|
FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE -- AN INNOCENT MAN IN GUANTANAMO |
|
Chapter 7: GUANTANAMO BAY, CAMP X-RAY "ALI MIRI?" "Yes, Ali Miri. Who is Ali Miri?" "A friend bf mine from Bremen ..." "What do you know about him?" "Not much. He's nice. He's married. With kids ..." "Where did you meet him?" "In the mosque ..." "Which mosque?" "At the main train station. I went there on Fridays after shipbuilding "The Abu Bakr Mosque?" "Yes, that's the one." "Where does he work?" "I think he's on welfare." The German-speaking American seemed impatient. He smoked a lot and played with his camera-pen. I was not allowed to sit down during the interrogation. I was chained by my hands and feet to the ring in the floor so that I could only kneel or stand half bent-over. If I knelt, I could straighten my back, but my knees hurt. If I bent over, the blood would start flowing into my legs again, but I had to look up at the American, and that made my neck hurt. But what could I do, tell him, "I want to go home now"? The interrogation lasted several hours. I was starving, thirsty, and sweating from every pore, as though I had run for miles. Every fiber of my body hurt. The American asked the same questions over and over. It had been a long time since he'd told any amusing stories. He spat out orders, yelled, and called me a terrorist. He'd asked about my friends and schoolmates, naming names and telephone numbers. One of them was my coach at the fitness studio. Suddenly he had hit upon Ali. I was surprised. "Ali Miri was your imam," said the American. "The deputy imam of the Abu Bakr Mosque." "The imam? No, he wasn't an imam. I know that he taught children. I only saw him praying like everyone else in the mosque. The man who led the prayers was someone else." "He was your secret imam. Your leader." "He wasn't a leader." "He encouraged you to become fighters." "No." "He made you into a Taliban, admit it!" "No, he was my friend." "He called you nine times before your departure. What did he tell you?" "Nine times? I don't know anything about that." "Don't lie!" "It may be that he called me. He wanted to convince me not to go to Pakistan...." Ali had tried to call me nine times? We had talked on the phone once or twice before I left, but I remembered calling him. Had he tried to reach me after I had already left? "You called Ali Miri from Pakistan!" "No, I didn't call anyone from Pakistan. No, wait a minute. I did call Selcuk's wife because I wanted to know whether he was still coming. But she hung up on me. Twice." "What kind of car does Ali Miri drive?" "What kind of car? A station wagon. A big station wagon." "Brand?" I don't know. It was a big station wagon." "Color?" "Light-colored. Maybe gray ..." "Does he preach against America? Did he try to stir you up?" "I've never heard him say anything about that. He never talked about these things." The American stood up and fished some photographs from his briefcase. He showed them to me. They were pictures of Ali Miri. They must have been taken somewhere on the street in Bremen. Where did he get these photos? And how did he know that Ali had tried to call me? "Is that Ali Miri?" "Yes, that's him. What did he do?" "That's none of your business." The American showed me pictures of Ali before he had grown his beard. It was hard to recognize him. But I told him, "Yes, that's Ali," so as not to disagree. Then he said that my plane ticket had been paid for by terrorists. "My plane ticket? I paid for it myself. I withdrew money from the bank and paid for it. You know that already." "No, it was paid for with a cash card. It belonged to the father of a Tunisian, Sofyen Ben Amor. You were friends with him, too." "I don't know him. Who?" "Sofyen Ben Amor!" "I know two Sufyans in Bremen. I don't know whether or not one might have been Tunisian. If you show me a photo, maybe I'll recognize him." "Sofyen Ben Amor had contacts to terrorists in Hamburg!" "I don't know anything about that ..." "Don't lie! He paid for your ticket! In a travel agency called Go Travel!" "Selcuk paid for my ticket!" I told the American why I hadn't gone with Selcuk into the travel agency. I couldn't understand how this other man could have possibly paid for my ticket. I went with Selcuk to the shopping center alone and had waited in a nearby tea salon for him. Selcuk didn't have anyone with him when he returned. He didn't give me back my money. Why should he have kept it? There was never any talk of a Tunisian. I didn't know every one of Selcuk's friends and acquaintances, but he hadn't told me he had met anyone in the shopping center, either. And even if he had, why should that guy have paid for my ticket? It didn't make sense. Was the American making everything up? But how then did he know so many details about my life? I didn't know what I was supposed to think. But I noticed he was trying to set me a trap. Only now-months after they had asked about my cell phone for the first time, my bank account, and Selcuk-did I realize that they had known everything about me from the very beginning. They weren't interested in the fact that I had never been to Afghanistan and