Don't Forget Us Here, page 15
“That was for the dog,” the officer said.
The IRF team dragged me by my legs to a cage in Sierra Block. It was hard to breathe and I knew several of my ribs were broken. I couldn’t see and didn’t know if it was because of the pepper spray, because my eyes were swollen shut, or because there was so much blood on my face. The blood in my mouth tasted of death.
By morning, they had moved all of us to Sierra Block. Then they came back for me. My face was so badly beaten and swollen, I couldn’t open my eyes or mouth. The IRF team came again and shackled my hands and legs. They dragged me back out to the rec yard and beat me again. It didn’t matter. The old pain numbed the new pain. When they dragged me back to my cage and threw me in, I stood up tall to show them that they hadn’t gotten the best of me. I stood to show my brothers that we didn’t have to fear them. I spit at the guards and they charged back in, all six of them, and slammed me against the wall. They pounded my head against whatever surface they could connect with and then put my head in the toilet and flushed. The pepper spray got worse with water, and now my face and eyes burned like fire. When they left me, I couldn’t stand. They had broken my ankle.
It wasn’t my intention to hurt the dog; I could have killed it if I had wanted. That dog had bitten so many of us so many times. It was strange to see how much love and respect they had for the dog, the dog they had trained to terrorize us.
They left us in Sierra Block, naked with no blankets in the middle of winter, with only the pepper spray to keep us warm. After the IRF teams finished with us, they went back to Romeo Block and finished stripping the rest of the compliant brothers. Sierra Block was next to Romeo and we listened to our brothers stripped naked, one by one, while getting their asses kicked.
Believe me, we didn’t want to continue. We were all in bad shape, but we had no choice. We had to show them that we couldn’t be beaten. The guards turned off the water so we couldn’t wash before prayer. We agreed that we would all refuse to leave our cages for everything: searches, shower, recreation, reservations. They served us a nasty breakfast with no spoons, but most of us couldn’t open our mouths or chew. We tore up our Styrofoam plates into small pieces and threw them all over the block floor.
“Room service!” we called. “Come clean for us!”
They just laughed at us. They didn’t even bother to clean the walkway. Instead, they went from cage to cage asking us to return our spoons.
“You didn’t give me a spoon,” I said.
“Detainee 441 is refusing to return his spoon!” the guard yelled. This was a violation, and according to SOPs, it required a cage search.
I refused to leave my cage, which meant they had to send an IRF team to remove me before they could search my cell. We all refused, and they were ready for us with IRF teams. I don’t think the camp admin even slept that night. They were busy planning. I saw General Miller himself in the yard helping the IRF teams gear up.
“This is not good,” Omar said. “No, it’s going to be very bad.”
The IRF teams marched into the block wearing raincoats and face shields. General Miller trailed behind them. They stomped their boots on the steel floor, their footsteps in unison like a beating drum.
“Welcome,” Waddah called out. “Unfortunately, we don’t have shit for you today, but we have this.” He threw the rest of his breakfast. They didn’t care much.
“Chicken! Chicken!” we all called together in English. “Shake your ass. Shake it. Shake it off!” I’m sure we sounded very funny in our bad English.
They came for me first. The commanding officer said to the guard filming us, “ISN 441, are you coming out for cell search?” They had to document everything to prove that they had followed SOPs and that we deserved what we got.
“Where is your dog?” I yelled in English. Then in Arabic I said, “I’m protesting the new SOPs in Romeo Block. Give clothes to our brothers!”
The commanding officer spoke to the camera. “ISN 441 refused to be compliant with the camp rules.” Before he was done, a guard hit me with pepper spray. They opened the cage door then pushed in all at once, slamming me into the wall with their shields. I felt like I had been hit by a car.
The IRF team kicked my ass, shackled me, and dragged me to the rec yard.
