Don't Forget Us Here, page 24
We all laughed. He was so excited; it was like he had seen his mom dancing down the block.
When San calmed down, a brother called out to him. “How are you so sure Obama won?”
“I swear by Allah,” San called back, “that guard’s face lit up like the moon, he was so happy. He didn’t have to say a single word.”
On another block, brothers asked a white guard who didn’t like Obama the same question.
“Hey, man!” Hamzah called out. “How do you like your new boss?”
“I don’t care, man!” the guard cried out. Hamzah said he looked really upset.
Before the big night, San had spread word through DNN that if Obama won, he would get guards to call a Code Yellow.
On every block, guards were assigned to an IRF team, and one guard from each block’s IRF team was assigned to the camp-wide QRF riot team. When big emergencies were called, the QRF guards came running from every block, banging doors, stomping up stairs, making so much noise that everyone in the camp knew what was going on.
As soon as San learned about Obama’s win, he covered the window of his cell door with a towel.
When the guard asked San to take the towel down, he didn’t. And when the guard called to him to answer, San stayed silent. This was a big deal. Ever since our three brothers had died, we weren’t allowed to cover our windows, so that guards could see that we were alive.
“Code Yellow!” the guard called. “Code Yellow, Alpha Block!”
Soon, guards in riot gear came stomping from every block, making so much noise that brothers everywhere woke up.
“Allahu Akbar!” brothers yelled out in celebration. It was chaos.
When the QRF team gathered at San’s cage to go in, he uncovered the window.
“I want to talk to the watch commander,” San said. “And the camp officer!”
The watch commander came and so did a medic with the suicide emergency gear. The watch commander refused to call the camp officer, so San covered his window again.
Every time the watch commander called to have San’s cell door opened, he pulled the towel off the window. SOPs said that guards couldn’t go into his cell if the window wasn’t covered.
“I will play with you all night long,” San called. “I won’t stop until the camp officer comes.”
In a few minutes, the camp officer was standing in front of San’s cage.
“Now that you are here,” San said, “I have a message for the chicken colonel. Please tell him, THERE IS NO MORE WHITE HOUSE! It’s the Black House now!” San laughed and laughed. He was crazy with laughter.
It was after midnight and brothers in every block were talking to guards, either congratulating the Black guards or making fun of the white ones.
“How did you all know who won?” guards asked.
“Obama called me himself!” one brother said.
“I just came back from the Black House,” another said.
Many of us simply said, “It’s classified.”
But one brother joked, “We have a radio.”
Not even an hour later, dozens of guards stormed into the camp. Day shift, night shift, guards we had never seen before. They came with civilians and cameras and many high-ranking officers. The last time we saw the camp admin send in so many guards and officers was when our three brothers died in 2006. At first, we thought one of our brothers had died.
Guards searched every cage in every block in every camp and we thought we were being punished because Obama had won. That wasn’t it. The camp admin was shocked that we seemed to know that Obama had won the election, all at the same time, even before some of the guards. It didn’t make sense to them. None of the guards had told us—that would have been a security breach. And they thought it was impossible for us to communicate from block to block and camp to camp so quickly. When our brother had joked that we had a radio, they’d thought he was serious.
One thing we had learned about the Americans was that they were really good at overthinking everything. Instead of believing that we were telling the truth all these years, they believed we were trained in special counter-interrogation techniques. Instead of thinking about how the Code Yellow woke up the entire camp, they believed we had somehow built a radio network. Imagine the logic.
It didn’t matter that night. The Americans had a new president, one who promised to close Guantánamo, and we all wondered if the time had finally come for change.
– PART 4 –
DEPARTURE
- NINETEEN -
I last saw Waddah alive around the time Obama became president and signed the executive order to close Guantánamo within a year. As I watched guards escort Waddah from Camp V, I thought I’d see him again in a couple of weeks when they rotated him back, or maybe at a force-feeding. The way I felt now about Redeyes like Waddah was how I felt about my tribe—they were in my blood; they were a part of me no matter where they were. We’d suffered together and sacrificed ourselves for each other in our resistance to interrogators and the camp admin. It was more than shared pain, though, more than torture and isolation and hunger. We also shared small moments of stolen joy in the jokes we played, the songs we sang, the little news we got from our families, especially when we learned of a marriage or a new baby. Cut off from our families for so long, we found a new brotherhood in all this darkness.
The day Obama signed the executive order to close Guantánamo, we all shared a sense of hope we’d never felt. The news spread quickly.
Cries of “Allahu Akbar!” rang out across the blocks.
Everyone was talking about leaving—camp officials, guards, camp staff, lawyers, the Red Cross, and even the iguanas, cats, and banana rats. I really hoped it would be true. Obama was better than that idiot George Bush, but I had my doubts that Guantánamo could close so quickly. It took more than four years and a hunger strike just to get salt included with our meals, and Obama thought he was going to close the camp in one? Nothing at Guantánamo happened that fast.
The first thing Obama did was send a delegation to Guantánamo to evaluate the situation.
