Don't Forget Us Here, page 25
Emily let out a nervous laugh and smiled.
He told me that there were three categories of detainees: low, medium, and high risk. The high-risk ones were too dangerous to ever be released. They called these men Forever Detainees. Not only was I categorized as the highest risk of Forever Detainee, I was classified as the worst of the worst—the one they used as an example.
“Really!” I was surprised.
“They made an example out of the statement you read at the Administrative Review Board in 2006,” he said, “when you declared that you were an enemy of the US. Some of your statement was published in newspapers.”
“I was hurt and angry and confused when I wrote that,” I explained. “I didn’t have an attorney and it seemed like they had already made up their minds about me. It was a bad time here. Three brothers had died.”
“I thought I was going to meet a monster today,” Andy said. “Instead, I met you. Thank you for agreeing to meet with us. I will do whatever I can to help you.”
When the guard came to get me, he was a real asshole. He yanked my chain and was rough with me. Andy told him to stop. Before I left, Andy extended his hand, confident and friendly, as if he’d known me for a long time. He was maybe the first person to see me at Guantánamo as who I thought I was and not as an animal. Me, Mansoor. Not the al Qaeda leader they said I was. Not 441. Not Smiley Troublemaker. Just me. He also crushed my hand.
“I think we’re going to be good friends,” Andy said.
WHILE WE WAITED for news that the camp would close, Obama’s Guantánamo delegation began making recommendations to improve conditions. The camp admin resisted. They had been here too long and couldn’t change the way they saw things. To them, we were at war and Guantánamo was a battleground, not a prison that needed better conditions.
Colonel Vargo came to me again one day while I was tied up and force-feeding.
“What are you still protesting for?” he said. “You’re leaving!”
“You believe that?” I laughed at him. “You will see.”
Brothers like me had come of age in this place and we didn’t have the best view of America. The Americans knew we wouldn’t have anything good to say, and worse, they were afraid we would join some battle against them if we were released. So why would they let us go?
I told Andy Hart this during one of our meetings. After just a few meetings, I came to like Andy a lot and felt I could talk to him about anything. With him, I finally felt like I was connected to the outside world and something other than Guantánamo.
“You’re talking like you’re the president of the United States,” Andy said. “How can you be so sure?”
“Let us wait and see,” I said. “You’ll see. I’ll be right. And we’ll have to protest for better treatment.”
The camp did start to change a little. They stopped searching our genitals, and we even got more time in the rec yard every day. More of us were allowed to have books and magazines. But the biggest change was that we finally got to have a call with our families.
I couldn’t sleep at all the night before my call. I worried they wouldn’t recognize my voice or that I’d forget the names of family members they’d talk about. Brothers and sisters had grown up. My parents had grown older and I worried about getting bad news. I’d heard stories of brothers learning on their call that their parents had died. But when I heard their voices on the other end, I felt the weight of a mountain lift off my chest. My parents were both alive and healthy! My older brother was still teaching at the same school, and two of my sisters had moved to Sana’a, where they were teaching. I cried knowing that everyone was still alive, still there, and that life hadn’t stopped without me. I cried knowing that they remembered those parts of my life I had pushed away and forgotten, and now I wanted them back.
The next call didn’t go as well. There were so many restrictions on both ends of our calls. We weren’t allowed to tell our families anything about the camp or what we were doing. We couldn’t say much more than “I’m fine.” If we said anything restricted, the call was terminated. And that’s what happened to me when I told my mother that “I am healthy, even though I am on hunger strike.” Instantly, the call terminated. My mother was old and had traveled over six hundred miles to Sana’a to the Red Cross office. I turned crazy. But before I did anything, I calmly explained to the guards that I didn’t mean to say anything about the strike, I just wanted my mother to know that I was okay. They didn’t want to listen, so I activated that beast within me, 441. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I broke everything I could get my hands on: the table, chairs, the computer monitor. I pulled all the cables out. I even broke two cameras. I did all this with my legs chained to the ground.
“Don’t come in!” I yelled when they came for me. “I’ll hurt anyone who comes in.” I did what I did because the camp admin had stopped other brothers’ calls, too. Because they always found ways to use anything good to hurt us the most.
The guards came and kicked my ass and brought me back to my cell. The camp admin never forgot what I did. They couldn’t believe what I did with my bare hands. They classified me as “very dangerous” after that.
THEY THOUGHT WADDAH was dangerous, too. We hadn’t had any news about him since he’d disappeared to the BHU months ago except that he was on hunger strike. I didn’t worry about that; I worried about how long they had kept him in the BHU. It wasn’t normal to keep brothers there for so long. And then we got news from one of the nice nurses in the BHU that an IRF team had broken Waddah’s back while they were restraining him to go to force-feeding. This had happened to many brothers before. When guards put us on our stomachs to be restrained, they always knelt on our backs, grinding their knees into our spines. This had happened to me and I still suffered from bad back pain. After we heard about Waddah’s back, the camp admin announced that they had changed the SOPs to reduce IRFs and forced cell extractions.