They stripped me naked, then shaved my body, my beard, my head. We hadn’t been allowed to cut our hair or beards for years. When the barber cut my hair, it was no regular haircut. He shaved a cross on my head. On other brothers, he shaved devil horns, Stars of David, stripes. He shaved one brother to look like a horse, a stripe of hair running from the middle of his head down his back. They shaved just one half of another brother’s head and beard, leaving long hair on one side. They gave another brother a mustache like Hitler. When we saw each other, we all laughed. We were hungry and miserable, but we laughed at each other and that lessened the pain just a little. We were all Redeyes laughing at each other as much as at General Miller for thinking that silly haircuts and good beatings would break us and make us talk to interrogators. That really pissed him off.
General Miller stopped in front of me.
“Why the fuck is he smiling?” General Miller yelled at the interpreter. “Fucking smiley troublemaker.”
That made me smile even harder.
WHEN THEY CAME to move us to solitary confinement in Oscar Block, we refused to walk.
“Give pants to our brothers in Romeo Block,” we said again. And again, the IRF teams came. Again the pepper spray, again they stormed our cages, shackled our arms and legs. Instead of carrying us, they pushed us onto our backs, then dragged us by our leg shackles.
When they took Othman, he sat up so that when he passed by our cages he looked like a kid driving a car. “Beep beep!” he called.
“Beep beep!” we called back. We drove our pretend cars all the way to Oscar Block. As we left Camp 3, we heard our brothers in other blocks joining the protest, refusing to leave their cells. At Oscar Block, the guards took our clothes, just like they did in Romeo. Some brothers were left with only pants, some with just a shirt, depending on how much they hated us. The psychologist, who was always asking us if we wanted to kill ourselves, told the guards to strip me completely naked and to leave me with nothing but my plastic ISO mat.
That night, the guards turned off the blinding lights and it was black in our cages. To do head counts, guards had to open the viewing window on our door and shine a bright light into each cage.
After the shift change, I heard a terrifying scream at the top of the block.
“Devils!” a woman cried. “There are devils in the cells!” One of the new guards had started doing the head count. No one had told her about our haircuts. When she shined a light into our cages, all she saw were naked men, beaten and bruised, their hair shaved with calculated cruelty.
“Devils!” she cried.
THEY LEFT US in our new “devil look” for days, weeks maybe. They brought camp staff, civilians, and many visitors to Oscar Block to see us. The guards opened the viewing windows on our doors so delegations could walk past and look at us like we were in a zoo. They laughed at us, but I also saw fear. What kind of men were they holding?
The interrogators tried everything to get us to talk. “Cooperate with us,” they kept saying, “and we’ll give you pants. We’ll move you to another block.”
None of us talked. It wasn’t a holy war between East and West. We thought this was clear by now. It was a battle for our humanity, to prove that we weren’t just animals.
Even the Red Cross laughed at us when they came.
“They aren’t beating you or torturing you like in Arab countries,” the Red Cross guy said. “They are using normal circumstances to try to make you talk. You should just talk. It would be better for everyone.”
“Why don’t you come and live with us?” I said. “Come live naked with us, get beaten, suffer from no sleep and from hunger. Then you can tell me it’s just normal circumstances and not torture.”
You couldn’t tell by looking at us, but we’d won a small battle. I thought General Miller was trying to accomplish two things: force the compliant brothers in Romeo Block to start talking again to interrogators, and stop more organized protests from happening. And he failed at both. It was simple: we had nothing left to lose by not talking to interrogators, so we didn’t. The harder General Miller tried to force us to talk, the more we resisted. Even worse for the camp admin, most brothers who were talking to interrogators before Romeo stopped talking after our protest.
We had been fighting battles against the camp admin for years. Now Miller was bringing us to war.
