My Guantanamo Diary (22 page)

This lawyer also refused to bring his client food and said he wasn’t there to “entertain” him. I tried to explain that food was important in the meetings, not so much to build trust but
because hospitality is a central pillar of Eastern culture. The idea was not so much to “feed” the detainee or “entertain” him; it was a matter of hospitality. Attorneys who’ve visited Afghanistan or the Middle East have always been struck by the extreme hospitality they encountered as they were offered copious amounts of food and tea. Even the poorest Afghans will give a guest the best of what they have. To receive someone empty-handed is an offense that can brand you as
bayghairath,
or honorless.

Over dozens of meetings, I learned that it was vital that lawyers never coerce their clients into doing anything against their will. The message detainees got from their interrogators was often that they’d better answer questions and do it quickly. But it never worked in anyone’s favor to pressure a prisoner. That included trying to get names of family members or evidentiary documents in addition to signatures on representation forms. Pressure and coercion only gave the prisoner the impression that he was being subjected to yet another form of interrogation.

The best relationships were formed when a prisoner genuinely looked forward to his meetings with his lawyers as a break from the monotony of jail, punishment, solitary confinement, abuse, and interrogation.

The ultimate attorney-client bond I saw was between Chaman Gul, a charismatic six-foot-three Afghan prisoner, and his American lawyer and investigator. I watched with amazement once as he stood up to hug them before they left. Chaman’s legal team worked very hard for him, traveling all the way to Afghanistan and London to collect as much evidence as they could on his behalf. That hug was genuine. The
lawyers and the detainee held on with their arms wrapped around each other. The attorneys exchanged letters and poetry with Chaman and genuinely grew to care about him.

I also found that the most comfortable prisoners were those given the greatest levels of control. Detainees had no control over any facet of their lives, including when they woke up, when they saw the sun, when they showered, when they stretched their legs, when they ate, or when they slept. Saying no, even to attorneys, was empowering. Before I went to Gitmo, I studied therapeutic jurisprudence, which emphasizes the importance of collaborating with the legal and psychological needs of prisoners. I thought that the attorneys who applied this model developed better relationships with their clients.

One serious faux pas that occurred on at least two occasions was lawyers’ employing interpreters who had worked for the U.S. military in Bagram or at Guantánamo Bay. In one instance, the Arab detainee immediately recognized the interpreter who had been present during his military interrogations. The detainee and interpreter started having a heated dispute in rapid Arabic, which the lawyer obviously didn’t follow. Eventually, the irate detainee kicked everyone out, and the meeting was over before it began.

Interrogations were a source of pain, anxiety, and shame for prisoners. It obviously wasn’t a good idea for habeas counsel to bring in individuals who’d been present when their client was interrogated or tortured. This was a major setback to ever gaining the prisoner’s trust. And it hurt not just the one law firm but had the potential to hurt the entire habeas team.

Jumah al-Dossary needed to take a quick bathroom break during a meeting with his lawyer. The guards came and unshackled the Bahraini detainee from the floor and led him to a nearby cell with a toilet. His lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, also stepped out of the Camp Echo meeting room and, watching the pouring rain, waited outside for al-Dossary to call out to the guards that he was finished.

Several minutes later, there was still no sound from the prisoner. Colangelo-Bryan began to feel anxious, wondering what was taking so long.

He walked over to the cell, pulled the door open, and poked his head in. Before he could call out his client’s name, he saw a puddle of blood on the floor. He threw the door open and rushed in to find al-Dossary hanging from the steel mesh wall of the cage, his face engorged, a noose around his neck. His tongue lolled from his mouth, and his eyes had
rolled back into his head. Before hanging himself, al-Dossary had slashed his arm.

Colangelo-Bryan rushed over to the cage.

“Jumah!” he shouted but got no response.

“Jumah!” he shouted again. Panicking, he yelled for help. Guards rushed in and unlocked the cage. They cut the noose, laid al-Dossary on the floor, and ordered the attorney out of the room.

Later that night, Colangelo-Bryan was relieved to learn that his client was in stable condition. He had been revived and given treatment for his injuries, including fourteen stitches in his arm.

It was the thirty-two-year-old’s eighth suicide attempt since he’d been brought to Gitmo in February 2002. But al-Dossary told his lawyer that it wouldn’t be his last: as soon as he got the chance, he’d try to end his “worthless life” again. Colangelo- Bryan immediately filed a motion, claiming physical and religious abuse, as well as sexual humiliation and vicious interrogations. He asked that the military be ordered to improve al-Dossary’s conditions: that he be given books other than the Qu’ran and more recreation time, that he be allowed to see a home video of his family, and that the lights be turned off at night so he could sleep. Otherwise, he faced “irreparable injury,” his lawyer told the Washington, D.C., federal district court.

The court never ruled on this motion.

