Dont forget us here, p.10
Don't Forget Us Here, page 10
At the shift change, the guards realized they were missing a pair of cuffs and couldn’t leave until they found them. They went crazy. I sat quietly in my cage hoping they wouldn’t do another cage search. If they did, I would have to refuse and then I’d get pepper-sprayed again. I was still burning from the earlier pepper spray, but the AC was so cold in my isolation cell, the burn kept me warm.
I called the new shift block sergeant and asked him to bring the watch commander. The watch commander came and I was happy it was a woman. They were usually nicer to us. She arrived with an Arabic interpreter.
“If I open your bean hole, will you promise not to make any problems?”
“I give you my word,” I said.
She opened the bean hole and I told her what happened with the last shift.
“As a show of respect for you,” I said, “I want to show you something.” I held up the handcuffs. “I’ll give them to you if you promise to call the camp officer please.”
This shocked her. The earlier shift was in big trouble over the cuffs.
“Do you trust me?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you respect me?” she said.
“You’ve always been nice to us,” I said. “Yes, I respect you.”
“If you give me these cuffs,” she said, “I’ll prove to you that you can trust me, too.”
I handed her the cuffs. She was very happy that she got them from me without any problem. This would go on her résumé. Five minutes later, the camp officer was standing in front of my cell.
He thanked me for giving back the handcuffs.
“You should thank the watch commander,” I said. “She’s one of the good ones.” Then I told him about how my neighbor had disappeared to interrogation for days. “I’m worried about him,” I said.
“You know we have no control over the interrogators,” the camp officer said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
More brothers on the block started making noise about my missing neighbor. We were in solitary confinement, but we still stuck together when we could.
The camp officer came back a little later with an interrogator, a young guy in a polo shirt. They all looked the same to me. He wanted to figure out how I knew my neighbor and if there was a connection between us.
“Where’s the new detainee?” I said. “Have you killed him yet?”
“We’re keeping him cool in a nice room with AC,” he said.
That really made me mad.
“For two days!” I cried.
“He’s refusing to talk to us,” the interrogator said. “I gave him a Pepsi and he picked his nose and put it on my pants. We’re trying to help him.”
“By torturing him!” I yelled so that brothers on the block could hear me. “If you don’t bring him back, we’re going to turn this block upside down.” The block started getting crazy when I said that.
About an hour later, escorts brought my neighbor back.
I watched through my bean hole and was surprised to see him. He was really funny-looking with big eyes and wild, curly hair. Some brothers looked mean with their Guantánamo beards and long hair, just the way interrogators wanted. But there was something about my neighbor that was different. He looked so young and innocent, like this was the last place he belonged. I barely knew him, but he felt like a brother to me.
He went straight to sleep and I didn’t bother him.
It felt really good to help someone. It made all the pain of the pepper spray and the harsh cold of solitary confinement go away, if only for a little while. I thought my father and brothers and all the men in our tribe would have been proud at how I stood up for him.
Just before the shift change, the female watch commander came to my cell with new clothes for me. She opened the bean hole and took my old ones, drenched in pepper spray.
“Shukraan lika,” I said. Thank you.
“You are a good guy for helping your brother.” She looked at me with kind, warm eyes that gave me hope some Americans could still see us for who we were.
The next day, interrogators moved my neighbor from the block again. Before he left, he whispered through the wall to me, “My name is Zakaria. Thank you for helping me.”
“I’m Mansoor,” I whispered back.
He saw the kind of person I was. So did the female watch commander, and that meant a lot. I felt lost in this terrible place—we all did. But sometimes I found myself, just little pieces, and I tried to hold on to them for as long as I could.
YOU SEE THAT you’re in a big mess that’s getting messier and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You understand now it’s the interrogators’ job to make sense of it all and they can’t. They don’t think you’re this Adel anymore, but now they think you’re someone else. Still, the questions remain the same: Where is bin Laden? Where is Mullah Omar? When is the next attack? You’ve tried everything with them. You’ve told them the truth. You’ve joked with them. But their ignorance scares you more than their sense of humor, and now you realize you’re in serious trouble. So you tell them that, yes, you are whomever they say you are and then they want details you can’t give them because you can only tell them what they’ve told you. You feel sorry for them that they are so afraid of you for something you didn’t do, but that fades after five minutes short-shackled to the ground, your hands chained to your ankles.
General Miller thinks you’ve been trained in counter-interrogation techniques. So now the interrogations get worse to counter the counter-interrogation techniques they think you know. Guards bang on your cell door every five minutes and you can’t remember the last time you slept peacefully. Solitary confinement. Bright lights. Loud music. Slaps. Extreme cold. Extreme heat. And you’ve heard that there’s worse.
Some around you stop talking to interrogators. You stop talking to them, too. What’s the point? You have nothing left to say, and they don’t know what they’re looking for.
And then two guards come for you and they’re really nice.
“Ready for your reservation?” they ask.
“Where?” you say.
