Sami Alhaj is a journalist.

As a journalist, Sami always knew that he would be exposing himself to danger as he worked to deliver truth to his viewers, as journalism is one of the most dangerous occupations around the world today.

But for over six years, Sami found himself a symbol of all that is wrong with the US “war on terror” and the camp of horrors they set up to support it.

Sami was arrested by Pakistani authorities on false charges in early 2001, then transferred to US custody. He spent over six years in the American prison camp in Guantánamo, Cuba, before he was finally released and charges dropped.

This is Sami’s story, told in his own words, in an act of generosity as he shares his pain with us. The story is told at his own pace, as the memories of those years in Guantánamo came flooding back to him after he returned to Al Jazeera in Doha.

“To have a brilliant and courageous journalist for a client in Guantánamo Bay was all I could have wished for. Sami’s work from inside the belly of the beast, revealing dark truths the US military would rather have kept well hidden, and contributed more to a true understanding of that dreadful place than anything else in the last 15 years. It is well past time that his story should be told at full length.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Sami’s lawyer

1 Some years ago, a female US soldier who guarded us at Guantánamo got in touch with me.

This is what she said: "You can inform the brothers that their strength has inspired me to accept Islam. May Allah protect you and guide you along the righteous path."

2 PREFACE

By the time I started writing this book, I was no stranger to sitting alone with my thoughts … I had spent countless hours doing just that in my cell in Guantánamo.

What I didn’t know during my six years of incarceration was that I wasn’t alone; my employers, Al Jazeera, were bringing up my name and my trial on a daily basis. They broadcast a message that resonated around the world: “Release Sami Alhaj.” My name scrolled across the channel’s TV news ticker, engaging viewers with my plight.

I am truly grateful to, and proud of, this organisation, which treated me like a son throughout my trial and brought my case to the world’s attention. They spurred on institutions and NGOs working on human rights issues in all four corners of the earth. They turned news coverage into an international onslaught.

There are some I would like to thank by name. First and foremost is my wife, Umm Mohammad, who worked tirelessly for my release and always believed I would return to my family.

At Al Jazeera, I would like to thank Wadah Khanfar, former director general of the organisation, who was waiting for me when I arrived in Khartoum airport after my release, having cancelled all commitments to be there. I’d like to thank Dr Fawzi O Sediq who coordinated with Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other civil society organisations. In Sudan, Dr Hassan Saeed al-Mujammar from the Civil Aid Organisation was tireless in his support and advocacy.

3 The International Office of Humanitarian and Charitable Organisations (IOHCO) in France also advocated on my behalf, Dr Haytham and Anna, who visited Guantánamo herself and made sure the administration there pulled my file back out of oblivion.

Alkarama, a human rights organisation in Switzerland, also advocated on my behalf, particularly Dr Rachid Mesli, the legal director. In Kuwait, Dr Adel Jassim al-Damakhi, head of the Kuwaiti Association for the Basic Elements of Human Rights at the time, campaigned on my behalf. Thanks are also due to Khalid al-Anasi, executive director for the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD) in Yemen, and Asim Qureshi, head of CAGE in London.

I also want to thank Al Jazeera’s lawyers, the Sudanese Lawyers Union and the human rights NGOs who worked tirelessly to free me. Also, I’d like to thank those who massed in a silent rally in front of the American embassy in Khartoum for believing in me and my innocence. To the Sudanese activists, parliamentarians, organisations, the Worldwide Body for Development in the South, the Khartoum Centre for Human Rights and Environmental Development, the Sudanese Observatory for Human Rights, the Hope Centre, and the Development Initiatives for Women and Children organisation, to all of you, thank you.

Everyone who stood by my side buoyed my faith in humanity and justice, and in the work I was doing as a journalist, work I had always been reverent of. I am indebted to all who worked on my behalf and believed in the justice of my cause.

With every beat of my heart, streams of gratitude flow towards Al Jazeera, who remained a compassionate and persistently approachable father. My gratitude extends to the organisations that took up the work of the mother,

4 and to all who worked on my behalf around the world and have become my brothers and sisters.

To you all, I dedicate my memoirs, an attempt to put down in words what I went through during six years in the world’s most inhumane prison camp. Taken without cause and held with no justification, I remained there, bewildered and in agony until my jailers saw fit to release me. Forgive my jumble of memories, thoughts and emotions as I tried to unburden myself to you and describe the depths of depravity and humiliation in which we were mired.

Through the telling of this story, I have gained insight, peace and strength, releasing the turbulence in my soul as the words poured out on paper. Now, I am at peace, stronger than I was before, more tolerant, more a friend and companion in the silence of this gentle Arabian night in the city that I love: Doha.

5 THE NIGHT BIRD

I sit alone in the darkness of night, listening to the sound of my breath and the beating of my heart, a soft breeze bearing light warmth towards me. The shushing waves of the nearby Arabian Gulf reach my ears as I recall the strongholds of a different gulf, a strange gulf.

A night bird lands near me, singing faintly, as if beseeching an absent mate. I can’t tell what kind of bird it is and try to make out its body in the night, but the sadness of its song sweeps me back into my thoughts; to an hour and place very much unlike this.

Guantánamo. Guantánamo is my story; I am prisoner number 345.

Guantánamo is my story and the story of over 800 prisoners. Most of us survived our time there, in some ways our experience was similar, and in other ways, it was very different. I remember days of pain and torture at the hands of hard-hearted, stone-faced men and women. They robbed me of the best days, months and years of my life without the least remorse.

But, I defeated them. I defeated them with my resolve, taken from Allah Himself, who is with us wherever we are, in the darkest of nights and longest of days. He is the Lord who inspired me to bear my suffering, till the demands of my body withdrew under the reins of my spirit.

A powerful emotion filled me, that steadfastness of mind and self, showed me that inside each of us is massive strength that lies dormant until needed, then ignites and rages, devouring all inhibitions and eliminating every challenging wind. This spark was triggered the day I began my journey into bodily hunger and spiritual fullness. I thought deeply before putting my life on the line, then I decided.

6 I would go on hunger strike. I would protest my unfair imprisonment and make my strength, grown from the calm Allah had put in my heart, known to my cruel jailers,.

In those dark days, I called on the example set by the heroes of Islam. Bilal ibn Rabah who endured the boulder rolled onto his chest in the desert of Mecca. I could see him in my mind, lying under the boulder, defiantly repeating his faith in Allah: “The One! The One!”

I saw Mus’ab ibn Umayr, holding the flag in his left hand after they cut off his right, then with his upper arm after they cut off his left hand. I recalled the heroism of Khalid ibn al-Walid whose body was so covered in cuts and wounds from swords and arrows that there wasn’t an inch of clear skin. I saw them in my mind’s eye, and I held on to them for strength.

Don’t depart, my mind.

As I sit in the Doha night, I remember the barbed wire, the clatter of weapons, dogs howling, the blood red of our clothes. Sounds of pain resonate in my ears, the pain of that place.

The place where my gaolers put me in solitary confinement, stripping me bare and throwing me into a cramped, freezing cell. I recall how, on that day when I was thrown into solitary, as I sat there shaking and trembling, I heard a voice from the cell on my right, entreating in a tone filled with endurance: “The One! The One!”

In a few moments, the voice of another prisoner came from the cell to my left: “Sami! Make Bilal on your right shut up so that I can deal with the cold.” And I smiled. In spite of everything, I smiled!

In the words of Ernest Hemingway: “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”

7 GUANTÁNAMO, ISLAND OF TORMENT

The night bird stays perched on the window sill, singing the beauty of the Arabian night.

A tender palm touches me, and a kind voice asks: “Sami. Why are you sitting here, awake? Is anything the matter?” My wife, whom the torturers had robbed me of for all those years.

“It’s nothing,” I say, “I’m happy to be at home with my family, and I’m trying to recall what happened during those terrible days which passed with the support of Allah.”

“Hmmm … but I don’t see you writing yet. God has granted you the strength to remember those difficult days, so it’s up to you to make a record of every moment.”

“You’re completely right, my dear wife.”

She leaves and returns with paper and pens, sets them down and sits beside me. I begin to write, and after a few minutes she gets up and leaves the room …

Dear reader, have you experienced lying naked, restrained, against the roughness of the solid floor?

Have you tried sleep deprivation night after night?

The hours of your day become a continuous nightmare in which the visible and invisible become ghosts, bringing forth more ghosts. Until madness becomes the only sanctuary.

8 Many of us in Guantánamo lost their minds, suffering a break with reality that perhaps was their only way out of the constant torment; in fact, I am surprised that my mind did not choose the sweet oblivion that madness offered.

For men like us, from strong, traditional societies where dignity and honour were prized above all, Guantánamo destroyed everything. Proud men who led their families, fathers who sheltered and guided their children, or young men who were just on the path to becoming the pride of their families, all of them were ground under the merciless wheels of Guantánamo, the never-ending humiliation and “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

At one point during my time in Guantánamo, my lawyer gave me case papers to read and I found among them an interesting report about a US military programme, “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”, created to train soldiers on what to do if they were captured by enemies. It introduced military personnel into the torments the authors feared soldiers may face if they were captured by enemy forces, and to me, it sounded very close to home.

One of the tortures trainees were taught to “resist” was the abuse of religion and religious icons by enemy forces to destabilise the “prisoners”. Trainers would torture the trainees by defacing the Bible and shouting curses like: “Curse your God and Jesus, they are useless!”.

Instructors would also storm into the cells and kick over food trays, shouting and flashing lights to frighten the trainees. The same things were being done to us, but in our case, we weren’t lucky enough to have a hot shower and a big meal with colleagues so we could laugh about our “training” when it was done. No, Guantánamo was our reality, even if the methods used on us were straight from the pages of a training manual for a fantasy camp.

I can recall two feelings from my time in Guantánamo: complete isolation in my pain, and the bitter cold. My jailers would turn the air conditioning in my

9 cell to its highest setting and the temperature would drop to what felt below freezing. I would shiver, naked but for a light pair of shorts. For me, raised in the heat of Sudan, the cold was true torture.

I set my mind to remembering Bilal and those men of history, which infused my spirit with tremendous energy. I felt an ease in my limbs, giving me - as God is my witness - a sense of warmth flowing into every cell in my body. I am not exaggerating when I say that, by the grace of Allah, the cell was sometimes filled with warmth for ten or fifteen minutes.

If I could say only one thing, it would be what British historian Arnold Toynbee said, that a human being is a being you cannot conquer. But I would add that whoever’s heart is filled with faith will be able to bear whatever is thrown at him.

