Don't Forget Us Here, page 9
“What’s your name, brother?” the man in the first cage asked as I walked past.
When I told him, he got very excited and called my name to the brothers down the block.
“Welcome, Lion!” he sang. Other brothers joined him. “Our hero!” they sang. “The Lion!”
I walked down the block and shook brothers’ hands through the fence. At first, my escort tried to stop me, but he must have had orders to be nice to me.
I was surprised that they put me in a cage next to Omar, the one-legged Libyan I had seen months ago rally the men in Lima Block. Omar laughed loud and hard when the guards left my cage.
“This is the general everyone is talking about?” he cried. “You’re just a baby!” He told me how another brother, maybe a snitch, told him that interrogators had showed him a photo of me in a high-ranking Yemeni military uniform.
“I’ve never been in the military,” I said. He laughed again. Our connection was instant and we told each other our stories.
Just like many Libyans who were against Gaddafi, Omar was jailed and tortured by Gaddafi’s intelligence service. He fled to Sudan, where he lived in hiding for years, until they found him. Then he fled to Pakistan, where he lived until 9/11 and the government sold him to the CIA.
It was dinnertime, and after guards served the meal, Omar told me what had happened in the days after I was taken away. The fights in our block turned into a riot and spread like fire to all the other blocks in Camp 1, and even to Camps 2 and 3. Some brothers fought with guards, and some refused to go to interrogations. Many brothers went on hunger strike when they heard about my neighbor and how I was dragged away to solitary confinement. This was the second big hunger strike at Guantánamo. Brothers were still refusing to eat, and interrogators were frustrated. Mr. Hunger Strike was very happy: the camp was in disorder with brothers resisting guards in every block now.
I told Omar the whole story.
“You have to be careful,” Omar said. “You might not be this Adel or a general, but that doesn’t matter anymore. They see you act like one, and that’s maybe worse.”
Earlier in the week, Charlie Block’s block leader was taken away to solitary confinement. Brothers had asked an older Egyptian, a professor, to take his place, but he declined. Block leaders were secretly elected by brothers to mediate issues between the guards and the prisoners and help keep the peace when things got out of hand. No one wanted to be a block leader because as soon as interrogators found out about them, they disappeared to interrogations and then to solitary confinement. The professor was smart and told brothers to make someone else block leader and he would advise them.
So they asked me. I wasn’t a leader. I wasn’t an instigator. I was young and, like most men my age, I was still learning; I was clever, but not wise yet. I was just a simple tribal man who couldn’t sit by and watch other men and boys get abused and mistreated. I couldn’t sit by and watch guards desecrate the Holy Qur’an. I talked to Omar about it and he agreed to advise me if I accepted.
As the new block leader, I helped negotiate the end to the hunger strike. I asked for better meals and time for rec. We got five extra minutes each week. I wasn’t the general they thought I was—I wasn’t even a leader—but I had found my role in this place: To feel the pain of others. To stick up for those who were beaten. And to try to make our lives better.
– PART 2 –
RESISTANCE
- EIGHT -
I didn’t last long in Charlie Block before they sent me to solitary confinement in November Block. That’s where I saw the idiot General Miller for the first time. He was bald and strolled down the center of the block with his chest puffed out in a strong army walk. He was stiff and arrogant and full of disdain. As he walked past my cell, he looked through the viewing window at me. I don’t think he saw me. I don’t think he knew who I was. He looked like he was sizing up an object he was going to break.
The big chicken General Miller took over Guantánamo around Ramadan in 2002 and turned it into an interrogation machine made to chew up men. Before Miller came, life at Guantánamo was full of false hope and gossip that the Americans would let us go soon. We didn’t have access to CNN or any other news. All we had was DNN, the Detainee News Network, which was rumors and news we called out to each other from block to block. It wasn’t the most efficient or accurate network, but it’s all we had. Welcome to Guantánamo. Rumors spread before Miller took over that even Donald Rumsfeld, the chief chicken, had complained to the camp’s generals that most of the prisoners weren’t al Qaeda or Taliban, only farmers and nobodies. The way Miller walked the blocks that day put that rumor to rest. He was putting us on notice that he owned us and would do whatever he wanted.
Before Miller, Guantánamo was a mess with fights breaking out all the time between interrogators, guards, the FBI, the CIA, and all the agencies trying to make sense of who we were.
Even brothers saw the tension between the two generals, Baccus and Dunlavey, who commanded different parts of Guantánamo. Baccus tried to make living conditions better and walked the blocks with people from the Red Cross. Under Dunlavey, interrogations got worse.
Only years later did I really understand that until General Miller, the camp had been divided between two task forces with different missions. JTF 160 was a military police force whose mission was detention. First, the marine general Lehnert was in command, but he was fired for being too soft and replaced by General Baccus, who was also too soft. They both believed in at least the basics of the Geneva Conventions. JTF 170 was the intelligence task force led by General Dunlavey, and their mission was to interrogate us and gather intelligence. And even though General Dunlavey had pushed for more extreme interrogation techniques, DNN rumors said that when he left Guantánamo, he believed that most of us had been sold to the United States and weren’t fighters.
