Inside the Kingdom (50 page)

“In four years of questioning, Yasser never told the Americans anything,” says his father admiringly. “That’s what his friends told me. He refused to speak unless he could have a lawyer. Nor could the Americans place a single charge against him. He was a person who had a will. Perhaps that is what brought him to his end.”

In May 2006 Talal read a report about trouble in Guantánamo. Guards and prisoners had been fighting, and three prisoners had been injured. Two weeks later he received a call from Riyadh to tell him that Yasser was one of three prisoners—two Saudis and a Yemeni—who had “committed suicide.”

“I just didn’t believe it. The coincidence between the three injuries and then the three ‘suicides’ was ridiculous. His friends have told me that Yasser was calm and optimistic. There was a program for the release of Saudi prisoners. Quite a lot had left already, and he was hoping to be in the next batch. Why would he not wait for that? I know my son’s personality—he would
never
commit the sin of suicide. He told me in his letters he was learning his Koran. ‘You know me,’ he wrote. ‘I have a lot of faith.’

“The Americans claimed that the three men hanged themselves in different parts of the camp at the same time—but how could that be, with surveillance cameras everywhere twenty-four seven? We know that the guards were patrolling the cages every three to five minutes.”

Abu Fawwaz, one of the numerous Saudis released and sent back to Riyadh before Yasser’s death, agrees.

“There was no rope in those cages: there was no way you could hang yourself. Besides, Yasser went to Afghanistan seeking heaven. Suicide is the entrance to hell. He knew that.”

When Talal got to Riyadh to claim his son’s body, he was met by three high-level officials of the Interior Ministry (in 2002 he had taken early retirement from the Mabahith to go into business).

“They told me the American story that it was suicide, and they seemed to be telling me that I should resign myself to that—they made it very clear that they did not want a row. The government was working its hardest, they told me, to get the remaining Saudi boys home without a lot of fuss. I didn’t blame them, but I told them I did not have any comment. I needed to see my son’s body.”

Talal went into the mortuary to say good-bye to his dead son, and what he saw there made up his mind.

“I kissed the boy on the forehead. I had had my doubts before I saw the body, and now I was quite sure. I said, ‘I don’t accept any of this. I accuse the Americans.’ ”

Yasser’s larynx had been removed.

“Forensic doctors will tell you—if you hang yourself, you don’t break your larynx. The rope cuts into your throat higher up. But your larynx
can
get broken if somebody strangles you.”

An autopsy by a panel of five Saudi doctors found marks on Yasser’s body that could have been signs of torture, and a wound to the chest consistent with some sort of fight. There were marks on the right shoulder from injections made while the young man was alive, but it was no longer possible to determine what had been injected into the body.

“We know how the Americans provoked and insulted their Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It was the same in Guantánamo. Yasser’s friends told me that the guards would stamp on their Korans and tear the pages. No wonder the Muslims were enraged. America has become an oppressor to us. They are as brutal and dominating as the Soviets.”

Yasser’s beard had been torn out on the left side, as if in a struggle of some sort, and there were strange, dark red marks on his skin. The Saudi doctors requested the American authorities to send them the toxicity report that should have been made at the time of death: they wished to determine the amount of poison in the body, and they wanted the evidence from the surveillance cameras.

For Talal and his family, there was even more compelling evidence that Yasser had not died by the sinful method of suicide.

“When I saw his body in Riyadh,” says Talal, “he had already been dead for fifteen days, but he seemed like he was sleeping. He smelt fragrant. Then, at his funeral a week later, all his friends and family who went to kiss him said the same. He was not changed. By then his body had been cooled and warmed for two autopsies. Normally a body that old would smell decayed. My son did not commit suicide. He was a martyr.”

Talal angrily discounts the idea that the fragrance might be from embalming fluid—and he also rejects the report on Yasser’s death by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) that was finally released in August 2008.

“The report had three thousand pages,” he says, “and that was three thousand lies.”

The NCIS investigators described finding similarly worded suicide notes in the pockets of Yasser and of the two other men who died, as well as in the pockets of a number of other prisoners who did not die—proof, in the American view, of “a coordinated suicide pact.”

“They have refused to show us this note that they say they found on Yasser,” says Talal. “Until I see my son’s handwriting, I will never believe that he took his own life. My family knows that he died fighting—he was a martyr.”

The photograph that Yasser’s mother keeps on her mobile phone provides strange support for Talal’s faith. Lying on his stretcher beside the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina three weeks after his death and a journey from the other side of the world, Yasser Al-Zahrani does not look like a corpse. On the small screen he seems to be sleeping. Every so often his mother switches on the digital image and kisses it.

“We prayed over him,” remembers his cousin Mohammed, “then we buried him in the famous cemetery beside the mosque, where many of the Companions of the Prophet are buried. All the Prophet’s wives, except Khadija, are buried there, and all his daughters. It was a distinguished funeral, with many hundreds of mourners.”

The men fall silent at the memory, sitting on the patterned armchairs and carpet of the family majlis, quietly passing around the letters that Yasser wrote from Guantánamo—sheets of lined paper sent home via the Red Cross in Geneva. CLEARED BY U.S. FORCES has been stamped across the back.