The guards added to the cruelty of Guantánamo; they maliciously worked to keep us terrorised day and night. They would storm our cells in riot squads, seven soldiers in protective gear, never with any cause. They would beat us mercilessly, almost happily, in any event. Even more so, if they were trying to scare those of us who were demanding justice into on our abandoning our solid resolve.

An eighth member of the squad would come in with a tear-gas canister; we called him the pepper man. He would approach me, speaking calmly at first, then suddenly bring the canister to my face and spray it. When I closed my eyes or turned away from the pain, the seven others would grab my arms and legs and plunge my face into the toilet bowl. Then, they would beat me again. Strangely, it seemed to be out of fear; all seven armed men, they seemed to fear me. But the reason they beat me doesn’t matter, only the fear, pain and damage they left behind.

10 Another of their weapons may not seem that harsh, but imagine the debilitating anguish that builds in your soul when you are no longer able to clean your body. Dirt gathered on our bodies and destroyed our humanity as they cut off water to break our spirits. Bodily cleanliness became a luxury, and soon our spirits wallowed in filth. We were disgusted at our dirt and griminess, separated from our dignity.

During my hunger strike, I often returned to my cell after force-feeding covered in vomit caused by the feeding tube. To humiliate me, the soldiers would turn off the water in my cell so I couldn’t wash my vomit- and dirt- stained shorts. For a long time, I wore just those shorts, caked in filth as they were, they were the only thing between me and freezing in my cell.

If I had to choose though, the sense of isolation was possibly harsher that the physical and mental degradation of our spirits and dignity. Even worse than the sexual violence of their purported “searches” of our persons. Prevented by my jailers from communicating with my family at all at first, I came close to madness as worry and longing ate away at me.

In Guantánamo, the world knew there were soldiers carrying out torture and officers ordering them to. Many worked tirelessly to bring these soldiers and officers to face justice for their crimes, to bear responsibility for what they have done. A British journalist who visited Guantánamo said: “This place is truly hell.”

And it was. It was a hell where the flames of hatred raged, moulded over ugly human faces, where the snarling heads of dogs guarded us day and night and where mistreatment became as normal as the constant humiliation. We were transported like animals, in chains, to be thrown into metal cells with concrete floors in the most notorious American prison camp, to foreseeable futures of humiliation and torture.

11 Guantánamo is a 116.55sq-km US naval base on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Some accounts say the US won the base as spoils of war when American forces beat the Spanish - who had colonised Cuba - in 1898. Others Cuba gave Guantánamo to the US in 1903 as a gesture of gratitude for American support during their resistance against the Spanish. The annual rent was two thousand pieces of gold, at that time amounting to a sum of $4,085.

After the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro repeatedly asked the Americans to leave the island, refusing to accept “rent money” for it. The Americans refused Castro’s request, citing the previous agreement, and it remained a main point of contention between the two countries.

The US administration made Guantánamo a dirty, secret place for those they detained as “terrorists”. A high-ranking official in the Pentagon who had worked with former-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld disclosed: “Legal advice had come that we could do what we wanted with them there ... outside the legal authority of any court.”

President Bush confirmed this when he issued a National Security Presidential Directive in November 2001, announcing that “al-Qaeda terrorists” would be judged by special military commissions not subject to restrictions imposed by civil courts. He also confirmed that they would be treated as unlawful combatants, not prisoners of war, removing them from the protection of the 1949 Geneva Convention that covered the rights of prisoners of war. And thus, we were stripped of the protections offered by US law to prisoners in American prisons, and of the weak protections offered by international law.

The US administration's decision to consider the detainees enemy combatants surprised Americans as well, disregarding as it did US and international laws. Colin Powell argued to the administration that this was a violation of America’s policy for more than a century, that it would undermine the protections American soldiers enjoyed under international laws of war and

12 lead to weakened European support for America. The administration paid no heed, he was a lone voice speaking against a coalition determined to violate human rights.

Determined to do it, and equally determined to cover it up; preferring to window dress Guantánamo, the president told the media: “As a political matter, the armed forces of the United States will treat prisoners humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.”

I was moved around a lot during my time in Guantánamo, so while I didn’t stay in all the camps or cell blocks, I saw enough to tell you they were all built along the same lines. The logic behind its architecture was cleverly utilised by our captors to keep prisoners apart, keep them under control, and to punish or reward them for how well they behaved.

There were six main camps, which were numbered, in addition to two smaller camps, Camp Echo and the infamous Camp X-ray, which was later transformed into Camp Delta. Camp X-ray was where they held the prisoners they considered high risk, while Camp Echo was where we could meet with our lawyers. In addition, there was a cluster of shipping containers that had been retrofitted to contain 48 cells.

Camp 4 was the nicest; the administration used it to hold prisoners who were about to be released. There were eight prisoners to a cell, moving around freely, unbound. They could eat and pray together, and shower and clean themselves in a dignified manner. They even had entertainment; I think they had a football and a ping-pong table. It had four long blocks arranged around a courtyard instead of a thick cluster of blocks like other camps.

Camp 1 contained eight cell blocks: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo (Echo block, not to be confused with Camp Echo that had other uses), Golf, Hotel

13 and the infamous India. India block was where punishments happened, including isolation. It was made up of open cells, about one-by-two metres square, divided only by steel columns. The cells held a metal washbasin and cot, with a small hole between them for us to relieve ourselves.

Camp 2 was only about one hundred metres away, with blocks: Kilo, Lima, Mike, November and Oscar. Camp 3 included: Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra and Tango. When I first arrived, I was placed in cell 40 in Lima block.

The cells had no furniture, everything was replaced each month. There was a styrofoam cup, bottle, mattress and a simple plastic mat that we used for prayer and to cover ourselves when we used the toilet. This was the standard issue that they gave us when we arrived, as well as a sheet, blankets and towels.

Soon, we were introduced to their system of levels, however, that they used to reward or punish our behavior. Those at the highest level, level 1, could keep all their things, but those who misbehaved were put on lower levels and started losing things. Soon these basic items turned into privileges that only the obedient could keep.

At level 2, they took our mattresses and water bottles, at level 3, they took the mattress, bottle, cup and one of the blankets. On level 4, they left only a blanket and the plastic mat - even the toothbrush, toothpaste and soap were gone. Still not satisfied, they added a new level where a prisoner could lose everything in his cell, keeping only the clothes he wore.

The levels became a way of classifying prisoners by the interrogators. They applied the levels depending on how happy they were with you, the level of cooperation you offered.

The harshest punishment was when they sent a prisoner to “isolation” in a solitary confinement cell. The cells were painted completely black with air

14 conditioning blasting and bright lights on around the clock. Prisoners who sent there would have their heads, beards and moustaches shaved completely, and everything they had been issued would be taken away.

The soldiers worked diligently to maintain our fear, and we knew they hoped for promotion, but promotion to what? To higher sadism than this, which came close to murder already?

The principal architects of the physical and mental torture we lived through in Guantánamo though were the doctors, who excelled at devising new ways to inflict cruelty and pain.

They actually told us: “We will torture you until death. But we won’t let you die. You will live in the space between life and death.”

These were doctors who served pain, not healing, in spite of their Hippocratic Oath. To think of the years of preparation, the support from their families, until they were qualified, only to become part of this ugliness. They relished coming up with new ways to inflict pain. Expired or “misprescribed” medicines, such as ear drops for eyes, were almost the norm.

There were three categories of medical pain that we had to survive (although not all of us did survive).

First, there were the “medical mistakes”, an ugly, common phrase heard far too often in Guantánamo. I read once that there are 150,000 medical mistakes in the US each year, despite technological advancements and the American fear of lawsuits. So you can only imagine what it was like in the hospitals of Guantánamo, with no checks or repercussions and evil manifest in its ugliest form.

Brother Abd al-Rahman al-Masri’s leg was amputated so gruesomely that it would have been better if he had done it himself. Instead of leaving 15cm of

15 the leg intact under the knee, as they could have, they left only five. In fact, they removed flesh so zealously that the bone was left painfully exposed. The wound would tear open whenever it touched clothing or restraints or the floor of his room. The pain nearly destroyed him.

Second, there were the failed operations, which they intended to fail. This happened to Brother Ansar al-Pakistani, who had been the strongest of men, straight-backed with a commanding gait. He had so many “failed operations” performed on him that he was left almost totally paralysed, only a shell of who he had been.

Third, there were the frivolous operations, inflicted either as punishment for protest leaders, or to train new medical personnel. Amran al-Ta’ifi had twenty surgical procedures performed on him to make it more difficult for him to lead protests. These random operations were usually scheduled and performed abruptly, even though the Americans claimed they were “ordinary surgical procedures”.

They also enjoyed forbidding medicines. As per Guantánamo’s rules, an interrogator could prevent detainees from receiving medicine until they divulged information he wanted. He could order the hospital not to treat a detainee, no matter how ill. Detainees would be crying out in pain, begging for treatment, and the doctor would reply: “Ask the interrogator for your treatment!”

This happened to Brother Ali al-Wa’ili, who had excruciating pain in both ears. I ask you, dear reader, to imagine the pain. I saw him writhing, unable to sit still from the pain. The soldiers only said: “Ask the interrogator.”

It’s hard to tell if leaving the prisoners untreated was crueller than the next trick they relished: coercing prisoners into addiction. They did this in two ways:

16 1.Giving narcotics to the sick until they became addicted, then stopping, turning it into a torturous method of exerting pressure. They did that to anyone they wanted information from. I saw one addicted prisoner, spinning maniacally around his cell, unable to stop until they gave him pills. Of course, he told them what he knew, and whatever else they wanted.

2.Forcibly injecting sedatives to the most zealous prisoners, to stop them from protesting and leading the prisoners. One prisoner they did this to spent six months out of his mind, unable to distinguish night from day or to recognise anyone. He stayed in his cell, madness eating at his mind and body.

It is a great testament to many Brothers that they withstood these torments in silence, not telling the other prisoners what they were going through. They hid their pain as not to demoralise their fellow Brothers while they themselves were in greatest need of sympathy and support.

17 DEPLOYED TO COVER THE “WAR ON TERROR”

Sometimes, when I think back and replay the stream of consciousness of how this all started, a wave of amazement rushes over me. It eases my physical pain, but the mental wounds only deepen.

I remember the beginning of my deployment to Afghanistan, we were sent there to cover the American “war on terror”. We were to arrive in Pakistan and to cross into Afghanistan from there, overland. Our first stop was Karachi; we were only there briefly as we took a flight to Islamabad right away.

There was a group waiting for us from the Qatari embassy at Islamabad airport, and they took us to the embassy to meet some of their colleagues, including Ambassador Abdullah Falah. They invited us to eat with them, as is the way of Arab hospitality, in a room full of tables laden with platters of rice and whole roast lamb on top. Large pots of Arabic coffee stood in the corners.

