My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  I slept.

  On Wednesday [January 30] a doctor came in and asked how I was.

  “Please take me out of here,” I said. “I want to go back to my cell.” He ordered them to give me 600 ml of Ensure and a bottle of water through the tube, along with something else. I was very tired. Nothing comes out any more when I go to the toilet.

  By the time anyone is allowed to read my words, I will have had my birthday on February 15. I will celebrate it in the Torture Chair this year, I think.

  It is sad to be on this strike. I have no desire to die. I am suffering, hungry. The nights are very long, and I cannot sleep. But I will continue the struggle until we get our rights. The strike is the only way that I can protest. The military administration treats us all so very badly.

  I saw my lawyer Clive in a dream. He was in Sudan, and I had invited him. He came to my home for dinner. We spoke. I said, do you remember those days in Guantánamo? It seemed so far away, such a long time ago.

  Many dreams here become reality. One day I dream of playing with my son Mohammed. Meanwhile, to my wife and son I say, “Don’t worry, what will happen will happen.” One day the sun will shine again, and we will be free. Facts are facts, and at last we will prevail.

  The following entry was recorded by Clive Stafford Smith during his March 1, 2007, visit with al-Haj:

  Food is not enough for life. If there is no air, could you live on food alone? Freedom is just as important as food or air. Give me freedom, and I’ll eat. Every day they ask me, when will I eat. Every day, I say, “Tomorrow.” Every day. It’s what Scarlett O’Hara says at the end of Gone with the Wind: “Tomorrow is another day.” I am being force-fed at 10 AM and 3 PM each day. . . . They take notes all the time, so I know they have a long record of what they are doing to me.

  They slam the prisoners into the chair. They tighten the straps so they cut into us. They have new padded shackles for moving the prisoners now, which are much better, but for the hunger strikers they use the old ones that cut in.

  They begin with the feet first, then the waist. Then, they do one wrist at a time. There is one band around each shin. One on each wrist. One on each elbow. One strap that comes down over each shoulder. Three on the top of the head, so that the head can’t move. The ankles are shackled to an eye on the chair. They pull hard on the wrists in particular.

  They pull a mask over your mouth, apparently to stop people from spitting.

  In the morning they use my left nostril, in the afternoon, my right. The pain of putting the tube up my nose depends on the shift. As it goes in, at first you are gagging on it. As it goes down, they blow air into it to hear where it is. They put a stethoscope near my heart to listen—I am not sure why. I prayed to Allah when they first did that!

  I worry that these people are not nurses at all. Ab-durrahman said that the IV was put in him by a guard, not a nurse. Some days they put the tube in okay, so it does not hurt too much. But some days I suffer until the tears stream down my cheeks. They have had two trainees who have practiced on me. One was a white woman, fat, short, something over thirty years old.

  The other was a captain nurse, a white man, over forty years old, blond, with a moustache, average build, about five foot nine, with green eyes. You saw the eyes when he was putting the tube in. He came three days in a row, and after the first experience, I prayed to Allah that it would not be him each time. He said, “Are you ready?” I said, “So, what if I am not? You will force me anyway.” Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it has gone into my lungs. They put water into it, and it made me choke. Water started coming out of my nose. One time the nurse wiped my nose. Another time, they did not seem to care.

  They use the same pipe (I can see it is the same number) for about two weeks at a time. It makes me nauseous to see the same one going in each time. Sometimes the guards come by and knock the pipe when it is in my nose. It is very painful.

  Most say nothing at all to me. Never once has one of them said “I’m sorry” when they have hurt me, or said, “I hope this doesn’t hurt.” Even when they put it in my lung.

  They force me to accept two cans of Ensure liquid nutrient, each of 236 ml, and 250 ml of water each time, for a total of 722 ml that they force through my nose. There is no taste of anything. It has been a long time since I knew the flavor of food.