When General Miller took command, he became the commander of both detention and intelligence, which meant he could do whatever he wanted to us. Around the same time, military leaders and lawyers in the Bush administration approved fifteen enhanced interrogation techniques they believed would help free the intelligence they thought we were hiding. Of course, no one told us this, but they didn’t have to: we were about to live it.
The day Miller took over, he ordered a camp-wide cell search in the middle of the night. I woke up to IRF teams storming my block with dogs. They opened up the viewing windows on all our doors, something they never did, and I thought that was so we could watch what was going to happen. I hadn’t seen anything like this before. Each IRF team had a guard with a camera who filmed everything for documentation, part of Miller’s new SOPs, standard operating procedures. This was to prove they weren’t violating SOPs. I watched the IRF team prepare to storm my neighbor’s cell. When they opened the door, my neighbor was already on his knees with his hands on his head. A guard stood in front of the camera, blocking it from recording what happened next.
“Stop resisting!” the officer called out, justifying what happened next for the camera. The IRF team stormed in, beat my neighbor badly, restrained him, and then dragged him into the hallway.
When they came to my cell, I asked the officer through an interpreter what was happening. He pepper-sprayed my face, then treated me just like my neighbor.
“Stop resisting!” they yelled. Out in the corridor, they pulled my pants down and searched my genitals. That genital search was like a rape. Six guards held me down and the seventh one hit my genitals and then did a rough cavity search. I screamed out and I kicked and punched. It hurt, but the humiliation was worse and the guards knew that by now. Brothers screamed all up and down the block as IRF teams stormed cells. They left me on my knees in the hall while guards took everything out of my cell. Farther down the block, I heard an older man screaming for help and then I saw him fall to the ground in the corridor with guards on top of him.
“Stop resisting!” the guards kept lying for the camera. Then the guard who was handling the old man’s head turned his back to the camera and pulled something sharp out of his pocket. The old man cried out as the guard tried to poke his eye out.
I screamed and other brothers did, too.
The female guard who was filming saw what was happening and shouted. She dropped her camera and threw herself over the old man’s head to protect him. The chaos and division among guards during that first search was just a sample of what was to come. General Miller would push everyone to the edge, even his own guards. No one would leave Guantánamo unharmed. What I saw that night made me realize how little any of us really knew about what the Americans would do, and how scared they were of us.
The point of the search was to take everything away from everyone—towels, toilet paper, sheets, toothbrushes, toothpaste, blankets, cups, clothes, soap, books—everything except our ISO mat, shorts, and a sheet to sleep with. Then Miller put us all on a system of levels that determined what items and privileges we could have. Interrogators controlled that system, and everything had to be earned by following the rules (being compliant) and talking to our interrogators (being cooperative). We all started off as level 4s, the lowest, with more comfort items and privileges at each level up. Level 1+ had blankets and clothes, soap, toothbrushes, and even one or two books besides the Qur’an. They could write and receive letters and were generally treated better. Even at level 4, things could get worse though: there were two lower levels just for solitary confinement where you were only allowed to wear shorts or, worse, absolutely nothing. Even our Holy Qur’an was used as punishment.
Miller didn’t stop with comfort items. He stopped broadcasting the call to prayer five times a day and didn’t allow us to know what time it was. We weren’t allowed to exercise in our cages—no push-ups, sit-ups, jumping, squats, or martial arts. We could sit and stand and pace and that was it. Once again, we weren’t allowed to talk.
It felt like a laboratory to study how Muslims would react to crazy rules and punishments, and how the human spirit could endure the worst harassments. Everything seemed designed to humiliate and demean us. Perhaps they thought that once we were dependent on interrogators for everything, we would start to give up all the intelligence they thought we were hiding.
Miller got all the parts of the machine working together—interrogators, guards, doctors, psychologists—and the Americans started filling it up with Muslims.
I HAD BEEN in solitary confinement at level 4 for a few weeks when they brought in a new prisoner to November Block. New detainees were arriving all the time now. From cage 20, I watched through the thin crack in the bean-hole door when he shuffled past. In all my moving around, I hadn’t seen him before. They put him in cage 19, right next to me. I sang the Nightingale’s song to him: O the one with trouble, be optimistic, your trouble will fade away, Allah is the one who will set you free.
“Who’s there?” he said.
“Shut the fuck up!” The guard banged on my door.
I waited for the guard to move on. Miller’s new SOPs had guards walking the blocks and looking into our cells every couple of minutes and waking us every half hour.
“Assalamu alaikum, brother,” I whispered through a hole between our two cages after the guard passed. We couldn’t see each other, but we could sit with our ears to the hole and talk.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“You’re at Guantánamo,” I said. “What’s your name?”
He was quiet for a long time and I understood he had just arrived. He didn’t know who I was, and why should he trust a voice on the other side of a wall?
“It’s okay, brother,” I said. “You don’t have to say your name. Where are you from?” He laughed and told me he’d rather not say. I could tell right away from his accent that he was from the Arabian Peninsula, but I couldn’t figure out where exactly.
“What’s your story?” I said.
