Don't Forget Us Here, page 27
“Who gave you the right to take them away?” I said.
“You want people around the world to see us playing Nine Tendos?” he said. “Shame on you.”
“People all over the world don’t give a shit about us!” I said. “That’s why we’re still here.”
When we all calmed down, we had a long and serious conversation about the Game Boys. Some brothers were concerned someone could watch porn on them. I understood they were trying to protect us, and I wanted them to understand I didn’t want someone just telling us what we could and couldn’t do. I asked the guards if you could watch pornography on the Game Boys. That made them laugh and they said you couldn’t. But their word wasn’t good enough for the self-appointed cultural advisers, so I called one of the camp officers and an Arabic interpreter. I really just wanted these brothers to understand that the Game Boys couldn’t be used for porn, that they were just games. I wanted us to work it out so that we were all okay with the games.
“Please,” I said. “I don’t want you to laugh. This is a serious problem. Can you explain to these brothers that you can’t watch porn movies on the Game Boys?” The camp officer thought this was really funny, too.
“Are you serious?”
“I am deadly serious,” I said.
I finally talked those brothers into keeping the Game Boys. For just a little while, as we settled into our new lives in communal living, I became the advocate for things like video games and the TV. The world had left us behind and I wanted to catch up. Some brothers had never seen TVs or watched movies before. They didn’t know what to do with them. We had one TV in the block and sometimes one person wanted to watch the news while another wanted to watch the Arsenal soccer game. I helped create a schedule so that brothers could sign up to watch their programs. Managing our brothers’ issues was at times harder than dealing with the camp administration. It was political.
Brothers went crazy for Mario Bros. They called Mario “Mario the Terrorist.” We took turns and played day and night for weeks. One brother used his entire body to control Mario, as if Mario was controlling him, not the other way around. I loved watching my brothers play. I loved seeing them happy. In just a few weeks, those brothers who were so opposed to the Game Boys were asking for their share of game time, too. I knew exactly what we needed. We all needed to live in our daydreams for a little while, and that’s where Mario transported us. To his magical kingdom in the clouds.
FOR NINE YEARS, I had lived in solitary confinement, fighting constantly with camp admin and interrogators to improve conditions in the camp. For nine years, we had lived our lives blacked out from the world. Nine years of computers and technology had happened in the world while we fought guards with our bare hands and bodies. When we came out of isolation, we found ourselves behind the whole world.
Some of those who claimed to be our leaders had been treated well in Camp 4 and other special blocks. They had read books, watched TV and movies, and kept up on what was happening in the world. News and technology didn’t pass them by. They got mostly whatever they asked for. I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t blame those brothers who lived there, even though everyone knew that Camp 4 was used for American propaganda to cover up the real torture. We were all free to make our own decisions. They made theirs and I made mine. I chose to spend those years fighting for others; now I wanted to focus on myself and see who I could become. I wanted to master English and learn about computers, picking up my education where it left off before Guantánamo.
Everyone knew I was reading Around the World in Eighty Days, and that it was taking me a long time to read. Guards stopped by my cell and cracked jokes.
“Are you living the journey day by day?” They’d laugh.
“I haven’t found my sweetheart yet,” I’d say. “When I find her, then my journey will end.”
We had only one Arabic-English dictionary on the block and the library had limited dictionaries. Someone was always using them.
One day I was reading a USA Today in the yard and one of the navy guards stopped to take a look at what I was doing. He was a nice African American guy I liked to talk to. He saw how many marks I’d made in the newspaper.
“What’s all that?” he said.
“Those are all the words I don’t know,” I said.
“Why don’t you look them up in the dictionary?”
I explained my dictionary problem and he helped me go through the words I didn’t understand. Then a couple of days later, that guard came to see me in my block.
“I got something for you,” he said.
“Food?” I said. “Candy?” Navy guards often brought in stuff like that for other brothers.
He laughed. “It’s better than all of that.” He handed me an English-language Merriam-Webster dictionary. I was really surprised. “It’s not Arabic-English, but this way you’ll be able to look up words in English and learn even more words.”
This really touched me. He had thought about something that I needed, something that would help me, and he got it for me as a gift. This was friendship, and I appreciated it.
Reading words in the dictionary wouldn’t be enough, though, and I knew I needed to take classes and really study English the way I had studied Arabic. Finally, after months of negotiations, the camp admin agreed to begin offering a limited number of classes for English, “life skills,” computers, and art.
Predictably, the classes were more lessons in humiliation than anything else. Just to get to the classes, which were in another now-empty block, I had to be searched three times: once when I left the block, again when I got to class, and a third time before I was allowed into the class. And even that wasn’t enough—they brought in full-body scanners like in the airport to search us whenever we left our blocks. What did they think we were hiding? Once in the class, guards shackled me to the desk and to the floor. I think it was the camp admin’s way of making something better yet still punishing us. It’s no wonder only three other brothers showed up.
While we waited for the English teacher to arrive, the Camp VI commander came in. I called him over.
“What brings you here, 441?” he said.
