Don't Forget Us Here, page 31
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough to us by holding us here for so many years?” I called out. Brothers in the block gathered around to listen. One of the high-ranking army officers came over to me.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but you chose to be here.”
“And how is that?” I said.
“You chose to be in Afghanistan.”
“So, you Americans kidnap people from all over the world and then tell them, ‘You chose to be here’?” I said. “I was in Afghanistan. Yes, this is my fault. That doesn’t give you the right to hold me forever without any rights or justice. To just forget about me. What about those men who were kidnapped from different countries and brought here? What do you tell them? What if some government kidnapped your son and held him without charges and no rights? What would you say to that?” I looked around at our block. “Is this what American greatness is about?”
His group called to him. Before he left, he looked at me and said, “You’ll make a great lawyer.”
“Exactly,” I said.
I hadn’t changed anything, but at least I felt like he had heard me. That’s what speaking English did for me now.
I overheard officers talking as they left. They were already planning to take away our privileges. They talked about locking down the blocks, shutting down communal living, and opening them up again as solitary confinement with stricter rules and no privileges. They didn’t see the world we had created and how it had brought calm and peace to the camp. They didn’t want to. They only saw terrorists who needed to be detained.
THEY STARTED HARASSING us, especially my block where many of the artists and old troublemakers lived. They targeted us with more frequent and invasive block searches and took from us things that we had had for years, like our paints and brushes and DVD players. They took belongings our attorneys had given us, our families had sent us, even things guards and interrogators had given us as incentives. It didn’t matter what they took—books, CDs, clothes—they just wanted to punish us. They made new rules that restricted what we could do and what we could have. They stopped classes. They even took away medical care. It was obvious that all the harassment was intended to provoke us into fighting with the guards again to prove we were just jihadists ready for battle. When they didn’t get the reaction they wanted, they sent their worst officer to search us.
It had been years since we had negotiated with the camp admin to stop guards and camp staff from touching or searching our Qur’ans. Anyone who had spent time here knew this was just common sense. So many of our fights with guards had been over our Qur’ans. We had agreed that instead of guards or camp staff searching our Qur’ans, the block leader would collect them from brothers and go through them in front of the guards to show that we weren’t hiding anything in them.
This army officer went to the one block in Camp VI that was mostly Afghani brothers who just wanted to be left alone. The communal camp had had so many arguments and so many troubles over what games to play, what TV shows to watch, what to eat, and these brothers just wanted a simple life. So they’d moved to one block together. They listened to the radio. They read. They prayed. They didn’t have a TV so that they wouldn’t argue over what channel to watch. They just wanted to be. When the block leader collected the Qur’ans, this army officer insisted on searching the Qur’ans himself. Remember, the Afghans were very protective of their Qur’ans. It was clear the camp admin wanted to provoke a reaction.
“You’re not allowed to do that,” the block leader said.
“I don’t give a damn,” the officer said. He was arrogant and careless. He grabbed the Qur’ans and searched them himself. It was like declaring war.
The next day, that officer went to another block to search, and they refused the search. Everything escalated after that. The camp admin said that we could be hiding weapons in our blocks if we were refusing searches. We covered the cameras in our blocks so they couldn’t see us and brothers started going on hunger strike.
Block leaders tried to negotiate a deal with the camp admin over the Qur’an searches, but they sent the same officer who’d initially searched the Qur’ans, and that made us even more determined to continue until they agreed to stop Qur’an searches. They refused that one point—one we had dealt with so many lifetimes ago—and that’s why all negotiations failed.
Over the last two years, we had pushed beneath the surface questions about when we would be released, too afraid to face the possible answers. Now those unspoken questions rose to the surface again and we had no choice but to address them. Going on strike wasn’t just about the Qur’ans or losing privileges; it was about our future. The beginning was difficult, but soon it was like Mr. Hunger Strike had never left my side.
Because many of us had attorneys, our stories started to get out to the world. The camp admin didn’t like that we were getting media attention and showing the world that conditions had gotten worse, not better. It was embarrassing for them, but it didn’t have to be.
We didn’t have a plan, but sometimes the best plan is to not have a plan at all. That is what made the hunger strike so powerful.
The camp admin tried to use time against us. They thought we wouldn’t last long this time. We didn’t plan to take the hunger strike far; we started off just making a point about the Qur’an searches. We just waited. Most of us didn’t expect the camp admin to actually shut down communal living.
But Zak, the cultural adviser, had gotten involved with the colonel. They were together all the time and Zak was advising him to take control of us. I don’t know why, but he hated us.
Within twenty-five days of the Qur’an search, Camp VI had turned into a death camp. Almost everyone was on strike. We survived on water, salt, sugar, and coffee. We lost a lot of weight. Some of us fainted all the time. We were all traveling to death together, on a slow and painful journey. We lay in our cells with empty stomachs and worn-down bodies, in pain, too hungry to sleep. Our dreams were all about food.
