Don't Forget Us Here, page 22
“Where are you going?” I called to him.
“Out!” He hurried to the gate.
“Control,” he said in a perfect American accent. “Open Alpha Block upper gate.” The gate opened and he disappeared off the block.
About ten minutes later, alarms screamed and guards ran through the block. I saw Ahmed run past the gate again, followed a few seconds later by about twenty guards. That was it. He was gone and so were the guards.
I saw him again weeks later in the rec yard and asked what had happened.
“I went to take a shower,” he said. “And I had one of those nasty army guards. When he put me in the shower, he didn’t lock the door. So I took a chance and just walked out. I wanted to get him in trouble and give them all some extra work.”
We laughed about it, then we both fell quiet for a minute. If we escaped, where would we even go? Doors were always left open by mistake. We just closed them or asked the guards to call Control to secure them.
Maybe it was time to start acting differently though. I had been at Guantánamo for six years, long enough to know that I wouldn’t leave here anytime soon. I’d been told after my tribunal that I would not be released, as I still posed a significant threat to the United States. Okay, I said to myself. I stopped thinking about the future and lived only in the moment. I submitted to Allah’s wisdom and plan, knowing that when He gave His permission, I would leave. We all believed this and it kept hope alive that we would eventually be released. But eventually was a long way off, and living in the moment seemed to slow the passage of time and made it less painful, if not less relevant.
WHEN WE WERE first brought to Guantánamo, we tried to count the hours using meals, or we wet toilet paper and stuck it to the wall and counted how long it would take to fall. That was too hard, so we tried to count the days by the changing of the guards’ shifts, but we stopped that, too. We had all the time in the world, and yet it was too hard to track without clocks or watches or anything to write with. Then we tried to count only the weeks. We stopped that, too, and tried to only count months. But what is an hour, a day, a week, a month when they bleed one into the next and you’re still in detention? I never wanted to count the years—it reminded me of how much time I had lost—but the rotation of guards was an inescapable measure of time. The guards served at the camp for around a year, then they rotated out for another mission. We couldn’t remember them all, but there were two kinds of guards we never forgot: the very good ones and the very bad.
Some guards rotated back to Guantánamo after serving somewhere else. When we recognized one of them, we’d call them by their nickname and say, “Hey, Sleepy! Are you crazy? Why would you come back to this place?”
I liked to see their reaction when they recognized me. The guards always remembered the detainees who spoke English and the ones who caused trouble.
“Smiley Troublemaker,” they’d say. “How in the world do you remember me?”
Some guards said things like, “I liked you so much, I came back just to see you.”
“Okay,” I’d say. “We have a lot of empty cages. Choose one and we can be neighbors.”
With those good guards, we asked about their life and what happened to them while they were gone. Some told us that they went to Iraq or to Afghanistan but couldn’t talk about it. Some got married. Some showed us photos of their kids, and we could see the mark of time as their children grew taller and older, photo by photo. Some guards came back clearly very troubled and changed by what they had experienced, like they were living a nightmare.
We always asked the nice guards about the other nice guards who had been to Guantánamo. Some had been killed in battle. Some injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of those guards committed suicide and that made me think about how hard it must be to escape this place, even after you’ve left, even if you’re not one of us. I noticed that when the really bad guards came back, they were the ones who had changed the most. They usually kept to themselves and we didn’t bother them. It was clear something had happened to them, and that they weren’t like before.
The guards who remembered us always asked about our brothers who had been released. “Did they escape or just get released?” they’d ask, trying to make a joke. They saw the changes in the camp. They saw the same changes in us.
“You’re older,” they’d say, pointing to my graying hair and beard.
Guantánamo aged, too, and kept growing, even though there were fewer of us here. The mesh blocks of Camp Delta rusted from the moist, salty air. Paint peeled everywhere. The green tarps covering the fences faded. The decay got so bad, they closed Camp Delta and Romeo Block, where I’d been kept until the end of 2006. They moved us all to solitary confinement in either Camp V or the new Camp VI.
Camp VI was an evil design and showed how smart the US government was. It was colder, crueler, and less humane than the other camps. The Geneva Conventions said prisons couldn’t be built underground, so the Americans built a concrete bunker aboveground from cement and with no windows. And like Camp V, every block was solitary confinement. They kept Camp 4 open—they had to for media tours, to show the world the softer side of Guantánamo, where the most compliant and cooperative brothers played soccer and shared their meals together. The rest of us, most of us, were hidden away in isolation, kept apart from one another and cut off from the world entirely, including our families.
I had never received a letter from my family and I still didn’t know if they knew where I was. We hadn’t had contact with our wives, kids, brothers and sisters, and, of course, our mothers and fathers at all since being here. The Americans worried we might reveal things about Guantánamo that would be a threat to their “national security.”
