by Mahvish Khan
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.
At the U.S. base in Kandahar, the men were pulled off the plane and forced to lie face down on the icy winter tarmac as soldiers trampled on them, hit them with their rifle butts, yelled obscenities, and beat them. Then, the soldiers ordered the prisoners to get up and tied them together with wire, leaving about six feet between each man. “Run!” they shouted.
But many of the men were injured and exhausted, and when they tried to run, some simply couldn’t keep up and fell to their knees. The soldiers kicked and punched them and ordered them to get back up. Al-Dossary still wore the shackles the Pakistanis had put on his ankles, which caused him to stumble repeatedly. Every time he fell to the ground, he felt a soldier’s boot against his body. One time, he passed out, then regained consciousness to find his head under a soldier’s boot. He was beaten unconscious again. The second time, he came around to a hot, wet sensation on his head and back. Confused, he turned his throbbing head to see the same soldier towering over him, urinating on him.
“He was roaring with laughter,” al-Dossary wrote.
Then, the soldier grabbed a fistful of al-Dossary’s hair and kicked his face until his lip split. According to al-Dossary, the soldiers always focused on sensitive spots, such as the eyes, nose, and genitals. During the beatings, he said, the soldiers insulted members of his family and called him a terrorist over and over again.
Al-Dossary spent two weeks at Kandahar, where he claimed that soldiers threatened to kill him and made him walk barefoot over barbed wire or shards of glass. They broke his nose. He was forced to raise his arms backward so high that he was afraid they would pop out of their shoulder sockets. After one especially intense beating, he wrote, he and the others were forced to strip, although much of their clothing had already been torn from their bodies.
“My blood was everywhere, my face was swollen. . . . I had cuts all over my body,” he recalled in his letter.
The soldiers began to photograph and film the naked, battered prisoners. Al-Dossary would get to see these photographs much later during an interrogation at Gitmo.
Religious degradation was as much a part of the program as physical abuse. Al-Dossary insisted that soldiers frequently cursed Allah and the Prophet Mohammad. When Red Cross representatives brought the prisoners Qu’rans, the holy books were thrown on the floor during interrogations and sometimes into the plastic buckets that prisoners relieved themselves into. Some soldiers used the Qu’ran as a football, tossing it around in front of the Muslim prisoners. Others tore out pages to clean off their boots.
Meanwhile, the physical abuse became more inventive. One day, al-Dossary had hot liquid poured on his head; another time, he was given electric shocks with a small device that looked like a mobile phone. Individual hairs were pulled out of his beard, and he was made to stand in stress positions for hours at a time and not allowed to sleep. Once, he said, a U.S. soldier put out his cigarette on his bare foot.
“Why are you treating me like this?” al-Dossary cried out. The soldier responded a few moments later by stubbing another cigarette out on his wrist. When he complained to a military physician, some soldiers decided to teach him a lesson. They blindfolded him and took him to another part of the camp. What he witnessed, he wrote, still haunted him.
“I heard an Afghan prisoner scream. He was crying and saying, ‘Oh, Allah! Oh, God!’” al-Dossary wrote. That was all he could understand of the man’s screams. He was led toward the screaming, which grew louder and louder, and then his blindfold was pulled off.
“I saw an Afghan brother in his fifties. He had a lot of white hair in his beard, and he was tied to the ground. Soldiers were holding on to his shackles, and he was naked lying on his stomach. One of the soldiers was sexually assaulting him. One of the soldiers was videotaping,” he wrote.
Al-Dossary was told that he would face the same fate as that “Afghan terrorist” if he dared to speak out again.
The first time I heard about sexual assault or rape, I had a hard time believing that U.S. soldiers could be capable of such brutality. Historically, sexual degradation has been considered an effective way to demoralize prisoners and an entire community. We caught a small glimpse of sexual degradation at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison, where young men and women in uniform posed and smiled for pictures next to naked and humiliated men on leashes, or stacked naked in a pile, or forced to masturbate for a camera while a female U.S. guard gave a thumbs-up and pointed at the prisoner’s crotch.
Abu Ghraib caused such a stir when a few of the photos were leaked to the media that the military was forced to investigate. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba was assigned to find out what had happened and spent most of February 2004 in Iraq with his team investigating. In an interview with veteran correspondent Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, Taguba said that he was appalled at what he uncovered. He revealed that the Pentagon forced him to retire in January 2007 as a result of his forceful inquiry into the scandal. Taguba also told the New Yorker that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had kept more pictures, about one hundred, and a video from the public. Americans haven’t seen a fraction of what happened at the Iraqi prison, and although only low-level soldiers were prosecuted in that case, Taguba said he believed that the orders for the actions could only have come from above.