After the meal, we went to a nearby hotel where we met with our colleague and fellow Al Jazeera correspondent, Ahmed Zeidan. Ahmed helped me over the next three days as I applied for the necessary visas from the Afghan embassy. I remember that the ambassador at that time was Abdul Salam Zaeef, who later became my friend in Guantánamo.

During my time in Pakistan, I started getting used to the sound of the beautiful Urdu language. I enjoyed striking up conversations with people in the streets and alleyways, digging into plates of biryani and chicken and drinking gallons of spice-infused black tea.

I wasn’t a complete stranger to the Indian subcontinent, although I was not familiar with Pakistan. I had done my university studies in India, which gave me a taste for the land and its colours, opening me up to a wonderful culture

18 with an incredibly rich history and civilisation. I can truly say love it and its people. India had been very important in my formative years.

Once we had our visas, we left Islamabad for Quetta, where we met Hassan al- Rashidi, the Al Jazeera correspondent covering that area. We stayed in a hotel where all the foreign journalists stayed, including our colleagues from CNN.

We were working with CNN at the time through a cooperation agreement, CNN covered northern Afghanistan for Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera covered Kabul and some other parts of Afghanistan for CNN. CNN had a house in Kandahar where their correspondent was staying; we were planning to stay with him there for a while.

We entered Afghanistan through the land border, first Chaman then Boldak, the beginning of Afghan territory and the beginning of my path to Guantánamo.

Waiting for us on the Afghan border was Qari Sahib, our Afghan guide who spoke Arabic and was going to guide us to Kandahar that night. I heard after I left Guantánamo that Qari Sahib had been killed and I remembered his children who had accompanied us that night, now orphaned.

As we arrived at the gates of Kandahar, there was an intense air raid on the city’s airport. I remember our colleague who was there, Yusuf al-Shomali, announcing live that Kandahar airport had just been struck and doing the first media interview after the attack.

We lived in the CNN house and carried out our daily coverage from Kandahar. The focus was on the war in the north at the time, and Kandahar was considered the Taliban’s capital, which meant that our movements were limited.

19 One day, we were out and about and I was filming in the market when we were arrested by the Taliban. They kept us for the whole day while they checked our papers and confirmed that we worked for Al Jazeera. At the end of the day, they released us and asked us not to leave our house without their permission. We went back to the house and continued our work, covering American air raids in different areas.

Kandahar is a Pashtun city - the third-biggest in Afghanistan after Kabul and Herat. It occupies a strategic location in the south of the country, and controlling it has been a goal for successive empires in its history.

There are different stories about how it got its name. One story says that it was adapted from the name of the neighbouring kingdom, Gandahara, on the Afghan-Kashmiri border; another says that the name came from Alexander the Great who was the first one to revive the city and wanted to leave his mark on the names of the cities of Asia.

Islam came to Kandahar during the Abbasid era, bringing it into the sphere of influence of the Arab empire, then the Turkish. During the eighteenth century, it became the Afghan capital following the rise of the Pashtuns but soon lost its status in favour of Kabul, which remains the capital to this day.

In spite of what the Americans told the world, their raids weren’t targeted, and mostly were dropped on civilian homes. We saw injured children in the hospitals, destroyed houses and more, all indicating the bombing of civilian targets. A scene that stayed with me a long time was when I saw a bomb hit a fuel truck with the driver still in it. He couldn’t escape the cab, and his body was burned beyond all recognition. It happened right in front of me, but there was nothing I could do to help the wretched man and that painful sight lingers in my mind.

20 On another day, a Taliban soldier told us about an air strike that had happened the day before on a village north of Kandahar. We drove for two hours to see what was left after the strike, and found a village destroyed, erased by rockets and bombs that didn’t even spare the graves or mosques.

There was much weeping over the terror of that calamity while people buried their dead in a huge crater left behind by the strike. They were gathering the bodies - or body parts - of their families whom they had left at home, in safety, they had thought, as they went out to seek a livelihood, aspiring to a calm village life.

There was an old man crying in agony. I asked his story,and he told me he had left the village for Kandahar to sell some things in the market to make money to buy necessities for his family. He came back to find everyone - his wife, his children, his parents, brothers and sisters - all eighteen of them, killed.

I was speaking to him through an interpreter, and he took us to see a rocket that had plunged into his small child’s bed. The interpreter translated for him as he asked: “What offence have we committed that all the members of my family had to be killed? What offence, whose cost was that my infant is cast out of this world by a blind air strike that wrongfully extinguished the flame that was his life?”

Why this village? The only explanation those defeated village men could offer was that there was a popular market held there every Wednesday and it seemed the crowds that day scared the Americans, who decided it was a Taliban gathering. They didn’t confirm this, they simply struck down those poor people and left them and their village in ruins. We produced a report about that village and sent it to Al Jazeera as part of our daily news packages.

When it was time for the evening prayers, we asked the imam to lead us in prayer, but he excused himself saying that he wasn’t feeling well. We let him

21 be, and our colleague Yusuf led the prayers. After prayers, I approached the imam to ask how he was and why he wasn’t able to lead us in prayer. He told me that day had been exceptionally difficult for him; for the first time, one of the people had asked him for help and he hadn’t been able to offer it.

I asked him to tell me what happened, and he said: “Do you remember when you were filming the man crying about his family, there were some other men crying and talking to us?

“They mentioned that the planes that had obliterated the village had also shelled a village at the foot of the mountain, and that his family was there now, underneath the rubble.” The villager wanted someone to help him remove the debris so that he could bury the bodies.

I promised him that after dawn prayers we would go with him to try to help those ill-fated men and that we’d film their situation and write a report on the catastrophe. The next morning, as promised, we set off at sunrise, driving along rugged roads to find the village.

After driving for a while, we had to stop the car and continue on foot for a couple of hours. I wasn’t used to the rugged terrain or the cold mountain air. I was panting from the exertion but struggled to stay on my feet and continue walking.

As we walked to the village, we started seeing rocket shrapnel; then, the first deep bomb crater left behind by American bombs. The crater was big enough for a grown man to stand in and had been caused by one of those terrible rocket-propelled bombs. I marvelled at the size and wondered how many tonnes of explosive material the bombs held and how such massive weapons could be dropped so casually on the people below.

We continued, walking amidst more craters, until we were within sight of the village. But once we arrived and entered the village, we discovered that it was

22 rubble. It only took a glance to confirm the obvious truth, that the people bombed here had been simple nomads. They had nothing to do with the Americans nor did they have links to the Taliban.

In this extremely cold village, the people dug their houses into the earth, leaving high chimneys for heating, which would have looked like trenches from above. As usual and in haste, the Americans bombed, thinking that they were hitting Taliban trenches without verifying that or confirming the identity of those innocent villagers.

After Kabul fell to the Americans and Herat was bombed until it, too, fell, the focus shifted to Kandahar, and the Americans soon focused their weapons on the city, tightening the noose. Every day, we saw tens of innocent civilians killed; women, children and old men. The sole hospital in the city - the “Chinese hospital” - was swamped.

I didn’t sleep in Kandahar. We’d be out all night, working, and return in the morning despite the continuing explosions. The situation got worse when power was cut, and soon there was nowhere to take refuge other than the Chinese hospital, so we went there to send reports.

In these difficult conditions, the blessed month of Ramadan arrived, but on the first day, we heard from the Taliban that they were going to withdraw and relinquish Kandahar. Our Afghan translator advised us to leave, telling us: “If the Taliban go, there will be no security, and the Afghans will fight.” I recall his words: “Sami, you don’t know the Afghans when they fight amongst themselves. It’s more vicious than dogs. I advise you all to leave Kandahar.”

And so we left on that first day of Ramadan, Yusuf al-Shuli, engineer Ibrahim Nassar and I. We went to the border area of Boldak, from there to Chaman and on to Quetta.

23 We had been in Quetta for a few days when we heard that Tayyeb Agha, special secretary to Mullah Mohammad Omar, would be holding a press conference in Boldak. So, along with some other journalists, we went back to attend the press conference.

In Boldak, we had an opportunity to cover the situation of Afghan refugees, another experience that left bitter memories in me. We went to cover the camps in Boldak, and I was drawn by the sight of a woman in her twenties surrounded by her children, washing her clothes in muddy water. She had no soap but was washing with one hand and holding a baby she was breastfeeding in her other arm. There was a little boy by her side, between three and four years old, who stood there crying as she washed clothes and held her baby.

To me, her image summarised the Afghan tragedy, and I decided to film her; I wanted the world to know what wars were about. I wanted to show the people who were affected by the Americans’ wars, destroyed by American bombing, which was purported to be protecting global peace, rights and democracy.

I began filming. There was a burned suitcase in front of her; it looked if it had been caught in a fire. I took some video of the items scattered around her, which I thought were hers. I saw a partially burned copy of the Quran, and when I moved closer to film it, I saw a bundle of red fabric rolled up into a ball on top of it.

I tried to push the fabric aside a little, and the woman gave a huge gasp and fell to the ground as if possessed by djinn. She was crying and contorting and shouting, but I couldn’t understand her. I was startled and asked the translator why she was so agitated. “You have to hold her still,” I told him, “so that her clothes don’t come off her.”

24 Suddenly, her mother came running. She pushed me aside, speaking in rapid- fire Pashtu. I asked the translator what she was saying. He told me that she was angry that I had touched the red fabric on the Quran and that I had caused her daughter’s epileptic fit.

She told the translator that the red bundle contained the ashes of her daughter’s young husband, her father, her brothers and the wives of her brothers. Jets had attacked their village, killing everyone in it except for the young woman, her mother and her two children. Their possessions had been destroyed and the only thing she possessed was this bundle, which she took with her everywhere.

The image of this poor woman and what was left of her family stuck in my mind, especially because they didn’t know what was happening to them. They didn’t know that Kabul was the capital of a country called Afghanistan and that they bore its nationality, that a war had started with the United States, a war against “terrorism”.

When he heard that the Taliban had fallen, we returned to Pakistan to sort out various visa issues and eventually made our way to Islamabad, from where we planned to finish filing our stories. It was still Ramadan when we returned to Islamabad and we were invited by the Qatari ambassador, Abdullah Abu Falah, to iftar, a breaking of the fast, with him.

I went to the iftar with my colleague Yusuf al-Shuli, engineer Ibrahim Nassar, Ahmad Zaidan, and Mia Baidoun. There we met officials from the Saudi embassy, and I told them about the Saudis who had been arrested on the Pakistani border and entire Arab families who had been detained. These families, mostly Yemeni, had emigrated to Afghanistan for different reasons, and had been fleeing to Pakistan when they were stopped on the border at Chaman; over a hundred families with women and children.