  They hold you for an hour in the chair after being fed, to make sure you don’t throw up. If I do throw up on myself, which happens frequently, I am given no clean clothes, and I cannot even clean myself, since they keep the water turned off when we get back to our cells.

  My stomach is causing me all kinds of problems. Now I am experiencing constipation and diarrhea alternately— for roughly three days each at a time. I feel dizzy and in danger of collapse when I stand up. . . .

  As of today, I have been held as a prisoner without trial for One Thousand Nine Hundred and Two days. Sometimes I wonder what a human being would have to be given to go through this voluntarily. When I was sent on assignment to Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera was paying $600 a day for dangerous work abroad. At that rate, it would be $1,141,200 for the time I have been away from my wife and son. Would I accept the suffering I have been through if I had been promised more than a million dollars? Never. Not at all.

  According to al-Haj, hunger strikers suffered the worst abuse in “India Block.” There, the air-conditioning was cranked up high, and prisoners were pepper-sprayed without warning, then doused with cold water so that they could never relax. They were forced to shower naked in full view of the guards, denied shorts or even towels.

  Systematic forced nudity was used to demean and dehumanize the prisoners, said lawyer Zachary Katznelson. That sort of prolonged degradation couldn’t be justified under the guise of a security threat. It brought to my mind images of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The only reason U.S. soldiers were charged in connection with the abuse that went on there was because someone made the mistake of taking photographs.

  But forced nudity wasn’t the only means of demoralizing prisoners like al-Haj. According to Katznelson, a number of prisoners reported that they were humiliated by soldiers repeatedly inserting their fingers into their anuses. One even claimed that a stick had been shoved into his rectum.

  Al-Haj was held for more than five years on the basis of secret evidence, never charged with any crime. Until the Associated Press sued the Pentagon in 2005, the military wouldn’t even acknowledge that it was holding him. His family had no idea what had happened to him and was unaware that he had been taken to Guantánamo until six months after his arrest, when his wife, Asma, received a letter through the Red Cross.

  Contact after that was strained. Al-Haj’s letters took several months to reach the family. It was even worse on his end. He went an entire year once without hearing from his wife. Another time he was given a letter from his brother—dated two years earlier. On average, Katznelson said, it took seven to nine months for his client to receive a letter—and then it was often heavily censored.

  In his military hearings, al-Haj was accused, among other things, of running a terrorist Web site, of entering Afghanistan illegally, of interviewing Osama bin Laden, and of supplying arms and funds to Chechen fighters. Attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who was not allowed to attend these military proceedings, called all the allegations “nonsense” and the hearings process itself “un-American.”

  “Al-Haj is no more a terrorist than my grandmother,” Stafford Smith said. “There is absolutely zero evidence that he has any history of terrorism at all.”

  During his more than six years at Guantánamo, the allegations against al-Haj changed repeatedly. The military found that he never interviewed Osama bin Laden, so that allegation disappeared. There was no jihadist or terrorist Web site, so that allegation too vanished, as did the charge of funneling arms to the Chechens.

  Again and again, the allegations proved false. “There is no evidence that he is guilty of anything,” insisted Stafford Smith. “And t
he U.S. has clearly shown that by the fact that they never even interrogated him about his alleged guilt—until he begged them to.”

  Strangely, the military showed scant interest in al-Haj’s alleged terrorist connections. Instead, most of his more than two hundred interrogations focused on pumping him for information about his former employer, which confused al- Haj. Eventually, he pleaded with interrogators to ask him about the alleged crimes he was being detained for, but their focus remained on Al-Jazeera. He was asked about the news staff, who paid its salaries, who paid for travel, where the money came from, and whether the network was really a front for al-Qaeda.

  The military made clear what it wanted, said Stafford Smith: for al-Haj to turn spy and inform on Al-Jazeera.

  Al-Haj refused.