was innocent. I didn't stand a chance. I knew that now. *** What does someone do who's cooped up in a cage all day? I sat. Sometimes cross-legged, sometimes with my legs stretched out. I waited for food. I prayed when the time came. I waited and I sat, legs bent, legs straight. When I thought the guards weren't looking, I got up for a second and stretched my legs. Or tried to speak with the other prisoners. Sometimes I'd do a couple push-ups. I used to be able to do a hundred. Now I had problems just supporting my weight with my arms. More than five were out of the question anyway. The guards would notice and send in the IRF team. I estimated that I had lost around forty or fifty pounds. Every few week we got new clothes, and though I used to need an XXL, small or medium now fit me. One of the other men was little more than skin and bones. He must have weighed less than ninety pounds. I spied him from a distance and remembered seeing him once in Kandahar. He was much bigger back then. Whenever I looked over, he was sitting. He never got up. Maybe he could no longer stand up. Sometimes, in a cage like that, you entertain stupid thoughts. I began to pick at the threads of my blanket. Before long I had a sixteen-foot-long thread in my hands. Every now and then, we would get Emaries again. I had saved the package in which the crackers came. I filled it up with dirt and pebbles. I tied it to the thread and threw it several feet away into the corridor between the caves. You could hardly see the thread. I waited until Lee came. "Lee, can you help me?" "What?" "My neighbor threw me some crackers, but they landed in the corridor." "That's against the rules! It's not allowed! Where are they?" "Over there. Can you see them?" Lee wanted to pick up the package and throw them away. I tugged the thread. "My God!" said Lee. He tried to pick up the package again, but I pulled the thread. "What's going on?" I pulled the package into my cage. Lee still hadn't noticed the thread. He was really afraid. He ran back to the other guards and kicked up a fuss. All the prisoners who had been watching started to laugh. When the other guards came, I showed them the thread. They laughed, too, and said I would have to be punished. The IRF team came, and they took my blanket and mattress away. Two days later they gave them back. Why did I do this? Lee treated us badly. He yelled at us, made fun of us, and pounded against our cage doors while we prayed, just like Johnson. He was simply stupid. But he wasn't as bad as Johnson, who beat Abdul on the hands when he was trying to hoist himself on to his bucket. Johnson was a red-faced, bald man whose eyes twinkled as though he was on drugs. He tried to play the tough guy. He particularly had it in for Isa since the Chechen was always grinning and making fun of the guards. The IRF visited him more often than any of the other prisoners now. And Isa fought back every time. Sometimes, he succeeded in throwing one of the IRF soldiers to the ground or hitting one of them in the visor. It's strange, but with time, you grow numb even to blows. Blows from the IRF team were the basic form of punishment in Camp X-Ray. At that point there were no solitary-confinement cells-they were still being built. They would also punish us by beating us and then chaining our hands and feet, connecting those chains with a third one. You couldn't move your arms, they were pressed to your body. Then they'd leave you sitting there like that and take away your blanket and the thin mattress. It could take days before they'd unshackle you. I couldn't see any rhyme or reason in their punishments, though I understood that the IRF team would beat me if I dared to playa joke on Lee. There was no way they could sit back and tolerate something like that. The IRF was called in on numerous occasions when the guards had seen me feeding breadcrumbs to iguanas or birds. I could understand that as well. And, of course, the IRF team came when they caught me doing push-ups. But most of the time I didn't know why I was being punished. Sometimes they just seemed to invent excuses. For instance, they claimed I had tried to hide my blanket, although I hadn't touched it the entire day. Why would I want to hide my blanket? And where? Under the mattress? Or I was punished for dirtying my shirt, even if it was clean. Sometimes, the thugs came without any excuse at all-in the middle of the night, in the afternoon, or at breakfast time. I gradually came to realize that punishment itself was the rhyme and reason for their behavior-there was no avoiding it. The point of punishment was to constantly humiliate us. It was the same when we took showers. Every time the soldier who operated the water supply thought up something new. Even if I lathered myself up as quickly as possible, the water would still be cut off before I had washed off the soap. Once I was brought out to take a shower and the soldier turned on the water while my guard was still unlocking the cage. As I was about to dash under the hose, he turned it off. "Your time's up," he said. I hadn't gotten a single drop of water. That really made me mad. I wanted