My Guantanamo Diary (17 page)

Next to Wazir Akbar Khan’s megamansions are Kabul’s slums, lined with mud houses and open sewage canals. They have no electricity, no running water, not even any heat to stave off the subzero temperatures. The average Afghan lives in abject poverty. As we drove through this neighborhood, I watched children pushing each other in a wheelbarrow and playing in mounds of garbage. They had no playgrounds, day care, or clean clothes like American children. Little boys and girls ran to
the car, holding up a finger in a request for some change. Some were so young they could barely reach the window.

Afghanistan’s children bear the brunt of the nation’s poverty. While there have been improvements since the Taliban were ousted, the country still has the second highest infant-mortality rate in the world, preceded only by Sierra Leone.
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The great majority of Afghan women do not receive any prenatal care and give birth at home without the help of a midwife or a doctor. As a result, Afghanistan has the distinction of having the highest life risk for maternal mortality. One in six Afghan women die in child birth every day. One in four children dies before age five.
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The life expectancy for men is forty-five; for women, forty-four. Almost 90 percent of Afghan women are illiterate.
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Most Afghan women are married before the age of eighteen. Many are forced into marriages for various reasons, including to settle feuds or repay debts.

When I saw the scale of deprivation, I was again reminded of my own good luck that I was born and raised as an American. What if my parents hadn’t been educated, had never emigrated to the United States? For the first time, I understood that the opportunities in my life were a windfall. The old taxi driver had been right about my good fortune.

While most of the Afghans I spoke with were grateful that the Taliban were gone, some bore an untempered anger toward the U.S. armed forces for the destruction of their land. A few times during my stay, I heard about inexplicable cancers and strange diseases that people seemed to have developed. Some believed that it was all due to the U.S. bombs.

I contacted Mohammad Daud Miraki, a local and international expert who has researched the mysterious illnesses. He works closely with Asaf Durocovic of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) in Washington, D.C. Durocovic sent a team of field workers to Afghanistan immediately after the coalition bombing of Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001. UMRC studied the presence of depleted uranium in populations bombed by coalition forces in targeted cities such as Tora Bora, Jalalabad, Spin Gar, and Kabul as compared with untargeted populations. Durocovic consistently found that the residents of heavily bombed areas had a uranium concentration in their urine that was twenty to two hundred times larger than that of the control group.

While no direct scientific data correlates the increase in uranium with the illnesses, Miraki saw no other explanation. “There is nothing ‘depleted’ about depleted uranium,” he told me. “It gives off ionizing radiation that damages DNA and genes. The damage can be seen most readily with cells that are dividing and growing rapidly, like those in a human embryo.”

Following Durocovic’s published study of radioactive warfare in Afghanistan, Miraki sent his own team of field workers to catalogue the anecdotal incidents. He traveled to the Operation Enduring Freedom bomb sites and collected photographs of severely deformed infants. Many were limbless and died soon after birth; some were born without eyes, with enlarged heads or with massive tumors protruding from their bodies. Miraki and his field workers also recorded interviews with locals in the noncontrol areas.

Assadullah, an Afghan from Paktia province, said that his wife gave birth to a boy with melon-sized tumors growing where his eyes should have been. “When I saw my little boy with those
monstrous red tumors, I thought to myself, why is it difficult for Americans to understand that they are hated in our country? If I did this to the child of an American family, that family would have the right to pull my eyes out of my sockets,” he said.

Jooma Khan’s deformed grandson, who
was alive for several hours after birth
but died shortly after this photograph
was taken.
Courtesy of Mohammad Daud
Miraki.

Sa’yed Gharid of Tora Bora became angry as he spoke about the horrors he had witnessed. “What else do the Americans want? They killed us; they turned our newborns into horrific deformities; they turned our farmlands into graveyards and destroyed our homes,” he said. “On top of all that, their planes fly over and spray us with bullets. We have nothing to lose; we will fight them the way we fought the previous monster,” the Soviet Union.

Jooma Khan of Lagman province said his grandson was a victim of unconventional U.S. warfare. “When I saw my deformed grandson, I realized that my hopes for the future have vanished for good, different from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism,” Khan said. “We are part of the invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we will not escape.”

