Don't Forget Us Here, page 7
It always started with the cry of “Chains are coming,” a brother letting us know escorts were coming onto the block to move someone. When this happened, everyone rushed to use the toilet and get their things in order. Whoever they came for could be gone for hours or days, often with no access to a toilet, or they might not even be coming back. Some passed things to their neighbors through the small holes in the mesh—a toothbrush or extra towels, a little food they had saved for sunset if they were fasting. Then we’d all wait to see whom the escorts came for. Guards played with us. They’d walk up and down the block, dragging their chains looking at brothers like it was their turn to go, or they’d stop in front of a cage and say, “You?” You never knew where you were going or why. The uncertainty was just another tool they used to keep us on edge for the interrogators.
Camp Delta was made up of three camps at first, Camps 1, 2, and 3. Each camp had five or seven blocks, and out of those blocks there were a few that no one wanted to go to.
Delta Block was one. It was called the BHU, the Behavioral Health Unit. Here, psychologists watched you twenty-four hours a day, taking notes on everything you did. They restrained you to metal beds and paralyzed you with shots. It’s where your worst nightmares came true.
India, November, and Oscar blocks were solitary confinement for big fish, punishments, and softening. Most brothers were terrified of solitary confinement after hearing stories like mine of being isolated for weeks and months.
Even knowing what I went through, some crazy brothers tried to get sent to solitary because it was the only place that had air conditioning and some peace from the chaos of the open cages. The summer was a special kind of hell in the mesh cages with no fans and all those men sweating, but those brothers didn’t know how crushing the isolation could be.
It was a gamble every time they moved you. Some blocks were better than others. Hotel, Charlie, Kilo, and Papa blocks were closest to the sea, close enough that sometimes you could hear waves crash against the rocks at night. The sound reminded us that there was still a free world outside our fences—our friends and families were still out there.
In the beginning, some brothers could see the sea if they stood on their sink and looked through their window. In the rec yard, I found that if I lay down on my stomach in the corner, I could tear away a tiny piece of green tarp covering the fence and steal glimpses of a turquoise sea. I told my brothers and soon many of us would lie down and spend our recreation time looking at the sea through that small secret window. Eventually the guards noticed the hole.
“Why can’t I look at the sea?” I asked the watch commander when he caught me.
“It’s for your own safety and security,” he said through an interpreter. I suspected he thought Osama bin Laden might land on the beach one day with an al Qaeda army and break us all out. America was supposed to be a smart country, but the things they believed made us question this.
I made another hole in a different place, and when guards found that one, they doubled the tarps around all the blocks and then sent me back to solitary confinement for a couple of weeks with Princess.
It was hard not seeing the sea despite being only a few hundred feet away. We had so little in our cages, a brief glimpse of beauty and the magnificence of Allah’s creation could carry our spirits for days or weeks. I remember explaining what I saw to one brother who couldn’t see the sea.
“I see an endless body of blue,” I said, “with a soul that courses through the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal, all the way to the Red Sea and the western coast of Yemen, where in the seaside town of Hudaydah, my father is at the market buying fish for a special meal. And when the tide comes in and the air is heavy with salt, my mind takes me straight to the port city of Aden and weekends I spent there with friends after high school. We’d lie on the beach and imagine our lives and the wives and families we would one day have.”
The sea infiltrated our dreams, reminding us of our past and giving us hope for our future freedom. The sound and smell of the sea were like the firm reassurance of a good friend who promises to protect you and be your witness. We all talked to the sea, confided in it, pleaded with it. Please stay with us, we asked the sea. Please set us free.
We lived as neighbors and friends with the sea, and even though we weren’t able to see it, the sea was with us all the time. Some brothers composed poems about the sea and sang them for the rest of the block. Some asked the sea to bring messages to the ones they loved and missed on faraway shores. Some complained about our prison and guards to the sea. Some reproached the sea for watching and doing nothing.
One Yemeni brother I met during a short stay in Hotel Block—close to the sea—was so in love with the sea, he named himself Bahr, which means “sea” in Arabic.
“Why would you name yourself Bahr?” I asked.
“What is greater than the sea?” he said.
Bahr had a beautiful voice and sang for us all the time. In those first months at Camp Delta, even the guards asked Bahr to sing.
“I can’t say no to anyone,” he’d say. “When someone asks me to sing, it’s because they have some trouble in their heart. What is better than making other people happy?”
Bahr sang in Arabic, Pashto, Persian, and English, but even if our brothers or the guards didn’t understand the words, his voice was enough to free us all from our caged lives, even if only for a moment. Music and poetry are the soul’s languages, and when Bahr sang, all the blocks quieted down so they could listen. His voice and his songs carried with me into solitary confinement, where I listened to Bahr and the sea in my head.
Once, one of the idiot interrogators told me during interrogation, “Stop holding out on us and I’ll take you to see the sea.”
“I already have Bahr on my block,” I said. “Why would I want to go to yours?”
I laughed and so did my interrogators.