“I know I cannot bring him back,” says Talal. “But it will be his memorial if we can see Guantánamo Camp shut down. If there is no illegality there, as the Americans say, why have they situated the place in a foreign country?”

Soon after Yasser went to Guantánamo, he sent his father a letter, to which Talal replied.

“I told him, ‘My son, please be patient and wait. Try to help the investigators and the guards and everyone to come to know Allah.’ His friends told me he was doing that to the end. He was the imam—the leader of the prayers in his group. Whatever the Americans said to him, and whatever they did to him, Yasser always had one answer: ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His messenger.’ ”

CHAPTER 28

King Abdullah

O
n August 1, 2005, after years of disability and several months in intensive care, King Fahd finally expired. The career that started with such promise as the bright young technocratic prince had ended with a sad decade of lingering decline—and stagnation for his country. The partnership of brothers that has run Saudi Arabia since 1953 has always functioned best when there has been a strong leader to push the consensus along.

“The Angel of Death was not kind to His Majesty,” says one of his kitchen cabinet. “Nor to the rest of us. He should have come for the king ten years earlier.”

Wrapped in a sheet, Fahd’s body was borne on a stretcher to the public cemetery, and buried there, according to Wahhabi custom, in an unmarked grave. Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz was finally king, and people exulted in the change of style.

The royal court had witnessed an amusing pantomime that summer as the princes had been preparing for their holidays.

“We are leaving very soon,” they would say, informing Abdullah of their destination, to which Abdullah would respond with a graceful nod and the wish that they might have an enjoyable time. He knew exactly what they wanted. It had been Fahd’s habit to hand envelopes containing literally millions of dollars to relatives heading on vacation, and following the old king’s death, one daring family member took it upon himself to remind the new king of that tradition.

Abdullah gave him a withering look and said nothing. But a few days later a message went out to the family announcing the end of holiday handouts and urging the virtues of living within one’s means. The fleet of royal jets was cut from fourteen to five, and the provision of free ticket vouchers on the national airline was also curtailed. Invited to pick himself his own brand-new private jet, King Abdullah said he would continue using the one that had served him as crown prince.

Journalists who caught wind of these economies naturally approved, even if it was not the sort of story that could possibly be reported in the Saudi press. Then the travel arrangements for the new king’s first state visits were made public. As in the past, announced the Ministry of Information, editors, reporters, and photographers would be very welcome to travel with the government party on the official royal planes, but these journeys would no longer be free. Editors would be guests of the king, but other media passengers would be required to pay the equivalent of the full first-class air fare—in advance.

There was once a farmer who inherited an ailing and broken-down grove of date palms and who toiled long and hard to restore the palms to shape. He cut back dead branches, enriched the soil with camel droppings, and diverted a watercourse—to produce, after a year, a bountiful crop of luscious dates.

“What a glorious harvest God has provided!” remarked the long-bearded imam at the village, nodding his head in pious pleasure as he passed by the grove one day. “
Al-hamdu lillah!
[Thanks be to God!]”

“Al-hamdu lillah, indeed,” replied the farmer. “You should have seen the harvest when God was the only one doing the work!”

Unlike his predecessor, who could “vanish” on occasions for weeks at a time, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz works hard, on a timetable that is predictable, but also eccentric.

“We’re all on the same schedule,” says one of his young advisers, ruefully shaking his head.

The new king sleeps twice every day, the first time between ten or so in the evening and one o’clock in the morning, when he rises for a spate of hard work through the small hours. Then, following the dawn prayer, he goes back to bed for a second rest from which he awakes around 9 A.M. In his younger years a certain amount of his morning work had been done in his swimming pool, where he would plough stolidly up and down, doing the lengths that his doctors prescribed for his health, while pausing to execute official business from time to time. Aides would bring papers for his attention, and the crown prince would come to the side of the pool to study them, dripping gently in a mist of chlorinated water vapor while he considered his decision. As his duties grew more onerous, the practice stopped. Abdullah has learned the importance of keeping business and relaxation separate. But the young prince’s poolside ponderings betrayed his inherent impatience: No delays, thank you, let’s get the job done.

Under the influence of “T-1,” the historically-minded Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, Abdullah had long been concerned with building up Saudi national feeling. Quietly rebutting Wahhabi claims that they were the core of the Saudi polity, Abdullah and Al-Tuwayjri had helped develop a folklore festival in the 1970s and ’80s around the annual camel race at Janadriyya, to the northeast of Riyadh. Abdullah had a farm near the track, and as owners and tribesmen gathered every February for the camel equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, the crown prince started inviting them to linger for displays of cooking and craftsmanship and traditional dancing. The gathering proved a hit. It was quite hard to find legitimate, public ways to enjoy oneself in post-Juhayman Saudi Arabia, and crowds came from the most obscure corners of the Kingdom. Janadriya grew rapidly, and when Al-Tuwayjri started inviting some of Islam’s cutting-edge thinkers to present their views the festival became seriously intellectual.