After witnessing his client’s grisly suicide attempt, Colangelo- Bryan returned to work in the New York offices of Dorsey
and Whitney. Once it was cleared by Department of Defense, he received a chilling reminder of what he’d seen in Guantánamo Bay: the sealed suicide note al-Dossary had given him before his bathroom break. It read,

The Department of Defense later confirmed that al-Dossary made another attempt to kill himself. “The purpose of Guan-tánamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed,” he told his attorney.

All al-Dossary’s statements and most of the facts in this chapter are based on his unclassified writings and his lawyer’s unclassified notes. Despite the humiliation he underwent, al- Dossary decided to speak out about his torture in order to
shed light on what was happening in the prison. His lawyer had written to him about the importance of disclosing his name to the media and of convincing other prisoners to do the same.

“I heard that some American officials deny that human rights violations are occurring in Cuba and deny that there are sexual assaults on detainees and that some journalists are also skewing the facts,” he wrote.

Al-Dossary’s detailed account of his captivity is one of the strongest claims of prisoner abuse at the hands of the U.S. military.

“How will I write about these horrors, and must I swallow the bitter lump that forms in my throat when I remember them?” al-Dossary wrote. “The revolting torture and those vile attacks . . . whenever I look back on them, I wonder how my soft heart could bear them, how my body could bear the pain of the torture and how my mind could bear all that stress.”

Many prisoners shied away from speaking about the indignities they’d suffered, preferring not to relive the shame. Military officials, however, maintain that Gitmo detainees are masters of deceit, carefully following al-Qaeda training manual instructions on how to dupe Westerners.

“These detainees are trained to lie, they’re trained to say they were tortured, and the minute we release them or the minute they get a lawyer, very frequently they’ll go out and they will announce that they’ve been tortured,” then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with Fox News in June 2005.

Statements like that angered al-Dossary’s lawyer, who watched his client crumble under years of methodical torture.

“So, are the FBI agents and military personnel who have described inhumane treatment of detainees also taking a page out of the al-Qaeda playbook,” asked Colangelo-Bryan, “or are they just describing what they’ve seen?”

Some detainees clearly lied. One Afghan told us on a first meeting that he was illiterate. But when we saw him a few months later, he was reading and writing flawlessly. It was only after perhaps noticing the odd look on my face that he suddenly remembered his lack of education and began to stammer and sound words out like a kindergartner.

Nonetheless, the evidence of torture was extensive. Countless detainees, aid workers, and even U.S. soldiers repeatedly described the use of the same type of torture, sexual humiliation, and religious degradation. Al-Dossary insisted that his story was not contrived in “a flight of fancy or a moment of madness” but was based on “established facts and events,” witnessed by other prisoners, the Red Cross, interpreters, and U.S. soldiers, who he said had filmed it all. So, he sat in solitary confinement and wrote a memoir of what he presumed would be his final years.

In his written account, al-Dossary described how his journey to Guantánamo began with a long walk to the Pakistani border in December 2001 to flee the bombs dropping on Afghanistan. He told the Pakistani soldiers at the border that he needed to go to the Bahraini Embassy. They seemed helpful and even welcoming, but instead of the embassy, they took him to a filthy Pakistani jail packed with Arabs and other foreigners, who had suddenly become valuable war commodities. There were no bathrooms and no mattresses, only men
crammed shoulder to shoulder, reeking of unwashed bodies and fear.

To protect the prisoners from the winter cold, the Pakistanis doled out vermin-infested blankets. The only food the men received was a hunk of hard bread, which quickly led to malnutrition. The Pakistanis treated him badly, al-Dossary wrote, but the real suffering started when he was blindfolded and delivered to the Americans.

In a long letter to his lawyer, he described how the Pakistanis took him to an airport and handed him over to U.S. soldiers. When the Pakistanis left, a female interpreter came close and told him in Arabic that the soldiers were going to get him ready for the flight to the U.S. military base in Kandahar. He was to keep quiet and obey the commands he was given. Moments later, someone seized him roughly and threw him down on the pavement. The Americans searched his body carefully and violently, then dragged him onto a windowless military cargo plane and bound him with chains to the cabin floor. They ripped off his blindfold, and before they covered his head with a sack, he glimpsed about thirty other prisoners on board.

When all the men were tied down, the cabin door was sealed, and the soldiers began hurling insults and swearing at the prisoners. They cursed “our families and our honor,” he wrote to his attorney.

Through the sack, al-Dossary caught quick glimpses of bright light as some of the soldiers apparently took souvenir photographs.

When they tired of shouting obscenities, al-Dossary wrote, the soldiers wove through the rows of chained, hooded men,
kicking and punching as they went. One stopped in front of al-Dossary to deliver a few firm kicks to his stomach. The Bahraini howled in pain. He’d had a stomach operation in the past and hoped that his captors would show mercy, but his cries were answered with more blows. He broke out in a sweat and felt nauseated as his mouth filled with a bitter dark liquid, and he began to throw up blood.

“The tragic event on the plane was only the beginning of the horrors awaiting me,” he wrote.