My Guantanamo Diary (24 page)

The years of abuse in Guantánamo broke him, al-Dossary wrote.

He had been interrogated at gunpoint several hundred times. Soldiers had threatened to rape him and to harm his family in the Middle East. He was told that his young daughter Nura would be kidnapped and that if he was sent home, he would be murdered by U.S. spies in the Middle East. He was also threatened with being sent to a jail in the United States.

“There are American prisoners waiting for people like [you],” interrogators told him.

According to his accounts, he was terrorized by growling police dogs, awakened in the night for questioning, and forced to spend long, cold nights on cement floors. One day, to punish him, he said, the guards poured a “very strong detergent” all around him in the interrogation room.

“I almost suffocated,” he wrote.

He described loud music, bright light being shone directly in his face, and being forced to stay in a “very, very cold room” for endless hours. Sometimes, he was denied food and water and not allowed to use the bathroom or to wash before prayers. He said that all the interrogation rooms had a metal ring embedded in the floor. The guards tied his hands and feet to this ring, forcing him to lie in a fetal position.

The worst indignity he suffered occurred very late one Saturday night. He was marched into an interrogation room, shackled to the ring in the floor, and left alone for an extended period. All at once, the door was thrown open, and four soldiers with
masks over their faces came in with a female interrogator. One of the soldiers operated a video camera.

“Now we want you to confess that you are with al-Qaeda or that you have some connection to the attacks in America,” the female interrogator told him. “Otherwise, tonight we will show you something that you will never forget for the rest of your life.”

They were right about his never forgetting. Realizing that something bad was going to happen to him, he pleaded that he’d had nothing to do with September 11.

“I started screaming and shouting so that perhaps one of the brothers would hear my screams . . . [but] the rooms were soundproof,” he wrote.

The female interrogator laughed and told him that no one would hear his calls. “It’s Saturday, it’s the weekend, it’s late at night, and there are no officials around,” she said.

After a final threat, she issued a command to the soldiers.

They “came and took me off the chair,” al-Dossary wrote. “My feet were tied to that ring as I mentioned before. They then laid me out on my back and put the extra shackles on top of my hand shackles and pulled me by them forcefully and brutally in the opposite direction, towards my feet, while I was lying on my back.”

They cut his clothes off and threw the shreds into a corner. He couldn’t have expected what happened next. The woman began to take her clothes off as the soldiers with the camera continued to film.

“When she was in her underwear, she stood on top of me,” al-Dossary wrote. “She took off her underpants, she was wearing a sanitary towel, and drops of her menstrual blood fell on me and then she assaulted me. I tried to fight her off
but the soldiers held me down with the chains forcefully and ruthlessly so that they almost cut my hands. I spat at her on her face; she put her hand on her dirty menstrual blood that had fallen on my body and wiped it on my chest. She stained her hands with her menstrual blood and wiped my face and beard with it. Then, she got up, cleaned herself, put her clothes back on, and left the room.”

The soldiers proceeded to shackle his hands and feet together to the floor. They picked up his clothes and left him— tied up, naked, and smeared with menstrual blood.

Several hours later, some soldiers came back into the room; he didn’t know whether they were the same ones as before, but they acted as if nothing had happened. They unshackled him and led him to a bathroom, where he was permitted to wash and was handed new clothes. He was taken back to the camp just before dawn prayer.

“I was in a hysterical state,” al-Dossary wrote. “I almost went mad because of what had happened, how it had happened, and why it had happened.”

“If these facts did not need to be documented for the whole world to know what happens in American detention camps, then I would not write this. I was shaken to the core; my body and my mind were shaken.”

Parts of al-Dossary’s testimony about this incident were corroborated by one of the Guantánamo Arabic linguists, Sgt. Erik Saar, who included an account of it in his book
Behind
the Wire
. While it’s unclear whether Saar was referring to al-Dossary, his account supports the notion that sexual humiliation of this kind occurred.

Al-Dossary said he wasn’t the only one who experienced this abuse, but the others wouldn’t allow him to mention
their names. “I used to be exactly like them before,” he wrote.

Al-Dossary said that, strangely, the interrogators who took part in sexual assaults were often never seen again afterward, “almost as if they were specialists in these types of crimes and assaults.”

Al-Dossary spent prolonged periods in solitary confinement, suffering the kind of social and sensory deprivation that, according to the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, often leads to mental breakdown. Other effects of extreme isolation include chronic, severe headaches, developmental regression, and an inability to control urges, as well as to concentrate, to control anger, rage, primitive drives, and instincts, to plan beyond the moment, or to anticipate the logical consequences of one’s behavior.

In January 2004, al-Dossary was moved to isolation in “India Block,” where he deteriorated quickly. He was often left naked in the metal cell under the cold air-conditioning vents directly above his metal bed, without even a pillow, a blanket, or a plastic mat to sleep on. To avoid the chill from the airconditioning, he cowered near the toilet. For weeks, he had neither toilet paper nor water to wash with, so he cleaned himself with the toilet water.