- THIRTEEN -
We didn’t start the fight the night we destroyed Oscar Block, and we hadn’t planned on escaping either. After the riot for Romeo Block, the interrogators moved half of the Redeyes to other blocks, leaving only twelve brothers in a block that held thirty-six. We were the youngest of the Redeyes and the ones interrogators had labeled the worst of the worst. We had all been moved around a lot since Camp Delta opened and this was the first time we were all together—only us—on a block. It was Waddah, Abdullah Alajmi, Khalid, Sayd, Hamzah, Adnan, Yassir, Mana’a, Ali, Othman, Yousif, and me, 441.
A tribal code had brought us together. Respect for respect. Shit for shit. We never started a fight, only joined when someone disrespected us or harmed our brothers. We didn’t have a leader and none of us gave the others orders. We all knew what to do and just naturally worked well as a team.
We knew something was wrong at the shift change that night. Instead of a regular shift from the navy or army, we got one made up of the worst guards from all over the camp, guards mean and nasty enough to have earned nicknames like Fat Ass and Lazy Rabbit. They started in on us right away.
“242,” Lazy Rabbit barked at Khalid. “Do you want to eat?”
“Yes,” Khalid said.
“242 refused,” Lazy Rabbit barked.
They put all our meals on the ground outside our cages and then twenty minutes later threw them all away in front of us. We couldn’t fight every single time guards harassed us. If we did, we would have been fighting every minute of every day. But we had our red line, and the guards knew this. We decided to be quiet until after we finished our prayers, then we would deal with this shitty shift. We prayed the last two prayers of the day at one time while guards banged on our cell doors and mocked us. When we were done, we filled our sinks and soaped our floors.
Waddah asked for the watch commander so we could register a formal complaint about the meals. Lazy Rabbit refused to get him. We banged our cell doors. They turned off the water. Fast Turtle danced up and down the block mocking us. We cursed them. They turned off the AC and ventilation. We baked in our cages and banged on the doors some more. They shot pepper spray into our cells and called for cell searches. We refused. They called the IRF teams. It was business as usual. But the IRF teams didn’t come. That meant they would wait until later and come when they thought we were sleeping.
Yassir was on hunger strike, and when the nurse came for his nightly checkup, we told him to leave with her. The guards had made it clear the night would be messy. When Yassir left his cell, the guards searched him in front of the nurse and pulled his genitals really hard. He hit the guard and they all kicked his ass bad. Now we were just eleven.
When he left, we yelled to each other through our doors to make a plan. All we had in our cells were our orange uniforms, thin plastic ISO mats, flip-flops, and some of us had one towel. Our plan was simple—destroy our cages from the inside. We’d never tried this before—everything was made of steel welded together. But Abdullah had figured out how to make a better hammer than the ones we used during the Romeo riot. He told us to roll our flip-flops into a ball, then wrap them tightly with our shirt. Then we wrapped the ball in a towel, each layer making the ball bigger. Next he told us to tear our pants in half, put the ball inside one leg, and roll it tightly into a bigger ball. Then we put that ball inside the other pant leg and tied it off; it was long enough to hold and swing like a hammer. We dipped the ball in water and that made it even heavier. Now we were just in our shorts, but we had a hammer strong enough to break anything.
The guards turned on the ventilation system again and put huge fans in the middle of the block to keep us from talking. It didn’t matter. We had our hammers and our plan.
Fast Turtle flickered the bright lights and laughed like a little boy. I had to close my eyes or I’d get sick. Finally, he got tired and turned them off completely, and that’s when we got to work.
We divided into two teams. The first distracted the guards by kicking the doors, while the second team hammered our sinks. Those poor babies didn’t stand a chance. Abdullah’s hammer was a beast. The guards were used to the sound of us kicking our doors, and that gave us cover for our real work. We kicked, we pounded, we jumped off our beds to land our hammers even harder. We beat the hell out of those sinks and finally they broke. Because the guards turned off the water, nothing happened when we pulled them from the wall. I pulled out pipes and pumps and scrap and threw them all over my cage. I sliced my hand badly, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even feel it.
“Mission accomplished!” we sang.
I went to work pounding through the ceiling fence to get at the lights.