to hit someone. But that was exactly what they were trying to achieve, and I suppressed my anger. Sometimes weeks would go by without them letting us take a shower. We didn't have the right to one. *** Then I got a new neighbor in Charlie-Charlie 4. It was a nice surprise. The escort team dragged him into the empty cage, which since my arrival had only been occupied by a dead cockroach that decomposed a little more every day. It was Salah from Oman, whom I'd met in my jail cell in Pakistan. Kemal, who had also shared that cell with us, was put in Charlie as well, but he was in Charlie-Alpha. I could only communicate with him via hand gestures. They both arrived on the same day. Salah stretched his finger through the chain link, and I shook it. I was happy to see Salah because he was like an older brother to me. He was a quiet guy with five children. I knew from our previous encounter that he had gone to university in the United States, but I didn't know what he had studied, and Salah didn't like talking about his family and his life before Guantanamo. In prison it's better not to open up too much about yourself. But I was able to learn English from him. At some point they hung a crest of arms on the fence. It was impossible to overlook. It featured a five-cornered building, with a black star inside it with an ocean and a horizon behind it. In the middle, you saw the outline of Guantanamo. On top of it all stood the words: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. I asked Salah what that meant. Salah translated things for me, also from Arabic, so that I could understand what the others said. Thanks to him I was able to get new information for the first time in a long time. Someone had talked to the Red Cross. According to them, the Americans said we would have to stay in the camp permanently. Salah knew the specifics. He said that Donald Rumsfeld believed we could be kept in these cages indefinitely and without a trial. That was the news. But Allah would decide whether he wanted to send us home or not. Allah was on the side of the good people and not of Donald Rumsfeld. I mustn't worry. I learned my first Arabic suras. An imam was now leading our prayers. He was a dark-skinned fifteen-year-old who had learned the Koran by heart. His cage was far from mine, but it was still in Charlie. I saw him sometimes when I was taken to the showering cage. He had a clear, loud voice. His prayers varied in length depending on which of the suras he recited. A few of the prisoners had English versions of the Koran in their cages. They hung them on thin threads from the chain- ink fencing since the Koran must never get dirty or lie on the ground. Arabic editions weren't permitted. "Maximum security!" we joked. There could have been something dangerous in it. I wanted a Koran, too, but the guards refused to bring me one. One of them said they had run out. Another pointed to a prisoner who did have one and said, Ask him! A third guard said, What am I, a Muslim? I don't have one. When the young dark-skinned imam called us to prayer, I tried to repeat the words in my heard or whisper them softly. *** One time there was a long, tortured cry. I turned around. There was a second and then a third cry, but they sounded different from the cries of people being beaten. It was the long and frightening wail of death. Through the chain-link fencing I could see a guard in the cage of one of the Arab prisoners. I immediately knew what had happened. We were searched every day. They even searched the Korans. The guards grabbed the books by their spines and shook them to see if anything was concealed in the pages. This guard must have thrown the Koran on the ground-otherwise the prisoner wouldn't have howled like that. I saw the guard trampling on something. Some of the prisoners sprang to their feet. A terrible wailing arose. One by one, all the prisoners were losing their cool. ''Allahu akbar!" they yelled. "Don't do that!" I screamed. The guard continued trampling on the Koran. It was as though lightning had struck in a zoo. Some of the prisoners tried to kick down the cage doors, others shook the fencing, trying to tear or bite their way through the chain links. Suddenly, the guard was afraid. He left the Koran on the ground and ran away. The other guards also beat a hasty retreat from Charlie Block. They ran through the corridors and hid behind the second chain-link fence. The prisoners were getting wilder. They screamed and wailed and kicked against the fencing and spun around in circles like dervishes. Some of them were rolling around on the ground. The clamor spread like wildfire to the other blocks. I heard yelling and crying from Alpha and Foxtrot. A short time later, Humvees, jeeps, and trucks arrived. Soldiers marched forward slowly encircling the camp. They wore bullet-proof vests and carried machine guns. Kneeling or lying on their stomachs, they trained high-caliber rifles on us. They took aim. I looked up at the watchtowers. The sharpshooters also had us in their sights. The situation was alarming. A massacre could have happened at any minute. The only thing that had to happen, I