Don't Forget Us Here, page 6
The door slams open and a masked man storms in and slaps you hard across the face. He’s so violent you think he might knock your head off your shoulders. Even the interpreter seems afraid of him.
“What’s wrong with this crazy guy?” you say. Though you’re scared, you still haven’t lost your sense of humor. But he doesn’t laugh. None of them do. He comes close to your face.
“You’re a fucking liar and I’m going to fuck your fucking life up!” he yells, an inch away from your face, his breath rotten with bad coffee. “Sounds like you didn’t like the black site so much. You want to go back? We can send you back. We can send you back and start all over again with your interrogator there.”
Now he has your attention. Your heart jumps and you feel the blood pounding in your temples. You try to be strong, but it’s hard to keep your eyes from watering up as muscles remember the black site, and this makes them happy.
“You’re one of the big fish,” he says. “And now we own you.” He lists things he says you’ve done. Bombings in Kenya. Recruiting in Yemen. And you think, How could I have done all this? How could they think I’m old enough to have done all this?
The female goes through a huge file on the table in front of you.
“We’re going to go through your file and every time you lie or change your story, this crazy man here is going to teach you how to be honest.”
You swallow, but there’s no saliva in your mouth.
She lights a cigarette and offers you one. You decline.
“Fucking al Qaeda,” she says. She’ll say this when you don’t stare at her breasts when she unbuttons her shirt. Every vice you turn down is proof that you’re a terrorist.
“Where did you train?” she asks.
The problem, you realize, is that when you said you were this Adel, you didn’t know anything about him. You don’t know any of the details they want. Now they believe you’re holding back, lying, protecting others, being clever, and no matter what you tell them, unless you tell them what they want to hear, they’ll say that you’re lying. There’s no escape from this circle.
“Were you at al Farouq?”
You shake your head no.
The huge man slaps you.
In this way, they go through your file, the huge man slapping you and the female interrogator making notes. After so many slaps you can’t count, you make up details but they don’t match the ones you gave before and that earns you more slaps because you’re lying and here is where they really kick your ass. You can’t give something you don’t have, and you can’t invent something good enough, and they keep repeating and repeating the questions until you don’t know what you’re saying, and that’s when they put words in your mouth. You’ve been at this for too many hours and too many days and you’re tired and weak and you don’t know what you’re saying anymore and it doesn’t matter to you because it’s their words and not yours and Allah will forgive that, but still they make their notes in your file.
Now they go through their piles of photos.
“Who’s this?” they say. “Do you know him?” They ask you to confirm names and faces of men you’ve never seen, but they don’t believe you when you say “I don’t know.” This is how your problem just gets worse and worse. The more you say “I don’t know,” the more they say you’re lying. Hours pass like this, a day, maybe more… they take breaks and change teams. They eat their meals in front of you and don’t offer you so much as a cup of water. They return you to your cell with the bright light that never turns off and the guards bang your door to keep you awake and before you know it, the escorts are back and you’re in the interrogation room again and this goes on for weeks. The only human contact you get are slaps and kicks; the only voices you hear are full of hate and distrust. So, this is America! An image takes shape in your head of a people who don’t believe in the truth, who don’t know right from wrong.
WITH TIME, WE figured out ways to connect through the thick metal walls in solitary confinement, and that little contact helped me survive at first. If I lay down on the ground and put my ear to the small holes in the wall, I could hear my neighbor talk. This is how I got to know the Nightingale, who turned out to be one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards. He told me about some of the other big fish on the block: the al Qaeda minister of propaganda, Osama bin Laden’s driver, and the Taliban’s chief of communications. None of them denied who they were, but the minister of propaganda refused to talk to the interrogators. Then one day he did.
“Why did he start talking?” I asked.
“Sheikh Osama told him not to talk for six months,” he said, “so that’s what he did. He kept his word.” I knew that meant he had been tortured and he still didn’t talk. Allah, oh Allah. What had I gotten myself into? I wasn’t a big fish, yet there was no way to convince the Americans I wasn’t.
Sometimes the guards left the bean holes open by accident and the Nightingale sang out to me, telling me to keep strong, that Allah was watching over me. In these rare moments, I’d catch glimpses of the other brothers in solitary confinement being taken to interrogation or to the shower or rec. They were all older than me—much older—and had the toughened faces of men who knew the cost of war.
“Assalamu alaikum,” I’d call out.
On the way back from interrogation one night, I saw that my neighbor’s bean hole was open—it was the Nightingale. All I could see were his eyes, warm and kind, matching the beauty of his voice.
“You’re just a boy,” he sang out. “You’re not a big fish—you’re a guppy. What are they doing bringing boys to this place?”
I don’t know what they accused him of or what he knew about Osama bin Laden. He told me he was hired to be a bodyguard and had given his word to do his job, and he did just that.