We might never have another opportunity like this, so I thought it was time to plan a massive hunger strike to get more attention and help Obama close this place. About fifty of us had been on hunger strike since 2007, and many of us had been moved to Camp V Echo, a new detached solitary confinement block where they kept what Colonel Vargo called troublemakers, instigators, and leaders segregated from the other prisoners. I was still mostly with brothers like Waddah, Hamzah, and Adnan—the same brothers I’d been with for years. Most of us were on hunger strike or keeping our weight just above one hundred pounds, which was when they started force-feeding us. Being isolated in Echo made it hard to convince more brothers to join us. It took weeks to talk to brothers who weren’t on our blocks. And even when we did, many of them doubted a hunger strike would do anything.
It was hard to organize with the camp listening in all the time. They had cameras in most of the blocks and heard everything we said. They’d even moved Omar to Camp VI, knowing he was one of the brothers who could bring us all together. But we got started anyway. The first thing we did was ask brothers, “What can you do?” Not all brothers could hunger-strike or wanted to, and that was okay. I understood. It was hard on your body, and there were other ways to join the new resistance. Some brothers said they could splash guards who harassed us. Some said they could begin refusing to leave their cells, which would cause all kinds of problems with IRF teams.
We had learned from the 2005 hunger strike that not all brothers could withstand the pain and health problems that came with not eating for long periods of time, especially those with diabetes or other medical problems. So we decided to gradually build the strike over time. First would be the brothers who were strong enough to strike for months or longer and could handle force-feeding. After that, every couple of weeks the brothers who were a little weaker would join the strike until we had everyone.
I volunteered to continue my hunger strike, to be the tip of the spear for this greater effort.
One day Colonel Vargo came to us when we were force-feeding.
“What in the world are you planning?” the colonel said through his interpreter. “You know you’re leaving soon, right? There’s no need to instigate a big hunger strike.”
“If I am here just one hour,” I said, “I’ll protest for better conditions.”
“What more do you want?” Colonel Vargo asked.
“You should talk to 078,” I said. That was Waddah’s ISN. He wasn’t on force-feeding yet; he was in his cell, down the block.
“I’ll talk to him,” the colonel said. “But I know you can’t bend that one.”
We’d asked Waddah to represent us if the camp admin came to us to negotiate. Waddah was patient and measured and firm when he talked to the colonel, but more important, we knew he would always have all our interests in mind and not just his own. He would never bend.
“We want you to respect us like human beings,” Waddah told the colonel. “Let’s start with that. Come talk to me when you can do that.”
A few days later when I was on force-feeding, escorts came for Waddah.
“Where are they taking you?” I called to him.
“You know, brother!” he called back. “They’re taking me to the BHU.”
This is what they did—as soon as they understood we were organizing, they broke us up. I still have nightmares about the BHU, about being strapped to the metal bed, paralyzed, and the constant harassment. I still remember the cries of brothers fighting and in pain. It was far away from Camp V, which meant once you were there, you were really cut off from everything else in the camp that could give you strength, even from DNN.
Waddah was thin but strong the last time I saw him. He smiled defiantly when he left the block. All the wheels were in motion. Brothers had already started smaller protests, like boycotting appointments and refusing to leave their cells. More brothers were skipping meals and eating less. We had started to break the camp’s circle of control. We were organized and I had hope; I never imagined that would be the last time I would see Waddah alive.
After Waddah was escorted away, I refused to leave my feeding chair in protest. So did all the other brothers on force-feeding that day. Our bodies had aged and become more fragile with time and we were too weak to resist like we did in the days when we fought guards every day, but we could still make the guards work. This was a lot of work: They had to pick us up and put us on our stomachs, restrain us, then pick us up again and carry us back to our cells. Then we refused to get up for each feeding after that. We refused to come back from the rec yard. We refused to come back from the showers. With each passing year the fight got harder, but we couldn’t stop, especially not with hope on the horizon.
A COUPLE OF weeks later I was told that, for the first time, I had been assigned an attorney. This was seven years after I was kidnapped in Afghanistan. Seven years and they’d never once charged me with a crime or told me what crime they thought I’d committed. They’d accused me of being this Adel and then Alex, both al Qaeda leaders, but these were only games they played with me. They had never shown me any evidence, any documents, any photos that connected me to these men. And now they wanted to give me an attorney? It was suspicious. I couldn’t figure out why some brothers had lawyers and others didn’t—there didn’t seem to be any logic behind it. Some brothers had military-appointed lawyers. Some brothers from wealthy families had lawyers. Some Saudis and Kuwaitis had lawyers.
Why all of a sudden would the US government give me a lawyer? I didn’t know what to do. What was the point if Obama was going to close Guantánamo? I’d learned that the Americans couldn’t be trusted, so why should I trust them now?
I was still on hunger strike in Camp V Echo. I asked Fouzi, a Kuwaiti brother in the cell next to me, what I should do. He’d had his attorney for a long time and liked him.