Letters from his family were confiscated and destroyed.

“I became like a house of cards that always falls down; whatever side you try to build it from, it will still fall down. I almost collapsed completely,” he wrote. “Oh, those days and nights. I felt that time had ended at that time and did not want to move forward. I felt that the whole world with its
mountains and all its gravity was bearing down on my chest. I had no helper and protector except Allah. I was at the end of my tether, all the doors had closed on me, and I had lost hope in everything except Allah. . . . In this state of darkness, injustice, and oppression, Allah was with me. He blessed me, in the severity of all this psychological stress in this very depressing cell, by helping me to memorize the whole Koran, in spite of the harshness of my circumstances, what I was suffering, and the intensity of this disgraceful psychological stress. This was Allah’s mercy on me.”

On May 25, 2004, al-Dossary was moved to the newly opened Camp 5, which consisted entirely of solitary cells where the air-conditioning was kept at frigid temperatures and enormous fans mimicked the sound of an airplane engine to prevent prisoners from screaming to each other through the concrete walls.

He met with attorney Joshua Colangelo-Bryan in March 2005 and told him everything he had been through. When the lawyer left, al-Dossary was threatened by an angry soldier. “It’s best that you forget everything that’s happened to you and don’t mention it again to anyone if you want to stay safe,” the soldier told him, al-Dossary later wrote. After that, he was given something peculiar tasting to eat and began to experience dizziness, headaches, vomiting, and fainting. His left arm went numb.

But he was careful to emphasize that not all U.S. soldiers treated him badly. Once, he wrote, a black soldier brought him cookies and hot chocolate. Another young soldier’s eyes welled with tears after he heard what al-Dossary had endured.

“There are some soldiers who have humanity, irrespective of their race, gender, or faith,” al-Dossary wrote.

Though he maintains that he has no terrorism connections and doesn’t hate the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pentagon say there was no mistake in his case and that al-Dossary went to an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1989, something that Colangelo-Bryan disputes. “Jumah did go to Afghanistan for a long weekend on a Saudi government–sponsored trip after the Soviets had left,” he told me. “The Saudis were sending lots of people there to see Afghanistan after the Soviets had been driven out with support of the Saudis and the United States.”

The Pentagon also said that he was “present at Tora Bora,” but it didn’t say when he was there, why this was a crime, what he supposedly did there, or who he was with. Al-Dossary maintained that he had never been to Tora Bora in his life.

Stories circulating on the Internet suggested that al-Dossary had come to the United States on a tourist visa in 2001 and delivered a heated political speech at a mosque in Lackawanna, New York, just outside Buffalo. But Colangelo-Bryan said that was not a basis for holding his client.

“Jumah did give a sermon at a mosque there, where he talked about injustice in the world,” the lawyer said. “He did not urge any violence against the U.S. or any other country or person, and there have been no allegations that he did.” The United States did not allege that al-Dossary had engaged in any recruiting at Lackawanna or elsewhere.

The Defense Department detained him year after year, its official position being that he was right where he belonged: in a seven-by-eight-foot cage.

That’s what the military said about everyone I met in Guantánamo.

There were some very bad men at Guantánamo Bay, maybe even men who deserved to be called “evil.” Some of the detainees were truly the worst of the worst, like Khaled Sheik Mohammad, a.k.a. KSM, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, or Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh, a key aide to KSM and the Hamburg roommate of September 11 lead hijacker Mohammad Atta, or Abu Zubaidah, the man who allegedly organized the aborted “millennium bomb plots” in Jordan and Los Angeles in late 1999. I’m grateful that these men and others are no longer free to terrorize the world.

But I continue to believe that terrorists should receive public trials before they’re locked up. Hiding them away from the world at Gitmo, or anywhere else, without charging them was shady and wrong. It made America look like a lawless thug state and tarnished our nation’s image as a beacon of justice in the world.

I wanted to understand why the Pentagon was insisting that men like Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi and Haji Nusrat were among the “worst of the worst.” I’d heard that the Defense Department had strategically transferred fourteen “high-value” detainees from secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons around the world to Gitmo in September 2006, after a flood of negative press and international calls to close down the military detention center, so that the claim could honestly be made that there were dangerous terrorists at Gitmo.

At its peak, Gitmo had 754 detainees. Four were said to have committed suicide. A fifth allegedly died of colon cancer. Would the military concede that those released without charge after years of detention were mistakes? And regarding the alleged suicides, why weren’t there open, transparent investigations into those deaths? Why were the men’s organs removed by the military before the bodies were transferred home?

