My Guantanamo Diary (6 page)

But Tom Wilner, a partner with the Washington, D.C., office of Shearman and Sterling, was having none of it. “Yeah, they’re nice,” he retorted. “But this whole place is evil.”

His words hit me hard. Tom was one of the most passionate lawyers working at Guantánamo. He would get angry talking about the conditions under which the detainees lived, reminding us that most of them were held in isolation in metal cells, separated by thick steel mesh or concrete walls. Each cell was fifty-six square feet. Many of the lawyers compared it to something slightly larger than a king-size mattress. That tiny space held a concrete bed and a steel toilet.

And in the cells, every man ate every meal alone. Sometimes prisoners were allowed out just two or three times a week for about fifteen minutes to exercise, often in the middle of the night. Many never saw sunlight for months at a time.

“It’s naïve for us to think that evil is committed only by people who appear like monsters or ogres,” Tom said. “Guantánamo is evil. It’s a place where men have been imprisoned for more than five years without charge and without any sort of fair hearing on the basis of only the flimsiest of allegations.”

Tom and his firm took on the representation of twelve Kuwaiti detainees in March 2002, after a group of families contacted him. At first, like most of the lawyers, Tom took the cases because of the legal principle at stake. But when he
was finally allowed to meet his detainee-clients in January 2005, his attitude changed.

“I was no longer fighting just for disembodied legal principles but for real people who had suffered,” he said. “The case changed for me, from one purely of principle to one of human suffering, with individuals counting on me to protect them and give them a fair chance to show their innocence.”

He said he didn’t know whether any of his twelve clients were guilty or innocent, only that they were entitled to a fair hearing. “When I got to meet them, and after talking with them, I realized that most of these guys were totally innocent and had been swept up simply by mistake.”

I thought of Ali Shah Mousovi when he said that. Even the presiding officer at Mousovi’s hearing had declared that he found it “difficult to believe” that the United States had imprisoned Mousovi and flown him “all the way to Cuba.” He had spent so much time away from his family and country. Was it because he had been swept up simply by mistake?

One of the things Tom hated most was having to tell his clients that a close relative had died while they were detained. But he’d had to do it countless times: Fouad al-Rabiah’s father and brother had died; Omar Amin’s father had died; Nasser al- Mutairi’s father had died; Saad al-Azmi’s father had died; Khaled al-Mutairi’s father had died; Fawzi al-Odah’s grandmother had died.

“I can’t describe how difficult it is to convey that news,” he said. “The way they’ve been treated and what they’ve had to suffer makes me ashamed. It brings shame on our country.”

The attorneys took their frustration out on the iguanas on the base—those “bastard” lizards. The U.S. government claimed that because Guantánamo detainees were foreigners outside
of U.S. jurisdiction, they could be denied rights under U.S. law. But the lawyers quickly discovered that even the iguanas in Guantánamo were protected by a U.S. law, the Endangered Species Act. An iguana that wandered off the base into Cuba was soon eaten, but the iguanas at Guantánamo were protected. Anyone, including any federal official, who hurts an iguana can be prosecuted. The prisoners at Guantánamo are entitled to fewer protections than an iguana. This annoyed the lawyers so much that Tom brought it to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court, and at oral argument, Justice David Souter pointed it out in response to the government’s arguments.

That first night I was in Guantánamo, Tom was impassioned, going on about the face of evil, how normal it looks, how so many of the men who perpetrated some of the worst crimes in history—Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—had been men who appeared perfectly ordinary, who were kind to children and dogs.

Haji Nusrat Khan, detainee No. 1009, is Guantánamo Bay’s oldest prisoner. Except he’s not sure exactly how old he is: no one recorded births back when he was born. “I do not know the year,” he told me. “But I am eighty. Or perhaps I am seventy-eight.” Who knows?

When I first met him at Camp Echo, I found it hard to imagine how this old man could be a threat to U.S. national security or a global terrorist. A stroke fifteen years earlier had left him paralyzed and bedridden; he was still unable to stand up without assistance. When he needed to go to the bathroom, he hobbled slowly, leaning heavily on a walker.

His hugely swollen legs and feet were tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor. He told me that his shoes were too tight, and he needed new ones. He couldn’t see well either, but the eyeglasses he’d been given didn’t really help much; they were the wrong prescription. He’d asked for medical attention for
the inflammation in his legs, as well as a list of other ailments, but he had yet to be taken to a hospital.

