Dont forget us here, p.21
Don't Forget Us Here, page 21
“Yes,” I said. If I said no, I knew there’d be another QRF team. They put the shackles on my hands and ankles so tight that they dug into my skin.
“Is that okay?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said. Remember, there was no “no.”
They pushed me hard all the way to the rec yard, and by the time I got there the shackles had cut deep into both my ankles.
At the rec gate, the nastiest guard searched me in the worst way possible. He grabbed my genitals hard and pulled.
Allah, oh Allah. I knew they would throw me to the ground and beat me if I did anything. I knew they would beat me if I did nothing. I said to myself, I will stay calm and as soon as they are calm, I will get one good knee or headbutt to the nastiest guard. After that, by Allah, they can do whatever they want to me. But as soon as I stepped into the rec cage, the nasty guard stopped me.
“Time’s up!” he said.
“What…” I said. I didn’t even finish before—
“Code Yellow in November Block rec yard,” he spoke into his radio. Before he was even done calling it, a QRF team stormed onto the block.
Everyone had big red canisters of pepper spray the size of fire extinguishers. The guards circled the outside of the rec cage so that I was completely surrounded. Guards all around me showered me with pepper spray. It came from every direction and knocked me to the ground right away. It burned like nothing I had ever felt. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. All I could focus on was the fire burning every inch of my body. The guards kept spraying until I was completely drenched and their canisters empty. I couldn’t breathe I was coughing so hard, and I thought I would drown in fire. I tasted death.
Where do we go in these moments of pain, when the world turns black? We always turned to Allah. I prayed to Allah to guide me, to protect me, to help stop this madness and hasten my release.
Guards dragged me back to my cage and threw me in. I heard a compliant brother, Hamam, screaming down the block like he was going crazy, and I started screaming, too, so that guards wouldn’t send a QRF team to beat him. I don’t know what I was screaming or whom I was screaming at. The camp. The guards. The colonel.
“Shut the fuck up!” The guard banged on my door.
I beat the door and screamed any words that came to my mouth.
The QRF team came again and piled on top of me. Choked me. Pulled my genitals.
This cycle went on for days, weeks maybe, and then the block went silent one day. The vacuums stopped screaming. Allah, oh Allah. My whole body relaxed. When I looked out of my viewing window into the hallway, I saw a Red Cross representative walking down the block accompanied by officers. The vacuums had disappeared. I called out to them and motioned them to my cell door. I wanted them to see my condition.
“Please,” I said. “I have been beaten badly and covered in pepper spray. My nose is broken.” I spoke quickly in Arabic to get out everything that had happened since Yassir, Mana’a, and Ali had died.
“No Arabic,” the Red Cross representative said. “I’m sorry.”
“Nose broke,” I said with my broken English. “Help.”
“Someone will come talk to you in Arabic,” he said. But we both knew that was just a lie that he had to say. There would be no representative speaking Arabic. The Red Cross cared about us as much as the colonel did.
I stopped eating after that. I wasn’t on hunger strike. I wasn’t planning one. I still accepted my meals but I couldn’t eat. I quickly lost the little weight I had gained back since the hunger strike. How do we slide toward the edge of despair? We inch toward it, little by little, so slowly it looks like we’re not even moving. I stopped drinking water, too, and that’s when I started hallucinating, struggling to unblur the world around me. I prayed to Allah. Allah, oh Allah. Please give me clarity. Allah, oh Allah. Please accept my soul if I die in this place. Allah, oh Allah… The world went black and when I opened my eyes, I was in the medical clinic with an IV connected to my arm.
“You almost died,” the doctor said. She had kind eyes. A guard stood behind her. “I’m recommending that your interrogators move you out of solitary confinement.”
“He’s there on Colonel Bumgarner’s orders,” the guard said.
“And what if he dies?” the doctor asked.
The guard had no answer.
THE COLONEL WASN’T done with me yet. They moved me to Romeo Block, which was newly redesigned to look like an experimental laboratory for rats. Really, it was like a battle arena, where guards and detainees fought every day like it was their job. The front of every cage was covered with thick glass, and then inside the cage was the same mesh as before, but it was covered with another smaller mesh that was almost impossible to see through. Every second cage was empty, holding only a vacuum screaming nonstop. The scariest part was seeing all my brothers in these cages, like crazy skeletons, some just in orange shorts, some in weird green robes. These were suicide robes and they looked like long tank tops that went to your knees. Velcro straps at the shoulders connected the front to the back. There was no way to rip or tear them. No way to hang yourself with them. All the brothers had long beards and hair, everyone was very skinny. You could tell that they weren’t fed. Their faces bruised and their hands raw, you could tell they’d all been fighting the guards.
“Welcome back to the worst of the worst,” Waddah called to me.
Allah, oh Allah. All of Romeo Block reeked of pepper spray.
Brothers up and down the block called out to me over the roar of the vacuum machines.
When I got to my cage, the guards unshackled me and demanded my clothes. Brothers cried out, excited at the possibility of a fight. I was still in bad shape and not ready to fight, but I couldn’t show I was weak. I refused to hand over my clothes. I think we know what happened next. QRF team. Pepper spray. All the brothers on the block stomped the floor and banged the cages, cheering me on. The noise was madness.
