Don't Forget Us Here, page 13
When I was called to interrogation that week, I found a new interrogator. We were always getting new interrogators. They were mostly young like me and didn’t know anything. We started from the beginning again. We always started from the beginning. But now they were adding to my file as brothers broke down and said whatever the interrogators wanted them to say.
“Do you want to tell me what you were doing in Tora Bora?” he asked.
“I wasn’t at Tora Bora,” I replied.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “We have a brother who identified you at Tora Bora. Said he saw you giving orders.”
“Giving orders to who?” I said.
“You tell me,” he said, and I knew where he was going. I stopped talking and started praying to myself. That made him mad, so he left me short-shackled and freezing in the room for a couple of hours with the AC on high.
“Start talking to me,” he said when he came back, “and I’ll take you out of that noisy block.” A light went off for me. They’d believe anything.
“No!” I cried. “I don’t want to go anywhere! And if you silence my elegant lady…”
“Elegant lady?” He looked confused.
“My beautiful lady with the beautiful voice,” I said.
“The vacuum?”
“Don’t you dare disrespect her!” I cried. “If you take me away from her, I’ll spit on you. I’ll spit on every guard. I’ll never talk to you if you take me out of that block!”
The new interrogator looked confused and maybe a little worried. The psychologist came in next and I talked about my lovely elegant lady to him, too. Then they moved me to India Block, where there were no vacuums. As soon as I reached the block, I threw myself to the ground and refused to walk to my cage. For this to work, I had to really commit.
“Take me back to November Block!” I cried. “I want my elegant lady.” The guards dragged me to my cage.
It was paradise in that block without the vacuums. I slept for the first time in a long time.
Oh, how I enjoyed the quiet away from those nasty, noisy, tailed ladies. Every day, I asked the guards to bring me my lady.
“Please,” I begged. “Bring me to my beautiful, elegant lady.” They thought I was crazy. That’s the thing about the Americans. They believed anything but the truth.
They were experimenting on us, and I was experimenting on them, pretending to lose my mind.
I spent a month on vacation in India Block, but I still couldn’t think straight. No matter how much I ate, I kept losing weight. I slept, but I always felt like I needed more. I thought that maybe the noise from the vacuums had permanently rewired my brain. I talked to my neighbors sometimes, but it was hard to think straight or even understand what brothers were saying to me. I had a hard time concentrating. I forgot things. I’d be talking to my neighbor and forget what I was talking about in the middle of my sentence. This was common with all of us who had spent time in November Block with the vacuums. It’s like the sound had burrowed into our minds and had broken pieces out. Most brothers in India Block had never heard the vacuums scream, but they noticed how I had changed.
“You’re distracted all the time,” one brother said to me.
He gave me a simple riddle to solve and I couldn’t concentrate long enough to solve it. I got mad at him. I was angry with everyone. But he was right. It was hard for me to know what I was thinking about all the time. My mind jumped from one thought to another. I couldn’t hold on to one no matter how hard I tried. My eyes hurt when I tried to focus, but I could still hear that screaming inside my head.
When I got my mind back just a little, my interrogators moved me to Romeo Block, where I found the vacuums again, still screaming like crazy. Of course they were. Adnan was there. So were Waddah, Dan, Bahr, and Omar. All the brothers who were with me on that last Saturday night. As I approached my cage, I kicked the vacuum as hard as I could. It fell over and stopped screaming. Before I could stomp it, the guards threw me to the floor, then dragged me into my cage.
Romeo Block had changed. The cords on the vacuums were hidden. And now there were clear plastic barriers in front of the cages, so we couldn’t splash the vacuums or the guards.
We lived years with those vacuums. Only a few blocks had them, but they were almost always in whatever block I was in. They followed me, screaming all the time. It killed my concentration. Even to this day, I can’t concentrate when there’s even the faintest sound of a fan in the room.
Whenever Farhad, the Afghan, saw one of the vacuums, he spit at it. Why would anyone invent such a terrible thing? he asked. He’s still not convinced they actually clean. He thinks all they do is torture. I don’t blame him. The vacuums pushed me toward the edge of insanity and almost broke me. The cold calculation of the torture and cruelty of the vacuums really enraged me. The camp didn’t want us to talk to each other because they wanted us to talk to them. If that’s what they wanted, I decided to play a joke of my own.
YOU KNOW EXACTLY what the Americans want. They can’t find Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar or the dirty bomb they think al Qaeda has hidden somewhere ready to go off, otherwise they would have stopped asking you the same questions over and over again. Where is Osama? Where is Mullah Omar? Where is the dirty bomb? You’ve only finished high school but you’re smart enough to know that it’s really hard to get a dirty bomb, and why are they asking you?
You were sold as Adel in Afghanistan, an identity they made you wear until they found another. Then you became Alexander, a battle-hardened general, again much older than you, but one of the other brothers identified you in a pile of photographs after he had been kept awake for days, shackled in a room with flashing lights and screaming music. You don’t blame him. He had to name someone, and if it wasn’t you, it would have been another brother.
“Why am I really here?” you ask.