The Nightingale and all the others in solitary confinement were tribal men, mostly, from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Men who had an idea in their mind of what was right and what was wrong and no gray area in between. Yes, some of them were fighters, but they weren’t fighting the Americans, at least the ones I met in solitary. They had more important battles to fight with the Northern Alliance and other tribes that their own tribes had battled for generations. I was still young and naïve and learning about the world, but I saw that these men were different from our interrogators and the guards who acted as if they were guided by honor and duty. Honor and duty to what? To defend freedom against me? Is buying men and torturing them what they called freedom? If you asked me who had more honor and integrity between interrogators and the interrogated, my answer would have been clear.
INTERROGATORS WANTED ME to break down in isolation. I tried to hold on for as long as I could, but I felt my mind slipping away. The only friend I talked to for weeks was Princess, who visited me during my ten minutes in the rec yard each week. Iguanas were everywhere, but I liked to think she was the same one who visited me in Camp X-Ray. Even though I didn’t have any food to share with her, she stayed with me anyway and listened to me talk about my life. I missed my family and thought about them every minute of every day. I found safety and comfort replaying in my mind moments from my childhood, like how my mother always prepared me and my brothers and sisters to go to school each morning. She made us tea and warmed tomato-and-bean soup, then lined us up and kissed each one of us as we left. I tried to feel that kiss and smell her scent of firewood and the fields, but it was all slipping away, replaced by memories of green walls and interrogators and what I wished I’d said during interrogations that could have saved me. I worried my memories of home would be lost forever. Without them, who would I be?
As the days bled away, I stopped caring how much time had passed. I stopped thinking about when I would get out. I stopped eating and I went on hunger strike again. But the camp thought of that as a threat, and as punishment they stripped me naked and took everything out of my cell. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care if I lived or died. If I died, I would see my family in paradise. I stopped talking to Princess. I stopped listening to the Nightingale’s songs and I stopped calling back.
When my beard was so long and my hair so wild my mother would have scolded me for not taking care of myself, the Wrestler showed up at my cell door.
We called her the Wrestler because she was big and broad and had the biceps of a wrestler, but she was just the camp psychologist. Back in X-Ray, brothers passed rumors that she was a sorcerer who could send jinns or demons to make you lose your mind. I didn’t believe in sorcerers. We had one in my village who cheated people out of their money. When I was a kid, I said to my mother, “If this sorcerer really has jinns, why does she take people’s money to summon them?” My mother had little patience for such nonsense and sent me out to help with the goats. So I went straight to the sorcerer and asked her. She cursed me and kicked me out of her house. But I knew her secret. I knew she was a fraud.
I didn’t even know what a psychologist was though. I had never heard the word before this place, and that scared me more than a sorcerer.
“Be careful talking to this one,” the Dane had said. “You like to talk too much, and she could really get inside your head and mess with it.”
When she showed up at my cell door, I thought, Oh Allah! What have I gotten myself into?
“Are you trying to hurt yourself?” the Wrestler asked.
I refused to talk to her because we knew that the psychologists were working with the interrogators. And when they sent the interrogators, I wouldn’t talk to them either. I just sat in the corner of my cell with my knees pulled to my chest and I prayed. She watched me and took notes, and sometime after she left I was given back my pants and a shirt. Soon the bean hole in my door opened and a guard told me to turn around and get on my knees with my hands on my head so I could be restrained. I was being moved out of solitary confinement. I had been afraid of the Wrestler, but I thought she was the one responsible for getting me out of solitary confinement, at least for a couple of days. I was thankful to be out, but in the reality of Guantánamo, I was right where the interrogators wanted me, hanging by a thread.
- FIVE -
When I first saw the open cages of Camp Delta, I thought they had created a zoo there for Muslims—or was it a laboratory? As they escorted me off solitary confinement, I saw for the first time Camp Delta’s Camp 1 and all the blocks made out of metal shipping containers. We walked past neat and orderly rows of cell blocks: Alpha, Bravo, Delta, Echo, Fox, Golf, and Hotel to Charlie at the very end. I heard the familiar sound of men inside shouting to each other in so many languages and voices.
“Assalamu alaikum,” brothers called out to me as I shuffled down the walkway between two rows of cages facing each other. There was no air conditioning in the open cage blocks, each with forty-eight men, one to a cell, all baking in the heat. The block reeked of sweat and fear.
Everything was metal: the walls between cages were a thick metal mesh, with holes only big enough for two fingers, but at least you could see through it. Some brothers talked to their neighbors; others called out down the block. It was noisy but comforting to hear the sound of so many men talking.
From my new cell, I could only see brothers to the left and to the right and directly across from me for two or three cages in each direction.
“Assalamu alaikum,” brothers called out.
“Wa alaikum Assalam!” I choked back tears, so happy to be in the company of so many new faces and voices. I had so many questions.
“Where are we?” I asked my neighbor, a young Saudi.
At last, I found out we were in a place called Guantánamo, an American military base on the island of Cuba, close to America but not in America. The American president Bush had declared a war on terror and that’s why hundreds of men had been brought here. Some of the new prisoners had actually seen news footage of us on Al Jazeera before they were taken here.