It wasn’t the first time we became skeletons. And unlike all the previous hunger strikes, we weren’t locked in isolation cells. But we were too weak to even talk or move around. Walking down the stairs for prayer was like walking a million miles. We prayed three times a day instead of five because we didn’t have the energy. The few brothers who were still going to art classes stopped. Soccer stopped. Even our poor cats had to stop eating and go on hunger strike with us. I was so ashamed we had no food or milk to give them, but we were now all in this together. Life stopped. The camp became a morgue.
Of course, the psychologists never stopped coming. They sent their assistants to ask us the regular questions: Are you eating well? Do you sleep well? Do you have any dreams? Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you want to kill yourself?
We stopped talking to them. We refused to leave our block, even for medical checks. The guards watched us through the cameras. They told us that they couldn’t even recognize some of us—that we looked like we had risen from the dead. We hoped the media would push the camp admin to stop their new policies. But nothing changed.
On the fortieth day, the administration declared war.
It’s difficult to sleep when your body is feeding on itself. You feel every nibble of muscle. Some of us slept outside in the recreation yard to keep our minds clear. The weather was nice at night, and it was delicious to taste the freedom of escaping our freezing cells.
I heard the first shot just after two in the morning. I thought it was a dream, and then I heard our brother scream in pain. Soldiers lined the outside of the fence and one had shot a brother at close range with rubber bullets.
I ran to help him, but soldiers shot at me, too. I turned and walked back toward the block and was met by a hundred guards in body armor, shields, and dogs. Outside the block, more soldiers surrounded us with armored cars and heavy guns.
“Get inside!” the guards shouted. It was chaos straight from The Hunger Games.
I smiled. I don’t why. Maybe because I couldn’t believe what I saw. Maybe because I knew all along that this is where we would end up. Maybe because we had fooled ourselves falling asleep in this dream that was still Guantánamo and always would be. Maybe because I was just too weak to do anything else.
I heard more gunshots and saw another brother hit.
“THIS IS A LOCKDOWN!” an interpreter repeated in Arabic over a loudspeaker.
There were fewer than a hundred men living between seven blocks in all of Camp VI. Some blocks had fewer than ten detainees living in them. My block had fifteen. Maybe the Pentagon didn’t understand that or made a mistake or got confused. We were half-dead on hunger strike and they sent an army to deal with our corpses. I hadn’t seen so many soldiers since we destroyed Oscar Block.
We didn’t resist. We couldn’t even walk. Still, they shot us with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray. They beat us and set their dogs on us.
They rounded us up and locked us in our cells, and that was the end of Phase I of their crackdown.
Phase II began with the guards’ chaplain dancing into our block, guards laughing behind him. He danced straight to our lovely library, the one we’d spent six months building. As he danced, he kicked it as hard as he could. First the doors, then the drawers. The guards joined him like a pack of hyenas. The library didn’t stand a chance. They didn’t stop until it had been beaten to death and packed into trash bags.
Then they set out in pairs and tore down shelves, paintings, signs, everything we had made. Some of my brothers shouted. Some cried. Some called the guards savages. The cardboard furniture didn’t break easily. We were good craftsmen. The guards kicked and punched and worked themselves up into a sweat.
Once the common areas had been stripped, the guards came to our cells in teams of six wearing body armor and riot gear, just like the days of IRFs.
“Look at these cells!”
“This is fucking better than my room.”
They beat us, shackled us, pushed us hard against the walls, and searched our genitals like they used to, in the worst way possible. They took our clothes, the clothes we had made or altered or colored, and gave us orange shirts and pants—the uniforms we hadn’t worn in years. They sat us outside our cells and then went in and got started on their real work.
“Looks like a fucking hotel in here.”
“Not for long!” They stripped everything off the walls and broke it all—desks, picture frames, shelves, artwork—they spared nothing.
Then they returned us back to those empty cells.
We listened for hours as they went from cell to cell.
“Hey, guys, watch this shit!” a guard yelled. Then he threw the Popsicle-stick palace with the garden over the second-floor railing. When it hit the ground, it shattered into a thousand pieces.
“Awesome, man!”
“More! More! More!” guards chanted and laughed.
Our beautiful trees? Over the railing.
When they found paintings, they critiqued them first.
“This is pretty enough to clean your nasty ass with,” a guard snickered.
Or they pretended to be one of us.
“Look at my beautiful painting! I used my dick to paint it.”
If we tried to reason with them, they mocked us.
“Why?” They laughed. “No!” they screamed like they were children. “Can’t you see that I’m an artist?”
If we asked them to please save a painting, they taunted us.
“You mean this?” a guard said while ripping the painting he was holding.
If any of us protested, pepper spray.
We’d built our own worlds in those cells, where we were allowed to be human again. Where we dared to reveal who we really were. Determined not to let the guards strip him of everything, one of our brothers called the guards over to his cell. He tore down his paintings. He tore down his shelves. “We are better than this,” he said, handing everything through his bean hole. “We aren’t the savages.” They tore it all to pieces.