But they don’t say. They take you to the Gold Building where you met the generals after the revolution and this doesn’t make any sense. They don’t take you to the nice big room with the blue couch and the fresh flowers. They take you to a smaller room with a long table holding a bottle of water and a bowl of pistachios. The guards chain you to the floor and leave.
You wait a long time and finally an old man with gray hair combed back comes in carrying his backpack. He talks to you in Arabic.
“I’m here today just for you,” he says. His Arabic is ugly but he’s not worth correcting. “I hear you’re a troublemaker. I hear you’re a leader. I hear you’re a clever young man.” He stares at you, making sure you make eye contact. “Making trouble won’t help you here, but I can help you.”
He takes a copy of the Holy Qur’an out of his backpack.
“I’m learning the Ko-ran.” He shows you his own handwriting on the first page and maybe he hasn’t studied it enough to know he’s disrespected the book by writing in it. He reads to himself for a moment as if he’s getting guidance.
Then he looks at you again for a long time. You look hard into his eyes.
“I’m the head of interrogation,” he says. “I will meet you just this once. Today, you and I are going to make a very important decision.” He closes the Holy Qur’an and puts it back in his backpack.
“I know who you are,” he says. He is very serious and there is the tone of truth to his voice that you haven’t heard before in all your interrogations. He opens your file, thick with pages and notes and photographs. He flips through, reading to himself. “I know you are not this Adel,” he says. “This Egyptian recruiter is too old for you. I know you’re not Alex, the al Qaeda general. I know you’re just a nobody from Yemen, but today is your chance to change that.”
Your heart races. They know, you think. Someone knows who I am. In sha’ Allah!
He studies you, trying to read your thoughts, and you try to betray nothing.
“We have a lot of men here that we know nothing about,” he says. “I see you’re liked on the blocks. They’ve made you a block leader. They trust you. You’re a natural leader.”
He continues with other compliments and lets them sink in.
“That’s why I’ve chosen you,” he says. “I need you to help us. I need you to work for me.”
You have never felt such ache in your heart of false hope. Is this what he’s offering? Is this your test? You hold up your hand. You are very respectful. Be mindful of Allah, you think, and Allah will protect you. Be mindful of Allah and you will find Him in front of you. If you ask, then ask Allah alone; and if you seek help, then seek help from Allah alone.
“Work for me,” he continues. “I will make your life good here.”
When everything has been taken away from you—your life, your family, your freedom, who you are—he now asks you to give away the one thing you have left: your integrity. Know that victory comes with patience, relief with affliction, and hardship with ease.
You were raised to respect your elders, to address them with respect, and that’s what you do. You use your best Arabic, your formal Arabic, like the men in your country do when they talk to someone who is older and much respected.
“You know from my file that I am not who they say I am,” you say. “You know I have done nothing wrong. You know that the men here are not terrorists. So why do you torture us? Why don’t you release us?”
He interrupts you.
“What would I tell the White House?” he says. “What would I tell Congress and the Pentagon? Should I tell them we have here only farmers, teachers, students, charity workers, and drug addicts? Do you know what they’ll ask? Where are those men who trained at al Farouq? Where are the fighters? Where are the men screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’?”
“If you’re studying the Holy Qur’an,” you say, “then you know He is my witness and I cannot cast my eye toward the sins of Muslims.”
He looks at you with a cold eye. “If you work for me, your brothers would never know. I would make you a wealthy man, rich enough to take care of your family for generations. You could live in the US. You would be taken care of…”
You hold up your hand again, and this time you don’t care if you are being rude.
“No,” you say. “If you know me… if you really are studying the Qur’an as you say, then you know you are insulting me by asking me to work for you.”
With the coldest tone you’ve ever heard, he says, “There are always victims in wars. If you say no to me now, consider yourself a victim.”
You have a choice and it’s very simple. Will you betray the brothers around you, the men who were dragged to this hole with you, who have shared their meals with you, who have been beaten with you, who have been tortured like you, who have taken care of you, who pray with you every day—wrongfully accused brothers who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11? Will you betray them and lie about them for empty promises and some comfort items? He’s just served you the nastiest, hairiest piece of shit on a plate and invited you to eat it. What do you say?
No.
He looks at you, disappointed. “That’s not what I expected,” he says.
You watch him stand up with his little backpack, holding the Qur’an he desecrated with his own writing in English. You watch him walk to the door. You watch him turn to you one last time.
“Fuck yourself,” he says in a funny Arabic way using air quotes. Then he walks out, leaving you chained to the floor.
Consider yourself a victim. You replay those words over and over again. You replay the conversation to see if there was any other way, any other choice to be made. No. You made your choice, the only choice you had, and you cry knowing that there is no easy way out of here now. They’ll never admit their mistakes. They’ll cover them up. They’ll deny them. They’ll try to turn their mistakes into opportunities to make snitches, and that means you’ll never get out.
AFTER MY MEETING, they moved me to the open cages in Sierra Block, where I told my neighbor I’d been offered a deal to work for the Americans. He told me he had been taken to the same room and offered a similar deal.