In our first meeting with him, as I tried to introduce myself and Peter, he interrupted me often, like a grumpy old uncle. He craned his neck and peered at me. “
Bachai
,” he said. “My child. I can’t hear you over this fan.” I jumped up and turned it off.

As I sat back down, I took the lids off the cups we’d brought and handed him one. “It’s chai,” I said.

“Does it have milk in it?” he asked. “My stomach isn’t good with milk.”

“I think it’s soy milk,” I replied.

“What is that?” he asked.

“It means it’s not milk from a cow; it’s made from beans, a plant,” I said. “So, it should be okay on your stomach.” I found myself talking louder and louder.

“I cannot hear you,
bachai
,” he said, suddenly deaf again. “Turn off this machine, this air-conditioning. It’s making too much noise.” He waved his hand in the air.

I turned the air off, and we went back to the chai issue. He seemed confused by the concept of soy milk.

“Well, I’ll drink it since you brought it,” he said, looking into the cup and taking a sip. The chai seemed to pass muster.

I introduced Peter and explained that he was a lawyer who had come to help him. Nusrat interrupted to ask whether Peter worked for the U.S. government. Before Peter could respond, he added that he couldn’t afford a lawyer.

“I am a poor man,” Nusrat said. “We Afghans, we are not like the Arabs here who have money.”

Peter Ryan was the first lawyer to visit an Afghan detainee. The attorneys for Arab detainees at Guantánamo had been
visiting their clients for an entire year before any of the Afghans got representation. This was partly because the families of wealthy Arab prisoners immediately sought out American lawyers when their sons and brothers went missing. A lot of the Afghan detainees had also learned that the families of Kuwaiti prisoners had been paying Shearman and Sterling’s hefty legal bills instead of accepting pro bono representation. While the Kuwaiti families insisted on paying so that they could feel more in control of legal decisions, it created confusion among the Afghans. Many of the prisoners who came from less affluent families speculated that lawyers only helped the rich.

“I don’t want my family to go into debt paying for a fancy American lawyer because of me,” Nusrat grumbled. “I thought only Arabs got lawyers because they have money, and the
ghareeb
—poor prisoners—don’t get lawyers.”

Peter explained that Dechert was a private corporate law firm with no ties to the U.S. government and that he was working pro bono. There was no need to worry about legal fees.

Nusrat had a long, straggly white beard and grayish brown eyes that drifted from Peter’s face to mine as we spoke about the legal issues and tried to explain what a habeas corpus petition was. He interrupted Peter mid-sentence to turn to me.

“
Bachai
,” he said. “Why are you sitting on the edge of the chair like this? Sit back in your chair.”

I realized that I looked tense, so I leaned back in my plastic chair. He smiled and gestured for us to drink our tea. Then, he told me that I needed to spend time in the mountains of Afghanistan to improve my dialect. I should go live with his
family for a few months, he insisted. Then, he asked me whether my parents were still living and how many brothers and sisters I had.

Every now and then during the meeting, Nusrat would catch me adjusting my shawl. I wanted to make sure that I was covered properly since I assumed that he was used to seeing only very conservatively dressed women in Afghanistan. He squinted at me.

“You are like a daughter to me, and I want you to look at me like a father or grandfather,” he said, nodding his head. “Don’t worry so much, and relax,
bachai
.”

Dera manana,
Baba—Thank you very much, Father. That’s “kind of you,” I replied. While it’s typical of Afghans to familiarize with each other quickly, I also sensed that he was particularly trying to reach out to me.

Haji Nusrat Khan was from a small mountainous village in Sarobi, forty-five miles east of Kabul. He could neither read nor write. He had ten children and didn’t know whether his wife was still alive; he hadn’t received any letters from home. During our meeting, his emotions swung erratically between frustration and fear, amusement and despair. At times, he seemed resigned to his predicament, and at others he unleashed sudden tirades against the injustice of his captivity. Sometimes he laughed, and at other times he was obviously irritated that no one would listen to his story.

“
Bachai
, look at my white beard,” he said to me. “They have brought me here with a white beard. I have done nothing at all. I have not said a single word against the Americans.”

Nusrat had insisted on his innocence from the beginning. But I could sense that his hopes for release had faded over the
years. He didn’t want to die in prison, he sighed, for a crime he had not committed.

Nusrat’s troubles began in early 2003, a few days after he went to the U.S. authorities to complain about the arrest of his son Izatullah (who was also detained at Guantánamo Bay). The Americans had accused his son of having ties to al-Qaeda and for harboring a cache of weapons. When Nusrat complained that his son had done nothing wrong and should be released, U.S. soldiers paid a visit to his home. They told him that he should come with them; they needed to speak to him, and they would bring him back home that evening.

