Guantánamo

  When Yee arrived at the camp, detainees were allowed out of their “cages” for a quarter hour, every three days. Allowed “out” meant having access to a small pen less than two hundred square feet, into which the guards sometimes tossed a soccer ball. Bathing opportunities were limited to the detainees’ day out. Religion was really all the prisoners had. And this is where Yee came in. The detainees were desperate to talk to him, and not just about religion, but about their innocence. Like Neely, it didn’t take long before Yee began to question the accusations against some of the detainees in particular. Take the case of Omar Khadr, for instance, the fifteen-year-old Canadian citizen Yee first encountered with “a Disney book” in his hand, provided him by the detainee library. In the face of skepticism about the detainees’ culpability, Guantánamo officials routinely point to an al Qaeda training manual known as the Manchester Document (found among the belongings of a terrorist cell in Manchester, England), which advises members, should they be detained by enemy governments, to make a claim of innocence. To Yee, the existence of the Manchester Document was inconclusive, to say the least. “Perhaps the act of steadfastly claiming innocence was a practiced al Qaeda strategy,” he remarked, “but it would also be the response of an innocent person. How were these prisoners to prove their innocence if the act of seeming innocent was deemed a measure of their guilt?”75

  Yee’s testimony suggests that the systemic abuse Brandon Neely reported early on at Camp X-Ray overlapped with the initiation of the systematic torture of al-Qahtani and other Guantánamo detainees. With scarcely any degree of agency left to confirm their humanity, some of the detainees hurled insults at the guards (along with water, spit, urine, and feces). By the time Yee arrived, standard operating procedures enacted by the military dictated that guards not retaliate precipitously to detainee abuse. The SOPs were rarely followed. “General Miller had a saying that he’d often recite to guards when visiting Camp Delta,” Yee recalled, “or whenever seeing troopers around the base. ‘The fight is on!’” Miller would holler out—“a subtle way of saying that rules regarding the treatment of detainees were relaxed and infractions were easily overlooked.” Just as he intended, Miller’s remarks “pumped up” the guards, and many headed off to work “looking for trouble.”

  Cruelty took many forms at Guantánamo. As Immediate Response Force beatings mounted over the course of the first six months, Yee made a point of visiting the detainee hospital. In one wing of the hospital not frequented by politicians and the press, Yee witnessed the force-feeding of a hunger striker reduced to eighty pounds. As one male nurse restrained the detainee, “another globbed petroleum jelly up his nose.” The detainee’s “screams could be heard throughout the hospital.” On another visit to the hospital, the detainee engaged Yee. “Why am I here, Chaplain? This is no use. I’ve told them everything, and they keep asking the same questions. What more do they want?”76

  Over the ensuing months, Yee’s relationship to the MPs, never warm, deteriorated. He recognized that their job was very difficult and their preparation (like his own) inadequate.77 But he also found it impossible to conceal his disapproval of the harassment to which the detainees were constantly subjected by the guards. His disapproval of the guards, in turn, was met by growing suspicion that he was on the wrong side. MPs began to follow him around the blocks, in violation of SOPs and despite his outranking them.78

  Most of Yee’s colleagues at Guantánamo were strikingly ignorant of Islam and disdainful of the elements they knew. MPs used this ignorance to their advantage, and seemed to delight in offending the detainees’ beliefs. One thing both the guards and the intelligence staff knew well, however, was the strictures in Islam against inappropriate contact with women. These the U.S. military studiously exploited. “Female guards were often used to provoke the detainees,” Yee noted. “Knowing that physical contact between unrelated men and women is not allowed under Islamic law, the female MPs would be exceptionally inappropriate in how they patted down the prisoners and how they touched them on the way to the showers or recreation.”

  Australian detainee David Hicks reported that he was offered prostitutes in exchange for intelligence. Yee couldn’t confirm the presence of prostitutes at Camp Delta, but fellow interpreters described female interrogators disrobing during questioning of detainees. “One was particularly notorious and would pretend to masturbate in front of detainees. She was also known to touch them in a sexual way and make them rub her breasts and genitalia,” while guards stood behind the prisoners, forcing them to watch. “Detainees who refused were kicked and beaten.” U.S. officials’ abuse of religion itself was no less pornographic. One detainee described to Yee a ritual in which “prisoners were forced to sit in the center of a satanic circle drawn on the floor of an interrogation room. Lit candles outlined the circle and the prisoners were ordered to bow down and prostrate” themselves in the center. Then “interrogators shouted at the detainees, ‘Satan is your God, not Allah! Repeat that after me!’”