thought, was for someone to break out of his cage. What was Isa doing? He wasn't tearing at his cage door. He was just standing there with a clenched fist, smiling. They turned on the floodlights. I heard one of the prisoners call out something in Arabic. I didn't understand what he said, but the howling began to ebb. Most of the prisoners calmed down and let go of their cage doors. Some of them were already beginning to sit back down. I sat down too, thinking it was the best thing to do in the situation. The Arab prisoner whose Koran had been defiled picked the Holy Book up off the ground. Again, someone called out something that I didn't understand. A number of long minutes passed. The soldiers still had us in their sights. Then the IRF teams came. They sprayed pepper spray in all the blocks. I shut my eyes and pressed my hands to my face. I heard them running on the gravel. "Hurry, hurry." I heard cage doors being opened. "Get up! Hurry!" The sounds of chains, blows, screams. I spread my fingers and could see Kemal emptying his water bucket on soldiers who were beating up a prisoner in the adjacent cage. The soldiers stormed into Kemal's cage. When he was on the ground, his neighbor poured the content of his toilet bucket on the soldiers. Then I saw other prisoners emptying their toilet buckets on the IRF teams. The team in Kemal's cage left him on the ground and began beating up his neighbor. When they were through with him, they returned to Kemal, grabbed his feet, and dragged him off. A lot of the prisoners were taken away. Then the soldiers returned and beat up the rest. The IRF teams had a busy night. It was morning before they stopped. They looked pretty worn out. I was lucky. This time around they didn't visit me. Maybe they were just tired. *** The following day some of the prisoners refused to take their breakfast. Others accepted the paper plates but didn't eat anything. When the guards came to my cell, I shook my head. Salah wouldn't eat anything either, and even Abdul didn't touch his plate. We weren't acting on a plan. It just happened spontaneously. By noon, no one in Charlie was eating anything. That afternoon we heard from Bravo that all of the blocks were on hunger strike. In the morning, at noon, and in the evening, the guards came with paper plates and Emaries, but we all refused to take them. Kemal never returned. On the fourth day of our hunger strike, the general who was in charge of Guantanamo in the early days arrived and talked with one of the English-speaking prisoners. The prisoner refused to stand up in the general's presence. The general took his cap off and sat on the ground in the corridor in front of the cage. At that moment, I realized that we were not utterly powerless. We could bring them to their knees if we all went on hunger strike! They didn't want us to die, But I didn't understand why the general had taken off his cap. Was he trying to signal that he wasn't on the job, that he wanted to speak to the prisoner as a human being? The general and the prisoner talked. The general was surrounded by a dozen or so high-ranking officers, They had stopped in their tracks. They didn't seem to like it that the general was sitting on the ground. The general asked why we had stopped eating, The prisoner explained how important the Koran was to us and what it meant. The general said he would punish the soldier who had defiled the Koran. When he got up and started to leave Charlie with the officers, he passed by my cage. He slowed down and looked me over, Probably because of my fair skin, I thought. I spoke to him. "What happen?" I asked. The general's answer was long, and I didn't understand very much. After he left, Salah explained: "He said he'll ensure personally that something like that doesn't happen again." We talked at length amongst ourselves in the blocks that day, and the guards let us. Some of the prisoners said they didn't believe the Americans. They suggested returning their copies of the Koran because they'd rather not have the book at all than risk it being defiled again. Others thought we should wait and see. In the end, we all agreed that we had to get organized and elect a leader. That evening, the first group of prisoners resumed eating. I decided not to, although I was very hungry. A guard came to me and asked why I still didn't want to eat. "Look over there," he said, pointing to a man with a cup in his hand. "You'll even get some warm tea if you start eating again." He had to be joking, I thought. After he left, I found out that they had in fact distributed tea. What an idiot! Did he really think he could bribe us with a cup of tea? I couldn't understand who the American guards thought they were. A few days later, the general reappeared, he wanted to negotiate. He asked for our conditions. The prisoner who spoke English demanded that the guards no longer be allowed to handle and search through our Korans. We didn't want our private parts searched. And we didn't want to be frisked by female guards. If he agreed to all that, we would start eating again. The general agreed. That evening I ate some cold rice and crackers. They