“Mansoor,” he said, “what do you have to lose? Go and meet this attorney. Be yourself. If he’s nice, you can have him be your attorney. If he’s not, then don’t accept him.” He thought about it again. “Just go!” Fouzi was very wise and smart.
I thought a lot about it that night. I thought about the life I had imagined for myself before Guantánamo and how I’d been so close to going to university in one of the Gulf States. Where would I be now if none of this had happened? I would be in Qatar, maybe, where jobs were good. I would be married and have children of my own. What kind of man had I become? Seven years was a long time to be fighting. What kind of man did I want to be? I could continue fighting and hunger-striking, lost in this vicious cycle, or I could try to find a way to live up to the man I thought I would be when I was younger. Who would I be next week or next year? Who would I be in another seven years?
Was this the man I wanted to be when I died?
No. I agreed to meet with this attorney.
I was at force-feeding when they came to get me for my first attorney appointment. Two years of hunger-striking had withered my body and I weighed only about one hundred pounds. After I finished the Ensure, guards escorted me to a small meeting room in Camp V. There were metal chairs, but no table. They chained me to the floor and to the chair and left me by myself, and all of a sudden, doubt raged inside me and I didn’t want to be there anymore.
Then this huge Irish guy walked in. He had sharp eyes like a tiger and really broad shoulders. He was over six feet tall and made the guards and interpreter look so small. His hands probably could have squashed me with just one squeeze, yet the way he looked at me, wide-eyed with shock, I thought he was more afraid of me. This was Andy Hart, my attorney.
I stood up to greet him. I was very shy and nervous, but polite.
“Assalamu alaikum,” this giant said.
He was with another attorney, Emily, and a male interpreter. They both looked terrified, too.
“Wa alaikum Assalam,” I said back.
Andy looked really confused.
“Detainee 441?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied.
He turned to Emily, who was visibly shaking, and to the guard. There was lots of whispering between them and flipping through their files like something was wrong.
“This is really 441?” Andy said to the guard, like maybe he was in the wrong room or with the wrong detainee.
“Just relax,” I said in my best English. That made him smile.
“You’re so… small,” he said. “The guards… You’re just not at all what I expected.”
“Nothing makes sense here,” I said through the interpreter.
Andy laughed and we all sat down, each of us nervous for our own reasons. Andy explained that he was a public defender who worked for the Ohio federal defender’s office and he was here to help me if I wanted him to.
“Have you ever had representation?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I explained to him how the private attorney I’d asked to defend me earlier had refused because they said I was al Qaeda. I told him about how I was classified as an enemy combatant and how I’d presented myself at my tribunal. Then I asked him, “Why give me an attorney now? I’ve been here for seven years.”
He had calmed a lot by now. So had Emily. I saw real sympathy in his eyes as I told my story. With every word I spoke, they both seemed to relax more.
“You were included in a mass habeas corpus filing in 2005,” Andy said. “And the Supreme Court ruled recently that even though you’re here in Guantánamo, you have a constitutional right to challenge your detention.” He explained how the government responded to that habeas corpus petition and Andy’s office in Ohio picked up my case. “I’m here to help you.”
It still didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I wasn’t sure if I could trust these lawyers who wanted to represent me.
“If you convince me that as my lawyer, you can help me,” I said, “then fine—you can be my lawyer.” I was polite but very direct. Although Andy was nice, nothing at Guantánamo told me I could trust the Americans. “If you can’t convince me,” I said, “you can still represent me, but I won’t come to these meetings. I won’t talk to you about my case. And no matter what, I won’t answer the same questions about al Qaeda. I don’t want to be manipulated or feel like I’m being interrogated. I don’t want to have any false hope.”
Andy listened to me carefully, and then we had a long and serious conversation. I told him about all the guys who had been released without lawyers—many of them had been accused of being al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—while the camp kept others, like me, who had protested our detention and fought against torture. I told him about our treatment and the thirteen-page letter I read at my tribunal. And how they had changed their accusations over and over again, always telling me they wanted me to confess to being someone I wasn’t. Always demanding that I confess to being al Qaeda or Taliban.
“Your statement didn’t help,” Andy said.
“I didn’t come here like this,” I said. “They made me.”
We talked like this for hours. He explained to me that he couldn’t tell me exactly why the Americans still held me—it was classified—but that he knew the details of my case and that we would have to build my defense without me ever knowing what the government knew or thought they knew about me. As the meeting came to an end, he became very quiet, like he was trying to decide if he was going to say something.
“I thought we had the wrong room when we came in,” Andy said. “The guards who brought me here warned me that you were a hardened terrorist, and that you would cut my throat if you had the chance. I was told all kinds of things by the camp staff here. They even said you were the leader of a terrorist cell here.” He studied my file for a minute while the interpreter finished. “And to be honest, I was really scared to meet you. I was terrified! I’ve worked in American prisons and defended murderers and criminals and the worst racists—really big and bad guys. But I was more terrified to meet you than anyone else in my life.”