“You tell me why you’re here,” they say.
“Because you think I know about a dirty bomb?” you say.
“So you know about the dirty bomb?” they say.
“That’s not what I said.”
You tell them what you know. You tell them what you think they want to know. You tell them nothing. You stop talking—you and so many of the brothers.
You know you have done nothing wrong, have harmed no one, and this gives you strength. Now when they call you for your reservation, you sit or stand or squat, whatever they make you do, and you recite a hadith to yourself. You pray. You recite verses from the Qur’an to yourself in your head. You used to say them out loud, but they stuffed a sock in your mouth and duct-taped it shut, they beat you. It’s okay. Allah will understand. You pray and this transports you out of this room that smells of sweat and urine and despair; it transports you to mountains in Raymah or up to the moon or out into the vastness of the universe, all created by Allah, and you don’t hear them anymore. You don’t hear their questions or their insults. You don’t feel their slaps. You don’t feel your body shake as your muscles rebel against the squatting position they forced you into, and this makes the interrogators furious and weaker, even if they don’t know it.
Some around you can’t handle the beatings, the pain, the sleeplessness, the uncertainty. They can’t handle the isolation and the constant screaming of the vacuums and the starvation and the sleep deprivation. They can’t handle the darkness of the tunnel that has no light and they break down. They work for the interrogators even though they don’t want to. They say yes when interrogators ask if a brother is al Qaeda. They identify brothers they don’t know in photos. They make up names and connections. They confirm or verify identities and information that can’t possibly be true. They lie and lie about hundreds of men, and when they lie, they get rewards. They get better food and better cages. They get moved to level 1+ and then to Camp 4, where the life is easy and there’s talk of getting free.
It’s hard to watch your brothers suffer while these snitches tell lies about men they never knew, including you. But you understand. You don’t blame them. You blame the interrogators asking them to lie and then believing them. You blame General Miller, who created this machine and feeds it. And one day when you’re in November Block in isolation with the vacuums screaming, you think of a way to teach them a lesson.
“Let’s play with them,” you say to Waddah that night when the vacuums go off. “We have nothing to lose. I’m here and they’re here.” And that’s when the fun begins.
You call for a reservation with your interrogators and that makes them very happy.
“Why’d you call?” they ask.
“I’m ready to cooperate,” you say. “I have some important information.”
They’re all smiles, your interrogators, an old guy and a woman, all pasty and pale.
Over the next three days, you make up all kinds of stories with your brothers at night about the dirty bomb they’re looking for, and in the morning you feed them to your interrogators. Your interrogators are so happy, they eat it all up, greedy for more. On the third day, at the end of your session, you tell them you have one more really important detail.
This feels good. They don’t know what pain lies ahead. They don’t know that you are in control. You want to savor this moment a little longer. They wait. You take one last sip of cold water.
“Everything I’ve told you over the last three days…” You pause for a moment. You take in their eager faces. “Everything I told you was absolute bullshit.” You watch the words hit like bullets in the chest.
Happiness turns to panic turns to anger and then they’re just crazy. They’re so mad they can’t talk to you. They storm out.
They call you the next day for your reservation and you go but don’t talk. You sit there and recite verses from the Qur’an out loud. You do this every day for a week and then someone older comes to talk to you. This person is in charge, you think. He must be in charge to be so calm and thoughtful.
“Why’d you do that?” he asks.
“Why are you holding me without telling me why?” you ask. “Why do you torture my brothers? Why do you believe obvious lies and then torture us to say they’re true? Why do you make snitches who will say anything to make you happy?”
“How do you know they’re lying?” he says.
“Your problem isn’t my lies,” you say. “It’s that you want to hear my lies and make them true. You know that your snitches and spies have been lying to you. And you’ve been torturing men because of those lies. I told you lies to teach you a lesson, to show you how easy it is to lie to you.”
This makes him very angry.
“Fuck you!” he says. “I’m going to break you next.”
“We will see.” You smile your biggest smile. “I will cut my tongue before talking to you again.”
The old woman interrogator comes in cursing you.
“I’m gonna take your shitty ass back to the US and make you my servant. I’m going to shave that disgusting beard and I’m going to make you into my slave. You’ll be cleaning my home, scrubbing my kitchen, cooking for me, holding my bag… Your ass is mine.”
You look away as she yells at you. You don’t say anything. And this makes her even more furious.
“Why’d you do it?” the other interrogator asks. He’s tired. “Is it because you hate America?”
“I wanted to learn how to be like you,” you say. “I wanted to learn how to be an interrogator.”
He slaps you. You didn’t think he had it in him. He slaps you so hard and so fast it’s shocking, and not much can shock you anymore. He kicks your chair from underneath you and throws you to the floor.
“Shackle him,” he tells the guards.
They chain you in the worst position. Your whole body shakes. He turns the AC up high and takes a pitcher of ice water and pours it over you.
“I’ll teach you how to be a good interrogator.”
“Okay!” you say. “Thank you!”
He slaps your face until you bleed.
“They trained you well,” he says. “But I’m going to make you cry like a bitch!”