“Did he offer you the wine?” my neighbor asked.
“No!” I cried. “Who do they think we are?”
Islam is a practical religion that’s woven into the fabric of our daily life. General Miller, this head of interrogations, the interrogators and psychologists all failed to understand the depth and strength of our faith. Yes, we were physically weak, we were beaten, and they would beat us more, but our strength was in our hearts, and our hearts were driven by our faith and trust in Allah. We couldn’t be bought with promises of riches. According to our faith, we’re all created for a single reason, which is to worship Allah. One way to worship is how you handle hardship and dilemmas in your life. Life on this earth is a test for us, and we should expect anything, even the worst hardships, in our test. At the same time, nothing happens without Allah’s permission; nothing moves without Allah’s will. If we were at Guantánamo, He had willed it and we would leave when He willed it. But we had free will to choose our path while here.
I went to my cage door and started calling out to my brothers, making a speech. It was messy, just me talking from my heart about what was right and good. I talked the way my father had talked to our tribe. I told them about my meeting and what the interrogator had offered me. I told them we had a choice in how we would survive here.
“We must stand together!” I yelled. “We must not spy on each other. We must not work with the Americans. If they torture one of us, they torture all of us.”
The brothers listened and they called out my words from block to block as I spoke. Many of the brothers liked what I said and called out, “Allahu Akbar!” and that’s when guards stormed the block and told me to “shut the fuck up!” But I didn’t. I continued calling out. I knew I would get punished. I knew I would get sent back to solitary confinement, that I would get harassed and beaten by guards. I knew interrogators would now turn my life into hell. I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want privileges or comfort items, things they could take away from me or use to manipulate me. I didn’t want to work up the system to level 1+.
I kept calling out to my brothers and soon I heard blocks all around me calling out my words, and that’s when the IRF team marched onto the block.
“We must all become level 4s!” I cried. “If we have nothing, they’ll have nothing to take away from us!”
The IRF team pepper-sprayed me and stormed my cage. They beat me. They always beat me. I was taken away to solitary confinement and isolation where I couldn’t talk to another brother for months.
- NINE -
Zakaria had a bad tooth, and this was the kind of problem interrogators loved. Soldiers beat him all the way here, and somewhere along the way, they broke his tooth. Maybe it was a rifle butt. Maybe it was a boot. He didn’t know and it didn’t matter. He couldn’t sleep or eat with the pain—he couldn’t do anything.
As block leader, I asked the guards to send medical staff, but they told us Zakaria had to talk to his interrogators. We were “classified” and that meant every part of our bodies and health, even our teeth, was top secret. We weren’t allowed to know what medicine they gave us or what vitamins or shots. If we had a health problem—any pain or sickness—we had to pay our interrogators for treatment. If you didn’t have information, you were in big trouble.
Interrogators controlled everything: food, air, clothing, water, light, sun, talking, sleep, rest, knowing the time, news from the outside, where we lived, and our health care. They had a theory that dependence or helplessness or both would make us talk.
Miller had opened Camp 4, where brothers wore white instead of orange, lived in open communal blocks, and had lots of privileges. This was to show us how we could live if we just followed their rules and talked to interrogators. I would never get there, and I was fine with that. I wasn’t the only one: many brothers had stopped talking to interrogators. After an interrogator put a Holy Qur’an under his foot, one of the brothers even issued a fatwa that said talking to interrogators was forbidden and cooperating a major sin.
Interrogators loved it when we had problems—one more thing they could control. Zakaria was called for a reservation with his interrogators, who offered to give him pain pills for his tooth. They offered to bring him to a dentist. All he had to do was talk.
Zakaria refused. I was back in Sierra Block, where most of us were being punished for not cooperating or talking to interrogators. Guards said it was a block full of troublemakers, but really we were mostly just guys who couldn’t tolerate bullies and rules that made no sense. General Miller was a bully and his SOPs were Shit on Paper.
When Zakaria’s pain was so great it kept him from eating, Waddah and I passed him milk from our meals. We poured it through the holes in the fence, from cup to cup, until it got to Zakaria. He lived on milk for a couple days, but the pain kept getting worse.
In protest, several of us refused to eat our food until they treated his tooth. We asked the guards to call the camp commander so we could ask him to help Zakaria. The camp commander didn’t give a shit about Zakaria. All he wanted was for him to talk to interrogators.
“Call your interrogators and ask them,” he said each time.
Some brothers like Hamzah refused to go to the shower and rec. Hamzah was from North Africa but had lived in Italy and worked for the Mafia. He’d been sold to the CIA by someone who wanted to get rid of him. Hamzah had a gravelly voice full of impatience and the build and confidence to set any bully straight. Refusing to go to shower or rec meant they had to call an IRF team to make him leave, and guards didn’t like fighting Hamzah.
Others like Sayd refused to leave their cages for anything. Sayd was a white Russian and former Soviet special ops who was all shoulders. He enjoyed a good fight with the guards.