Still, they moved me off Bahr’s block to Mike Block, one of the blocks that was always full of Afghans. Few if any of those brothers on Mike Block spoke Arabic, and that’s why interrogators liked to send Arabic speakers there. The interrogators thought the isolation of strangers speaking Pashto and Urdu would break us. The Afghans were a tough bunch, but the interrogators didn’t understand that each move, each interrogation, each beating brought all of us closer together despite our differences instead of pushing us further apart. This place called Guantánamo had created a brotherhood among us and now we looked out for each other wherever we were, no matter who we were.
Mike Block was only about twenty feet away from Hotel Block, with a walkway separating the buildings. I could still hear Bahr sing, much to the disappointment of the interrogators. I sang back to him that the Afghani brothers treated me like one of their own. The guards and interrogators heard every song we sang, but they never listened.
Everything they did made that clear. Or maybe they listened but couldn’t understand what they didn’t want to hear—that their choices had consequences and not the ones they expected.
They moved me again, this time to Lima Block, and when I’d been there for a couple of days, a new rotation of guards arrived and began training with the old one. We’d been there long enough to learn that guards rotated missions every six to twelve months, depending on their deployment and assignments. You never completely got used to the noise of the blocks, but you learned to live with it, you learned to adjust, and that made you stronger than the guards or interrogators. This new company of guards couldn’t handle the noise.
“Shut the fuck up!” the new guards screamed.
We weren’t being disrespectful; we were just living the only way we knew how. Since the hunger strike in X-Ray, we’d been free to talk. But this was before the camp had standard operating procedures and so the new guards were just making up rules. Things got crazy fast. Some brothers started splashing guards with water or milk. The guards called IRF teams. While we were fighting the IRF teams and the guards were yelling at us to shut up, one of the officers, General Dunlavey, walked onto the block. The generals walked the blocks regularly.
This general was different than the square-jawed one who stopped the hunger strike at X-Ray. This general was in charge of the intelligence task force, not the guards, and he tried to project strength and control whenever he walked the blocks. But he just looked arrogant.
Omar, a Libyan brother with one leg, called out to the general when he walked by.
“Excuse me, sir?” Omar said. He was very respectful. “Yes, we speak, please?” He motioned to the interpreter to translate and then explained that he wanted to talk to the general about the new rules the guards were enforcing.
The general ignored him and waved off the interpreter. He puffed up his chest and stuck his chin in the air. Omar looked around to see if other brothers had seen this. We all saw it. I didn’t know Omar well yet, but I’d heard that he was very wise, and all the brothers respected him.
“Brothers!” Omar called down the block. “Say hello to our general!” Within seconds everyone was shouting and yelling in different languages. I joined in. We were like wild animals, biting the fence, making crazy faces. The new guards looked terrified. It was scary, even to me.
The general stopped and went back to Omar’s cage.
“Your new guards told us we can’t talk,” Omar said to the interpreter. “We got rid of that rule in Camp X-Ray, remember? We have to be able to talk. That’s just a basic human right.”
“You have no rights here,” he said. “You gave them up when you joined al Qaeda.”
“What do the rules say?” Omar said. The general didn’t respond. “Okay,” Omar continued. “No rules.”
Omar called down the block again and told us there were no rules, and that’s when the real chaos started. We all jumped around in our cages. We took our shirts off—also against the “rules.” We kicked our doors. We threw whatever we had. We shouted in our loudest voices. We made faces at the guards. Brothers in the next block thought we had all gone mad, that the camp admin had given us drugs in the food that turned us crazy.
The guards got rid of that new rule and I think the general had nightmares about us that night and for weeks to come. I was glad to be on Lima Block and asked the watch commander if I could be moved closer to Omar. He seemed like a wise man I could learn from. But remember, this was Guantánamo, and I was a big fish, and the next day I was moved to another block.
With each move, the camp’s brotherhood grew stronger. More of us were resisting the random rules, and it was just a matter of time before there were enough of us resisting that we’d start resisting together.
I thought the general knew what was coming and was trying to get ahead of us. We figured out one of his new tactics when I was on Hotel Block and Ali had his shower cut short. Cutting a shower short might not seem like a big deal, but when you get one two-minute shower a week, it’s a big problem you have to protest.
Taking a shower was like a sport. We had to maximize our speed to make one billion moves per fraction of a second in order to strip, lather up, rinse, and get dressed again, all in under 120 seconds. If this were the Olympics, I’m sure my brothers at Guantánamo would have won all kinds of medals. We trained hard at showering and could strip, wash, and rinse in 90 seconds and then have a few moments to enjoy the cold water before the guards started the countdown.
“Ten seconds left,” the guards would warn.
A well-trained brother would say at exactly 120 seconds, “Ready to go back.” And smile his biggest smile.
Ali was a very patient Saudi brother, very soft-spoken. He trained hard for his shower, and in the few days I had been his neighbor, I saw that he always abided by the rules, always did what the guards asked, and never gave them a hard time. He was the opposite of Waddah, a young Yemeni like me whose father was the head of many tribes. Waddah was always looking out for other brothers and that meant confronting guards. I’d seen him in other blocks, and I’d heard he was always protesting and getting moved around, also like me.
