My Guantanamo Diary (19 page)

Reading material for the prisoners is the subject of an ongoing tug-of-war between the Department of Defense (DOD) and the attorneys. The DOD used to review books that lawyers wanted given to their clients. Many were rejected and sent back. Among some of the censored books were
Hidden Agendas
by John Pilger,
Blair’s Wars
by John Kampfner, and
I’m Not
the Only One
, by George Galloway. These selections were probably considered too political for the prisoners. But it’s less clear why “Puss in Boots,” “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Beauty and the Beast” were also nixed.
¹

In September 2005, habeas lawyer G. T. Hunt sent his sixty-one-year-old Pakistani American client Saifullah Peracha a copy of the Bible after the detainee made multiple written requests for it. While Peracha was a practicing Muslim, Islam overlaps with many biblical beliefs, and he wanted to further his religious understanding. Hunt mailed the Bible to the Unitarian chaplain at the base and requested that he deliver it to Peracha by hand. But the Bible was intercepted by the military. The next time Hunt was at Gitmo, he got an earful. “We are trying to run a prison here!” one of the officers on duty told him.

“I got reamed,” Hunt told me, not understanding why the military would refuse to deliver a Bible. “I thought it represented
colossal gall, even from a government claiming the right to lock up anybody anywhere forever.”

The military attempted to ban several lawyers from the base, but habeas counsel were a zealous bunch of more than five hundred attorneys who didn’t get steamrolled easily. They had inexhaustible access to courts and legal resources. Collectively, they were a legal powerhouse and a highly influential force.

On one occasion, DOD told Tom Wilner of Shearman and Sterling that he was going to be banned from the base because of an interview with a detainee that his office had allowed the BBC to broadcast. DOD said that Tom had violated the base protective order. Tom wasn’t pleased.

“There was no violation, and I told them to go to hell,” he told me by e-mail, maintaining that everything his firm gave the BBC for their broadcast had already been cleared by the DOD and stamped unclassified. He said the BBC interview “pissed [DOD] off mightily.” Notoriously outspoken to the press, Tom said the interview was an excuse to attempt to shut him up and cut off face time with his prisoner clients. The matter was eventually settled at the prisoner’s insistence, and the lawyers agreed to inform the military beforehand the next time they decided to publicize an interview.

The DOD tried the banning tactic with a large New York firm after it informed a prisoner that the military had no legal right to force-feed him while he was on a hunger strike. The firm’s legal advice was correct: more than thirty years ago, the World Medical Association declared it unethical to force-
feed a mentally competent hunger striker. After the attempted ban, the firm’s lawyers brought the issue before a federal magistrate, and the threat to ban the firm from the base was withdrawn.

Other obstacles arose when the prisoners got visits from interrogators disguised as doctors, lawyers, or delegates from their home countries telling them that they were going to be released. Prisoners never knew who was telling them the truth. They had also been told a wide variety of things that the military believed would incite mistrust in their attorneys. The military told Clive Stafford Smith’s South London client Shaker Aamer that Clive was Jewish, and they told his Jordanian client Osama Abu Kabir that he was gay.

“I think it’s extraordinary, puerile, duplicitous, and wicked, all in the same breath,” Clive said.

Clive also experienced obstacles of another kind. On a trip to the base in 2005, shortly after several detainees began a hunger strike, he was pulled aside into a meeting room by Captain [name redacted], who told Clive that, based on information from the detainees, he believed that Clive was orchestrating the hunger strike. He pointed to a steel mesh cell, threatening to put Clive in it.

“I was really incensed by that,” Clive told British reporters. “I wrote them a letter saying, ‘I don’t want to hear anything more about this, or I’ll be suing you people.’”

Then came the next accusation: In addition to the hunger strikes, Stafford Smith had orchestrated the camp suicides. According to press reports, the U.S. military claimed that a prisoner had said Clive masterminded all of it. It was scary stuff, being framed by the military. It could ruin your life.

Clive responded by going to the media with the threats. He spent a great deal of time dissuading suicidal clients from attempting to take their lives, he said. He had no intention of encouraging anyone to leave Guantánamo in a casket.