It was late and the fans were off and the block was quiet enough for us to whisper to each other. He was silent for a long time and I figured he wasn’t interested in talking to me.
“It’s a long story,” he finally said. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You are at Guantánamo,” I said. “I’ve heard it all. There’s a man who’s one hundred five years old. There’s Osama bin Laden’s driver and his cook. There’s a professor of Arabic and a journalist for Al Jazeera. I’m only nineteen years old and they think I’m an Egyptian general.”
I heard him laugh. I settled in, leaning my head against the hole. After a while, he started whispering to me the most amazing story I’d ever heard about a trip he and his friends took to the country of Georgia.
I heard in his voice a very light and innocent soul. I liked him already.
Then he got serious all of a sudden and told me how he and his friends were ambushed by masked soldiers and how a gun battle broke out that left one of his friends dead. The masked men kidnapped him and his friend and sold them to the CIA.
“I had never seen so much American money, brother,” he whispered. “I don’t know why they paid so much for me.” His story was like a Hollywood movie. “I never dreamed I’d ride in a helicopter, but there I was, taking off in one, naked, hooded, and shackled. Then they shipped us to Afghanistan, where I was questioned and…” His voice trailed off and he started weeping. I knew he had been sent to a black site, and he would never be the same again.
“It’s okay, brother,” I said. “We’ve all been tortured.”
“Then they sent me here and that’s when I heard your lovely voice singing to me through the wall.”
His story made me cry. Maybe because it felt like the Americans wouldn’t stop until they disappeared every Muslim man to this place.
“Do you know what the CIA is?” I said.
He didn’t and I started to explain. I’d learned a lot over the past year. But he interrupted me.
“Oh, I don’t care about them!” he said. “I need to sleep, brother.”
IN THE MORNING, escorts took my new neighbor away to interrogation. He was gone the entire day and into the next. The second night, when he hadn’t returned, I called the guards to bring an Arabic interpreter.
“Where’s the brother in cage 19?” I asked.
“It’s none of your business,” the guard said.
I couldn’t rest knowing what the interrogators were probably doing to him for this long. I had been short-shackled and left in a room for days with loud music and flashing lights. I’d been slapped and beaten and stripped, and even though I had only known my neighbor for a few hours, he was one of us now, and it was hard for me to sit by and do nothing. If you hurt, I felt your pain. There were a couple of other brothers who felt this way, too, and as level 4s we were finding ourselves rotated frequently to the same blocks.
I waited until the guards came to collect the meal trash, then I refused to give them mine. When you have nothing, you protest with what you have. The only way I could protest was by refusing to follow the rules.
“Send me the watch commander,” I said.
The watch commander came, shouting at me to give back the trash. I tried to talk to him about my neighbor.
“441!” he screamed. “Are you refusing to hand over your trash?”
I knew what would happen next. According to Miller’s SOPs, not returning garbage was a violation requiring a cell search. If I refused the cell search, SOPs required an IRF team to remove me from my cell so they could search it. It all meant more work for the guards.
The watch commander and I stared at each other a minute.
“I refuse,” I said. He radioed the DOC (Detention Operations Center) and requested an IRF team. Minutes later, a six-man IRF team marched onto the block. These guys were big and looked like they spent a lot of time working out. Each one weighed at least 180 pounds. That’s 1,080 pounds of testosterone-fueled force waiting at my door with armor, shields, pepper spray, and a dog. IRF teams had to follow strict SOPs for everything—how they carried their shields, how they walked, how they stood outside the cage, how they stormed the cage. It was scary at first, but now getting IRF’d was like a day job for me. I knew what to expect and just had to get through it.
“441, will you come out of your cell for a cell search?” the guard screamed at me.
“Will you bring my neighbor back from interrogation?” I yelled back.
“On my three!” the IRF team leader yelled.
They pepper-sprayed me first, and that hurt like hell, but once the pain settled, the adrenaline hit. I was ready for them.
As soon as the door opened, all that weight crashed in like a moving mountain. I felt my body fly at the speed of light and for a brief second I was suspended in midair not feeling anything, until I hit the wall and—boom—the air got knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe. All I saw were stars.
The SOPs could be interpreted by the IRF team depending on the situation. IRF teams hit our heads against the ground, choked us, kicked us, twisted our fingers, put our faces in the toilet, knelt on our necks, sat on us—whatever they thought necessary to restrain us. They were very creative.
Every brother had a different approach to getting IRF’d. I always resisted. I had to. I’d learned that they would beat me no matter what, so at least when I fought, they had to focus more on securing me than beating me.
SOPs said that each of the six guards was assigned to restrain one part of a detainee’s body. One guard was assigned the head, one to each arm, one to each leg, and another to the torso. SOPs were created with the average detainee in mind and didn’t account for brothers who weren’t completely average. I’d seen IRF teams spend more than an hour trying to follow SOPs to remove a brother who had only one leg or who was too short to have a guard on every limb.
They restrained me with plastic wrist ties and dragged me out of my cell. They took my ISO mat, towel, blanket—all my stuff—and then they put me back in. When the IRF team threw me back, they dropped a pair of handcuffs. No one saw it happen, so I picked them up quickly and hid them in my cage.