  In the several investigations the U.S. military has conducted of itself at Guantánamo Bay, it has conceded an incident or two in which a Qur’an was accidentally mistreated, after which rioting ensued. Yee testifies that the mistreatment of Qur’ans was a regular feature at Camp Delta. One particularly egregious incident set off a mass suicide attempt. Continued mistreatment of the Qur’an prompted the detainees themselves to propose a solution: we’ll surrender our Qur’ans to you, so long as you cease abusing them. Not allowed; every cell must have a Qur’an. New SOPs authored by Yee specifically to end the abuse did little. Guards warned not to touch the Qur’ans themselves delighted in knocking the Qur’an stands to the ground.79

  Yee’s Sisyphean task to help the U.S. military distinguish between Muslim beliefs, on the one hand, and acts carried out by a few Muslim criminals, on the other, is perhaps best symbolized by an incident in which a staff member in the local chaplain’s office approached him concerning an article about to come out in the next JTF newsletter. Produced by an outfit called the Servants of the Persecuted Church, the article told the story of an “Egyptian Muslim” named “Mohammed Farouk.” Now, Farouk “hated Christmas,” and “in an attempt to obey the Koran and please Allah,” he and some friends “began to assault and harass Christians in their village.” The group then “broke into Christian businesses, robbing, and vandalizing them,” and so on. When Yee took this to the head chaplain, noting its violation of army regulations prohibiting religious intolerance, the chaplain agreed to withhold the news-letter’s distribution, but only after checking first if indeed the Qur’an ordered the murder of all Christians.80

  Yee’s account of life at Guantánamo is corroborated by the linguist Erik Saar. An Arab-speaking sergeant in the U.S. Army, Saar was a graduate of the Defense Language Institute assigned to Guantánamo in December 2002 to assist the intelligence operation. Like Yee, Saar found himself underprepared for the assignment he’d been given, and surrounded by colleagues no more adequately prepared.81 Like Yee, Saar found his first encounter with the MPs inauspicious, and his impression of MP treatment of detainees grew worse over time.82 “The MPs just thought the detainees were treated too well,” Saar remarked; “they were terrorists, responsible for 9/11, and their lives should be miserable.” 83 In general, Saar found the MPs hostile to interrogators and linguists alike. Where the first were “screwing up the mission,” ostensibly by constraining the punishments MPs could inflict on detainees, the linguists earned the MPs’ undying enmity for talking to detainees. “What the fuck is wrong with you,” Saar was asked; “are you one of them detainee lovers?”84

  In many instances MPs were simply instituting the will of their commanders. “Always remember,” Saar heard one lieutenant colonel tell his charges, “you guys should feel privileged to be here guarding this scum. These men are the worst of the worst. This place is reserved for those terrorists who either helped 9/11 or were planning future attacks against us when they were apprehended.”85 One didn’t have to be a
Muslim to worry about detainees who returned from interrogations with “a defeated look,” their “head held low,” their “eyes lifeless.” After particularly “tough interrogations,” some simply “huddled in a fetal position in the corner of their cells, staring off into space or even quietly crying.”86

  Saar, too, had a keen eye for the absurdity of detainee operations. After the suicide attempts, the camp assigned a “psych tech” to keep an eye on disconsolate detainees. “Do you feel hopeless?” one technician asked a detainee before moving on. “Seemed to me,” Saar observed, “that asking these men if they were feeling hopeless was a little absurd, given their situation.” Wasn’t that exactly what interrogators “wanted them to feel? It was a little ridiculous that the psych team was trying to conduct damage control for everything the interrogators were trying to do, and I found that, in fact, there were certain detainees the psych techs didn’t see because the interrogators wanted those guys depressed and dejected.”87