“Keep them busy so they don’t beat you,” Waddah called out.
“Don’t worry about Mansoor,” Omar called. “He knows how to handle them.”
All the guards coughed from the pepper spray, and I knew right away they were inexperienced trainees. I almost felt bad for them, amateurs going up against a professional.
When they charged in, I jumped out of their way and they hit the wall. Boom! They fell into a pile on the ground.
Brothers cheered.
From my bed, I jumped onto that sad pile of men and started punching whatever I could. My brothers shouted and laughed. I grabbed a helmet here, pulled a visor there. I didn’t know what I was doing. My adrenaline was rushing and I thought I might faint at any moment. I saw the cage door was open and darted for it, but I hit a wall of pepper spray and then guards dropped me to the ground. It was over now. They piled on top of me, knelt on my neck, and restrained my legs and hands together behind me. They carried me like this to the rec yard, the guard in front holding me by my throat so that I couldn’t breathe. In the yard they cut my clothes off me, laughed at my skeleton body, and then put me in a suicide smock. They were always finding new ways to humiliate us. When I was restrained again, guards gave me a couple more kicks, then carried me back to my cage.
I wasn’t done. I needed to finish strongly to show my brothers I wasn’t weak.
The cell pull-out can be tricky for new guards. They have to take the restraints off and back out quickly before you can move. These guards were slow and I was able to grab one of them by his armored vest. It ripped in half and the five guards pulling him fell out of the cage and the block sergeant slammed the door shut, leaving that poor new guard stuck in my cage alone with me.
“Pull me out!” he screamed.
Brothers cheered. Brothers laughed. “Pull out!” they mocked.
I charged him. I threw punches and kicks everywhere while he was stuck with his back against the door. As soon as they opened the door to pull out the guard, I threw the vest and it hit the officer standing outside the cage barking orders. Those vests are heavy and it hit him hard and knocked his cap off and made him drop his radio.
“Allahu Akbar!” brothers shouted. “Push in! Pull out! Pull out! Push in!” It was crazy with all the noise.
Again, pepper spray. Then the guard was pulled out.
“May Allah bless you,” Waddah called.
“Are you trying to kill my men?” There was the colonel again, yelling at me in front of my cage.
“Hello, fat chicken,” I said in my best English. “No one wants to kill your chickens.”
“My men are here trying to help you!” the colonel yelled.
“Like you helped my three brothers?” I said.
“Help us!” Omar called out. He was the block leader on Romeo Block. He pointed to me. “This is your idea of helping us? Look at him! Look at his face. You should be ashamed.”
The colonel didn’t answer.
“You’re the killer,” I said. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to give him the respect he craved.
The colonel stormed out. I think he had accomplished what he wanted.
The rest of the day, guards from other blocks came and looked at me, like they were told to make sure they knew who I was.
THAT NIGHT, A young female sergeant came on as watch commander, and the first thing she did was open all the windows on the block to air out the pepper spray. She even opened the brothers’ windows that had been ordered closed for days as punishment. We called her Mole because she had a beautiful mark on her cheek. She had always been fair and respectful and never harassed us. She was one of the only guards who didn’t change after our brothers died.
When she was done with the inventory, she went to Omar.
“You’ve heard what happened today?” he asked.
“I’ve heard.” She smiled.
Omar was very polite with her and asked if we could clean our cells and get the men to rec early so we could sleep.
“You know the rules about rec,” she said. The new rules were that half the men on the block had to go to rec during the day, the other half at night. Going to rec meant lots of noise: shackles rattling, doors opening and closing, guards talking and barking orders. With a bad shift, it was impossible to sleep. “We have to do rec at nighttime, unless you refuse.”
“We don’t want to refuse,” Omar said. “We just want some peace.”
“Okay,” she said. “If your brothers cooperate, we can hurry through rec and showers early. I’ll tell the guards to be quiet later.”
Mole told Omar that she had been warned not to help me. She told him that the colonel spoke to everyone on the night shift and told them that 441, Smiley Troublemaker—that’s me—was the most dangerous detainee at Guantánamo. He told them that I had tried to kill an officer earlier that day. He meant the vest I threw. Labeling me like this was a really big deal. It meant extra punishments and more harassment from guards. It meant I was a target. We knew the colonel wanted guards to clamp down on us for what had happened that day. They needed to punish us. But this took it really far.
She was hesitant about helping me at first, but Omar asked her to talk to me and then decide for herself if I was dangerous.
“Oh shit!” she cried when saw me. “What happened to your face?” There was blood all over my face and smock. There was blood on the floor and on the bed. I couldn’t see her that well, my face and eyes had swollen so much.
“Poor Mansoor,” Hamzah called. “No one can tell if that is your ass or your face!”
Some brothers offered kinder words of sympathy. Most joked and laughed, trying to make the situation better and to cheer me up.
It hurt to laugh. I thought I had a broken rib. But I smiled.
“I’ll get you some new clothes,” Mole said. “Promise me you won’t cause any trouble.”