“I want to master English,” I said.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Smiley,” he said, “I think we hear enough from you as it is. What are you going to do when you master English?”
“I will run the camp, of course,” I said. “And let you rest.”
He laughed hard at that.
When the English teacher arrived, he handed out a single paper to each student and then sat down and didn’t say anything. I called him over to my table and introduced myself. I reached out to shake his hand, but he wouldn’t take it.
“I’m not allowed to,” he said. That’s when I knew for sure that the camp admin was intentionally ruining the classes.
I asked him how he was going to teach us English.
“I can bring you stories to read on one piece of paper,” he said. “And you ask me questions if you have trouble understanding them.”
“Aren’t there any books?” I said. “Any lessons? Vocabulary? Verb conjugations?”
“Nope,” he said. He wasn’t trying to be difficult and neither was I. He kept his eye on the guards to see if they were watching him. I understood he was nervous talking to me.
“How can I learn English if I don’t have books?” I said.
“This is what they told me to do,” he said. “I’m not even supposed to talk to you like this.” He looked to the guards again. “You should talk to the camp admin.”
I called the watch commander with the Arabic interpreter and told him how crazy it was to call this a class.
“I understand,” he said. “You need to speak with the Officer in Command.” That was the Camp VI commander I talked to earlier. I told him I would be sure to bring it up in our next weekly meeting.
The other brothers in the class thanked me for speaking up and trying to make things better. They didn’t understand the stories either. It was my first day of English class and I hadn’t learned any English. But I thought we’d made some progress, and sometimes that’s all you can do.
My first computer class was even worse. It was full of brothers and everyone had his own agenda. Some wanted to learn English, some wanted to learn how to type, some wanted to learn how to use a computer, and some just wanted to get off their block and chat. I was serious about class. I was supposed to study computers when I went to university. I’d even taken DOS classes in Yemen, but I’d never used the internet and I wanted to catch up.
I was really late to my first class because of all the body searches, and the only computer left was a half-broken laptop nobody wanted to use. The teacher just gave it to me and didn’t show me how to turn it on or anything. Because we only had an hour—often less—and everyone wanted to learn something different, the teacher divided his time, which meant each of us got about five minutes of instruction.
I turned to my neighbor, Amr, for help. He was a Saudi brother who had lived in Camp 4 and was very good with computers.
“No, I won’t help you!” he said. “I know you’re going to use the computer for forbidden things, like watching movies or listening to music.”
I was shocked. He was one of those brothers blinded by self-righteousness.
After class, I talked to Omar about what happened.
“Mansoor,” he said, “you will be fine without his help. Focus on you, not him.”
The next time I went to computer class, I called one of the navy guards to my table while the teacher was helping others.
“Do you have a minute to help?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about this. I don’t even know how to turn it on.”
This navy guard was very nice and patient. He started from the very beginning and taught me how to plug in the laptop, turn it on and boot it up, log in, open programs, shut it off. I wrote everything down and drew icons. In just one hour, I learned a great deal.
Amr was so mad that I was talking to a guard.
“You’re a guard, not a teacher!” he yelled. Then he demanded to talk to the camp commander. He mistook me for a brother who would tolerate his nonsense.
I turned to Amr. “And who gives you the right to tell him what his job is? When guards talk to me, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and mind your own business!”
“Don’t talk to guards!” he yelled at me. “I won’t allow it.”
Here we were in classes for the first time in nine years and he was trying to control what I could learn. Hadn’t we had enough of that?
I stayed in the room after class was over and refused to leave. The teacher stayed with me.
“Thank you for what you said,” the teacher said. “This guy drives us crazy. He wants to run the class.”
In the next weekly meeting with the camp commander, I told him that the classes were a disgrace.
“I’m serious about learning English,” I said. “That’s not teaching. That’s a new form of torture. That’s depriving us of knowledge.”
“You’re already making policies,” the camp commander joked. But he understood. I think he really wanted to help. Of course, he had no control over the classes, but he said he would arrange for me to meet with Colonel Thomas. I wrote up all the things we needed for the English class, and I asked the teacher to make a curriculum so we could request the necessary books, CDs, and anything else he needed to teach. The camp commander said he would write up a report documenting all my issues and suggestions. With the curriculum and the report and the list, we could talk to the camp admin and the Red Cross to push the camp to get us what we needed. Andy could help, too. And other lawyers. I continued writing official letters to Colonel Thomas with my requests.
Despite the issues, I kept attending classes and learning on my own. I wasn’t shy about getting help from guards whenever I needed to. I took meticulous notes on everything in computer classes and studied on my own in my cell so that during class I could practice my typing.
Eventually, we got an Iraqi teacher named Jamal, who was very nice and well educated.
“Don’t worry,” he said on his very first day, “I will teach you all about a PC until you know how to do everything—even fix technical problems.”
I was so happy, but he didn’t last long. The next class, he told us he was leaving.
“I’m not allowed to teach you what you should know,” he said. “The camp admin gave me very firm restrictions. I can’t stay in a place like this, where they won’t even let me teach you what kids in first grade know.”
