by Mahvish Khan
On May 25, 2004, al-Dossary was moved to the newly opened Camp 5, which consisted entirely of solitary cells where the air-conditioning was kept at frigid temperatures and enormous fans mimicked the sound of an airplane engine to prevent prisoners from screaming to each other through the concrete walls.
He met with attorney Joshua Colangelo-Bryan in March 2005 and told him everything he had been through. When the lawyer left, al-Dossary was threatened by an angry soldier. “It’s best that you forget everything that’s happened to you and don’t mention it again to anyone if you want to stay safe,” the soldier told him, al-Dossary later wrote. After that, he was given something peculiar tasting to eat and began to experience dizziness, headaches, vomiting, and fainting. His left arm went numb.
But he was careful to emphasize that not all U.S. soldiers treated him badly. Once, he wrote, a black soldier brought him cookies and hot chocolate. Another young soldier’s eyes welled with tears after he heard what al-Dossary had endured.
“There are some soldiers who have humanity, irrespective of their race, gender, or faith,” al-Dossary wrote.
Though he maintains that he has no terrorism connections and doesn’t hate the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pentagon say there was no mistake in his case and that al-Dossary went to an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1989, something that Colangelo-Bryan disputes. “Jumah did go to Afghanistan for a long weekend on a Saudi government–sponsored trip after the Soviets had left,” he told me. “The Saudis were sending lots of people there to see Afghanistan after the Soviets had been driven out with support of the Saudis and the United States.”
The Pentagon also said that he was “present at Tora Bora,” but it didn’t say when he was there, why this was a crime, what he supposedly did there, or who he was with. Al-Dossary maintained that he had never been to Tora Bora in his life.
Stories circulating on the Internet suggested that al-Dossary had come to the United States on a tourist visa in 2001 and delivered a heated political speech at a mosque in Lackawanna, New York, just outside Buffalo. But Colangelo-Bryan said that was not a basis for holding his client.
“Jumah did give a sermon at a mosque there, where he talked about injustice in the world,” the lawyer said. “He did not urge any violence against the U.S. or any other country or person, and there have been no allegations that he did.” The United States did not allege that al-Dossary had engaged in any recruiting at Lackawanna or elsewhere.
The Defense Department detained him year after year, its official position being that he was right where he belonged: in a seven-by-eight-foot cage.
That’s what the military said about everyone I met in Guantánamo.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHAT THE PENTAGON SAID
There were some very bad men at Guantánamo Bay, maybe even men who deserved to be called “evil.” Some of the detainees were truly the worst of the worst, like Khaled Sheik Mohammad, a.k.a. KSM, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, or Yemeni Ramzi Binalshibh, a key aide to KSM and the Hamburg roommate of September 11 lead hijacker Mohammad Atta, or Abu Zubaidah, the man who allegedly organized the aborted “millennium bomb plots” in Jordan and Los Angeles in late 1999. I’m grateful that these men and others are no longer free to terrorize the world.
But I continue to believe that terrorists should receive public trials before they’re locked up. Hiding them away from the world at Gitmo, or anywhere else, without charging them was shady and wrong. It made America look like a lawless thug state and tarnished our nation’s image as a beacon of justice in the world.
I wanted to understand why the Pentagon was insisting that men like Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi and Haji Nusrat were among the “worst of the worst.” I’d heard that the Defense Department had strategically transferred fourteen “high-value” detainees from secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons around the world to Gitmo in September 2006, after a flood of negative press and international calls to close down the military detention center, so that the claim could honestly be made that there were dangerous terrorists at Gitmo.
At its peak, Gitmo had 754 detainees. Four were said to have committed suicide. A fifth allegedly died of colon cancer. Would the military concede that those released without charge after years of detention were mistakes? And regarding the alleged suicides, why weren’t there open, transparent investigations into those deaths? Why were the men’s organs removed by the military before the bodies were transferred home?
I e-mailed a Department of Justice attorney responsible for coordinating habeas visits to Gitmo and asked him to put me in touch with a Pentagon representative. He referred me to Commander Jeffery Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Some of the habeas lawyers thought I was naïve to assume that Gordon would be cooperative or straightforward. But I was open to hearing something that would diverge from what I had witnessed at Gitmo.
I e-mailed Gordon and told him that I was interested in getting the military’s perspective on Guantánamo Bay. He re- sponded immediately with a lengthy e-mail, copied to several military officials.
Instead of agreeing to help me understand the military’s perspective and to answer my questions, he wrote a bitter missive chastising me for the article in the Washington Post, which he denounced as “biased and fundamentally flawed.” He told me that he had contacted Post editors after my article ran and requested the same amount of space to write a rebuttal, a request that had been turned aside.
He also reminded me that I had photographed a Gitmo soldier against that soldier’s will. I didn’t tell him that this soldier had readily posed for photos, while I took dozens of pictures of him drinking habeas beer, smoking habeas cigarettes, and eating habeas steaks with us. He went on to call my article “deeply offensive to the military men and women who have volunteered to proudly serve in the armed forces in defense of this nation.” I didn’t understand the relevance of a year-old article, or why Gordon was bringing it up.
He wrote that while he was glad I had come to him to “set the record straight,” I should have come to him the year before as well.
I e-mailed him back:
I contacted you because I wanted to get your side of the story. . . . I can only write about what I have seen and observed at Gitmo; I can’t speculate about all the “bad bomb makers,” and so far, all that I have seen negates what I have heard. . . . I am not attempting to “set the record straight”—I am attempting to ask you if there is another side to the story which you would like to share with me and with readers. . . . If you truly feel that I have been “biased” by my meetings with these prisoners, and if you feel that my perceptions are “fundamentally flawed,” then correct me and let me know—I’m coming to you so I can report and tell the whole story. . . .
If you are interested in helping me understand . . . how America has become a safer place, with a harrowing description of the bad guys that we have heard about so much, then I would like to write about it. . . .
Finally, I would like to say that I’m sorry my article offended you. I was offended by what I saw and was merely relating that. And while my heritage is Afghan, I was born in America, and I think part of what makes this country great is the ability to discuss and speak until we learn from one another.
In reply, Gordon asked me to answer several obscure questions before he would agree to provide any information. He asked whether I had taken the bar exam and in which state, whether I was working for any nongovernmental organizations, and whether I was providing legal representation or any other services to detainees or former detainees.
I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I really wanted to talk to him, so I responded: No, I hadn’t yet taken the bar. No, I didn’t work for any nongovernmental organizations, and I wasn’t sole counsel on any case. I did have my own case but was being supervised by Dechert.
That’s when the problems started.
Gord
on insinuated that I was lying. He couldn’t fathom how I could have my own case even though I wasn’t a member of any bar. Apparently, he had done a series of Internet searches on my name and found an article on my law school Web site discussing my habeas case. He accused me of lying to an academic institution and to a government official. I was livid.
Peter Ryan of Dechert had contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and requested an Afghan client specifically for me, in addition to the fifteen clients whom Dechert was already representing. Peter agreed to supervise me because I wasn’t yet barred, but I would be responsible for preparing for meetings with the prisoner, gathering evidence on the prisoner’s behalf, and so on. I wouldn’t be acting as interpreter; it would be my case. Had Gordon done his homework, he’d have known that law students and nonbarred attorneys are permitted to practice under the supervision of a practicing attorney. Instead, he called me unethical.
Gordon surely knew the answers to the questions he had asked me and was attempting to entrap me. I e-mailed back and said that further communication wasn’t a good idea.
His response: “Well, you didn’t quite start off on the right foot with the Wash Post Outlook cover story last year, which was one of the strangest things I’ve seen in the past couple years.”
He and I have a different idea of what is “strange.” Strange is American soldiers torturing prisoners. Strange is giving “rewards” of $5,000 to $25,000 per prisoner, and stranger still is the U.S. military’s making arrests without first investigating allegations put forth by locals who stand to gain financially from them. Strange is holding men for more than five years without ever charging them. Strange is the military’s removal of organs from prisoners who committed suicide before sending their bodies home for burial. Strange is calling a paralyzed eighty-year-old man an “enemy combatant.” Strange is that while U.S. soldiers throw the Qu’ran in buckets of feces, the administration had figuratively done the same to the U.S. Constitution.
Gordon accused me again of having lied. He said that I was being unethical and mentioned that he knew alumni of my law school, as if he were going to expose me or something. “I have several close friends and a relative who are also alumni of U of M [sic] Law School and am certain they would agree with maintaining integrity of the school’s Web site and all their public information products.”
His e-mails were always very lengthy and somewhat irrelevant and led me to believe that he had a lot of time on his hands. He told me how he’d once enrolled in a class at a law school.
“Although I am not an attorney, I did complete a cert program at a law school and thus am keenly aware of the ethical issues involved in representing oneself to the public, in particular to government officials and academic institutions,” he wrote.
I figured that he had enough time on his hands to try to make me look bad, and at first, I did feel intimidated. It’s not pleasant being threatened by a Pentagon commander.
Still, I took allegations of ethical impropriety seriously. I responded by e-mailing him, the dean of my law school, and Dechert attorneys directly to explain what he was saying and why it was wrong. The dean of the School of Law replied in my support, as did the attorneys at Dechert.
The ordeal made me think back to my meeting with Abdul Salam Zaeef. It seemed unfortunate that a former Taliban representative had treated me, a female visitor from America, better than the Pentagon public relations office. Zaeef had at least entertained my questions about the Taliban’s mistreatment of women without becoming incensed and threatening me.
My communications with Gordon were futile, except that they gave me a good taste of what it felt like to be scared by the government and its power.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE POLICE CHIEF
Abdullah Mujahid thought that the feminist movement had shortchanged American women. Once they were loved just for being “nurturing mothers and wives, precious sisters, and little girls.” But now, Mujahid perceptively noted, women in our country carry an ever-growing load of responsibilities; in addition to caring for a family, they’re expected to work.
“If a woman chooses to work because she likes and wants to, she should,” the thirty-five-year-old Afghan detainee said to me and Carolyn Welshhans, a lawyer from Dechert’s Washington, D.C., office, at a meeting in March 2007. “But women shouldn’t have to get jobs. We are happy to take care of our women, protect them. And women in my country are happy to depend on their husbands and fathers.”
It sounds good. But as I listened to Mujahid, I thought that “depend” was the wrong verb. Afghan women don’t just “depend” on men; they’re at men’s mercy. Men dictate when and whom a woman may marry, how she may dress, with whom she may interact, and whether she’ll ever be able to read a book or write a letter. But I kept all of that to myself because I sensed that Mujahid was gently trying to bridge our worlds and paint a better image of his countrymen for the two women from America.
Farid Ahmad holds his brother Abdullah Mujahid’s framed photograph; Gardez, Afghanistan. Jean Chung/WPN for Boston Globe.
We didn’t have our first real conversation with Mujahid until our third meeting with him. He was a strongly built man with closely cropped hair without a single strand of gray. He was well mannered and gracious, like Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, but somehow reserved and slightly guarded. The first time I met him, I assumed, because of his strong physical presence, that he would take control of the meeting, but in fact he said little. He only politely answered questions, never steering the discussion or even hinting at an initial mistrust, as most prisoners do. So, the afternoon of our third meeting in Camp Iguana was unique.
“Afghan men really believe that women should spend their lives comfortably. We love our mothers and wives,” Mujahid said. “They’re so delicate, and they need someone to protect and care for them. There’s nothing wrong with this. I just don’t think women should have to worry about feeding their families and making money.”
“What if they enjoy working, like we do?” Carolyn gently challenged him.
“There’s nothing wrong with a woman working, but being forced to . . .” Mujahid’s words trailed off, as if he were about to say that it would be like child labor.
Still, I thought to myself that an Afghan women’s movement would at least give girls the right to an education. And Mujahid agreed. Before his July 2003 arrest, he had been the police chief of Gardez, the same town from which Dr. Ali Shah hailed. When I visited Afghanistan, I met an official from the Ministry of Education who described Mujahid as a zealous supporter of girl’s schools. In fact, as soon as the Taliban were pushed out of Gardez, Mujahid had financed the construction of numerous schools for girls out of his personal savings, then spent time encouraging hesitant parents to enroll their daughters.
Mujahid was curious about how Americans perceived Muslims and Afghans and whether the young blond lawyer sitting before him had any prejudgments of her own.
“What did you think about Muslim men before you came here?” he asked Carolyn.
“Actually, the first Muslims I ever met were at Guantánamo Bay,” she told him, “and the experience has completely opened my eyes.”
He asked how.
“I was a little apprehensive before I came,” Carolyn told him. “I didn’t know what to expect. But every prisoner has treated me with dignity, respect, and kindness.”
Carolyn admitted that she had once lumped all Gitmo detainees together, as an indistinguishable mass of numbered Muslim men. While she felt that they deserved representation, she had come in with a headful of biases.
“I was afraid of being rejected as an American and as a woman,” she admitted.
Mujahid nodded. “The problem,” he said, “is that the Taliban’s short rule of Afghanistan has given all Afghan and Muslim men a horrible name. But the Taliban and what they did to our country does not offer a true picture of Afghanistan or of Afghan men. It was a terrible time for us, and anyone who had the money fled.”
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sp; “You’re right,” Carolyn said. “And as I got to know each prisoner here, one by one, they’ve chipped away at my biases. With every prisoner I met, I realized that each was a unique individual. Every man was as different from the next as any two people could be.”
She described how Abdullah Wazir Zadran, a good-looking twenty-eight-year-old Afghan shopkeeper from Khost, reminded her of her younger brother Jeff, who was the same age and had the same light brown eyes.
“Jeff is younger than I am, and we’re very close,” she said. “Seeing Zadran chained to the floor made me think of my brother and that it could have been him, thousands of miles from home, without access to his family, friends, or a fair hearing.”
The boyish-faced shopkeeper was Carolyn’s only client younger than her, as well as the only one who tried to boss her around. Sometimes, after some discussion of what was going on in Afghanistan or the legal issues in his case, Zadran would get a bored look on his tanned face and start telling Carolyn to do something, insisting that she bring him a book after lunch, for example. Even after she explained that books had to go through a clearance process, he would keep right on insisting.