I e-mailed a Department of Justice attorney responsible for coordinating habeas visits to Gitmo and asked him to put me in touch with a Pentagon representative. He referred me to Commander Jeffery Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Some of the habeas lawyers thought I was naïve to assume that Gordon would be cooperative or straightforward. But I was open to hearing something that would diverge from what I had witnessed at Gitmo.

I e-mailed Gordon and told him that I was interested in getting the military’s perspective on Guantánamo Bay. He re-
sponded immediately with a lengthy e-mail, copied to several military officials.

Instead of agreeing to help me understand the military’s perspective and to answer my questions, he wrote a bitter missive chastising me for the article in the
Washington Post
, which he denounced as “biased and fundamentally flawed.” He told me that he had contacted
Post
editors after my article ran and requested the same amount of space to write a rebuttal, a request that had been turned aside.

He also reminded me that I had photographed a Gitmo soldier against that soldier’s will. I didn’t tell him that this soldier had readily posed for photos, while I took dozens of pictures of him drinking habeas beer, smoking habeas cigarettes, and eating habeas steaks with us. He went on to call my article “deeply offensive to the military men and women who have volunteered to proudly serve in the armed forces in defense of this nation.” I didn’t understand the relevance of a year-old article, or why Gordon was bringing it up.

He wrote that while he was glad I had come to him to “set the record straight,” I should have come to him the year before as well.

I e-mailed him back:

In reply, Gordon asked me to answer several obscure questions before he would agree to provide any information. He asked whether I had taken the bar exam and in which state, whether I was working for any nongovernmental organizations, and whether I was providing legal representation or any other services to detainees or former detainees.

I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I really wanted to talk to him, so I responded: No, I hadn’t yet taken the bar. No, I didn’t work for any nongovernmental organizations, and I wasn’t sole counsel on any case. I did have my own case but was being supervised by Dechert.

That’s when the problems started.

Gordon insinuated that I was lying. He couldn’t fathom how I could have my own case even though I wasn’t a member of any bar. Apparently, he had done a series of Internet searches on my name and found an article on my law school Web site discussing my habeas case. He accused me of lying to an academic institution and to a government official. I was livid.

Peter Ryan of Dechert had contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and requested an Afghan client specifically for me, in addition to the fifteen clients whom Dechert was already representing. Peter agreed to supervise me because I wasn’t yet barred, but I would be responsible for preparing for meetings with the prisoner, gathering evidence on the prisoner’s behalf, and so on. I wouldn’t be acting as interpreter; it would be my case. Had Gordon done his homework, he’d have known that law students and nonbarred attorneys are permitted to practice under the supervision of a practicing attorney. Instead, he called me unethical.

Gordon surely knew the answers to the questions he had asked me and was attempting to entrap me. I e-mailed back and said that further communication wasn’t a good idea.

His response: “Well, you didn’t quite start off on the right foot with the
Wash Post Outlook
cover story last year, which was one of the strangest things I’ve seen in the past couple years.”

He and I have a different idea of what is “strange.” Strange is American soldiers torturing prisoners. Strange is giving “rewards” of $5,000 to $25,000 per prisoner, and stranger still is the U.S. military’s making arrests without first investigating allegations put forth by locals who stand to gain financially
from them. Strange is holding men for more than five years without ever charging them. Strange is the military’s removal of organs from prisoners who committed suicide before sending their bodies home for burial. Strange is calling a paralyzed eighty-year-old man an “enemy combatant.” Strange is that while U.S. soldiers throw the Qu’ran in buckets of feces, the administration had figuratively done the same to the U.S. Constitution.

Gordon accused me again of having lied. He said that I was being unethical and mentioned that he knew alumni of my law school, as if he were going to expose me or something. “I have several close friends and a relative who are also alumni of U of M [
sic
] Law School and am certain they would agree with maintaining integrity of the school’s Web site and all their public information products.”

His e-mails were always very lengthy and somewhat irrelevant and led me to believe that he had a lot of time on his hands. He told me how he’d once enrolled in a class at a law school.

“Although I am not an attorney, I did complete a cert program at a law school and thus am keenly aware of the ethical issues involved in representing oneself to the public, in particular to government officials and academic institutions,” he wrote.

I figured that he had enough time on his hands to try to make me look bad, and at first, I did feel intimidated. It’s not pleasant being threatened by a Pentagon commander.

Still, I took allegations of ethical impropriety seriously. I responded by e-mailing him, the dean of my law school, and Dechert attorneys directly to explain what he was saying and
why it was wrong. The dean of the School of Law replied in my support, as did the attorneys at Dechert.

The ordeal made me think back to my meeting with Abdul Salam Zaeef. It seemed unfortunate that a former Taliban representative had treated me, a female visitor from America, better than the Pentagon public relations office. Zaeef had at least entertained my questions about the Taliban’s mistreatment of women without becoming incensed and threatening me.

My communications with Gordon were futile, except that they gave me a good taste of what it felt like to be scared by the government and its power.