About a week after my arrival, a snowfall covered Kabul’s dirty slums in white. I fell in love with wintertime in Afghanistan. At night, I would fall asleep to the rhythm of snow falling, and every morning before sunrise, I would jump out of bed and pull back the curtains to photograph the sunrise over the city or the big white snowflakes falling from the sky and covering Kabul in a glittery blanket. Afterward, the roads were blocked, shops were closed, and the city slowed to a silent lull.

Afghanistan’s winter lull.
Author photo.

Suicide by hanging: that was the Pentagon’s verdict in the case of Salah al-Aslami, No. 693. But back home in Yemen, his father couldn’t believe it. It was murder, he cried.

The official version of the story went like this:

Sometime after midnight, Yemeni prisoner al-Aslami, twenty-seven, and two Saudi prisoners scrawled out suicide notes in Arabic, then hung laundry inside their cages and arranged their beds to look as though they were sleeping, all in an effort to conceal themselves from patrolling cell-block guards. The three then created crude makeshift nooses from bedsheets and clothing and pulled them over their heads. Guards found the prisoners shortly afterward, hanging by their necks in separate Camp 1 cells. All three were pronounced dead after attempts to revive them failed.

Base commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr. immediately issued statements to the media, reiterating that the dead men
were dangerous terrorists “committed to killing Americans” who had taken their own lives in a crafty act of war, a planned suicide pact cum public relations stunt against America.

“They have no regard for human life,” Harris said. “Neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.”

Rubbish, said habeas attorney Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve in London. “It is asymmetric,” he said. “On one side are a bunch of heavily armed soldiers. On the other are prisoners who are unarmed and always shackled. Warfare, it is not.”

Al-Aslami’s younger brother said he first heard about the suicides on the local news in Yemen but never considered that one of the dead might be his brother. He didn’t think much more about the news reports. But the following day, the family was shocked to receive a phone call from an American lawyer who confirmed that Salah was one of the dead prisoners.

The family was hysterical, and Salah’s wife, Hayat, may never recover. Their disbelief and shock slowly settled into despair and outrage. Al-Aslami’s brother rejected the notion of suicide immediately, believing that something more sinister had taken place.

“We were all stunned by the news,” he said from his home in Yemen. “My brother was a simple and gentle sort of guy. Taking his life is very out of character. We have never accepted that this is how he left us.”

When I heard about the suicides, they struck me as the ultimate Guantánamo tragedy: three men who had never been charged or given a fair hearing would be going home in caskets.

When I visited the base a few weeks later, it was clear that news of the suicides had made the prisoners anxious and uncomfortable. They wanted to know what had really happened. But no one had any information other than what the Department of Defense had released. There were no independent investigations, and the military refused to release its autopsy reports. So, we could only tell the detainees what we, like everyone else, had heard on the news.

Some of the prisoners listened pensively; others asked thoughtful questions. Taj Mohammad blurted out the conspiracy theory that the others only pondered—or perhaps feared: “I think they were killed.”

Since the detention center at Guantánamo Bay opened in early 2002, there have been more than forty-one reported suicide attempts by twenty-three detainees. Many more have gone unreported by the media. Some detainees were accordingly reluctant to accept that three prisoners could have successfully committed suicide on the same night and at around the same time.

Taj Mohammad tried to hang himself several times. Shah Mohammad, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan prisoner, also tried to take his life.
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He was reportedly put into solitary confinement when all the regular cells were occupied. There, he tried to commit suicide four times. In 2003, he was released to Pakistan, where he told reporters that the U.S. military gave him injections prior to his interrogations to make him talk.
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The abuse was more than he could manage. Around the time Shah Mohammad was released, another twenty-three detainees tried to commit suicide en masse—unsuccessfully.

In the aftermath of the suicides, the Department of Justice alleged that the detainees may have used paper provided by lawyers to plan their suicide pact. It asked a court for permission to seize and review privileged attorney-client documents. The move outraged the habeas legal squad, which considered it an excuse to invade the detainees’ and lawyers’ privacy.

“This is nonsense,” said habeas attorney Stafford Smith, who represented thirty-seven prisoners. “For an organization intent on people taking responsibility, they sure don’t want to do it themselves.”