Taguba told the New Yorker that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The general also said that an Iraqi father and son were sexually humiliated together and that there were images of a female Iraqi prisoner forced to bare her breasts before U.S. soldiers. The general told the magazine that there were images of male prisoners stripped naked with female guards pointing at their penises, of Iraqi women forced to expose their genitals to the guards, of prisoners forced to perform “indecent acts” upon one another, and of guards physically assaulting prisoners by beating them and dragging them around on chains. There were also reports by an army physician who indicated that an anal fissure on a prisoner was consistent with the sodomy the prisoners alleged.
Many similar reports never reached the U.S. media. Lal Gul, director of the Afghan Human Rights Organization in Kabul, said that U.S. soldiers pervasively raped men and women, regardless of age. Chicago-based sociologist Daud Miraki told me that his field workers attested to multiple cases of rape by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan too. Miraki has recorded a case of a young woman in Sarobi whose husband was away from home when U.S. soldiers came to search the house and took her to the military base “for questioning.” Neighbors informed her husband, and when he went to the base to pick her up, she reportedly told him that she had been gang-raped. Her husband told Miraki that he could no longer accept her as a wife. She went to stay with her parents and committed suicide days later. Some speculate that many rapes in Afghanistan have gone unreported because of the extreme cultural taboo associated with it.
Perhaps it’s difficult for soldiers to refuse to obey orders, especially when they’re told all prisoners are the enemy. Professor Stanley Milgram, author of the famous experiment that measured participants’ willingness to obey an authority figure wh
o instructed them to perform acts that went against their personal consciences, concluded, “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs . . . can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
It’s easier to abuse when there’s a presumption of guilt, an assumption that the prisoners are terrorists. Was this what provoked the torture and sexual humiliation that led Jumah al-Dossary down the path to self-destruction?
“I spend many hours trying to convince Jumah that he shouldn’t kill himself,” his lawyer Colangelo-Bryan told me. “I tell him that he’ll go home one day and be with his family again. He asks when that will happen, and, of course, I have no answer. He reminds me that he has lived for years alone in cells . . . and has been told by the military that he will live like that forever. All he can see is darkness. For me, his words bring on a feeling of crippling powerlessness.”
The next states of al-Dossary’s captivity began when a soldier cut off all his clothes with a pair of scissors, and his head and face were shaved clean. Naked, he was led into a large tent holding a group of men just like him, all bald, naked, and hairless. Soldiers instructed them to don orange prison jumpsuits, and they were fitted with sound-blocking ear muffs and blackened goggles. It was a bewildering experience to be deprived of basic sensory input. The men were then left in the room for hours, from noon until nightfall, to wear them down physically and mentally for the long flight west.
“We sat without food or drink, [and we were] unable to relieve ourselves or pray,” al-Dossary reported. But the men did pray, trying their best to make the motions. Very late that night, they were led onto a plane and tied by the legs to the cabin floor or to the seats. Al-Dossary’s forehead and nose were injured by the tight goggles, and his hands and legs swelled from the pressure of the shackles.
“Then, the plane took off and flew for many hours. I do not know how many,” he wrote. “[It] landed in a country where the weather was hot.”
They were moved to another plane and flown further west.
When they landed in Guantánamo Bay, the men were unloaded onto a military bus.
“You are at an American base. You must not speak or move. You must keep your heads down,” a translator shouted in Arabic, warning that prisoners who moved would be beaten.
“When it was my turn to get off the bus, I could not move because I was extremely stressed and exhausted,” al-Dossary wrote. “They told to me get up right now and shouted at me. When I wanted to tell them that I could not move, they started hitting me and told me again that I was not allowed to talk.” Two soldiers picked him up and threw him out of the bus.
The men were taken to Camp X-ray and left there until the following night, when they were led one by one into a large tent to be photographed and fingerprinted. Next, they were taken to a “cement building” to take a shower.
“They stripped me of my clothes and gave me soap but did not take the goggles off my eyes,” al-Dossary wrote. Though the water was very cold, he was relieved to be bathing. But just as he was lathering his hair, he was ordered out of the shower.
“They were well aware that I had not bathed in over a month and a half,” he wrote.
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 th
e 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.”