On this day, the guard didn’t give Ali his ten-second warning, and when he turned off the water, Ali was still covered with soap. The guard refused to let him rinse. The rules were the rules and we had to follow them no matter what. If we didn’t, we knew we would get beaten or worse. One brother who had protested a short shower was beaten so badly guards broke his jaw. Ali was cooperative at first and put on his clothes. He let the guards escort him back to his cage without protesting, but when they removed his chains, he snatched them and retreated to the back of his cage. Sometimes even the most cooperative brothers found their breaking point.
Ali teased the guards and refused to give back his chains. This went on for some time, and we all cheered Ali and taunted the guards.
In Yemen, what my father called the country of love, whenever there was a protest against the government, or even a small riot, our president reacted diplomatically with fighter jets, tanks, artillery—all kinds of peaceful means—as a way to show his love. At Guantánamo, they didn’t have fighter jets or tanks, so they had to think of other creative ways to tell us we should be quiet and stop protesting.
One of the guards reached into his pocket and pulled out a small canister that looked like a toy. He sprayed Ali’s face with something that made him drop to the ground crying in pain. The guard walked into Ali’s cage and snatched the chains.
“I can’t breathe!” Ali cried. He coughed hard and turned red, then blue. It was serious and the guard didn’t care. None of us had any idea what had happened.
Waddah was the first one banging his cage and cursing the guards. He wasn’t hiding anything from the Americans. “When they invaded Afghanistan, they became my enemy,” he’d said. He said he told his interrogators, “We aren’t friends, but we still need to treat each other like human beings.” He thought the attacks on innocent Americans were a sin, but said when he left Guantánamo, he would fight American soldiers again on the battlefield. It wasn’t personal. He respected them. They were just enemies.
When the guards walked past, Waddah spat at them. The same guard stopped and pulled out that little can. Waddah stuck his face up to the cage like he wanted whatever the guard had, and that’s exactly what happened—the guard sprayed him, too.
Waddah coughed hard and fell back.
“It’s definitely not perfume,” he cried.
Ali was still wheezing and looked like he was going to die. We all banged our cages and screamed until the guards called for a medic and an interpreter.
When Waddah tried to wash it off, it burned even more.
“It’s pepper spray,” a Canadian brother called out, “like tear gas.”
I didn’t know about either and he had to explain. There was a lot I didn’t know that I was learning at Guantánamo.
Ali had asthma, and medics took him away to the clinic to be treated.
“Why did you make the guards spray you?” I asked Waddah.
“I wanted to know what I was up against,” he said.
“Weren’t you afraid you might die?” another brother asked.
“Shame on you!” Waddah laughed. “Death is afraid of me.”
A brother at the top of the block called out, “Chains are coming!” and I knew they were coming for me. Whenever there was trouble in a block, they always moved me first.
I understood why Waddah had done that. If he was afraid of that toy canister of pepper spray, the guards would have been in control. We might be in cages, but we couldn’t let them think that we could be controlled so easily.
I got to know the pain of pepper spray quickly. Many of us did as we protested daily abuses like genital searches and guards harassing us in childish ways when we prayed. I was learning the art of resistance, and that would be my survival.
BY THE TIME I met the Bosnian in Lima Block, I’d really gotten to know the pain of pepper spray. The Bosnian was a very nice guy in his early forties, quiet, polite, and well educated. He spoke English well, and soon after he was moved to the cage next to mine, one of the guards from another blocked stopped by. They talked for a while; both laughed. This was really strange. I noticed guards had changed a little since the first days of X-Ray. Some gave brothers extra food if they asked. Some were nice to us and talked openly to brothers who spoke English, even though it was against the rules. But most still seemed confused by their mission and who we were. And I’d never seen one stop by a brother’s cage for a laugh.
When the guard left, the Bosnian turned to me.
“I scared the shit out of him a couple weeks ago,” he said. Then he told me the story about how that guard had fallen asleep on duty and two other guards had asked him to play a joke.
“They let me out of my cage,” the Bosnian said, “without shackles or restraints. They snuck me quietly back to the rec yard shower where this guy was dead asleep. They hid behind me and told me to wake him up saying, ‘You’re surrounded!’”
“And you did?” I asked.
“I was bored,” the Bosnian said. “What else was I going to do all day? At least I got out of my cage. So I woke this sergeant and said very quietly, almost whispering, ‘You’re surrounded.’ I gave him my biggest smile. He looked like he had been expecting a camp revolution all along and knew what to do. He fell to his knees and started begging for his life. I mean really begging. ‘Please, don’t kill me!’ like a baby.”
I nodded and laughed. This is who we were to many of the guards: crazed murderers. If we didn’t laugh, it would have hurt too much to think about.
“I felt sad for him,” the Bosnian said. “I felt sad that he thought I would do that. And for a second, I thought that I shouldn’t have scared him like that. Then his friends stormed in laughing. And we all laughed really hard.”
The Bosnian got quiet.
“Then they chained me and brought me back to my cage.”
We were both quiet for a while.