I heard from a brother who had been at the BHU that Waddah was in really bad shape and had lost a lot of weight. He said that the psychologist, a really evil guy, had ordered Waddah’s clothes taken away. He said Waddah couldn’t walk anymore without using crutches and that he was always in a lot of pain.
I wrote letters that week to Colonel Vargo and the camp commander asking them to move Waddah back to our block so that we could take care of him. This would have been the humane thing to do. I knew what it was like to be in the BHU with no brothers around for support and that it would be hard for Waddah to recover in isolation like that. I never got a response.
The next week, I was on force-feeding when the senior medical officer pulled up a chair and sat right in front of me, very serious. He took off his hat and put it in his lap and started to ask me about how I was feeling being on hunger strike and if I’d had any thoughts about hurting myself. They did this sometimes when we were hunger-striking. They didn’t really care—they just needed to pretend like they did. For some reason I can’t explain, I knew something was wrong with Waddah.
I interrupted him. “Is 078 okay?” I asked. “Is there something wrong with him?”
Wa Allahi, all the blood in the SMO’s face drained. He got up without finishing his questions and hurried away. I knew right then something bad had happened to Waddah. I knew.
Back at the block, I saw Fouzi at the rec yard and told him about my meeting with the SMO.
“They’re not telling us something,” Fouzi said.
Two days later, a camp officer came to Camp V Echo with an Arabic interpreter and told us that our brother Waddah had died in the BHU.
I had known Waddah since the very beginning of Guantánamo, when he had always passed at least one of his meals to brothers he thought needed the food more than he did. Waddah stood up for anyone, whether he knew them or not. Brothers loved him, even brothers who didn’t know him well. He had fought the camp and the interrogators with us. He had honor and integrity and kept his word. He didn’t deserve to die at Guantánamo just as things were starting to improve. He didn’t deserve to die at all.
I dropped to my knees and cried. All of us on the block cried out for Waddah. We were consumed with sadness for days, and then we vowed to continue our hunger strike to honor Waddah.
The camp admin said that Waddah had committed suicide by hanging himself with his underwear. It didn’t make any sense. The BHU had cameras in every cell, and Waddah was under something called “Direct Line Watch,” which meant that a guard stood stationed at his door looking at him every minute of every day. Waddah was a fighter and he never would have taken his life like that just as we were organizing what could be the most important hunger strike yet. I didn’t believe this lie any more than the same lie they told about Ali, Mana’a, and Yassir.
I was so mad. We all were. But I knew the best way to honor Waddah was for us to stay strong and united. For months, the camp admin tried to end the hunger strike and other forms of resistance by playing games with us, moving us around and hiding us. Yet every month, more brothers joined the hunger strike and more brothers were put on force-feeding. No matter where they moved us and no matter what they did, the camp couldn’t stop the hunger strike from spreading.
By the beginning of 2010, Guantánamo was still open and there were no signs of it closing anytime soon. I didn’t want to be right about Guantánamo not closing, but I knew I was. I started to see fear and disappointment on my brothers’ faces that Obama wouldn’t fulfill his promise. It was around this time that Colonel Vargo was replaced by the new colonel, Donnie Thomas, a tall Black man we called Obama.
The new colonel right away began to negotiate an end to the hunger strike. We knew we had to play it right this time, and our plan was simple. We told the new colonel that the only brother who represented all of us was Omar. We had trusted Omar for years and he had looked out for us more than any of the other brothers who wanted to speak on our behalf. The camp admin trusted him, too, because he was calm and always kept his word. I’m not exaggerating when I say he saved a few lives in the camp. He was charming and charismatic and humble. He knew how to see everyone’s humanity and use it to solve problems.
Omar knew very well that closing Guantánamo wasn’t going to happen, so he’d been trying to negotiate with the camp admin to improve life for us while we were there. He made the same demands of the new colonel that he’d been making all along. He wanted to end solitary confinement and get us all into communal living, like Camp 4. He wanted to end interrogations and all the hideous punishments we had suffered for years to get us to talk. He wanted to get us the proper medical treatments we needed and for the psychologists to stop punishing us in the BHU. He wanted to open up communication with our families with more phone calls and letters that didn’t go through the interrogators. He wanted us to have access to TVs, newspapers, and books. He wanted us to have better food and clothes. He wanted us to be able to take classes, get an education, and begin to prepare for the day when we would be released. He wanted the guards to treat us better. None of these things were unreasonable.
We had to be strict with our brothers about the negotiation and insisted that no one else except Omar talk to the camp admin on our behalf. No one. If the new colonel or other camp admin tried to talk to anyone, the brothers had to refer them to Omar. There was one group of brothers who thought that any improvements in our daily lives would distract us from the real goal, which was to be released. Of course we wanted the camp to close, too. But that wasn’t happening soon and we wanted better lives while we waited. It was complicated, and there was a real risk of brothers becoming divided about what we needed to achieve and when. I was afraid the camp admin wanted to break us apart to make it easier to give us nothing. We couldn’t afford to repeat the same mistakes we’d made in 2005.