tasted great. *** After the incident with the Koran, we went ahead and elected a leader. All of the prisoners were allowed to nominate a candidate. It was a secret vote-the Americans knew nothing about it. It took several weeks because the vote was strictly oral, the preliminary results passed from cage to cage. Out of five hundred prisoners, ten men were chosen, and suggestions were collected and evaluated. Those ten men chose three other men, who in turn elected our leader. We called him the emir. No one but the three men who had elected him knew who he was. Officially this man was not our leader. He chose a spokesperson to deal with the Americans and to appear as our leader. In that way, the real emir could remain in the background, undetected. We strung the Americans along. We acted as though we had elected an emir, the spokesperson, and let his name be known. Before long the spokesperson disappeared for months. The Americans thought they had broken our resistance, and there wouldn't be any more hunger strikes. But the real emir was still making the decisions behind the scenes. He collected opinions from all the prisoners' representatives and decided what the figurehead emir would tell the Americans. We wanted to put an end to the defilements of the Koran. We wanted the Americans to respect our faith and stop playing the U.S. national anthem during our prayers. We wanted to restrict the level of torture and get medicine for some of the wounded prisoners. Sometimes the Americans seemed to accede to our demands, for example regarding medicine, but of course we had no way of knowing what exactly it was they were giving the sick prisoners. We wanted them to treat the sick, elderly, and handicapped prisoners more respectfully. We wanted proper food. Later, each block chose its own emir. Eventually I also became a block emir because I came to speak not only good English but other languages used by the prisoners. In Bremen, I had studied English in school, but the language didn't interest me because I didn't have any use for it. In Kandahar and Guantanamo, I wanted to learn English so that I could understand the Americans and defend myself during interrogations. I wanted to learn Arabic so that I could read the Koran and understand the other prisoners. I learned English from my interrogators and from Salah, Uzbek from Uzbeks, Farsi from the Afghans, Arabic from Salah and the Saudis, and Italian from the Algerian who had lived in Italy. I wasn't fluent in these languages by any means, but I could make myself understood. And that was very useful in Guantanamo. When it was my turn to be the emir, I was the contact person for the Americans. I mostly served as emir when I wasn't being transferred or spending time in solitary confinement. They transferred us frequently to prevent us from getting organized, but the more often they moved us, the more quickly information spread among the prisoners. As an emir I was responsible for whether or not prisoners in my block would go on hunger strike. There were some longer hunger strikes and a lot of shorter ones. I had read that if a man doesn't eat for two weeks, or doesn't drink anything for four or five days, he can die. I believe the doctors in Guantanamo didn't know exactly when a man might die. That's why they were careful during the first hunger strikes-until they found out precisely how long we could last without food or water. One of the prisoners refused to eat for more than a hundred days. At some point he was force-fed. There were always small groups of prisoners or individuals on hunger strikes. Soon the Americans understood our tactics. They didn't seem to care any more if someone hadn't eaten for a couple of weeks. They only came after twenty days or more. I listened to the prisoners' demands and passed them on to the Americans. Negotiations began. They would make us offers to end the hunger strikes. The negotiations were tough. For example, the Americans offered to remove the Korans from our cages-that was one of our demands. But we would also have to give up our T-shirts. Their offers always included punishments. We were given a choice to either keep our overalls or get medicine for someone who was sick. Either keep our soap and flip-flops or be allowed more showers. The Americans called this making "suggestions." If there wasn't a majority among the prisoners, then I had to decide. I soon realized that we didn't have any real power. It was just an illusion. It was up to the general alone whether or not there would be negotiations. He was the first and last camp commandant with whom we could at least negotiate religious issues. He kept his word. But this general was replaced, and everything changed overnight. Still, our leadership system worked. The men who were our official emirs were always being put in solitary confinement. The man that we had first elected in Camp X-Ray remained the real emir without the Americans ever catching on. Indeed, very few of the prisoners knew who the real emir was. I know his name, but I'm not saying anything. As of 2007 he's still in Guantanamo, and he's still the prisoners' true leader.
|