25 Ambassador Abu Falah confirmed that he had heard older reports about these families and said that he would contact the Yemeni ambassador and update him with what I had heard and offer his assistance in returning the families to Yemen as soon as possible.

After the meal, I returned to my hotel to prepare for flying back to Doha. Shortly after I got to my room, I received a call from Ambassador Abu Falah telling me that Mr Mohammed Jasim al-Ali, the director of Al Jazeera, had contacted him and asked that I stay on in Pakistan. My visa to Afghanistan would be renewed and I would accompany a new colleague from Doha, Abdul Haq Saddah, to cover the handover to the new government in Kandahar.

The embassy took my passport so they could renew my permit to stay in Pakistan for another three months. After it was extended, the ambassador called to let me know that the Emirati ambassador would be travelling to Quetta on a private plane and I could accompany him there to meet my colleague, Abdul Haq Saddah, and go from there to Kandahar.

The next morning, I flew with the Emirati ambassador to Quetta. When the plane reached the airport, I saw a military plane waiting for the ambassador, as well as a group of journalists and a cameraman from Abu Dhabi TV. They were going to cover humanitarian operations on the Pakistani border that the Emirati government had organised. I asked the ambassador if I could accompany them, but a Pakistani general at the airport declined, saying that there wasn’t room for anyone else on the plane. There was limited space, he claimed, for the ambassador and the accompanying journalists from Abu Dhabi. The ambassador apologised to me.

One of the military officials there accompanied me into the airport. As he dealt with my papers, he asked where I was planning to go. I told him I was headed for a hotel in Quetta to meet my colleague. We were going to Kandahar, I said, to cover the situation following the fall of the Taliban state. He completed my

26 entry procedures and I got a car that took me to my colleague, Abdul Haq Saddah, and we began to prepare for Kandahar.

The next day, we left Quetta for Chaman to enter Afghanistan from there. The road wasn’t easy, and we weren’t able to find our Afghan translator, so we weren’t sure what would happen. In Chaman, I was warned that foreigners, especially those who looked Arab, were being targeted. The message made it clear that our lives would be in danger.

We stayed in Chaman to produce some coverage and follow up on the border. I remember that Pakistani military and border authorities had penetrated two or three kilometres into Afghan territory, raising Pakistani flags and transferring their activities into the area.

27 “WE KNOW THIS IS A MISTAKE” - MY ARREST

Once again, a compassionate palm touches me: “Sami!” says my wife, “you’ve stayed up late enough.”

“My memories are flowing and have a life about them. Nothing like this has happened before. I want to write down everything.”

She turns to the window, smiles and points: “Your night friend will stay and sing for you, don’t overburden yourself.”

She withdraws quietly, and I write on:

We stayed near the border for several days. On the last day of Ramadan, December 15, we headed to Kandahar, leaving for the border in the early morning to exit Pakistan and enter Afghanistan. We hired a group of armed men to protect and get us to Kandahar.

There were over seventy journalists from various news agencies at the border crossing, all of whom were trying to enter Kandahar. We were relieved to see that there was a good group gathered for the godforsaken journey ahead. We handed over our passports and press cards to the Pakistani officials to finalise our exit.

Our papers took a long time and my colleague Saddah, who was crossing for the first time, started wondering about the delay. I told him that Pakistani officials usually asked for a bribe. He wasn’t convinced and argued that our papers were complete and that they wouldn’t demand anything. I explained the basic truths of that frontier to him, of officials who lived a desolate life and sought to eke out any value they could.

Things weren’t going to go our way, so perhaps Saddah understood the harshness of everything later. It soon became clear from one of the border

28 officers that the problem wasn’t a bribe, he said there had been a misunderstanding, he would explain in a while.

Our wait lasted another hour or two; then the officer returned with a sheet that he handed me. It identified a Sudanese journalist/cameraman working for Al Jazeera, named Sami, and instructed that he be stopped and returned to Pakistan. On the sheet, my birthday, passport number, and the English spelling of my name were wrong.

The officer said: “We know this is a mistake. You’ve crossed the border before, and we know you. But this paper was issued to us four or five days ago.”

I explained that I was in Islamabad when the paper was issued and if anything had been wrong, I would have been stopped there. He reiterated that there must have been a misunderstanding, he knew that I had passed through there before, he had processed my entry and exits himself. He asked for some time to correct the mistake.

We waited several more hours. Our colleagues from Al Jazeera were calling to find out if we were ready to send a report on something new. We explained that we hadn’t crossed the border yet and the director, Mr al-Ali, called us to find out why we had been stopped.

“There must have been a misunderstanding,” he said, and that he would contact the Qatari embassy to intervene in the matter. A second secretary from the Qatari embassy phoned us to ask about the situation. We told him what happened and he seemed to think it was a simple matter he could fix quickly. We waited.

By mid-afternoon, Mr al-Ali had called again and we told him we were still on the border. We had checked several times with the border officer, who replied that intelligence still hadn’t responded.

29 At around three, an intelligence officer came to into the office to inspect my passport and press card. His colleagues also showed him the paper sent by the intelligence service. “There’s been a mistake,” the intelligence officer said, “we’ll fix it with headquarters in Quetta.” He left, we spent the night on the border, and the next morning it was ‘Eid.

The passport officer contacted intelligence services to say that since he hadn’t been given any guidance as to why he had to stop me, he would hand over my passport and let me leave. Their response was: “If you do that you will go to prison.”

He persevered: “If you don’t send me a conclusive response in the next two hours, I will let him leave.”

And so, a military intelligence car arrived within two hours, and they asked me to go with them. I never saw my colleague Abdul Haq Saddah after that.

I was given a room at the intelligence services’ offices, and they assured me the mistake would be fixed. I spent the rest of ‘Eid day with them. The next day, the second secretary from the Qatari embassy arrived, accompanied by a man from Qatari security and intelligence services and some embassy employees. They had driven over eighteen hours since they had not been able to obtain plane tickets.

The delegation had come to end the confusion with Pakistani intelligence and to have me leave with them to Doha. The second secretary produced an official paper written in English and sealed with the embassy’s official stamp. It confirmed that I was Sami Alhaj, a journalist and that I was of good repute, not the kind of person to be under this kind of doubt by Pakistani intelligence services. The Qatari diplomat added that he knew me personally and that I had visited the embassy on numerous occasions, dispelling any confusion as to my name and identity.

30 The intelligence officer faxed the embassy statement to his bosses. We waited a few hours, but there was no reply. The officer proposed that the Qatari delegation come back the following day. Perhaps the people in the Quetta office were off for ‘Eid. The secretary and those accompanying him returned to Quetta to rest and follow up on the case. They promised they would return the next day or if anything new came up.

The next day, the Qatari diplomat called me to say that they had consulted the Quetta office but were told the matter could not be decided without an indication from Islamabad, which would take time. The officials there were busy, either on their ‘Eid holidays or with the threat of an Indian invasion in Kashmir. Besides, the chief of intelligence was accompanying the interior minister to China on official business.

Two days later, the embassy called to say they still hadn’t reached a solution at the Quetta office and that they would return to Islamabad to follow up from there. I stayed on in the room assigned to me at the intelligence services office. I asked the Pakistani officer, Aftab, for permission from to call my family. He was convinced that my detention was a mistake, so he didn’t hesitate to let me use my phone. I gave him money, and he bought me scratch cards for credit.

I called my wife, Umm Mohammad, who was in Azerbaijan, and wished her and her family a blessed ‘Eid and promised that I would see her soon in Doha. I called my family in Sudan, not telling them that I was being detained. I was still hopeful that a call would come that would end the situation. I didn’t call Saddah, since I knew from the Qatari delegation that he had reached Kandahar and was waiting for me to catch up with him there.

I stayed in the intelligence services’ building for roughly twenty-three days, from December 16 to January 7. During that time, I was able to move around freely; I left the building to use the bathroom - it was outside - and I was

31 allowed to heat water for washing since it was winter. I used my money to buy food, and later to buy medicine when I got sick and they brought a doctor in to see me.

On the morning of January 7, I was told that an order had come to hand me over to the Sudanese government. I was very happy and called the Qatari embassy to tell the second secretary what the Pakistanis had told me.

“They’re lying,” he said. “We asked for their file on you so we could refute any claims that you're a forger, but the file itself showed that wasn’t their belief anymore. We asked them to fix the situation since they didn’t think you were a criminal anymore, but they said they wanted you to meet some Americans to confirm your identity. We’re still in working on it; the ambassador will meet with the interior minister today about your case.”

Since my arrival at the intelligence offices, I had been able to move around freely within the building, on that day, I saw chains and restraints for the first time. On some nights, they would have an armed guard sitting in front of my room. It was amazing, I was the same person, what had changed?

I had a radio in my room, so I listened to the news in the morning every day. I heard about some Arab prisoners who clashed with Pakistani police forces while they were being transported somewhere; the clashes ended with people killed on both sides.

While I sat listening to the news, some of the officers would sit and chat with me, our conversations going back and forth. One day, I was in my room, and an Afghan man came by. He spoke broken Arabic and said: “I am a friend of officer Aftab and I can help you.”

“How will you help me?” I said.

“I can ask him to release you,” he said, “and he’ll do it.”

32 I thanked him: “I don’t need anyone to intervene. My case is just an error, and it’ll be fixed soon.”

The next day, I saw him again and asked him where he learned Arabic. He told me he’d been to Dubai.

A few days later, an argument broke out between the Afghan and a Pakistani officer, and they turned to me to settle the dispute, so I asked what they were arguing about. The officer told me: “This Afghan claims he has American Stinger missiles and I’m accusing him of lying.”

The Afghan replied that he did have Stingers. Turning to the officer, he said: “How much would you pay me if I brought them to you?”

Cornered, the officer said: “I’ll pay you $100,000 for each one.”

The Afghan said he had two and would bring them in. The officer realised he was serious and the argument got more interesting.

“Those rockets are out of date by now. Even if you have them, The Americans gave Stingers to the Afghans during the Afghan-Russian war. They were made at the end of the 1980s and only work for five years. After that, they’re useless. If these are that old, they are useless.”

The Afghan replied that it didn’t matter if the rockets were useless. “We agreed,” he said, “you said you’d give me $100,000 for every Stinger, and I’m going to bring you two.”

Needless to say, the officer beat a hasty retreat from his promise at that point.

After the debate died down, I asked the Afghan again how he learned Arabic. He told me he was a drug dealer and he’d been to Dubai for work. He moved drugs from Boldak, Afghanistan, to Chaman in Pakistan, then on to Quetta,

33 then Karachi, where he normally sold them. He’d decided to expand by travelling to Dubai to make deals with drug dealers there.