I begged him to stay and do his best. He agreed, but he only lasted another month. By that time, though, Andy had brought me English grammar books and books about Windows Vista and Microsoft Office.
Now I was learning English and Microsoft at the same time. I didn’t get a lot of time with the laptop, so I read a lot in my cell to make the most of my time. In just a couple of months, I had learned a great deal—I knew the ins and outs of Windows Vista and could create any kind of document with Microsoft Office. My English was even better. I was still just learning the basics, but for me, it was a big deal, and for the first time, I was starting to imagine what a life could be like after Guantánamo.
DIFFICULT AS IT was for me, Andy was always thinking about the future and had it in his mind that when I could read and write well enough in English, he would help me get into an American college so I could begin working toward a degree. Andy came about every three months, and with every visit, we became closer. Whenever he visited, he always brought me coffee from McDonald’s and tuna fish sandwiches from Subway. It was hard to get halal food in the camp, and I missed having any kind of seafood. If I was really lucky, he’d bring my favorite treat, salted almonds.
After our first meeting, I’d told Andy that if the US government wouldn’t tell me why they were holding me and what evidence they had against me, there was no sense in us talking about my case. He was okay with that. He laughed sometimes, thinking aloud about the things he’d read in my file, like that one reason I was considered a threat was because I was smart and capable of leading people. He couldn’t tell me why, but he was confident that based on the documents he’d seen, I had a strong habeas corpus case.
So instead of talking about my case, I told Andy about life at Guantánamo. In one meeting, I sang for him a funny song one of the brothers made up in the early years of General Miller and Camp Delta, when things were really bad and brothers were splashing guards. We’d sing this song just to the nasty guards, like the ones in the 9/4.
I have no money! I have no job! I have no food! I have no clothes! I have no freedom! I have no appointments! I have only shit to do.
Some guards and camp staff loved that song, but not the 9/4. They knew that when we sang it, they would have a bad night.
Andy laughed hard when I sang it for him.
“You need to write these stories down!” he said.
“I’ll write a book,” I said. “And I’ll write about all the moments from Guantánamo that no one knows about.”
Andy listened and laughed—he had the biggest laugh. It felt good to tell my stories and see his eyes grow big at some of the things I’d say. I told him about Nono, who was the first brother to splash General Miller with shit, and how a guard brought him chocolate afterward as a secret thank-you, since most of the guards hated Miller just as much as we did. I told Andy how one of the guards said that Miller hated the song we sang together when brothers were taken to interrogation, and that he had nightmares where he woke up singing that song himself. I sang it for Andy: “Go with peace, go with peace, may Allah grant you ever more peace and ever more safety. Go with peace, go with peace.” I told him to imagine forty-eight guys all singing that together in a metal shipping container.
It was strange to hear myself tell these stories and to remember everything we had been through. It was like reliving another man’s nightmare. Sometimes I didn’t recognize myself in those stories, like the wild twenty-year-old painting his cell with his own blood. Andy got really upset when I told him some of the worst stories, and he told me he felt ashamed that his government could do such things.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Guantánamo is made up of people who were ordered to do things they didn’t believe in. There were always some good people, even some of the interrogators. But this place chewed them up, too.” I told him about the young female guard who refused direct orders to drag me to interrogation, and about Captain Yee, the Muslim chaplain who was arrested for espionage trying to make our lives better. But the stories I liked to tell the most were about those small moments that made me laugh. Like when General Miller introduced a new rule that we had to stand in front of our cell door before guards gave us food, and my neighbor, the shortest guy at Guantánamo, got into an argument with the guard about whether or not he was standing. Talking to Andy helped me begin to understand what had happened to us and what we had lost of ourselves as we struggled to survive.
My favorite part of our meetings was hearing Andy talk about his family. After shaking hands and getting settled, he always said something like, “My family says hello and sends their kindest regards.” After more than a year talking to Andy like this, I felt like I’d come to know his family, and I wished one day I would meet them. Andy was a father, and the way he talked about his family brought sunshine into the room. The love he had for them made me miss my sisters and family even more. Andy and his family brought me hope that one day I would get out of Guantánamo, start my own family, and fill a room with sunshine talking about my own children with Andy.
When we said goodbye at the end of our time together, we always shook hands, and I’d say, “Please, Andy. Give your family my kindest regards.”
ANDY’S IDEA OF applying to colleges made me really want to learn to speak and write English perfectly. I’d heard about a brother who lived in Camp 4, Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman who was one of the most educated men at Guantánamo and had taught many brothers English. He had become like a father to everyone in his camp. We called him Shasha. I was so happy when he moved to Camp VI. We were in different blocks, but I saw him in the main rec yard and immediately went over and welcomed him. Right away, I understood why all the brothers and guards liked and respected him. He was gentle and sociable and didn’t mind all the questions I asked him, so I asked if he would teach me English. He didn’t even think about it. He simply said yes, then told me we would start the next day. No questions. There were problems though. We were in different blocks, so we could only meet at certain times and would have to talk to each other through fences, with a walkway between us. He didn’t care.