I promised. It was humiliating to have to assure people that I wouldn’t hurt them after getting beaten. It hurt being asked not to cause a problem when that’s all they ever did. Was it really that hard to understand why we did what we did?
WHEN I WAS told that I was to appear at an Administrative Review Board hearing to determine if I was still an enemy combatant, I imagined going before the colonel and telling him he was a criminal. I didn’t know what this hearing was or how it was going to be different from the last one or even why it mattered. No one explained it to us. Other brothers, even ones who had attorneys to help them prepare, said these hearings were still nothing more than dressed-up interrogations where the board asked the same questions interrogators asked. The Americans didn’t present any accusations or charge any of us with crimes. They just read out loud the lies interrogators had forced out of us under torture. This was their justice? Only a few brothers had ever been reclassified and released, and they were mostly from European countries or from Saudi Arabia, and they were only released because their governments pressured the Americans.
So what was the point? I decided to give them what they wanted. I would give them their jihadist. I would give them their al Qaeda fighter.
Before my hearing, the camp admin asked if I wanted to prepare a statement to read to the review board.
Of course I did! I hadn’t had a pen or paper in years and couldn’t wait for the chance to write my statement. I would write it personally to the colonel and General Miller. I was taken to a room and given a pen and paper, and over three days, I wrote a thirteen-page letter to the board in Arabic. I was direct in my accusations of the Americans. They were criminals for what they had done to us and to Muslims and I wanted them to know it. Each night I recited to my neighbor, a brother from the UAE, what I had written.
“Mansoor,” he cried. “You’re crazy to write such things. They’ll kill you.”
“They’re already killing us here,” I said.
“They’ll keep you here forever!”
“They’ve already told me that I’ll be in solitary confinement for seven years,” I said. “What will they do after that—just let me go? They’ve made up their minds about who I am. Look at the people who run this place. Colonel Bumgarner, General Miller. These people are crazy! They’ll never let me leave.”
I was young and devastated from losing my brothers. The Americans had already decided who I was, even though they knew better. I’d spent years trying every way I knew to protest my detention and our treatment. I had learned who my enemy was and that’s what I wrote.
“I hope the colonel is there to hear my statement,” I said.
My neighbor laughed. But I was serious.
The day of my review, I refused to wear the white clothes they gave me and instead wore the orange jumpsuit. “Let’s be honest,” I said. “I never get to wear the white of a compliant detainee. Why would I wear it today?” They took me to a room with a bunch of high-ranking officers and an interpreter.
They asked if it was okay to call me Abdul Rahman Ahmed, one of the names interrogators called me now. There had been so many names, I couldn’t keep track of them all anymore.
“Call me whatever you want to call me,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve told you who I am and you still call me by this name.”
They had all these formalities to make it seem like it was a court, but we all knew it was just a show and meant nothing. I had no lawyer. They had no charges. They asked me if I wanted to make an oath according to Islam.
I was very polite and respectful.
“I don’t need to take the oath,” I said. “I will speak the truth under Allah.”
They told me how the review would go and asked if I understood. It didn’t make sense to me. It seemed like they had already made up their minds about me, and what was I to say? This hearing meant nothing to me.
Then they read what other brothers had said about me during interrogations and things I had said in interrogations under torture. They even talked about all the lies I told interrogators when I was playing the trick that got me blacklisted. They asked if I wanted to say anything about what they read, and I told them I had a statement to read at the end. The review went on for a long time and, finally, I was asked to read my letter.
First, I recited a verse from the Qur’an. Then I read my statement about how the United States was oppressing the world’s religions with their criminal acts. I read that they preached democracy and human rights and justice for all, but these were just fabrications to hide all their vicious killing and torture. I told them I was a jihadist—that it was my duty to continue in the way of jihad until the very end. I even praised the attacks on America as opening the door to jihad.
They listened, clearly surprised at what I said. It was apparently the most forceful statement any brother had presented. When I was done, they asked me a few more questions that were just like the questions they had asked me over and over again in interrogations—was I an al Qaeda leader? Did I go to Afghanistan to wage jihad?—questions that told me they still didn’t understand Muslims and didn’t care to.
I told them again that I was not al Qaeda, but after what they had done to me, done to us, I would join if they would have me. I told them I was an enemy of the United States and its allies and that I would fight them if they released me.
I was angry. I was hurt. I said things that I didn’t mean, but I was in a deep, dark hole. I wanted to make them mad. I had lost three brothers, murdered by the torturers who took my life away. I felt that no matter what I said, they wouldn’t release me or believe me. I wanted to teach them a lesson. I wanted to teach them that they couldn’t kill us and torture us and expect us to love them for it. No. I wanted them to see what they had created.
- SEVENTEEN -
I knew Ahmed wouldn’t actually escape when I saw him walk past my cell door free and alone, completely confident in where he was headed. He was an Algerian brother, well educated, a doctor who spoke four languages. I’d never seen a brother walking through Camp V without shackles and guards. I’d never seen the block without guards in the hallway either, but we were at Guantánamo and hardly anything shocked me anymore.