“How much do you make selling drugs?” I asked.

“Drugs in Afghanistan are very cheap,” he said. “If the price for a kilo of cocaine in Boldak is a hundred dollars, it doubles by the time it reaches Quetta. In Karachi, it has quintupled. And by the time it is in Dubai, it is ten times the original price.”

“How do you get the drugs through the checkpoints?” I asked.

“I have an agreement with Lieutenant-Colonel Aftab,” he said, “and I go from Chaman to Quetta on back roads, a journey that takes four to five hours. The Pakistani police checkpoints are along the main roads; they can’t set up on the back roads.”

“Sometimes, if I need to, I’ll get a ride with Aftab in his car to pass checkpoints. He drops me off in Quetta, and I pay him. I have an arrangement with a special intelligence officer in Quetta, and I pay him, too. I went to Dubai to discuss with a dealer there about how to get drugs in and have him sell them.”

I asked him: “What religion do you believe in?” He replied that he was a Muslim.

“You’re a Muslim who sells drugs,” I said to him, “do you not know that is not permitted in Islam? And that it is one of the clear corruptions on earth since it destroys other people and deprives them of their health and money?”

“We sell to non-Muslims,” he said to me.

“Who said that was OK?” I said. “Also, you sell in Karachi and Dubai, and these are Muslim lands. I don’t want to cast doubt on your faith, but I know

34 that every Muslim knows that drugs are haram and that Islam doesn’t permit their sale, transport or distribution.”

I advised the man to repent and seek a halal livelihood instead of this unlawful path. He told me he had justifications that he described as permitted by Islamic law. I didn’t talk to him after that, but I saw him come back to the office a lot.

One day, they decided to transport us. At 8am, they led me out to board the bus; as I stood there waiting to get on the bus, a soldier approached to restrain me. I looked at one of the officers - the one who had quarrelled with the Afghan about Stingers - and he told the soldier: “Don’t restrain him. Sami hasn’t done anything. We’re handing him over to his country, not putting handcuffs on him.”

The officer said goodbye and gave me his mobile number, asking me to contact him when I returned to my family. When I boarded the bus, I realized there had been others detained in the office building; there were five people on board who looked Arab. I greeted them, but they didn’t reply.

There were two police cars escorting us, one in front and the other behind. Officer Aftab came in a separate car. The Afghan drug dealer joined us on the bus, too, which made me believe what he said about his dirty business.

I was in jeans and a shirt, my head clean-shaven and my face flushed, which seemed to give the impression that I wasn’t Arab. I found out a while later - after the other men made sure I was who I said I was - they thought I was a black American who had come to hand them over.

The bus drove for ten hours, arriving in Quetta at six that evening. During the ride, I spoke to the five brothers, explaining that I was Sudanese and worked for Al Jazeera and that I had been told I was on my way to be handed over to Sudanese authorities. At first, they refused to engage with me. I changed

35 tactics and spoke about the news, telling them what I had heard on the radio, including a report that said the Americans had a prison in Kandahar and that they were taking Arab prisoners to Cuba.

Eventually, the five men relaxed and told me they were Saudi: Abdullah al- Sharqi, al-Kurbi and three others whose names I don’t remember any more. We spoke a bit, and they told me they had been captured on the Pakistani border and detained in the intelligence services building. They asked me to inform the Saudi embassy about what had happened to them.

As we entered Quetta, I told them: “Remember God when entering a city, and ask Him to spare us from the evil of its people.”

We were taken to the intelligence services’ building; it was right in front of the hotel I had stayed at before. We parked in front of it for half an hour; the Afghan drug dealer got off, and officer Aftab left, then a police escort moved us on.

We arrived at a military prison in Quetta, and the five Saudis were taken off. I was left on the bus, having been told that they would take me to the airport to travel back to Sudan. About half an hour after the five Saudis entered the prison; they came for me. They asked me to go with them for a few hours until it was time to take me to the airport.

It was January 7, 2002, and we were all fasting. They had prepared food for us for breaking the fast at iftar. After iftar, they put me in a solitary confinement cell, but they put the Saudis in cells in pairs. The road to Quetta had been arduous, and I was tired after sunset. We prayed the Maghrib and Isha’ prayers together. I listened to some news on the radio then switched it off. As I was getting ready for bed, I heard movement, and the door of the cell opened. A man came in and gave me a blue shirt and trousers.

“Put these on,” he said, “so we can take you to the airport.”

36 This seemed odd to me, so I said: “I will wear my clothes.”

He replied in an imperious voice: “Don’t talk so much. Put these on.”

I put them on over my clothes and packed my bag. Another person came into my cell; he had restraints with him. “We’re going to take you to the Americans,” he told me, “so they can execute you.”

I said, “Don’t you mean to say, ‘You are going to be handed over to your country?’”

“No,” he said. “We’re handing you over to the Americans so that they can kill you.”

“No problem,” I said. “I am not afraid of death. Death is simple. It isn’t the end of life; there is another life, accounts and punishments. The Lord is just, and he doesn’t lose sight of rights.”

“Without a doubt,” he said, “death is not the end of life, but the Americans are going to execute you.”

He put the restraints around my hands and feet, took my bag and put me in line behind the others to get on the bus. I spoke with the soldier who had come with us from Chaman. I asked him: “What’s the story here? Why are we being sold to the Americans?”

“We are forced to do this,” he replied, with flimsy excuses that they were following orders.

“We will not forgive you,” I said, “in front of God Almighty. We will claim our rights from you there.”

There were eight in the vehicle, myself and the five Saudis and two other Saudis. The radio was on, and we listened to the news at around 10:30. The Saudi Brothers were still hoping to be taken to the Saudi embassy, but I told

37 them that it was more likely that the Americans would take us and bring us to Kandahar, and from there on to Cuba. They were still hopeful, but I told them that I as far as I knew, there were also no flights to Islamabad until tomorrow.

I felt bad bringing such grim news to these hopeful Brothers, but there was no way out of the truth that we were on our way to being handed over to the Americans. And so it was.

“Stand up! Who are you?”

Those were the first words we heard through our blindfolds at around 11:30 that night. It was an American soldier, speaking in Egyptian Arabic. He came up to each of us and said that. When he reached me, I said: “I am Sami Muhi al-Din Mohammad Alhaj, a Sudanese journalist …”

“Don’t talk so much,” he said. He pulled me towards him and said, “Don’t try anything. Otherwise, you’re going to get a beating.”

“I have a bag with me,” I said.

“Stop talking,” he said.

He took me and my bag, walking me up some steps and through a door into a big room with an extremely strong light and the rumble of an aeroplane engine. Heavily armed US soldiers surrounded me in a circle, getting right up in my face, and one approached to search me.

I still had my radio, in my pocket. When he touched it, his hand froze, he froze. His colleague who spoke Egyptian Arabic said in English: “What did you find?”

The soldier remained silent but moved away from me quickly; I guess he thought the radio was a bomb. “What is it?” his Arab colleague asked.

“There’s something solid in his pocket,” he said.

38 The Egyptian speaker turned the light on me and ordered me to the ground. I did, then he said: “What is in your pocket?”

“A radio,” I said.

He translated for his colleague, and the search continued as I was told to empty my pockets. Out came the radio, my watch, wallet, money, passport, plane ticket, glasses, ring and shoes. They put all those items into a large bag and my luggage into another one. They changed my restraints from metal to plastic, binding my hands only this time. They put a black bag over my head, and two soldiers led me to the plane.

39 OMAR AL-KANADI (OMAR KHEDR)

Omar wasn’t taken alone by the Americans, they also took his brother and killed his father in a single confrontation on the Pakistani border. The Americans had gone into a house in that area, intending to kill all its inhabitants, and Omar was among them. In the confrontation, one American soldier was killed and another injured, so they accused Omar of having thrown the explosive device that killed him.

When he first arrived, he was only 14 or 15 and had been shot in the eye and the lung. There he was, so young and so small, locked up alone in a cell. He grew up in prison, and to his credit, he grew up to be a fine man and left Guantánamo with a fine character.

I was in Charlie block when Omar arrived, and he was brought in and placed two cells away from me. I heard them go to his cell to torment him with photos of his father after he had been killed.

We were able to talk to each other by shouting out of our cells, and I learned a bit about him, but he was later moved to Camp 4, so I asked some of his cellmates and closest friends in the prison about his story, as well as my lawyer. His closest friend in the camp was Salem, a Saudi fellow, and I spoke to him a lot about Omar.

I found out that Omar was Canadian-Egyptian and had come to Afghanistan with his father who was an aid worker. Because of his youth, he was frightened and traumatised by his time in Guantánamo even more than the rest of us. He was also injured, as I mentioned, and his vision was very weak, with one eye blinded and the other barely functioning.

40 His brother, Abdelrahman, was also detained in the same block, but he was turned and worked as a spy for the Americans, which meant that he was able to get out, but Omar remained for years until he was finally able to return to Canada.

41 IN BAGRAM

We were on a cargo plane; I was chained to its floor. We were told any movement would be responded to with force, even bullets. I sat there as I felt others being brought on board.

An hour and a half later, the plane took off from Quetta and flew for an hour then landed somewhere where we stayed for about two hours, then took off again. During the flights, the prisoner beside me was crying out that he needed the toilet. Whenever he begged, a soldier would walk over to beat him. Soon, I felt a wetness and realised he had had to relieve himself where he sat. He told me later that they eventually gagged him to stop him speaking.

Finally, in the early hours of January 8, 2002, we landed at Bagram airbase, the first American detention facility I went through. It had been set up to be the first station for detainees in the so-called “war on terror”. The goal was to interrogate of prisoners as fast as possible to extract information to help catch their most wanted figures.

In a sense, our detention in Bagram was the most intensely painful stage, since it introduced us to the poor treatment and exploitation we were going to face. We were baffled at the beating, abuse and desecration of dignity and religion. We were ordinary civilians but had become prisoners, expected to comply, obey, and even lie when our interrogators demanded that we give up names of imaginary conspirators.

Once we arrived, soldiers came into the plane; they were shouting in our faces in English: “Why did you come to kill us?!”

Most of those on board didn’t speak English, adding to their confusion as they were beaten and insulted. My turn came to be escorted off the plane, but my

42 legs had seized up after being chained to the floor for four or five hours. The soldiers tried to move me, but I swayed, unable to stand. They pushed me to the exit, shouting: “Why did you come to kill us?”

“I am not a combatant,” I replied. “I am a journalist.”

“Don’t lie. Where are you from?”

“I am from Sudan. I’m not a combatant. I am a journalist.”

I got to the door of the plane, still blindfolded. At the door they pushed me to jump off, and it felt like falling off a cliff in the absolute dark. I jumped, landing badly on my right leg and tearing the ACL ligament in my knee, an injury that’s still with me today. The pain was so intense that I cried out.