They saved Moath’s cell—the best—for last. They tore down his shelves, his curtains with the most perfect curtain rod, the AC vent box, and the windmill, the first piece he’d created. Then they took down his windows. The windows he had created for all of us to look out onto a better world and the dream of freedom and one day home. The guards stomped those windows with their boots. They kicked them. They tore the shutters off their hinges and shredded the palm trees. Just like that, our cardboard heaven was gone.
When the guards finished picking the block clean of everything that had given us life, that proved we were alive, we stood at our cell windows and watched them stuff the remains into trash bags. The colonel and a group of officers inspected the empty block. Their mission was a success. They had shown us.
We’d created a small, simple life from scraps. We had connected with each other, with guards, and with the world beyond our cells through the simple act of opening ourselves up and expressing ourselves. If that was so threatening, nothing would change their minds. But it didn’t matter what they saw in us. We had regained ourselves, something they couldn’t take away from us ever again. And we were determined to fight for it.
THE CAMP ADMIN closed communal living the way they had planned to all along, and now they treated us worse than the first days of Camp X-Ray. What they didn’t understand was that the hunger strike wasn’t about art or contraband or even living conditions—it was about life. Our lives.
It was clear now that there was no end in sight to our indefinite detention. This really scared us and made us realize we had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
The lockdown didn’t stop the hunger strike. Instead, it inspired more brothers to join, and within days our numbers spiked to include everyone in Camp VI except two brothers who had serious medical conditions. The camp admin had spent years keeping hunger strikers separated from each other in solitary confinement blocks or spread out between all the camps. But now we were all together, mostly in Camp VI, and we united.
We knew how they were going to try to stop the strike before they did. I knew the drill. First, they put me and all the other hunger strikers back in the orange outfits of noncompliant detainees and locked us in our empty cells. They took away our toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, blankets, books, letters—everything except ISO mats—and once again we were in our colorless world where we had nothing. They put us back on a program of sleep deprivation and harassment. Guards woke us up every twenty minutes to make sure we were “still alive.” They started IRFs again and the use of pepper spray. If I didn’t show guards that I was awake and alive when they banged on my cell door, guards called an IRF team. I think we know what happened then. Pepper spray. Five well-fed guards slamming into me. Me on my stomach, my arms and legs tied behind my back. And, of course, their favorite humiliation: pulling down my pants and searching my genitals in the worst possible way. Yes, they even started routine genital searches again.
If guards weren’t waking us up or searching our asses, they were busy making as much noise as possible. We’d been through this before, but we didn’t have the energy to resist anymore. All I could do was refuse to leave my cell and continue the hunger strike. That’s what we all did.
Others joined us from outside of Guantánamo, and it felt like finally the world had found us again after we had been lost for so many years. Families in Yemen and in countries around the world organized protests demanding our release. Andy and dozens of other attorneys signed a letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel detailing how bad conditions were in the camp under the new command.
While our voices grew stronger with the help of our supporters, the camp admin tried the same tactics they had used for years to undermine our simple demands—they told the world that we were terrorists and jihadists and that our hunger strike was our way of waging war in prison. Through DNN, we heard that Colonel Bogdan held a press conference to show all the weapons they’d confiscated during the crackdown. He had a table spread with curtain rods made from bottle caps and weights fashioned out of water bottles and broomsticks that the camp admin had allowed us to use instead of metal weights, which were a security risk. When asked the number of detainees on hunger strike, Zak downplayed how many of us were on strike and instead told reporters that a hard-core cell of extremists was determined to hunger-strike until many of us died, as if we had made a suicide pact.
I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in this place for something I didn’t do. There were no easy choices, but I chose my path. We all did. I spent fifty-seven days without food, surviving on just water, the longest I’d ever gone before being forced into force-feeding. I lost more than sixty pounds in that time, and I was so tired and exhausted that I prayed to Allah to take my soul. Just months earlier, I had been working out in the rec yard, and now I could barely hold my head up. Some brothers weighed only eighty-five pounds. One brother was in a coma in the intensive care unit. I had never felt closer to death, and that’s when the camp admin moved me to the BHU, where I began to get IV infusions. They were separating leaders and instigators, hoping it would stop the strike. I couldn’t help thinking about Waddah and how he died there years ago. I wondered if I would be next.
In the BHU, my body started to shut down, even with the infusions. My mouth was dry all the time and I was thirsty. I couldn’t sleep, even though I was exhausted. I couldn’t hear well, and my vision was getting blurry. I could barely stand up or walk, so I just lay on my mattress. I really thought I might die, and I tried to find peace within myself. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a life on the outside. I wanted a wife and a family. I wanted to see my parents one last time. But if Allah wished it, I would let it be.
One night, after I finished my last prayer, I lay down and fell into a deep, deep sleep where I dreamed that I was resting beside a small stream of water. In this dream, I could barely keep my eyes open as I struggled between life and death. Above me, at my head, stood a woman weeping, her hands raised in prayer to Allah. I watched her tears drop into the water, and then I leaned over to drink from the stream. As soon as the water touched my lips, I was jolted awake.