First, we insisted that Zak, the Jordanian cultural adviser who was really a torture adviser, not be included in the negotiations. Zak said he represented us, but things always came out worse when he was involved. All we had to do was count the number of brothers who had died since Zak arrived, now at five.
Omar asked that hunger strikers be treated for medical conditions that came with hunger-striking, not just fed and thrown back in isolation cells. The camp staff was really angry about that. They thought that any new privilege, even medical treatment, was like giving up ground to the enemy. They never agreed to the change.
Then Omar focused on improving living conditions. The new colonel moved fast and turned two blocks into communal living, but only for four hours a day. They did what they always did—they tried to give us the very least they could get away with. We had learned a lot during our eight years at Guantánamo; we knew how the camp admin thought better than they did, and none of the brothers agreed to move to those communal blocks. Why would we? Omar argued that everyone should be moved to communal blocks, and those blocks should be like Camp 4, where brothers had access to common space twenty hours a day.
It was a big deal when Omar came to our block to talk to us. When I saw him escorted in, I knew we would be ending our hunger strike and that things would change. He had good news: he had negotiated to convert Camp VI into communal living. If we ended our hunger strike and agreed to be compliant to the camp rules, we could join him.
I had mixed feelings. I had spent more than eight years fighting for better treatment, had even lost good friends like Waddah in the struggle, and now there was a real possibility that it would happen. I was happy. I tried to imagine what life would be like if Omar was able to negotiate all the things he had asked for, like classes and books and news from the outside world. But would they actually categorize me as compliant if I stopped the hunger strike? If they did, would I really be able to read and study again the way I wanted? I had never been categorized as compliant and I worried what that would mean for me. Would better living conditions just distract us from fighting for what we really wanted, which was to be released? And without fighting and resisting the camp admin, would I really be able to focus on myself the way I wanted to? I worried that maybe I had changed too much at Guantánamo and lost that Mansoor who had dreamed of going to university one day.
- TWENTY -
I was ready to leave the dark ages of punishment and solitary confinement behind me, but I waited to transfer to Camp VI’s communal living until all the other brothers were moved and I knew that Colonel Thomas and the new camp commander would keep their word about improving conditions. I stayed in Camp V Echo, where we had stopped fighting with the guards the way we had before. The days became longer as we waited, and we were bored, all of us—guards and brothers.
Camp V Echo was made out of shipping containers just like Oscar Block—with solid metal walls—but we had glass doors. It was also one of the only blocks in Camp V that didn’t have cameras, probably so that they couldn’t document abuse and inhumane conditions. Without cameras, the guards could sleep, read, play games—we even joked around sometimes with the friendly guards.
Our jokes were almost always on new guards. When new guards arrived, they were so young and fresh, and all of them had been told terrible things about us. That was where the fun began.
On the outside of each cage was a detainee card with all our information. Next to the card was a white card where guards could write notes for other guards, like restrictions, critical medical conditions and medications, punishments, and warnings.
Sometimes, working with the block sergeant and older guards, we left the new guards strange new instructions. My favorite was “bedtime stories.”
One day we asked the nice female block sergeant to write BEDTIME STORY on a few of our white cards. After the last meal and prayer, she called the new guards and told them to see how many detainees needed stories.
“I counted three, sir!” one of the new guards said.
“Okay,” the block sergeant said. “Let’s divide up. Who wants to read stories?”
“You can’t be serious,” another new guard said.
“They can’t sleep until someone reads them a story,” the block sergeant said, “or tells them one. It’s up to you.”
“What kind of story do we tell them?”
“Just read to them from the books they have.”
“Story time, please!” Abdul called out. “I’m tired.”
Three new guards took chairs and each of them sat in front of a cage. They all looked really confused. Hamzah lay down on his bed and asked the guard to start reading from a specific page in the copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus he had on top of his cage. Khalid did the same. The third guard found a National Geographic and started reading an article about saving energy. Everyone laughed quietly while they read, and the brothers fell asleep. When the guards were done, we all called out for more stories.
“Read me a story, please!” we called out.
Sometimes the block sergeant wrote things like HAND EATER or FLAME THROWER on our cards and made up crazy stories about how a brother had eaten guards’ hands or could breathe fire. Once, the old guards told the incoming guards they needed to collect our number two before each meal. Brothers had a lot of fun with these jokes. The new guards would believe anything after what they had been told about us during their training. Usually, they figured things out in a couple days, and by the time they rotated out, they were joking around with us and planning pranks on the new rotation of young guards.
We also played jokes on brothers who were moved to Camp V Echo from Camp 4, where the living was much easier. Some of these brothers had never been to this block and knew nothing about the hard life in solitary confinement. On our block, we were only allowed to have a blanket for around seven hours a night, between 11 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. We asked the night shift block sergeant to tell one of our new brothers that the block rules said he had to give up all his clothes at 11 p.m. and sleep naked. It was a mean joke to show him what our lives had been like, but it was also our way of welcoming him to our block of the worst of the worst.