They ordered me onto the floor, so I lay face-down, still crying out from the pain. Following their script, they started screaming, beating and threatening me with death if I moved. I heard dogs barking nearby and the shouting and suffering of the rest of the prisoners. My limbs were almost frozen and I was shivering from the cold.

They switched tactics and started shouting: “Why aren’t you moving?” as they beat me on my back, then stood me on my feet. They tied my hands and lined me up with the others, then brought a restraining rope to connect all our hands.

A soldier pulled on this rope, while the rest stood to both sides. Dogs were still barking around us; it was so cold our hearts almost stopped, it was dark under the blindfold and the pain from my ACL was drowning me; it was terrifying.

They moved us by pulling the rope - we were bound so that anyone who slowed down would feel the tension increase around his hands, and anyone who fell over was beaten.

43 We were cold, but we were also shivering with fear. The barking dogs, screaming soldiers, and the cries of agony from the other prisoners mixed into a terrible symphony of sound whose effect on those souls only God could know. After about a hundred metres, the strange caravan stopped. They ordered us on our knees and began escorting us away, one by one, blindfolded and hooded.

Our imaginations ran wild as we sat there in blacknesses. I imagined that those taken away were being tortured by having cold water poured over them, being whipped, mangled by dogs; the images that came to my mind were wild. I wasn’t too far from the truth, sadly.

They dragged me away because I wasn’t able to walk. The pain of my ACL tear made me cry out, but whenever I did, a soldier would beat me until I fell over. They dragged me, kicking me with their heavy boots, into a room. They removed the hood and I was instantly blinded by the painfully bright lights directed at me. I was in the middle of a circle of soldiers brandishing their weapons, surrounding me from all sides, there were women in the group, and as always, there was a dog barking madly nearby. One of them said: “Don’t move a muscle. You must obey our orders. One move and we’ll put a bullet in your brain.”

Then they cut the restraints around my wrists; and asked me to take off my clothes. I began to obey, slowly, shivering in the cold and swaying from weakness and exhaustion. They shouted at me each time I swayed. First, I took off the blue overalls I had worn on the plane from Pakistan. They asked me to take off my trousers and shirt that I had, too. Under those, I was wearing long underwear as protection against the cold. They told me to continue to strip my clothing and when I hesitated, they shouted: “If you don’t take them off, we’ll shoot you.”

44 I took off the undershirt, leaving on the shorts. They shouted at me, and in my exhausted confusion, all I could see was weapons and screaming mouths directed at me as I hoped against hope that I would be able to keep this last shred of dignity.

A soldier approached me, holding his automatic weapon as if for safety, and told me to take off my long underwear. I took it off. He told me to look straight ahead, not to look behind me. I was completely distraught, feeling something more than pain. I didn’t know if this was because I was ill, or if it was the pain of being a prisoner, or the oppression and humiliation of being forced to stand naked in front of those scoundrels with their dogs.

As I stood there, I was overtaken by a wave of panic that lessened the physical pain, but the mental wounds only deepened. I am a proud Muslim, in my religion men are embarrassed to be naked even in front of their wives, and here I was forced to stand naked in front of these female soldiers. How was it possible to survive that?

The screams and barking continued, and cutting coldly through them was the evil sound of guns and pistols being cocked. My brain recorded what was happening in snapshots, so I remember the biting cold, the light in my eyes, the ugly, frightening faces of the soldiers and the dogs. And they made me stand there, naked, shivering, as if to make sure that I knew full well the level of humiliation I should expect from then on.

After a while, one of them threw me my clothes, but I didn’t react, stiff with fear, not knowing what to do. They started to release the dog in my direction, and I snapped back to my senses. I jumped into my clothes to cover my nakedness, even though I wasn’t able to do the buttons on my shirt, my fingers had frozen.

45 Two soldiers came up to me and bound my hands behind me, then pushed me into another room. Two people stood behind a table and I was brought in front of them with two rows of soldiers to my right and my left, the two soldiers still holding me by my arms. One of the two standing in front of me (behind the table) spoke Arabic in a North African dialect.

“What’s your name?”

“My name is Sami Muhi al-Din Mohammad Alhaj.”

“What nationality are you?”

“Sudanese,” I said.

“Did you film Osama bin Laden?” he said.

“No, I didn’t film bin Laden.”

“But you did film bin Laden,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t film bin Laden. I was in Afghanistan as a journalist covering the war.”

“Don’t deny it,” he said. “Denial won’t help. If you deny, we will beat and humiliate you and strip you bare. You’ve lost your life here, all you can do is respond to questions in the affirmative.”

I repeated my answer.

“Be quiet! Don’t answer unless you are asked.” He went on: “How much money do you have? What do you own?”

I said that I had a few dollars, some Pakistani currency, Emirati dirhams, Qatari riyals, my passport, my plane ticket and my press card. I also had a small radio, video camera and equipment, watch, glasses and medicines.

“Shut up,” he said.

46 He wrote my answers in his log book and ordered the soldiers to take me away. They dragged me to an old aeroplane maintenance building with a tiled floor on which were large barbed wire cages. They opened the door to one and pushed me in. There were already people sleeping there.

I was given two blankets, informed that one was to be used as my bed, the other as a cover. In that cold, neither the bed nor the blanket was enough, but I was exhausted so I did as they said and fell into a deep sleep from which I didn’t wake until I heard soldiers calling my number; I was number 35 there, I realised that the number was written on the back of my clothes.

The ever-present dogs were barking, and the soldiers were shouting: “Wake up, 35, move it, 35.” It was as if I was a corpse engulfed in deep sleep, then waking up in a panic to see one of the soldiers calling me from outside the fence.

The other prisoners were sitting in front meals of packaged food, tiny portions of maybe 200 grammes. The soldier threw a meal in a plastic bag to me, followed by a spoon, and as I caught them, fear returned to me and made me panic. I didn’t know where I was or how I had arrived, or what was going on around me.

The events of the day and night before flashed quickly across my mind, and I tried to grasp any logic to help me understand what was happening. I sat, still on the outside and quaking on the inside, trying to understand what happened to me. The shouts of the soldier asking for us to return the plates and the rest of the meals cut through my haze.

“I haven’t eaten yet,” I said.

He screamed in my face, demanding my meal back. I returned it to him and kept the spoon, but he asked for it as well.

47 I looked around, the place was as I thought initially, an old aeroplane hangar on Bagram air base. It looked like it had been built by the Afghan Communist government. We later learned that it was the Russian base in Afghanistan, built at the time of the Soviet Union.

Neglect and disorder were apparent all over the building, which was divided into two sections. Each section had two floors and four rooms, two each on the ground and first floor. The floor was split into four cages. I was in the a cage facing the two front rooms.

At dawn, I wanted to pray the Fajr prayers. I couldn’t see the sun, but I reckoned it was seven or eight in the morning since there was some light. When I made to stand up, a soldier ordered me to sit back down.

“Standing is forbidden,” he said, “the same goes for looking up or down, or talking to the other prisoners.” He continued reading me the rules: If I wanted anything, I had to raise my hand for permission to speak, and I had to obey all orders from the soldiers. After he was done reading, I said: “I would like some water for wudu.”

“You are only allowed one bottle per day,” he said. “And don’t let me catch you washing with it! You are only allowed to use it for drinking. If not, you’ll be punished.”

The soldiers wore helmets and carried M16 rifles, handguns, and backpacks. They had rods in their hands that they would beat on the ground when they talked. They threatened us, cursed us, hurled obscene and lewd words at us - words that I cannot bear to repeat here.

I saw a prisoner rubbing the ground with his hands, he was doing tayammum and praying while seated, so I did the same. After finishing my prayer, I asked for water, and they gave me a small bottle and I took two mouthfuls, then sat, looking around me.

48 Our hands and legs were in restraints the whole time. We were allowed to use the toilets in the early morning, at midday and in the evening. After our midday meal, they started taking us to do that, but when my turn to stand came, my legs betrayed me and couldn’t carry me. I managed to stand, and was told to step forward, raise my hands and turn while looking back.

They opened a door in the barbed wire and grabbed my arms while my hands and legs were restrained, then brought me out and closed the gate quickly. Again, they ordered me to look down and not to move except with their permission. They walked me a few metres to the building’s door, which had a pit directly in front of it. “Do your business here,” they said.

I asked them to remove my handcuffs, which they did, but when I waited for them to leave, they didn’t go.

“Do it!” they told me.

“You can either wait for a short time or go away,” I said.

“No,” they said. “We won’t go. We’ll stay here, and if you don’t use the toilet in two minutes, we’ll bring you back another time. You only have three opportunities a day, and this is your second. You only have one other chance, at the end of the day.”

I retreated into my thoughts, but they jolted me out: “Just look straight ahead. There’s no time to delay.”

I heard a woman laughing and raised my head. A female soldier stood with her automatic weapon pointed at me. She moved her finger, indicating that I should hurry up, while she laughed with the other soldiers in mockery. I managed to use the toilet quickly, but they didn’t give me anything to clean myself. No water, no paper, nothing. So I stood up.

49 They pulled me and cuffed my hands behind me again, then dragged me back. Next was number 36 who was taken away. That’s how we lived at Bagram, filthy, unable to move, eating one meal a day. The meals came from the soldiers’ ration packs; we were given the “main meal” packets, which were about 200 grammes of food that never sated our hunger.

We never knew anything about the ingredients, were we eating pork? We never knew. After my first trip to the “toilet”, I decided not to eat, sticking instead with two gulps of water a day. It was cold in January, and every morning the water bottles had completely frozen solid.

On the second night, I went to bed having avoided that day’s meal. It was extremely cold and the pain in my knee shot all over my body, especially after sitting for so long in the restraints. I tried to move my leg to ease the pain, but the guards saw and placed a metal restraint on my leg instead of the plastic one, the metal hurt more. My legs started swelling from the extreme cold and pressure of the restraint.

I lay there, unable to sleep from the pain and the cold, which the thin blankets did nothing to stop. I was enveloped in a bone-crushing chill. When morning came, I performed my prayers, but didn’t eat. Water was enough, so I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. I saw others suffer when they needed the toilet in the night. They were shouted at; some were beaten, laid out on the ground and suffering for the impudence of needing the toilet.

This happened to one prisoner, who was even more impudent and asked them why they were doing that to him. In punishment, they hung him from the doorframe by one hand. He struggled to release the restraint with his other hand, so they attached it as well. He stayed there all night, a message to all of us. None of us slept that night.