“I think they’re targeting me over these suicides in Guantánamo because the military doesn’t want to accept that the prisoners got depressed because they’ve been treated so badly,” Clive told British reporters. “So, they want to point the finger of blame wherever they can.”

In April 2007, the Department of Justice asked a federal court to put more limitations on the lawyers representing Guantánamo prisoners. The government wanted to limit the number of times a lawyer could see a client to four, it wanted permission to read attorney-client-privileged mail, and it wanted more control over what lawyers could discuss with their clients.

The government made this move, claiming that lawyers were directly responsible for inciting hunger strikes and unrest through their communications with prisoners during visits and in legal mail. But this attempt to throw attorney-client privilege out the window outraged lawyers and civil liberties groups nationwide. The American Bar Association called on its members to protest the continued erosion of U.S. law and ethical standards.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle has been learning the military’s sneaky speak. Here are a few interpretations: Enhanced interrogation technique: torture; manipulative self-injurious behavior: suicide attempt; voluntary fast: hunger strike; contraband: flowers, hair clips, straws, plastic spoons, plastic
forks, staples; rendition: kidnapping; assisted feeding: forcefeeding hunger strikers by shoving a plastic tube up nose; asymmetric warfare: suicide; self-harm: attempted suicide; hanging gesture: suicide attempt; law fare: legal motion; comfort items: soap, toilet paper; recreation time: placed in a cage by yourself with a ball; high-value detainee: individual secretly imprisoned and tortured by the CIA.

The following are from the 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures (Unclassified/FOUA): Document exploitation: detainee mail screening procedures; Behavior Management Plan: to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process; Roving Sally: a unit responsible for opening and closing the cell-block gates with haste whenever an IRF team is “requested.” There are also special procedures for “Military Working Dogs” (MWD) gone wild: First person to notice a loose dog will call out: LOOSE DOG! Everyone in the area will stop movement and remain still. In the absence of the assigned handler, the person nearest the dog (in some cases this might be the detainee) will attempt to restrain it. There is no protocol for a failed attempt to restrain the MWD except calling in the Roving Sally to facilitate a quick escape.

And finally, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: United States.

Sudanese journalist Sami al-Haj was covering the war in Afghanistan when he was picked up by U.S. armed forces. He’d been hesitant to head into a war zone, but like so many rookies in search of a scoop, he’d decided that the potential career boost outweighed the risks. But what he thought was the road to celebrity journalism landed him instead in a seven-by- nine-foot cage at Guantánamo Bay.

After that, the thirty-eight-year-old prisoner No. 345 could only share stories in letters or in meetings with his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve in London, who visited every six weeks. But al-Haj documented as much as he could about his detention and what he saw at Guantánamo. He said he was willing to be the last man out of the camp if it meant that he could tell the world the truth about what was happening inside its prison walls.

Writing also helped him cope. In a letter to his attorneys, he imagined “small, iron” cells like the one that imprisoned him at Guantánamo lining the foot of the Statue of Liberty: “Inside there are creatures wearing orange clothing. It hardly seems possible that they are human (but) they breathe, just as we breathe,
al-Haj.
Courtesy of the family
Sami al-Haj.
they have feelings just as we have feelings, sentiments and emotions,” he wrote.

Sami al-Haj.
Courtesy of the family
of Sami al-Haj.

In April 2000, al-Haj responded to an employment ad run by the Middle East broadcasting network Al-Jazeera. He had no formal training in journalism, but he was ambitious, fluent in
English, knew about computers, and had a natural command of language.

He started as a freelancer, then jumped at the chance to prove himself on the frontlines as a cameraman in Afghanistan. More seasoned journalists shied away from the assignment, but al-Haj saw it as his moment to shine.

From Pakistan, he headed west to Afghanistan with the rest of the Al-Jazeera news team to cover the conflict for more than two weeks, sometimes working fifteen hours a day, before returning to Pakistan. He made several trips like this, sometimes crossing the border at Chaman and other times at Spinboldak. In December 2001, the station sent him to cover the inauguration of interim Afghan president Hamid Karzai. But the crew was stopped en route by Pakistani police, and al- Haj was detained. His passports, travel visas, and press cards were taken. It was the last time his crew saw him.

