive experience working with U.S. government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Justice, and various U.S. intelligence agencies.

In her role at ISI Consultants, Ms. Abbas leads the business development activities of the firm, which includes developing and leveraging international relationships to serve our clients. She also acts as the firm’s key liaison with US and foreign government departments, agencies and embassies in support of international business efforts.

Before joining ISI Consultants, Ms. Abbas was the Director for International Business at Leo A. Daly, an internationally recognized leader in the design of the built environment that is consistently ranked among the top design firms in the world. Prior to that, she ran her own consulting firm, working with companies on the set-up, development and implementation of their international business and providing market intelligence and consumer insight to capitalize on new business opportunities in international markets. Ms. Abbas also served as International Marketing Liaison at Pelco (a subsidiary of Schneider Electric) and as International Business Development Manager at Perity Land Inc. the largest commodity exporter in North America. She was also employed at L-3, as a consultant at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, supporting Operation Enduring Freedom during 2002- 2003 and as a news reporter at Radio Free Asia.

Ms. Abbas has also worked as a linguist and translator for several federal agencies including work for the US State Department in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and for President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush.

Ms. Abbas holds a Bachelor of Science from Xinjiang University in China and completed a graduate program in International Business from California State University in Fresno.

Outside of work Ms. Abbas has been an active campaigner for human rights and works closely with members of U.S. Senate, Congressional Committees, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the U.S. Department of State and several other US government departments and agencies.

Source

Last time you hosted an IAmA, you failed to adequately answer important questions, offering only the following deeply cynical justification for your work at Guantanamo Bay—suggesting that political prisoners at a CIA blacksite preferred their imprisonment over freedom:

As an American, I’m very proud of working for the US government in Guantanamo while translating for 22 uyghur inmates there. The uyghurs were treated respectfully with dignity and rights in Guantanamo. Do you want to contact them and ask how they feel about GTMO? They would tell you that their lives inside of the GTMO cell blocks were better than the normal uyghur people’s lives outside of the concentration camps. GTMO detainees were able to fast, able to pray, they weren’t force to eat pork. They had Quran and praying rugs.

I repeat those original questions here:

What was your role in Guantanamo?

Did you personally oversee torture or help with interrogating prisoners by using translation services? How much were you paid for your role in Guantanamo and do you condemn the shocking human rights abuses in Guantanamo or Abu Gharib and other black site CIA torture camps as robustly as you do Chinas?

Given the CIA used "rectal cleaning" torture as well as other forms of sexual torture like rape with inanimate objects and forcing inmates to masturbate in front of female torturers, do you consider what is happening in Xinjiang worse or less worse than what was happening in Guantanamo when you were employed by the US to translate at Guantanamo?

When you did translations was that during the torture or after the CIA had created "learned helplessness" in their victims?

Given you have worked with almost every arm of the American regime change machine, have the Americans offered you a green card yet? Which American state do you intend to settle in when they do?

You manage your own Wikipedia page? That's a violation of Wikipedia's rules against conflict of interest editing.

Looking at the revision history on your page, I assume you're Tburakd or GeographyInitiative. I'll be contacting Wikipedia's administrators to report this violation of their rules against manipulation of information.

I recommend that my fellow Redditors not take the recommendations of someone who has worked as a propagandist with the CIA in China, with the Defense Department at Guantanamo Bay, with the State Department on who knows what, and now pretends to be an advocate for human rights.

If you cared about the rights of your people and of Muslims the world over, you would have become a lawyer... not a collaborator with a government who has gone to war with multiple Muslim nations, surveilled Muslims and restricted the terms of their visas and citizenship, and killed more Muslim citizens than can be counted.

They went to Afghanistan to escape from China's oppression? Why flee to a war-torn hotbed of international affairs with no significant representation of their ethnincity rather than, say, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs live in relative peace? Or Turkey, which hosts many Uyghurs and shares close linguistic and cultural ties to its people?

Furthermore, why did Pakistan, which has 3x the population of Uyghurs compared to the United States, which at the time hosted Abdul Rasul, Uyghur leader of the Asian Muslims Human Rights Bureau, and which is one of the largest communities in the world for people of Uyghur ethnicity, not have language support for Uyghurs?

That's not what the U.S. DOJ, Senate Armed Services Committee, the New York Times and The Guardian believe:

A May 2008 report by the Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice claimed that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to enact sleep deprivation of the Uyghur detainees.
A bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report, released in part in December 2008 and in full in April 2009, concluded that the legal authorization of "Enhanced interrogation techniques" led directly to the abuse and killings of prisoners in US military facilities.