“Hi, sweetie,” I said to the light fixture. “It’s time to put you to sleep.”
All night long, we worked on our cages with Lazy Rabbit and Fat Ass walking up and down the block, mocking us for being so loud in the dark.
“Are you angry?” Lazy Rabbit cried. “Poor babies are hungry?”
“Go to sleep, kiddies,” Fat Ass spit with a mouth full of tobacco. “Go to sleep so we can play tomorrow.”
“I’ve almost broken the toilet out of the ground,” Abdullah called out. “Wrap your towels around the sink and make a hammer out of it. Then jump off your bed and hammer the toilet.”
Then Abdullah discovered something that changed everything. Breaking the toilet from the floor would open up a hole big enough for him to go through.
“We can escape!” he called out.
“Allahu Akbar!” we cried.
Sweating from all that work and no AC, I took a break and listened to the booms and bangs. It sounded like heavy-duty construction. But it was our song, a new rhythm for our block, and some of us even sang along.
When Abdullah had almost finished with his toilet, we talked about what we would do when we got out. One brother suggested we hide on the rec yard roof and cover ourselves with the green tarp.
“They would never think to look there,” he called out.
Waddah suggested we fight the guards with all the metal we had pulled out. Mana’a suggested we sneak out, and when the guards came to fight us, go back to our cages.
We knew there was no way we could actually escape from the camp. The most we could do was escape from our cages and maybe the block. We didn’t want anyone to get hurt. And we didn’t want to hurt anyone. We just wanted to show Miller that he couldn’t cage us, even with the strongest American steel.
Our plan was to break all our toilets by the time the guards usually settled down to sleep for a couple hours. We could finish breaking the toilets, rest for a little, pretend we were asleep, and then escape.
“I’m done, brothers!” Abdullah called. “Let’s go!”
The rest of us needed more time. Finishing the job wasn’t easy. The cut on my hand was deep and bleeding a lot now. My cage was covered in blood. I ripped up my towel and wrapped my hand, but it quickly bled through. I kept working, holding my hammer in the other hand and jumping off my bed onto the toilet with just one leg, keeping weight off my broken ankle. Nothing could stop me.
“We have to go out together,” Waddah called.
“Are we sure about this?” Ali called. “One of us could get killed.” He was always the cautious brother, thinking and planning ahead.
“Let us at least try,” I called out. “It would be a shame in the history of this hell if nobody tried to escape.”
Abdullah was quiet. We thought he was just resting. We continued working on our toilets. Then all of a sudden, we heard guards shouting.
“Code Black, Oscar Block!” guards yelled. “Code Black! Detainees escaping. Repeat. Detainees escaping.”
We celebrated and congratulated each other. We danced and laughed.
“I’m sorry, brothers!” Abdullah yelled. “I went out through the floor to find a good way for us. I was only halfway out when Fast Turtle opened a window and saw me.”
“You were supposed to wait,” Waddah called.
“I just wanted a quick look!” Abdullah cried. He really was sorry.
“Still,” Othman said, “may Allah reward you.”
Oscar Block filled with guards, civilians, dogs, camera crews, day shift guards, soldiers with guns—it was like the entire world had been called to us.
As guards piled into the block, we threw all the stuff we had pulled from the walls and floor out into the open for the guards to see.
They tried to turn the block lights back on, but most of us had broken our light fixtures.
Two IRF teams stormed Abdullah’s cage and kicked his ass. But he put up a good fight. He hurt one of the guards with a piece of his toilet.
I went back to work on my toilet. I really wanted to finish. Miller had arrived in the yard, and I was running out of time.
“Hey, General,” Hamzah called. “Do you want to buy some stuff? You seem like a rich asshole. I have a Guantánamo sink, specially made in America. Original. A little beaten-up but very valuable. I’ll even guarantee it. How about a light? Good for sleeping, and also from America. I’ll give you a deal. Just one cup of shit on your face.”