You laugh at him. Then spit in his face. It’s a good one, mixed with blood.
The guards strip you naked. He pours more water on you and leaves you chained to the floor, squatting with your hands in front of you.
The interpreter says, “He’s been doing this for fifteen years and you’re the first one to make him look like such a fool.”
How did this become about him? you think.
Guards come in every hour to pour cold water on you and make sure you’re awake. You pray. You recite hadiths. Days pass like this. You’re miserable but you really enjoyed seeing those assholes so angry.
They try hard to get you to say you weren’t lying. They’re desperate for you not to lie. Sorry things didn’t work out the way they liked, you tell them.
“You’re going on the blacklist,” the old woman says.
You don’t know what this blacklist is. You’re already in this prison; what could be worse? You’re young, you don’t give a shit about anything. If you challenge me, you think, be prepared to bang your head against a wall with your blacklist.
“You’re going to spend the rest of your life here!” the tired old guy yells at you.
The angrier he gets, the happier you are because you know you’ve beaten them.
“By Allah,” you say, “I will leave Guantánamo. And you will be the one holding my hand and leading me to the airplane. One day you criminals will be found out.” You’re serious when you say this. You don’t doubt it for a second. You believe these criminals will be caught, that they’ll be stopped, and that you’ll all be set free.
This old tired guy looks at you, surprised.
“Who the hell are you working for?” he says.
“Allah,” you say.
“Someone will break you,” he spits. “Someone will break you soon, Osama’s guy.”
You recite to yourself a hadith: And if they were to gather together to harm you with anything, they would not harm you except with what Allah had already prescribed against you. The pens have been lifted and the pages have dried.
You are here because Allah has willed it, and with His blessing, one day you will leave. In a land of sick jokes, that is the only truth.
- ELEVEN -
Now that I was on the interrogation blacklist, I was in deep shit—not the usual face slaps, short-shackles, and humiliating genital searches—deep, deep shit where interrogators and guards got creative with all kinds of nasty techniques. We were all suffering and sitting on a bomb waiting to go off.
One of the worst tortures was sleep deprivation, which went on for months or even years. But guards had a special treat for brothers on the blacklist. They called it the “Frequent Flyer Program.” To keep me awake, guards stormed my cell, beat me, restrained me, then ran me to a new cell in another block, where they’d leave me just long enough to fall asleep, then they’d storm into my cell again, beat me, restrain me, and run me to another cell. This could go on all night or for days and weeks. Sometimes they even made bets on how fast they could run a detainee through a certain number of cells in one night.
I wasn’t the only one in such deep shit. Brothers all over the camp were refusing to talk to interrogators and suffering for it. The nastier the interrogations got, the more brothers refused to talk.
One Afghani brother, Nadeem, was in the sleep deprivation program for nine months. He lost a lot of weight, around sixty pounds, and had only about one hundred pounds left. He was a little older than me, maybe twenty-one years old.
Word about his condition spread through DNN and we started to protest. The brothers in Camps 1 and 4 didn’t respond. They had it good and didn’t want to risk their privileges. Camps 2 and 3, though, that’s where things started to fall apart.
As usual, we started to protest peacefully by putting in formal complaints with the camp officers to stop the abuse and religious harassment, especially the desecration of the Qur’an. They didn’t respond, so we started refusing our food and medicine. Then we refused to go to rec and shower. The camp admin still didn’t care, so we had to move to the next level, which was to refuse to come out of our cages for anything, especially interrogation. We had nothing but IRF teams, and so the guards had nothing but work.
A majority of detainees were Afghani brothers like Nadeem. The Afghans were quiet most of the time, keeping to themselves and not getting involved in our protests. And that’s what they did despite Nadeem’s condition—they kept quiet. I don’t know why. The camp was messy, but without the Afghans, it wasn’t messy enough.
The interrogators wanted Nadeem to admit that he was an al Qaeda leader, and they really pushed him, but things didn’t completely erupt until one of the interrogators put the Holy Qur’an under his foot. It’s important to understand that the Afghans took the treatment of the Qur’an very seriously. When a guard threw a Holy Qur’an to the ground and stepped on it, he woke a sleeping beast.
The Afghans put their hearts and souls into their work. They started fighting early in the morning, right after the first prayer, and didn’t stop until after the last prayer. They banged their cages and windows all day long. They yelled. They spit. They splashed. They turned the camp upside down. Our Arab resistance was nothing compared to what the Afghans did. This went on for over a month before the camp admin decided to crush us with IRF teams. They beat us badly. They showered us with pepper spray. They made our meals smaller. They kept us awake all night with searches.
The Afghani brothers in Quebec Block thought the camp took it too far, so they did, too. When things only ever get worse, you can lose all hope and lose control of yourself. The camp admin doesn’t respond to peaceful protest or hunger strikes or fighting, so you ask yourself, what can I possibly do to make my captors care about my shitty situation? The Afghani brothers in Quebec Block thought they had the answer. They organized a mass suicide where they would all hang themselves and throw the camp into complete chaos.