  No less absurd was the spectacle of forced inoculations. Unsurprisingly, detainees were hesitant to accept shots and medicine from U.S. personnel. “They think we’re going to kill them,” Saar explained to a psych tech sent to oversee one particular operation. After witnessing an IRF team brutalize an intransigent detainee, Saar remarked to himself, “There was something nonsensical about all this, of course. American soldiers on a tropical island brutally suppressing a man captured in the Global War on Terror—all for the sake of protecting him from the flu.”88

  As Saar became increasingly alarmed by the abuse he witnessed at Camp Delta, he found himself hoping that at least it was paying off. Running into a fellow linguist assigned to the interrogation group, Saar allowed that he hoped that this was all leading to a rich harvest of intelligence. “Maybe in the interrogations I’m not in,” came the response.89 Saar would get a chance to see the interrogation operation himself soon enough. Transferred from the Detainee Operations Group to the Detainee Intelligence Group, he immediately became aware of turf wars between military intelligence and the FBI. He overheard one military interrogator, grown tired of watching for weeks as an FBI agent deployed conventional rapport-building techniques with a detainee, remark, “Those goddamn agents sit in chairs across the table and talk to the guy all night like they were chatting with their best friend.” One of the agents was actually growing a beard to demonstrate empathy with a detainee. “When are we going to get our hands on that bastard, sir?” the military intelligence official asked his boss.90

  One of the first things Saar noticed upon transferring to the intelligence-gathering group was the marked discrepancy in training between the FBI officials, often with years of experience, and the military intelligence officials, often inexperienced and inadequately trained. Inscrutably, General Miller claimed the advantage in this contest went to the inexperienced. In “this testing lab in the global war on terror,” Miller told journalists, “intelligence is a young person’s game.”91

  The more Saar learned of the intelligence harvesting, the less the whole Guantánamo operation made sense to him. As commanders continued to insist that Guantánamo was yielding first-rate evidence that was saving people’s lives, the whole detention operation came to seem like “a Potemkin village”—those “elaborate fake towns the eighteenth-century Russian field marshal rushed to build when Catherine the Great toured her empire.” The military regularly carried out fake interrogations for visiting VIPs. “A façade would go up, like a set in an old movie. We’d put on quite a show—the camp’s leadership had these events down to a science.” In the days approaching an important visit, Saar recalled, the intelligence group would receive the itinerary and set to work. “My commanders staged the production carefully,” Saar wrote. “A flurry of emails went back and forth among the JIG [Joint Intelligence Group] staff members about which detainee to schedule for these observations and what to ask him.” Choosing a cooperative detainee, the interrogator “would simply go back over the material covered with him previously. A foolproof recipe for faux interrogations and the VIPs were none the wiser.”92 Politicians as well as investigative teams regularly returned from Guantánamo touting the treatment of detainees, especially the food and medical care, and downplaying the overwhelming evidence of torture and abuse.93

  The deception of those outside Guantánamo Bay was matched by internal indirection. In February 2003 the intelligence community at Guantánamo Bay was summoned to a meeting presided over by a JAG lawyer whose job it was to update the staff on the detainees’ status vis-à-vis the Geneva Conventions. The meeting had a peculiar feel, Saar remembered. The previous year, President Bush had vowed to abide by the Geneva protocols, where appropriate and consistent with military necessity, despite the fact that neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban qualified for Geneva protections. This, apparently, was changing. While offering nothing new, the visiting JAG officer took pains to review the administration’s rationale. “This meeting was an explainer, and the military doesn’t do explainers,” Saar thought at the time. The administration “clearly felt” the issue “dicey enough that they had to stoop to providing us with some reasons, such as they were.” Reasons for what? The closest the head of the Guantánamo intelligence operation would come to saying it outright was this: “We still intend to treat the detainees humanely, but our purpose is to get any actionable intelligence we can, and quickly.”94

  In the ensuing weeks and months, the interrogations at Guantánamo grew rougher. Upon first transferring from the Operations to the intelligence group, Saar heard news of the techniques loosed on al-Qahtani. The problem with these new techniques, he recognized, was that “nobody had any experience with them. In the army you’re trained for every event. No detail is too minor. Training, in fact, is all the army does when it isn’t actually at war.” Having long relied on the guidelines of the Army Field Manual, army interrogators were now being asked to disregard not only its rules but also its overarching philosophy: “Torture doesn’t work, and in fact produces less reliable information because it has a tendency to induce victims to lie. Interrogators were taught that if they were skilled, they could get all the information they needed without going too far.”95