50 We spent a week being taken to interrogation, one by one. I remember they brought a new group of prisoners that week; then they started bringing in groups every three or four days. After thirteen days, they came to take me to the upstairs room they used for interrogations. When I entered, I felt warm and drowsy for a minute, but as my eyes drooped, they shouted: “If you close your eyes, we’ll have you stand on your legs for the duration of this interrogation.”

There was an officer sitting there, with him was the Arab I had met the first night.

“What is your name?” he asked. “Where are you from? Nationality and date of birth? What is your profession?”

“I am a journalist,” I said.

“Was it you,” he said, “who filmed Osama bin Laden?”

I denied again being the one who shot the film the world saw on the day of the attacks on Afghanistan.

“I watched that film in Doha,” I said, “from the network headquarters. The report was broadcast from the Kabul office. The proof is in my passport which you have. I didn’t leave Doha until October 11, 2001. But the report was two days earlier.”

I explained that the second report about Osama bin Laden was produced by the Al Jazeera office in Kabul which appeared onscreen, introducing the report to those watching.

“Are you sure,” he said, “that you weren’t with him filming?”

I confirmed that I was in Kandahar, covering the situation there. I hadn’t even seen Kabul. I told him that I had witnesses, that they were from CNN because

51 I was their guest in Kandahar until I left Afghanistan. I said I believed they would be prepared to confirm all of it.

He resumed: “So where were you, then, on September 11?”

“I was in Syria,” I said, “on holiday with my wife and some family members who came from Sudan. Al Jazeera got in touch with me while I was in Syria and asked me to return to Doha because they wanted to send me to Afghanistan. I sent my family back to Azerbaijan and said goodbye to my relatives, then travelled to Doha towards the end of September or the beginning of October. I did some training there, and they sent me to Afghanistan after I completed my courses in filming, production and filing. This is how I was chosen for the job.”

I informed him that I had presented my passport to the Pakistani embassy for a visa, then left Doha for Pakistan on October 11, arriving in Islamabad on October 12. The journalist Yusuf al-Sholi was with me on that flight, and the rest of the story you already know. He surprised me with next question: “If we let you go, what will you say about us?”

I realised that he knew I wasn’t the person who had filmed bin Laden and that I was in Syria on September 11 as I said. He had an Arab translator with him who checked the dates in my passport and explained them to him in English. Keeping Allah in mind, I said: “I will say what happened. I will say you beat me and caused me to tear my ACL, forbade me from praying, starved us, violated our dignity and humiliated us for no reason, didn’t allow us to practice our religion and prevented us from speaking or making a single movement.”

He laughed and asked me if I needed anything else since the interview was over.

52 “Yes,” I said. “I would like a doctor to treat me since my knee hurts and the cold is making me sick.” I showed him my knee that was swollen from my severe rheumatism and the ACL tear. I asked him to permit us to use covered toilet facilities, to practice our religion, and for decent food that was enough for us in the harsh cold, and more blankets to protect us.

“We can’t sleep from the cold,” I said. He said he was unable to help me much but would provide me with a third blanket. Indeed, he took a blanket and put it around my shoulders, since my hands were handcuffed, and ordered the soldier to take me back down to the cage.

The next day, a group of prisoners were transported in the middle of the night. They lined them up, attached them with a rope, and took them out to the middle of the airport. They vanished; I guessed they were being transported to the American prison in Kandahar.

I remember an Afghan prisoner tried to escape one night. They caught him and beat him with agonising blows in one of the rooms, as we sat awake listening to his cries of suffering. Suddenly, they came out, terrified, and a little later they brought out his dead body.

Three days after the interview - after sixteen days in Bagram - on one of the coldest nights, the soldiers called my number along with a few others. They put us in a row, connecting us with a rope going through our hand restraints as they had the first night, then pulled us to the plane. The night was frigid, the dogs were barking, and the soldiers screamed at us. Our heads were covered with black sacks. They put us on the plane, and we heard the growl as it started to move. We were leaving Bagram, with its humiliations and pain, but to where?

As I contemplate the twists and turns of fate during those days and years, I ask, what were the moments that led me to the gates of Guantánamo? The

53 gates opened in Pakistan, and I entered, shackled. My pain was one with the stories of others, such Brother Sheikh ‘Alaa’s:

“They took me, dragging me under my arms with my hands behind me. They pulled my glasses off and covered my eyes, pushing me forward. They tightened sharp plastic restraints around my legs which cut me like a knife, and put a black hood over my face. I couldn’t keep up with my legs bound and fell. They lifted me into a vehicle, then brought me back down. With each raising and lowering they would search me, savagely. Then I was walked violently up the ramp of a plane. That was enough to exhaust me, I am physically weak, and my hearing and sight are poor. They brought me onto the plane and forced me to sit on the ground. They extended my legs and restrained my hands attached with another restraint to my waist, and another rope attached my restrained feet.”

54 BAGRAM TO KANDAHAR

I remember the moment when the plane took off from Bagram to Kandahar; it was January 23, 2002. After roughly an hour and a half of turbulence, we arrived. The soldiers met us with beatings, then we were shoved to the ground. Dogs were barking and the soldiers were screaming and jumping on our backs; they would stand on the back of a prisoner and then jump from there onto the back of another prisoner.

I felt that my breath would stop flowing from the pressure of the soldiers’ feet on my back, from which torrents of blood flowed. They continued beating us and covering us with insults.

They asked if we spoke English. I told them I did. A prisoner near me, a Saudi man whose name I later learned was Shakir, told them he did, too. They beat him and said: “Tell the others that they are in our custody now. As for your mothers, your wives, your sisters, we will …” They said things that don’t bear repeating, cursing our mothers and sisters, exceeding all limits.

They told him to tell the prisoner next to him what they wanted to do with his sister or mother. When Shakir refused to repeat this filth, they beat him until he translated it for the man next to him and translated the man’s answer into English. If he didn’t answer, they beat him. If the other prisoner answered with something they didn’t like, they beat him.

One by one, they took us off somewhere, our eyes blindfolded, when it was my turn, two soldiers took me and brought me to a big aeroplane hangar like the one in Bagram. I found a group of officers standing there, each with a table in front of him.

55 The first asked me: “What is your name? What’s your nationality? What language do you speak? How old are you? What’s your job?”

I replied as was appropriate to the questions, though I told him that I only spoke Arabic. When I told him my profession, he was impressed: “We have a journalist with us here?

“What kind of journalism do you do?”

“I work at Al Jazeera,” I said, and he slapped me across my face. He insulted Al Jazeera and called it all sorts of indecent things. Then slapped me again.

“OK, so you’re fighting us,” he said, “and you hate America and are fighting against it.” He pushed me to the next person.

They stripped the entire group naked, cutting off our clothes with scissors, then asked us: “Do you have anything to complain about?”

When they saw the blood flowing from my back, they asked: “What’s this blood?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say. He pushed me on to someone else who checked over my body in a humiliating way. Then I was pushed to the next person, whose role was to take photos of the prisoners.

Another man appeared, he plucked hairs from my beard and put them into a bag, then took a saliva sample. The next man cut my hair and shaved a cross onto my head, something the prisoners told me about later on since I couldn’t see my head without a mirror.

The last one pushed clothes and shoes towards me. They were too small for my feet, and when I told him, he said: “If you can’t put them on your feet, shove them in your mouth!”

56 The soldiers brought me to a cell with a group of prisoners in it, eventually, they brought all us new arrivals in. This time our hands and legs weren’t restrained, but a strong light shone in our faces, as it had in Bagram. They gave us blankets and we did the same to fight off the extreme cold, we spread one blanket underneath us and used the other as a cover, then huddled together to keep warm.

I woke up that first morning after the sun had risen. Some of us wanted to pray, and others needed the toilet. For a toilet, we had a bucket in our cage with us. We were stunned! How did they think we could do our business inside there, with all the other prisoners watching?

A prisoner suggested that we shield the prisoner using the bucket with a blanket, but the soldier standing on watch shouted: “You’re breaking the rules! You do that, you lose your blanket!”

All we could do was turn our backs on whoever was using the bucket as we used it in turn. We heard the male and female soldier watching the scene laughing as they described the size of the private parts each prisoner. I refused, as did the others who understood English, to translate what was being said to our fellow prisoners, it didn’t bear repeating.

One day they brought an Afghan in and beat him in front of us, his head was injured and bleeding, his clothes were bloodstained. It looked like he had fought them hard, with all the strength of his heavy-set, muscular body. They put him in with us and he raised his head and asked: “Are you Arabs?”

We nodded, and he said: “Save me, those men are assaulting me.”

We couldn’t reply, and he burst into tears of futility. Some of us cried with him, although we couldn’t move an inch, we were a renewed picture of man’s defeat.

57 After Fajr prayers one day, the soldiers came every hour or so and took one of us away. Those taken didn’t come back, and soon my turn came. They called me by my old number and gave me a new one: 448.

They took me and restrained me as usual, then took me, shackled, into a tent where I was sat down on the ground. A soldier began the routine interrogation: What is your name? Where are you from? Date of birth? Place of birth? When did you come to Afghanistan?

He had an interpreter who spoke in the Egyptian dialect. We went on for half an hour, the interrogator asked me again about filming bin Laden, and I replied with a “no” again. At the end, he closed the file and said as he was walking out: “Listen, your Lord is no use to you or anyone else here, unless you tell the truth. If you don’t, we’ll bury you where you sit!”

A group of soldiers put a black sack over my head and took me away, keeping my head bowed until it almost touched my knee. They walked me, restrained and uncomfortable, to a place where heard people speaking Arabic, music to my ears! They opened a door, pushed me to the ground, took off the hood and removed the restraints from my hands and legs. They ordered me not to move, and left quickly, locking the door from the outside.

I heard the voices, encouraging me to stand, so I stood and saw that I was in a big tent with around 20 other people. I walked towards the Arab prisoners there, they embraced me, and I was overcome with emotion. I embraced them and cried; we all cried.

After the warm embrace, my fellow prisoners tried to help me treat my knee and swollen leg. They supported me as I moved around the tent, and we got to know each other better. They told me what they knew of the prison regime; I learned that we were near Kandahar airport, prisoners were kept in tents which were arranged in rows of three, and there were still some empty tents

58 when I arrived. Only three people were allowed to move around or speak at any one time, even inside the tents.

There were people in the tent I recognised from Bagram: The two Sudanese men from the military prison in Pakistan, and the people who had been with me in Chaman on the bus transport to Quetta. Whenever they brought new prisoners into the tent, we had to go to the other side and line up, kneeling with our hands on our heads. Our movements in the tent were observed by a soldier watching through the barbed wire around the tent, just as there were soldiers in towers who observed every movement inside the camp.