In the early days of Guantánamo, back in Camp X-Ray, the Red Cross encouraged us to write letters to our families. How nice of them, we thought. Some brothers did write letters, and of course interrogators read them and used their words against them. Sometimes interrogators even wrote fake letters back to us. We were young then and didn’t know much.
By 2007, I was given twenty minutes every week to write letters in my cell. They’d bring me a nubby pen and official Guantánamo paper, and I could write to whomever I wanted and send it one of three ways. There was “detainee mail,” which was just military mail, and I knew those letters went straight to the interrogators for translation and analysis. Then there was legal mail, which no one in the camp admin could read but was only for brothers with attorneys. Not many of us had attorneys, though, including me. The last way was through the Red Cross, and we still didn’t trust that those letters wouldn’t be read by interrogators.
So many of us found creative ways to use that time. Some brothers drew or wrote poetry, but they couldn’t keep what they created. I used my twenty minutes to write letters I sent through the military mail, knowing the interrogators would read them. I used my words to test the translators and taunt and tease the interrogators. I wrote a letter to President Bush about Yassir, Mana’a, and Ali’s deaths, telling him they weren’t suicides and that he should investigate the colonel. I wrote letters to Donald Rumsfeld about my interrogations, noting that I quite enjoyed the screaming vacuums and sleep deprivation. I wrote letters to the United Nations about torture and human rights. I wrote to the king of Jordan about how his interrogators tortured us and claimed they were a delegation from the Arab League—they beat me and told me they would have the women in my family raped by dogs. I wrote a letter to Muammar Gaddafi asking him for a lawyer. I understood he did outrageous things and thought he might actually send me one. I wrote letters to the US Congress telling them that the force-feeding was inhumane and that they should join me sometime for a meal. I wrote a letter to Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen, asking him very politely to intervene on my behalf as a brother and fellow Yemeni, and stating that it wasn’t kind of him to demand hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States in order to take back Yemeni prisoners. After that, interrogators came to me and wanted to know if I was a part of Saleh’s family. The Red Cross, useful as ever, asked me the same thing. I wrote letters to aliens in outer space, warning them that if they came to Guantánamo, they would see the worst side of humans. All the letters came back to me stamped NOT APPROVED.
Still, those twenty minutes every week were the only times I felt like myself. I wrote in Arabic, playing with words and phrases the way I had in my Arabic classes at the Islamic institute. When I told Omar about my letters, he encouraged me to write more and to write about everything we had been through.
“Analysts have to read everything and keep copies,” he said. “This is our way of documenting what happens to us so that there will always be a record of it.”
And so I wrote an angry but respectful letter, this time addressed to myself, when Abdul Rahman al-Amry, a fellow Redeye, was found dead in his cell like Yassir and the camp admin said it was another suicide. I wrote about how it would have been impossible for him to hang himself, bound the way they said he was with his hands behind his back and a cloth in his mouth, and because there was nothing to hang from. I wrote that he’d had a reservation with his interrogators that day, which they said had been canceled. There was no way for us to know if he went or not, but what did they expect us to think by saying it had been canceled?
I wrote a letter to myself about the black line that was painted on our cell floors and how guards wouldn’t give us our meals unless we stood with our toes on the line, and how some guards used it to humiliate us and harass us. I wrote a typical scene of a guard yelling at me to inch my toes closer then farther away from the black line before refusing to give me my meal because I wouldn’t stand on the black line exactly as he instructed. I wrote about how Adnan had figured out a way to erase his black line and that the watch commander didn’t know what to do without it. I wrote about how I was given five months in solitary confinement as punishment for accidentally stepping on a guard’s shoes while passing him in a crowded walkway on my way back from interrogation.
I wrote many letters to my mother and to my brothers and sisters in Yemen. I never got a single letter from them. I only received my own letters back, stamped NOT APPROVED.
Years passed like this and most of us never received anything from our families or loved ones. Nothing except fake letters written by interrogators. We got no sign that the ones we loved knew where we were, that they were thinking of us, that they knew what we were going through… nothing. Not even the smallest indication that they knew we were alive.
Some families did send letters through the Red Cross, but they all ended up detained like us, kidnapped, given ID numbers, exposed to many humiliations while they were searched in the worst ways and examined by translators, experts in poisoning and code-breaking, military analysts, and only Allah knows what else. Eventually, some of those letters got out. That may sound like good news. But those letters were released to interrogators, who controlled everything. Even brothers whose families sent letters often didn’t have the necessary privileges to receive them or to read them. Here is where the interrogators played their game.
Interrogators would call a brother for a reservation and say something like, “We have something for you, and it’s your choice whether you get it or don’t.”
“What do you have for me?” a brother would say.
The interrogator would take out a letter or even a pile of letters and show him.
“Look for yourself,” they would say. “Cooperate with us and help yourself. Here is news from your family. You decide.”
It wasn’t really a choice. If we wanted to free those poor letters, we had to talk, and not just any talk. We had to give them valuable information.