  The interrogations Saar participated in as a linguist confirmed the wisdom of the Army Field Manual. The premise behind the move to enhanced interrogation techniques was that conventional interrogation took time, and that the United States did not have the luxury of time in the war on terror. Violence does not speed up the harvest of intelligence, Saar suggests. On the contrary, it brings interrogation to a standstill. Saar contrasted an interrogation he witnessed by a CIA agent, who studiously “built a bridge” to a detainee, ending an interrogation session after two hours and promising to return and continue the session the next week, to that of a Defense Department interrogator, who relied on stress positions and uncomfortably cool room temperatures to soften up a detainee in advance of the interrogation. Where the CIA agent began her session by remarking, “I understand you speak some Spanish. Do you want me to talk to you in Spanish or would you rather we use Arabic?” her Defense Department colleague opened his interrogation with a curt “Are you going to cooperate with me tonight?” The outcome of the Defense Department interrogation seems preordained. As the detainee sat mutely, the interrogator became more and more frustrated and irate, before finally calling “the detainee a liar and every obscenity in the book.”96

  By April 2003, Saar was hearing more and more interrogators talking about “turning up the heat” on detainees. The expression had sexual as well as purely violent overtones, and Saar was present at a notable incident of sexual humiliation. One evening, a female army interrogator asked Saar to take the place of a Muslim colleague who she didn’t think “would enjoy taking part in this one.” The detainee they would be interrogating was “a piece of shit,” Saar was told, and they “might have to turn things up a bit.” The detainee in question was suspected of taking flight lessons, and had stopped cooperating with other intelligence agents
. “I’m starting to take shit from above because he’s not talking,” the interrogator told Saar. “We need to try something new tonight.”

  The key to breaking this detainee, the agent concluded, was to alienate him from his Muslim religion, by which he seemed to be maintaining his strength. “We’ve gotta find a way to break that, and I’m thinking that humiliation may be the way to go. I just need to make him feel that he absolutely must cooperate with me and has no other options. I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can’t go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and God.”

  When Saar arrived in the interrogation room, he found the detainee “short chained” by ankles and wrists to a metal ring on the floor, leaving him hunched over in an awkward position. Short-chaining may have been just the thing for a conventional roughing-up, but that is not what Saar’s colleague had in mind on this night. She ordered the guards to seat the detainee in a chair, which would put his head about level with her waist. Then she began a striptease. “To my surprise,” Saar wrote, “she started to unbutton her top slowly, teasingly, almost like a stripper, revealing a skin-tight brown army T-shirt stretching over her chest.” Taunting him throughout, she circled behind him, “rubbing her breasts against his back.” The taunting continued: “Do you like these big American tits, Fareek? I can see you are starting to get hard. How do you think Allah feels about this?” Sitting in front of him, the interrogator grabbed her breasts and asked him, “Don’t you like big tits?” prompting him to look away. The script practically writes itself. “Are you gay?” she asked him when he averted his eyes.

  Predictably, when this treatment did not induce the detainee to talk, the interrogator turned up the heat still more. The way to make a Muslim man feel too dirty to appeal to God, a Muslim colleague had informed her, was to touch him with what appeared to be menstrual blood. Braced by this suggestion, the interrogator returned to the room, repeated her banter with the detainee, then stood up, unbuttoned her pants, and informed him that she was having her period. She then circled behind him, touching him as if with menstrual blood. Returning to face him head-on, she removed her hands from her pants, revealing what looked like real blood on them, and wiped them on his cheek. “Who told you to learn to fly, Fareek? You fuck.” At this point, the detainee screamed, spat, lunged, and struggled vainly to extricate himself from the chair. Summoned to the room, the MPs shackled the detainee to the floor, where he lay crying “like a baby, sobbing and mumbling in Arabic too distinct for me to understand,” Saar remembered. “The only thing I picked out was, ‘You American whore.’”97