It was noisy and wild in the open cages but at least we could talk. “What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your story?” I asked my neighbors first, then called out to brothers down the block. I found men from dozens of different countries around the world speaking more than twenty different languages.
“You’re from the mountains, aren’t you?” my neighbor asked. His name was Fayez and he was a well-mannered, educated Kuwaiti, older than me.
“How did you know?” I said.
“You haven’t sat still the entire time you’ve been here. You’re used to having space and talking.” We both laughed because he was right.
Being in isolation for so long, I was hungry for any news and conversation, to talk about and to better understand this place we were in. But the open cages were loud and the lights bright. Like the solitary confinement cells, there was a toilet and running water in the cages, but your toilet was next to your neighbor’s bed. The smell was terrible and there was no escape from it. When you tried to sleep, you had no choice but to put your head right beneath the blazing light, and we weren’t allowed to cover our eyes or face. Everything seemed to have been built to make sure we were as uncomfortable as possible, to break us over and over again.
I was glad to be in the open like this, but I was crushed by the sounds. The open cages of Camp Delta were like a massive living, breathing, never-ending song that was a complete assault on your ears, especially if you had spent months in complete isolation. The day began with the morning prayer, and then the gates banged open and stomping boots announced the morning head count. From there on, it was an unrelenting cacophony of meal carts squeaking, bean holes banging, chains jangling, guards barking, detainees shouting, ventilators rumbling… It was all too much, and it was all by design.
It was a place of arbitrary rules strictly enforced with one end and one end only: to control us for interrogation. We didn’t know it at the time, but they called this “controlled chaos.”
We added our own chaos. When brothers were taken away for their “reservations” with interrogators, we sang to them: Go with peace, go with peace, may Allah grant you ever more peace and ever more safety. Go with peace, go with peace. We sang this, all of us, with one big voice that echoed and boomed. And when brothers were returned, we sang again.
After I had been out of isolation for a couple of days, I was feeling good that the interrogations had finally stopped and that maybe at last they understood that a nineteen-year-old Yemeni from the mountains wasn’t a seasoned, middle-aged al Qaeda leader.
That morning, guards escorted me to the rec yard for my ten minutes of fresh air and beautiful views of green tarp. After rec would be my two-minute shower. The rec yard was divided into two cages so that two brothers could be out there at the same time. I saw Suhib, a Libyan brother I hadn’t seen since the first days of Camp X-Ray. I was glad for any familiar face, and I went to the fence and put my hand out to greet him. Our hands hadn’t even touched when the guard shouted at me.
“Rec time is terminated!”
“No English,” I said. I smiled, trying to communicate that I wasn’t looking for trouble, only that I didn’t speak English. I was trying to be the polite young man my mother had raised. The guard called an Arabic interpreter.
“You broke the rules,” the interpreter said.
Guards came and escorted Suhib back to his cell. I felt guilty—we only got ten minutes twice a week and I had caused him to lose his time.
“What did I do?” I asked.
“You shook hands with another detainee,” the interpreter said.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “We didn’t even touch!”
“It doesn’t matter,” the interpreter said. “It’s a rule and you broke it.”
The harshness of the rules hurt. Not because they were strict, but because they were cruel. It had been months since I felt the touch of a kind hand, even for something as simple as a handshake. It was wrong. If these are the rules, I thought, they’re going to have to drag me out of here.
“I’m not coming out,” I said. “Even if you call your mother, the watch commander.”
The watch commander stormed out and stood at the rec gate screaming all kinds of curses in English I didn’t understand.
“By Allah,” I said. “I’m not coming out, even if Bush himself comes to talk to me. Why are you punishing me—because I tried to shake a brother’s hand in greeting?”
I knew it wouldn’t do any good, but I had to do something. The IRF team marched into the yard, their boots booming. I knew where I was going. They kicked my ass. Of course they did. They beat me badly and dragged me back to my hole in solitary confinement, where I sang about it to the Nightingale and all the other big fish. I couldn’t see them or shake their hands, but I felt the comfort of my fellow brothers.
- SIX -
After thirty or forty or fifty days in solitary confinement, just as I was really falling apart and in bad shape, they’d move me back to the open cages for a few days and begin the cycle all over again. In those early days of Camp Delta, it seemed like they were confused about what they were supposed to do with us, or that we had disappointed them by not actually being important al Qaeda or Taliban fighters. Interrogators moved big fish around to keep us feeling isolated and unstable, to keep us from making friends or becoming too familiar with any one block. If I wasn’t in solitary confinement in India Block, I was being moved around in the open cage blocks. They’d keep me in one cage for a few days, then move me along.
Solitary confinement was hard, but the constant movement had its advantages: I learned the camp fast. I got to know the ins and outs of all the different blocks, how things worked, who was where and why, and most important, who everyone was.