  It’s no secret that Washington doesn’t like Al-Jazeera. The network angered U.S. officials with its unsanitized approach to covering combat. In its typical no-holds-barred reporting style, Al-Jazeera filmed and televised Iraqi war victims, dead U.S. soldiers, and scores of civilian casualties. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly called its coverage of the war “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.” The news team defended its broadcasts by stating that “the pictures do not lie.”

  The network, which has millions of Middle Eastern viewers, is also known for broadcasting videotapes sent in by al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. As a result, Americans have come to suspect that Al-Jazeera is in the business of aiding terrorists, even though the same videos are usually replayed by U.S. networks.

  When Al-Jazeera’s Kabul office was wiped out by U.S. bombs in 2002, and when U.S. air strikes took out the Baghdad office a year later, killing Al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub, the news staff began to suspect that they were a target of U.S. armed forces.

  Al-Jazeera producer Ahmad Ibrahim told me how terrifying this was for his staff. Al-Jazeera journalists, he said, are no different from other reporters and have never been tied to any political groups.

  “We have operated in the most professional manner throughout our ten-year history,” Ibrahim said from his office in Doha, Qatar. “There is not a single instance where Al- Jazeera has operated in a way that favored any group, political party or country over another.”

  He said that Al-Jazeera never agreed with the concept of “embedded” journalism, that is, allowing a news reporter to travel with a military unit involved in armed conflict. Embedding during the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Washington’s response to the broad and sometimes unfavorable coverage of the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. But Al-Jazeera staffers wouldn’t go along with the way Washington wanted them to conduct their journalism.

  “[Washington] wanted us to operate as embedded journalists— seeing the world from their Humvees or aircraft carriers—and treating that as the only opinion,” Ibrahim said. But “our motto is ‘the opinion, and the other opinion.’” Reporters should gather news independently, he said; embedding with the military would provide an incomplete and lopsided view of the war.

  As al-Haj’s lawyers saw it, his continued detention was a political game that had little to do with him. “He is a clearly a pawn in a game much bigger than he is—human collateral in the United States government’s grudge against the television station,” said Katznelson.

  A transcript of al-Haj’s Annual Review Board hearing on August 12, 2005, quoted the prisoner pleading for mercy and stating that he would like to return to his family. He had been arrested in error, he told the board.

  “I can say without hesitation that I am not a threat to the United States or to anyone else,” he said. “I strongly condemn any act that is taken against innocent people, and I strongly condemn the tragic attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Islam properly understood would never allow the killing of innocent people in this way.”

  Al-Haj’s imprisonment frightened his coworkers and threatened their profession globally, they said. They think twice now before covering a subject that might anger the United States. Many fear that they too could be targeted.

  “All journalists feel less safe now than before,” said Ibrahim. “Personally, I think twice before I head to cover certain events in certain places, but I go anyway.”

  Still, al-Haj’s colleagues stood behind him. His face became familiar in the Middle East as Al-Jazeera carried frequent news updates on his case. A documentary detailing his arrest, torture, and detention called Prisoner 345 caused public outrage and led to calls for his release.

  His imprisonment also got the attention of Reporters sans frontières (Reporters without Borders), an international group headquartered in Paris that defends press freedom and the rights of journalists all over the world. The watchdog group has advocated tirelessly for al-Haj’s release.

  Sudanese government officials also followed his hunger strike and imprisonment. In April 2007, Sudanese minister of justice Mohammad Ali al-Marazi publicly condemned al-Haj’s imprisonment without charge or trial. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a parade of world leaders also condemned it.

  When you arrive at Guantánamo Bay, you’re greeted by a large plaque inscribed “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.” Every time I saw it, I wondered whether the men in charge of that colossal operation had any true concept of honor, or that freedom might be a universal, not narrowly American, right.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE DRAMA

  Every trip to Gitmo was full of drama, with boozy beachside barbecues and endless storytelling. In and outside the detention camps, the military base is a surreal place, peopled with curious characters. I often found myself wondering who the people around me were and why they were at Guantánamo Bay.