Instead, they tied him up, blindfolded him, and drove him to Bagram Air Force Base. There, he said, he suffered countless humiliations. He found it hard to talk about the abuse. The Americans took away his crutches and pushed him to the toilet in a cart, he said. Once, he was forced to take off all his clothes in front of a female soldier as an interpreter explained that he was to bathe while she stood guard. He hesitated before telling us about his beatings at the hands of the Americans. During one beating, he fell to the floor and injured his arm. He was frequently ordered to hold out his arms for great lengths of time. When he couldn’t hold them up any longer, his captors found other ways to bring him discomfort. U.S. soldiers tied him tightly to a wooden plank, which they used as a means of transporting him. One time, he said, two soldiers tied him to the board and left him lying on the ground for some time. One of the soldiers finally glanced down at
him from a chair and asked how he was doing. When the interpreter translated, Nusrat began to laugh.

“You must be an idiot to ask me this,” he said. “I am a paralyzed old man, and you have tied me like a dog. I’m lying on the floor, and you are sitting in a chair. Look at me. How do you think I am doing? Why are you even asking me this?”

It was hard to keep track of time at Bagram. He was regularly blindfolded and couldn’t tell whether it was day or night.

He thought he had spent about forty days at the airbase before he was tied up again, forced to wear special black goggles to prevent him from seeing, and flown to Guantánamo Bay.

When Peter asked for additional details about his torture, Nusrat shook his head. It was a humiliating episode, he said. He had already said enough.

After I met with other detainees, I realized that many are reluctant to talk about torture. Most of them believe that the military eavesdrops on attorney-client meetings, so they’re afraid to speak about their captors. But I know that many, like Haji Nusrat, are reluctant to give details because it’s uncomfortable to remember being stripped naked, beaten, and tortured. It forces the men to relive the shame and humiliation.

One detainee, who was released in November 2006, said that U.S. soldiers at Guantánamo “put their fingers inside” him. His eyes welled when he talked about it. It wasn’t for a medical reason or to see whether he was hiding something, he said, because they did it at least fifteen or sixteen times, maybe more. “There was no purpose for this,” he said, “other than to degrade Muslim men.”

This detainee said he endured multiple full cavity searches and was forced to strip while female soldiers watched him.
Some of the lawyers told me they believed it was something that happened to all the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay but most were too ashamed to admit it.

But Haji Nusrat said that being at Guantánamo beat Bagram by a long shot.

“Bagram was very, very bad,” he said. “The soldiers here, maybe they have a shred of humanity.”

Nusrat was happy to be reunited at Gitmo with his son Izatullah. For a time, father and son were together at Camp 4. But Nusrat was upset when soldiers came unexpectedly one day and took Izatullah off to Camp 5, the maximum-security prison that he says is notorious for prisoner abuse. We do not know why he was taken there. “Men go insane there—crazy,” he told us.

Nusrat waited daily for the soldiers to bring Izatullah back, but it was ten long months before he saw his son. And when Izatullah returned, he wasn’t well. He’d been kept alone in the dark for almost a year. The old man gestured toward his head and said that his son was suffering from mental problems because of the prolonged isolation at Camp 5.

“They gave him medicine for his brain, so he can find peace,” he said.

The details of the U.S. case against the old man remained murky even at his 2004 combatant status review tribunal hearing. Like Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, Haji Nusrat was pleased that he was finally going to have a trial. But unlike Mousovi, Nus-rat, an illiterate old man from the mountains of Afghanistan, didn’t try to articulate points or show respect for the officers at his hearing. As soon as he was shackled into his plastic chair
and the instructions for the proceeding were read to him, he interrupted to say that he wanted to make a few comments. Then, he plunged ahead before the tribunal could object or agree.

“We asked our Great God and finally there is a tribunal!” he boomed, looking through milky eyes at the military officers seated before him. “You are smart people. You know that I have been paralyzed for the past seventeen or eighteen years. I could not even stand up, but you brought me here as an enemy combatant. You should think to yourselves, how could I be an enemy combatant if I cannot stand up?”

“We have some administrative issues to go through here,” the tribunal president said, cutting him off. “There will be a place in the hearing for more comments.”

“Okay. I will not interfere again,” Nusrat grumbled, “but all I wanted to say is that we were not against the government of Afghanistan, and we were not against the government of America.”

The panel ignored his statements and asked whether he wanted to swear an oath to tell the truth.