There were only two explanations for how three men might have died on the same night and at roughly the same time: they were killed, or they committed suicide in a joint pact.

I don’t know what happened in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 10—whether it was desperation that brought the three young Arabs to suicide or whether, as many in the “non-American” world tend to believe, something more sinister happened. But three prisoners were dead, and I wanted to know about their lives. I was particularly intrigued by Salah al- Aslami because he was just twenty-three when he was brought to Gitmo. I wondered how his parents had reacted to the news of his suicide and wanted to know more about his childhood, why he’d left Yemen, and what had led him down the road that ended in his premature death.

So, I Googled the dead Yemeni, hoping to learn more. When I tried to get transcripts of his military hearings, there was nothing. Al-Aslami had had a combatant status review tribunal, but the military refused to release the transcript despite
a court order that resulted from an Associated Press Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

I was able to locate a record of his military Administrative Review Board transcript, but it was entirely redacted and disclosed nothing, not even the allegations against him. There was, however, a brief mention of al-Aslami in the military transcripts of another Yemeni prisoner, Fahmi Abdullah Ahmed, No. 688. The two had been picked up together in Pakistan.

From the transcripts, it appears that Ahmed was twenty-two years old and, like al-Aslami, in Pakistan on business. The two met soon after Ahmed’s arrival and hit it off right away. Al-Aslami invited his new friend to come live with him in a communal house shared by a group of students, many of them also from Yemen. Ahmed told the tribunal that he had never been to Afghanistan and that as far as he knew, al- Aslami hadn’t been either.

The two lived together for just two weeks before their house was raided by Pakistani police, who seized the group of young Arabs and handed them over to U.S. armed forces. Eventually, both wound up at Bagram before being brought to Guantánamo.

For Tom Wilner of Shearman and Sterling, who represented several Arab detainees, the Pakistani police raid scenario was dejà vu all over again. Eighty-six percent of the detainees had been seized in Pakistan, according to declassified Defense Department documents.
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It’s believed that a great number, if not all, of these men were sold into captivity.

“None of my clients were captured on any battlefield or are even accused of engaging in any hostilities against the U.S.,” Wilner said. “Each was sold into captivity for bounties.”

Al-Aslami was one of the first prisoners brought to Guantánamo Bay, and according to news reports, military officials said he was a regular hunger striker who protested his detention and encouraged others to do the same. Back home in Yemen, his parents prayed that he would be released soon, as other Yemeni detainees had been.

The family was reassured of their son’s well-being when they received occasional calls or letters from released detainees who had been imprisoned with him in Guantánamo. Former Kuwaiti detainee Saad al-Azimi and several released Saudi detainees told the family that their son was in good health and felt confident that he would be headed home soon. Nothing could have prepared the family for the news of his suicide.

With the help of lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, I was able to speak with al-Aslami’s family in Yemen. His father, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, who now prefers to be called Abu Salah (in Arabic “father of Salah”), was adamant that his son was a devout Muslim who had memorized the Qu’ran and would never have committed suicide, which is a grave sin in Islam.

“My son was murdered by Americans,” Ali Abdullah told me through an Arabic interpreter. “This idea of suicide is a lie.”

Al-Aslami was born into a large, tight-knit family of eight brothers and four sisters. When he was a child, the neighbors often saw him playing soccer in the streets with his brothers and friends. He loved the sport, and the boys competed in a local neighborhood league.

“Salah was a good brother,” his younger brother, Amar, said. “He never got upset with me, even when something was my fault.”

As a boy, al-Aslami enrolled in the village elementary school, Abu Bakar bin Sadiq, where he excelled in math and science. Even then, his father said, he was very precocious and business minded. He wanted to earn a living and was always coming up with new business ideas.

“It pleased me that he was so bright at a young age,” said his father.

While attending school, the boy got a part-time job at a neighborhood store called Salameen Groceries, where he made pocket money selling nuts, yogurt, and meat. He often came home with jars of fresh honey for the house. A cook at the store became fond of young al-Aslami and regularly made him his favorite foods—spicy fish, rice, and meat.

Al-Aslami also helped his father around the family farm, feeding the animals and playing with the sheep. “I shared so many little moments like that with him,” his father said. “Now I wait patiently to see him again in the hereafter.”