Three weeks later, on January 7, 2002, the Pakistanis handed him over into U.S. custody. Al-Haj described the event in his writings:

His American captors transported him by plane to Bagram Air Force Base. When the plane landed, he was thrown onto the tarmac by a U.S. soldier. The impact tore the tendons in his knee, which never healed.

The next sixteen days at Bagram, he said in terms we heard from so many of the prisoners, were “the worst days of my life.” He said he was severely tortured, attacked by dogs, held in an icy cage, and fed frozen food. He was later moved to a dark prison infested with rats in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, where his physical and psychological torture and abuse continued: he was subjected to multiple full-cavity searches, forced into stress positions, made to kneel for long periods on concrete floors, and mercilessly beaten on a regular basis.

Amnesty International further reported that the hairs on al- Haj’s beard were plucked, that he was not allowed to wash for months on end, and that he was infested with lice and threatened with rape.

June 13, 2002. Along with dozens of other prisoners, al-Haj was hooded, shackled, gagged, and hauled onto a dark, windowless military plane.

Guantánamo Bay. On arrival, he was intimidated by ferocious dogs, the beginning of the abuse he would suffer. He
was denied medical treatment for throat cancer and rheumatism. He said he witnessed numerous desecrations of the Qu’ran. Some guards didn’t even bother to refer to him as No. 345; they just called him “nigger” because he’s black. Al-Haj thought that some of the black prisoners were denied recreation, and depending on which soldier was on duty, their meals were often delayed for long periods.

In 2007, he was moved to Camp 6, the newly built maximum-security section of the prison where prisoners were confined to eight-by-ten-foot cells for at least twenty-two hours a day and allowed out only infrequently to shower or to exercise in enclosed areas surrounded by high concrete walls. There were no windows to the outside, and the prisoners complained that the cold was unbearable.

At 9:30 AM on January 7, 2007, the fifth anniversary of his imprisonment, al-Haj began a hunger strike. He wrote to the base admiral and to his interrogators, saying that his protest would continue until the following five conditions were met: (1) the U.S. military agreed to respect the prisoners’ religious rights, (2) the Geneva Conventions were properly applied, (3) those held in total isolation were allowed to rejoin humanity, (4) there was a full and fair investigation into the fate of the three prisoners who died in custody on June 10, 2006, and (5) he was either set free or allowed a fair trial in a civilian court in the United States.

He received no response to his requests.

At least thirteen prisoners went on strike along with him to protest the harsh Gitmo conditions. Al-Haj’s lawyers worried as he lost more and more weight and his orange uniform
hung more and more loosely on his shrinking frame. He experienced dizzy spells and started to have trouble standing up. His pulse dropped to seventy-six, and his hearing started to deteriorate, as did his eyesight. As punishment for going on strike, the military took away his glasses. If he tried to read the Qur’an, his eyes watered badly, and he got splitting headaches. He started finding it hard to concentrate and to sleep.

The guards also confiscated his knee band, and his knee caused him constant pain. He was force-fed twice daily in sixteen-point restraints. He always prayed that the process would go smoothly, but the tube was often jammed into his lungs instead of his stomach. Water that was poured down the tube to see whether it was properly positioned would often spurt up his airways and into his nose.

The forcefeeding was designed to make things as difficult as possible for the strikers in an effort to induce them to stop. In the early years, many did. But the prisoners toughened over the years, and the forcefeeding ceased to be an effective deterrent. The thirteen hunger strikers in 2007 were tough, so the military changed the forcefeeding times to 8 AM and 11 PM to disrupt the prisoners’ sleeping schedule and exhaust them. Eventually, four of the strikers would give up. But even at the end of the year, nine, in addition to al-Haj, were persisting in their protest.

Even during the hunger strike, al-Haj continued to write. He also kept a diary of his strike, which his lawyers recorded for him. Declassified by the Defense Department, it reflected the experiences of numerous other detainees who had protested in similar fashion. Here’s an excerpt: