My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  Hayat Ullah, one of Ullah’s brothers, insisted to Newsday that his family was not behind the arrests, even though he ac- knowledged that Abdul Rahim was a political rival. “We have many powerful rivals,” Hayat Ullah reportedly said. “If I were going to get ISI to pick up an enemy, why would I choose an ordinary person like him?”

  In an interview after his release, Badr said that his arrest had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or with terrorism but rather with his political opponents’ desire to shut him and his older brother up. They were columnists for several magazines and had been zealously pushing for the creation of a sovereign Pashtunistan, an autonomous state for ethnic Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. This angered Pakistani officials, who have been trying for years to subdue the Pashtun separatist movement.13

  Whatever the reasons for their arrest, the brothers were held in a filthy Peshawar jail for three months before being driven blindfolded and handcuffed to Peshawar’s International Airport and passed to American soldiers.14 “They chained our feet,” Badr said to James Rupert of Newsday. “Dogs were barking at us. They pulled a sack down over my head. It was very difficult to breathe . . . and I saw the flash of cameras. They were taking pictures of us.” They were dragged aboard a military plane, shackled down, and flown to Bagram Air Force Base and later to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.15

  Badr said his worst experiences were at these prisons, where he was forbidden to bathe,16 threatened by dogs, deprived of sleep, and photographed naked17; he also had his beard and eyebrows shaved and suffered various other indignities.18 He heard the moans of other prisoners as they were beaten and their holy book was desecrated. But he says that neither he nor his brother was tortured at Gitmo.19

  The brothers were flown to Guantánamo in May 2002.20 According to Badr, U.S. interrogators told them that Pakistani Intelligence alleged that they were al-Qaeda operatives, Taliban supporters, and a dangerous threat to former president Clinton.21

  Soon after their imprisonment, Badr and Abdul Rahim were separated. But Badr found a way to discover his older brother’s whereabouts. When they were first brought to Guantánamo Bay, everything was still under construction, and prisoners were kept in open-air cages or sometimes in makeshift tents. The prisoners were given plastic buckets to use for their bodily wastes. When the buckets were full, the guards selected detainees to clean and empty them. Badr was lonely and desperate to see his brother, so he volunteered for the chore. Making his way from tent to tent through the camp collecting buckets, he finally found his brother. Always the poet, Abdul Rahim greeted Badr with a bucket full of excrement and with poetry on his lips22:

  What kind of spring is this

  where there are no flowers

  and the air is filled

  with a miserable smell?23

  Badr was stunned that his brother was composing and reciting poetry at Guantánamo Bay. But gradually he began to cling to the words. It meant that his brother’s mind was still thriving, and it helped him persevere. Writing was difficult because detainees weren’t allowed paper or pens. Abdul Rahim improvised, using his fingernails to etch prose into Styrofoam cups.24 The better ones, he memorized. Later, he was able to use stationery provided by the Red Cross and even mail some of his poetry home.25 In three years at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim wrote more than twenty-five thousand verses in Pashto.26

  “Poetry was our support and psychological uplift,” Badr said in his post-release interview. “Many people have lost their minds. . . . I know forty or fifty prisoners who are mad. But we took refuge in our minds.”27

  After being separated for more than a year, the brothers were brought together and placed in adjacent cages. Their poetry soon became an underground sensation in the camp, as fellow prisoners passed the poems from cage to cage using a pulley system fashioned from prayer cap threads.28 Many of the prisoners memorized the catchy verses, whispering them to each other in Pashto or translating them into Arabic. The poems made them laugh; sometimes they captured all their torment in a few powerful lines and moved them to tears.29

  A favorite poem in the camp was about the androgynous appearance of the guards who patrolled the cell blocks. Badr said that he and the other prisoners couldn’t distinguish women from men. The poem poked fun at the women with men’s haircuts and the men without beards, all of them dressed in identical fatigues. The prisoners never saw long tresses on a woman or a rugged masculine face. The poem ends, “They may have weapons and missiles, but we can find no sign of manhood in this army.”30

  During their imprisonment, the brothers were both asked endlessly about Clinton. But they didn’t crumble mentally as many did. Instead, the interrogators found that the brothers, who were fluent in English, could communicate easily with the guards and were always cooperative. The two never resisted the questioning, even though they had to explain their joke over and over. As soon as one set of interrogators figured out the political humor, a new set came in and had to be convinced all over again.31

  When they finally convinced the prison authorities that they were not what the Pakistani ISI had claimed, they were given white prison jumpsuits and moved to the communal Camp 4, where prisoners could teach each other to read and write and to speak English, and where they had access to ample paper. The brothers spent their time writing, reading, and reflecting. Here’s a line from one of Abdul Rahim’s favorite poems:

  Bangle bracelets

  befit a pretty young woman

  Handcuffs befit

  a brave young man.32

  The brothers sent as many verses as they could home in letters. 33 Abdul Rahim’s eldest son neatly catalogued whatever made it past the censors in a black binder in the home library in Peshawar. The contents of the poetry varied with the brothers’ day-to-day emotions. In the beginning, it was filled with despair and hopelessness, but as time wore on, the poems grew stronger. Badr and Abdul Rahim wrote for each other as well, to keep their spirits up.34

  The Islamic holiday of Eid was particularly difficult. Eid is a time when parents and relatives give children gifts and money, and everyone wears their new Eid clothes. Badr wrote a poem from the perspective of a child who is separated from his father on Eid day.

  Eid has come,

  but my father has not.

  He has not come from Cuba.

  I am eating the bread of Eid with my tears.

  I have nothing.

  Why am I deprived of the love of my father?

  Why am I so oppressed?35

  When I spoke to Afghan prisoner Abdullah Wazir Zadran, I realized that this poem expressed many of the prisoners’ feelings of loss during the holiday. Unfortunately, at Guantánamo, the U.S. military seemed to go out of its way to torment the prisoners on Eid. Zadran told me and Rebecca Dick of Dechert’s Washington, D.C., office that the guards put up two posters all over the prison camp. One depicted “beautiful, happy, Muslim children” on Eid day. “They are laughing, wearing new clothes, and holding gifts and money,” he said. The second is of a group of young Muslim children wearing tattered, dirty clothing, crying, with no gifts or money. The caption reads, “These are your children on Eid Day.”

  The three-year nightmare came to an end in September 2004, when Badr Zaman was selected to be transferred to the custody of the Afghan government along with seventeen other Afghans. Soon after, in April 2005, his brother Abdul Rahim was also released, and the two were reunited in Peshawar.

  Badr Zaman with his children and nephews, whom he takes care of now. Courtesy of Badr Zaman.

  Yet, their release was not complete: the U.S. authorities had confiscated the bulk of their prison writings. Abdul Rahim felt that the loss of his writing was worse than the imprisonment. “Why did they give me a pen and paper if they were planning to do that?” he asked in an interview. “Each word was like a child to me—irreplaceable.”36

  In interviews, he pondered how he might recover his work. “I wrote from the core of my heart in Guantánamo Bay. In the outside world,
I could not have written such things,” he said in one interview.37 And in another, he commented, “If they give me back my writings, truly I will feel as though I was never imprisoned.”38

  In addition to the thousands of poems, books, and literary reflections, Badr is demanding monetary compensation for three years of lost wages. “If they don’t compensate us, then we might seek justice in court,” he said. “My business suffered because of my arrest, and my family suffered as well, having two members taken [to Cuba].”39 He also claimed that the Pakistani ISI had looted thousands of dollars’ worth of emeralds, rubies, and sapphires from the home where the brothers had conducted their gemstone-dealing business.40

  As he tried to readjust to freedom, Badr admitted that it was difficult to forget his captivity at Gitmo. As he went about his daily life, minute details of his detention often came to mind: the sounds of the chains rattling around his feet, the smell of the plastic waste buckets, the razor blade shaving his beard off, the sounds of solitude.

  The reunion with his older brother was comforting. They had reassured each other through the hardest moments of their lives together, and only his brother truly understood the suffering, he said. But their freedom was short-lived.

  The two brothers wrote a book about their experiences, a 450-page tell-all entitled The Broken Chains of Guantánamo, which blamed their arrest and detention on the corruption of the Pakistani ISI.

  Several former prisoners I talked to couldn’t understand why the brothers would run such a risk in the volatile political climate of Pakistan. Writing a book critical of the Pakistani secret police was playing with fire.

  Sure enough, shortly after their book was published in 2005, Abdul Rahim disappeared. It’s believed that he was taken away by the Pakistani secret police. His family, which has been pleading for his release, doesn’t know where he is or whether he’s still alive.

  Amnesty International issued an appeal to its 1.8 million members worldwide to lobby for the journalist’s immediate release. When I visited Afghanistan and Pakistan, I heard rumors that he had disappeared at the hands of the ISI. I made dozens of calls to Pakistani government and military officials, but invariably, my calls were mysteriously disconnected, or I was told to call back later. Or the Urdu speaker on the other end of the line suddenly became unable to understand my English.

  Frustrated, I got in touch with John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York, who explained why it was so hard to get information from the Pakistanis. His reasoning also explained why it had been similarly challenging to communicate with the Pentagon.

  “It’s hard to get information from governments for two simple reasons,” Sifton told me. “One, the system of detention and interrogation operated by Pakistan and the United States, for terrorism suspects, is illegal, and both governments know it; they are ashamed to have the details known to the larger public. Two, some innocent victims have been sucked into the system, making the abuses all the more inexcusable.”

  Sifton argued that the United States and Pakistan don’t play by the rules when it comes to detainees captured in Pakistan. “Detainees are arrested without warrants, held incommunicado, tortured, there are no extradition hearings, no publicity, no transparency whatsoever. The entire detention and interrogation practice jointly run by the United States and Pakistan exists outside the rule of law.”

  Badr now fears that he, too, will be arrested. He has given up not only his once brazen criticism of local politicians, but journalism altogether. For months, I tried to call him many times, but he keeps his mobile phone turned off and changes the number frequently. According to locals who have tried to help me locate him, Badr has abandoned his family home, moves frequently, and remains in hiding.

  Freedom has done what the Guantánamo prison failed to do: it has silenced the voices of Abdul Rahim and Badr Za-man. But somewhere in the recesses of Guantánamo, their voices still live in the thousands of verses scrawled on bits of Styrofoam, Red Cross paper, and prison stationery, an epitaph for all the innocent victims of politics.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SERIAL NUMBERS

  I have been to the prison camp more than three dozen times, and each time, I have been struck by the ordinariness of it all, as well as by the radical disconnect between the beauty of the surroundings and the grim reality they mask.

  I still remember my feelings of anxiety before the first trip and the stern, forbidding place I expected to find. Instead, I found sunshine and smiling young soldiers, boozy nighttime barbecues, and beaches that called to you for a late-night swim. I also found loss and tears.

  And, in a sense, I’ve found a new part of myself. The trips to Guantánamo have brought me closer to who I am, to my heritage and what it means to me. In that sense, the camp and the relationships I’ve forged there will always be a part of me.

  Over two years, I met nearly all the Afghans who had legal representation. And, under the supervision of Peter Ryan, I took on the representation of Hamidullah al-Razak, a charming middle-aged man and zealous supporter of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban democracy.

  The scores of prisoners I met are largely invisible to the world outside the camp. They’re nameless, faceless entities, cataloged and referred to by serial number as a way of dehumanizing them. A name makes a person—or even an animal—individual and unique. Serial numbers are for inanimate objects.

  The military didn’t go so far as to tattoo these numbers on the prisoners’ arms, but it had other ways of humiliating them. It’s well known, for instance, that soldiers at Gitmo shaved the beards of the Muslim prisoners to punish them for minor infractions. What stronger image does this evoke than of the Third Reich and the Nazis shaving the beards and heads of Jews? Eventually, the Jews were stripped of their names.

  It’s easy to mistreat something called No. 1154. It’s easy to shave its beard, to kick it around like an object, to spit on it, torture it, or make it cry. It’s harder to dole out such abuse when No. 1154 retains its identity: Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician who fled the Taliban, worked for the United Nations encouraging Afghans to participate and vote in the new democracy. It’s harder to hate No. 1154 when you realize that he’s more like you than he is different. His wife, an economist by profession, waits month after month, year after year for the news that her husband is coming home; his two sons and young daughter grow up without him.

  The numbers denied the humanity of those assigned them: No. 1009, No. 1103, No. 902, No. 0002, No. 1021, No. 693, No. 0004, No. 345, No. 560, No. 928, No. 953, No. 969, No. 713, No. 976, No. 1001, No. 914, No. 801, No. 848, No. 304, No. 1037, No. 1074, No. 702, No. 892, No. 1453, No. 0003, No. 10006, No. 1458, No. 0061, No. 753, No. 306, No. 1104, No. 371, No. 1094, No. 0639, No. 657, No. 907, No. 909, No. 849, No. 1101, No. 899, No. 1003, No. 701, No. 0062, No. 1022, No. 694, No. 1095, No. 1459, No. 954, No. 1010, No. 755, No. 745, No. 820, No. 10007 . . .

  It’s easy to skim over numbers. And there are hundreds like them.

  But at the prison camp, I listened to the numbered men tell their stories, and I quickly understood why the military had stripped them of their identities. Habeas lawyer Sabin Willett put it well. He represented Uighur prisoner No. 293, Adel Abdul-Hakim. Uighurs are ethnically Turkic Muslims who live in oil-rich northwestern China and have faced persecution from the Chinese government over their land for centuries. Abdul-Hakim was one of thirty-eight prisoners who the military admitted was not an enemy combatant but kept imprisoned nevertheless. Abdul-Hakim feared that if he were repatriated to China, he would be tortured or killed.1

  No. 293, Adel, with his niece. Courtesy of Sabin Willett.

  “The facelessness of the men at Guantánamo makes their abuse palatable,” Willett said to me via e-mail. “But if Adel actually turned up in the U.S., there would be pictures. His picture would be in the newspaper the next morning, and he’d be on Good Morning America the morning after that. And if Americans actually got a look at him, they’d be shocked. If they looked at him, if they heard him sp
eak, if they met him, they’d ask, ‘This is who we are holding down there? This guy? This is what our “war on terror” means? Adel?’ And they’d feel that old Abu Ghraib shame, all over again.”

  There were hundreds of men just like No. 293, Adel Abdul- Hakim, and No. 1154, Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi. Each serial number represented a man: a human being with a family, an individual who valued his freedom like any American and deserved a fair trial. These men were other individuals’ fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. They had wives, sisters, and daughters whose lives will never be the same.

  I listened to No. 1001, Hafizullah Shabaz Khail, protest that he was a university-educated pharmacist and a staunch supporter of Hamid Karzai’s ascendancy. I watched No. 0004, Abdul Haq, pace back and forth in a panicked frenzy, refusing to come out of his tiny cell. I saw No. 1021, Chaman Gul, crouch in his cage and weep for fear that his family would forget him, then I later watched him bury his face in a dozen roses as he worried about his aging mother. No. 560, Wali Mohammad, used humor to mask his pain. When No. 061, Murat Kurnaz of Germany, was told that German officials might be put off by his long, straggly red beard, he responded thoughtfully, “If they fear a long beard, then Santa Claus is an enemy combatant.”

  The first time I met my client, No. 1119, it was clear to me that he missed the company of women. “I am happy you are here,” he told me. “Even if they throw me in the ocean with a sweet lady like you, I would be happy.”