  Like the legless man.

  Each morning, when I took the ferry to the windward side, I would see a young Cuban man with prosthetic legs. He always wore shorts, so I’d catch myself sneaking peeks at his plastic legs and wondering what had happened to him. One day, he told Peter Ryan and an Arabic interpreter his incredible story.

  His name was Amadoo. One day, he’d decided to flee Fidel Castro’s Cuba. But instead of trying to sail to Miami in a makeshift raft, as most refugees do, he thought he would go over land and try to reach Guantánamo Bay, where he would ask the Americans for asylum. Unfortunately, Cuban soldiers spotted him from a guard tower as he neared the base and shot him in the leg. The gunfire drew the attention of U.S. border guards, who ordered the Cubans to pull back and allow him passage. The Cubans refused, and a standoff ensued.

  A U.S. and a Cuban helicopter both flew out and hovered over him for a time. Finally, perhaps not wanting to create an international incident, both choppers retreated, and Amadoo dragged himself as quickly as he could toward the American side.

  There were once seventy-five thousand land mines placed by U.S. troops across “no man’s land” between the U.S. and Cuban border, creating the second-largest minefield in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere (the first largest is in Afghanistan). But President Bill Clinton ordered them removed in 1996, and they have since been replaced with motion and sound sensors to detect intruders. Unluckily for Amadoo, however, the Cuban government hadn’t cleared the minefield on its side of the border. As he hobbled along, trying to make his way to the U.S. side, a Cuban land mine took out his other leg.

  For hours he lay unconscious, slowly bleeding to death, as neither U.S. nor Cuban soldiers made any move to help him. Finally, that night a Cuban soldier, assuming that Amadoo was dead, picked him up and threw him into a nearby cemetery. He was discovered the next morning, barely breathing, by other Cubans, who took him to a hospital, where he was fitted with his artificial legs. As soon as he had recovered, he fled again. This time he made it across the border. He’d been living at Gitmo ever since. He was eventually granted political asylum in the United States, but his wife and children remained in Cuba.

  There was a sizable Cuban community on the leeward side of the base, and more Cubans dropped in all the time. One da
y, two surrendered to one of the Arabic interpreters, who was chain-smoking outside the Combined Bachelors Quarters when they came ashore. The elderly translator was the first person they saw, so they threw their bags down and put their hands up in the air.

  A number of Cubans who’d been intercepted by the Coast Guard while trying to make it to Florida were also living on the base. Cubans who reach U.S. soil are allowed to stay, but if they’re intercepted at sea, they’re sent back to Cuba on the basis of so-called wet-foot, dry-foot statutes. Instead of sending some refugees back to Cuba, though, the Coast Guard brought them to Guantánamo.

  On my first trip to the base, I saw an adorable little brown-haired boy carrying a red Spiderman backpack on the morning ferry. His older brother was playing video games on his Sony PSP. His father wore a red polo shirt with a yellow Mc- Donald’s insignia. Over the months, I got to know little Jordan Lopez. His father, Jorge, said the family had fled Cuba on a homemade motorized raft that had run out of fuel just a few miles from Miami. They’d been picked up by the Coast Guard and brought to Guantánamo Bay, where Jorge worked at Mc- Donald’s. He looked over his shoulder constantly as he spoke to me. Immigration officers were always monitoring them, he explained. After spending about a year at Guantánamo, the family was finally granted political asylum in the Czech Republic.

  Alex, another Cuban, was not so fortunate. He pulled out military papers to show me that he had been reprimanded for “familiarizing with a Jamaican.” After three separate violations, Alex said, he was thrown into solitary confinement for several days with only one hour of recreation each day, during which a guard would give him a ball to kick around. The Cubans, Alex complained, were treated like the detainees, their letters home censored and their phone calls monitored. “I am not a criminal,” he said. “But they treat me like a spy.”