Some brothers received letters regularly, every time the Red Cross visited the camp. That was also part of the game. When you are totally disconnected from everything—your family, the outside world, news—you might give your left eye for any words from your loved ones. Seeing other brothers get regular letters caused great pain. At one point, we told the Red Cross to stop visiting us because we knew they were cooperating with the Americans. I even wrote an official letter signed by the detainees to the Red Cross asking them to leave the camp and explaining that their presence gave legitimacy to everything the US government did to us. That letter was NOT APPROVED.
After we asked the Red Cross to stop coming, some brothers started to receive their letters. Not new letters—just the old letters, dated from years ago. Most of the letters were blacked out so that you couldn’t make any sense of them. Imagine you are a husband and you get your first letter from your wife, your only letter in years, and it reads:
Dear XXXXXX,
I XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX. Your XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX, XXXXXXX XXXXXX. XXXXXX XXX XX XXXXX XXX? XXXXX father XXX XX XXXXXXX. XXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXX leg XXXX XXXXXXX having XXXXXXX. Please, XXXXX XXX XXX XXXXX. I can’t XXXXX XXX X X XXXXXX XXXX XXXX. XXXX XXXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXXX blue XXXXX XXXX XXX. We XXXX XXXX X many XXXXX X XXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXX. XXXX mother XXXXXX XXX X XXXXXXXX XXXXXX ! We XXXX XXXXX XXXXXX.
XXXXX XXXXX
XXXXXXX
I watched brothers spend days and weeks reading them over and over, trying to figure out something, anything. Interrogators even blacked out the faces on photographs families sent, or they gave brothers a black-and-white photocopy that was so dark, you could only see a silhouette. The Red Cross said it was for security reasons.
Some brothers said that getting those blacked-out letters was even worse than not getting them at all. I don’t know about that. Brothers who got any kind of letters—it was like life had been breathed back into them, even if only for a little while.
When I was kidnapped, I disappeared. The United States wasn’t going to contact Mansoor Adayfi’s family when they were insisting I was someone else. It killed me every day to think that my family didn’t know where I was or what had happened to me.
At the end of 2007, after six years of total darkness, I got my first letter from home. A Yemeni brother was released back to Yemen earlier that year. In Sana’a, he visited my cousins and told them what had happened to me and that I was being held at Guantánamo. My mother wrote to me, very carefully writing only what I had instructed via the Yemeni brother, so that the interrogators couldn’t find them. Interrogators used everything against us, even our families.
She wrote that she cried when she found out I was alive—she thought I was dead. My interrogators gave me a copy of the letter with lots of words blacked out. Getting that letter made me feel connected to the outside world for the first time. It didn’t matter what she wrote. I knew that she was alive and that she knew I was alive—that was more than enough. A very small part of me had been found and I felt alive again. They let me have the letter for two hours and then came and took it away. Then an interrogator told me he would give me the entire letter if I started talking to them again. Seven years I had been there and they still thought I had valuable intelligence I wasn’t telling them. I didn’t need to talk to them, and wouldn’t. I just wanted to know that my family was alive and that they knew that I was, too—that was enough.
AS MORE YEARS passed, more brothers were released. Yousif, the boy who inspired me to go on my first hunger strike at Camp X-Ray, went back to Saudi Arabia. Then my Yemeni brother Salim was released.
“Mansoor!” Salim cried as he left the block. “They’re releasing me! Mansoor, I’m going home.” He laughed wildly. We had joked that he would be released before me, even though he was Osama bin Laden’s driver.
“Salim!” I yelled back. “Tell them I am his other driver! Tell them I am his bodyguard or his cook. Tell them I know Osama!”
I was joking but I was serious. It seemed like anyone who knew Osama bin Laden was getting released.
Rumors of new releases spread throughout the camps every couple of weeks. I’d hear through DNN that a lawyer said that a group of twenty was approved for release. I thought the interrogators usually started those rumors to study our reaction and to prevent us from going on hunger strike again, to give us a little sense of false hope.
Omar said that those rumors were our heroin and that we couldn’t live without them. I thought there was some truth to that. Those rumors helped keep hope alive when it was always on the verge of death. Sometimes I helped spread those rumors, knowing they weren’t true. I knew some brothers were looking over the edge of hope to despair and they needed something to pull them back. That line between having faith and believing rumors was difficult to walk. If we believed too many of those rumors and nothing ever happened, we could really fall into despair.
Even when the rumors were true and brothers were approved for release, interrogators came up with new games to humiliate them and strip them of hope before they went home. Days before Hamam left, he came back from his final interrogation with tears running down his cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” we asked. “Did they tell you that you aren’t leaving?”
“No,” Hamam said. He could barely talk he was so upset. “When I was brought into the interrogation room, they gave me all the letters my family had sent to me over the years. The interrogator told me I could read them if I wanted, then he left the room.” Hamam cried now. “Nothing was blacked out. I found out that my mother died two years ago. My father said that her last words were, ‘I wish to see Hamam one last time.’”