The swelling in my legs was worse, and my knees were even more painful. I was only able to stand with great difficulty, so imagine how agonising it was to bear the soldiers’ games where they would entertain themselves by beating and kicking us.

One day, soldiers called my number and moved me to another tent where I met a Bahraini man called al-Murbati. He told me he’d been in the tent for the past three days. He explained the rules that older prisoners had explained to him. It was very similar to Bagram, but here we would get two meals a day, not one: One at midday, the other at midnight.

Before they distributed food, the guards would call out our numbers to confirm that everyone was present. We would queue in front of a soldier flanked by his colleagues who would call our numbers one by one. We’d repeat our number, turn so the soldier could read the number on our back, and walk to the tent. After this, meals would be placed in front of our tents according to the number of those inside. You had to finish eating within fifteen minutes since the soldiers would gather up the dishes whether or not you had eaten.

There was a heavy, cold rain one night as they served our meals, we were hungry and freezing cold, yearning for the warmth of home. But we couldn’t

59 even dream of that in the ugliness of our surroundings. I was hungry, thirsty and exhausted, so I picked some of what was in the meal and ate, chatting with al-Murbati. He told me how he got there: He was picked up while he was proselytising (da’wa) with the Tablighi Jamaat. When the war began in Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities arrested him and handed him to the American forces.

He asked me my story; I told him about my work and the circumstances of my arrest. He gave me advice on how to handle Americans, saying that he had travelled to America and dealt with them in Bahrain. He advised me to try to win them over, explaining when to get angry, when to smile, when to show goodwill and so on.

As we sat chatting, a soldier shouted angrily at him: “Why didn’t you clean this tent?” and ordered him to his knees with his hands above his head. Luckily, the soldier didn’t extend the period of punishment beyond an hour. It wasn’t unusual that one of us be punished like that, and the soldier who ordered the punishment would - deliberately or not - forget and go off shift, leaving you there. The order couldn’t be rescinded except by the person who gave it.

After al-Murbati completed his punishment, he said: “It’s as if God wants to dissuade you from my advice. That rabble doesn’t use mind or logic. I was wrong trying to win them over.”

In the middle of my second night with al-Murbati, soldiers called my number to take me to another tent where I found nine Arab and three Pakistani prisoners. I got to know the Arabs - one Yemeni and eight Saudis. Among them was Majid al-Farih from Mecca who had come with me from Chaman, but we had been separated.

60 Majid was no more than eighteen years old. He, too, had come to Pakistan for the Tablighi Jamaat. They were travelling between villages after war broke out and Pakistani police arrested the whole group. He was handed over to the Americans after his money and papers were seized. The Americans asked him for his passport, which is when he found out that the Pakistanis hadn’t handed over any of his documents.

There were Moroccans and Tunisians in the tent next to us. Multiple nationalities, languages and faces had been brought together for this torture, united by anger and injustice, and common among them all was Islam. How pathetic were those Pakistanis who salivated at the prospect of money and sold their consciences to the forces of oppression and injustice, handing people over after taking a few dirhams in payment?

During my early days in Kandahar, a delegation from the Red Cross came to visit, I was so excited to tell them what we were going through, the beatings, harassment, humiliation and starvation. We told them everything we could, all the rights we had been denied. One of the Red Cross delegation members spoke French and he tried to get us to speak to him in French so the American soldier couldn’t understand. The only French speaker among us was an Algerian man who had spent his whole life in France, but he didn’t speak a word of Arabic, so we couldn’t tell him what to say to the Red Cross officials.

I spoke to one fellow on the delegation who said that they would take our home addresses and bring us paper and pens to write home. I told him about random inspections in the middle of the night and the humiliation of being ordered to our knees with our hands on our heads for inspection or punishment. And the constant curses, insults, and beating, whether with their hands or the butts of their guns.

Sadly, I also realised after talking to the delegation that there didn’t seem to be a system for the prisoners so far, and the only solution at the moment was

61 these camps. I asked for paper to write two messages: one to my wife and the other to Al Jazeera. I didn’t receive any replies to the letters I sent, but when I asked the Red Cross delegation, they simply said they hadn’t received any replies. That didn’t diminish my resolve, I kept sending messages.

The worst thing about Kandahar was the roll calls. In the winter they would have them in the frigid night, and in the summer, they were in the sweltering daytime. The discomfort caused by the weather was only compounded by the abuses and intimidation by the soldiers.

We also weren’t allowed to clean ourselves for four months, neither for ritual purity nor general cleanliness. They gave us bottles of water for drinking only. Dirt was baked into us, and lice infested our clothes, hair and bodies. I will never forget the suffering, degradation and humiliation they put us through.

Life went on in Kandahar, and the surprise inspections did, too. They would have training exercises where they simulated that the prison had been overrun by a rebellion and they had to end it. Hummers and small armoured cars barreled in. Gun-toting soldiers in body armour entered to loud blaring music and stormed one of the tents, surrounding the others. For their training, they focused on the tent where the sick and wounded were.

These exercises were part of the ongoing psychological war against us, which the Americans seemed obsessed with, as obsessed as they seemed to be with painting their “war on terror” as some kind of extension of the Crusades.

Shaving the cross into prisoners’ heads in Bagram and raising a big wooden cross high above the watchtowers in Kandahar, as if that would mortally wound us, the Muslim prisoners. None of us took issue with the cross in any form, rather what hurt us more were the obscene things said by the female soldiers who made lewd comments to humiliate and psychologically torment us.

62 THE OLD AFGHAN MAN

There was an old Afghan man among the prisoners; he was a heavyset man, and his clothes didn’t fit well and eventually tore. He asked for needle and thread to mend them, and the guards choked him with it until he fainted, the bruise was visible on his throat for days.

I spoke with this Afghan by way of a translator. He explained that he was one of the nomadic peoples on the border with Pakistan. The Americans had attacked and detained them, and his son, some brothers and relatives were in another tent, charged with smuggling Arabs from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

The man swore he didn’t know any Arabs and that he was deaf, unable to understand what people said to him. He didn’t know how to pray, so we taught him how to. He didn’t follow the rituals or know much about religion, but that didn’t spare him from the Americans. After three months of torment and interrogation, even they realised he was innocent and released him and his family. By then he had learned al-Fatiha and some of the smaller surahs from the Quran, and how to pray.

A Red Cross official informed us later that those innocents had returned to their village and found it reduced to rubble, attacked by American planes. Its buildings had been brought down upon the heads of helpless women, children and the elderly.

63 INTERROGATIONS IN KANDAHAR

The interrogations in Kandahar were worse than Bagram, they were longer and more complex. They could happen anytime during the day or night, the midnight ones were the most annoying and exhausting. They stretched for hours, with questions repeated in multiple variations. I was interrogated upon arrival and called back two weeks later, both times I was asked about my entire life.

Just like Bagram, soldiers would come in to take a prisoner for interrogation, ordering us all to line up, kneeling, hands above our heads. They would call on prisoner’s number, and he would go to their side of the tent and lie face-down on the ground with his hands behind his back. One soldier would put a knee firmly on his back and restrain his hands from behind while another soldier restrained the prisoner’s legs with iron cuffs. They would place a black hood over his head and stand him up, forcing his head down as if he was bowing for prayer. With two soldiers holding the prisoner’s arms and one pushing his head and neck down, they would escort him out of the tent, locking the door behind them.

They set off at a jog for the interrogation tent, making sure to pass through water, potholes and stones so the stumbling prisoner would get a little more hurt. They also never warned the prisoner to duck when entering the tent, so he would hit his head on the doorframe.

Once in the tent, you would be shoved to the ground with the hood still on your head and one of the soldiers next to you. The interrogator would approach with a translator, then you would be sat up, two metres away from the translator and interrogator. A soldier would take the cover off your head,

64 and the questions would begin, covering every detail of your life in sheer monotony. I went through this four or five times in total.

I was barefoot since the shoes they gave me didn’t fit my feet, swollen by humidity and the cold. They would take me barefoot, stumbling through cold puddles in that bitingly cold, dismal weather. Back in the tent, I would shiver and savour my excruciating pain, unable to get a wink of sleep all night.

Once, a new interrogator who didn’t seem experienced enough in the role he had to play told me: “We’re at war, you know, and mistakes happen in war. We’ve confirmed through our investigations that we were wrong. So, the military administration has decided to free you and return you to your country. We’ll give you clothes and money to get you home.”

I looked at him, and he said: “Don’t count on a large amount of money. It’s limited but enough to get you back to your country.”

I replied: “I have my tickets back to Doha, and I have money, it’s all with you, so there’s no need to give me anything extra. I only need a statement from you that you made a mistake and for you to send it to Al Jazeera so that I can return to my job.”

He agreed: “We’ll give you the letter that you want on condition that you don’t publish it.”

I promised him, and he left me with a promise to release me within days. Needless to say, that never materialised. A week later, they called me for another interrogation, and I was treated as I had never been before. The interrogator greeted my cheerfully and offered me a seat and a blanket with which to cover myself. He was courteous, even his questions were friendly, oriented specifically towards my family life after marriage and my relationship to Azerbaijan.

65 He spoke softly and was wearing civilian clothes, and spoke English with a British accent. There was no comparison between him and the Americans. I knew that Americans were a mix of peoples and nationalities, and perhaps the interrogator was an immigrant or resident. I didn’t think they would be employing British citizens.

A month later, I was called again and brought into a tent with a male and female soldier in it. They sat me down on a chair, and he said they knew that I was a cameraman for Al Jazeera and that I had come to Afghanistan to do some reporting work.

I responded calmly: “Sure, you both know me, but who are you?”

The female soldier mocked me: “We’re Tom and Jerry. He’s Tom, and I’m Jerry.”

It didn’t occur to me to smile as I replied: “What do you want from me?”

“We know that you’re about to leave, so we’d like to ask you some questions. Who are the most respected men in the tent where you are right now? Who’s the leader, the important one in the tent? The person who, when he speaks, everyone listens, or when he orders, they obey?”

I told them: “There’s nobody that fits that description here. We’re all ordinary people.”

He replied with a question: “How about Hamza al-Batal? How many blankets does he have? How many meals does he eat a day?”

This Hamza al-Batal, a Tunisian quite deserving of the name (batal means ‘hero’ in Arabic), was a courageous man. He didn’t fear or shy away from anything that deserved censure, nor did he surrender to any of the Americans’ requests, rejecting them strongly.

66 “Hamza is a completely ordinary person,” I said. “He respects others, performs his prayers and lives like the others. He doesn’t have any authority or distinguishing characteristic.”

It was quiet for a while, then: “Well, who in your tent is thinking about escaping or carrying out violent activities against the camp?”

“Where would we escape to?” I said. “We’re in Kandahar, at the airport, on an American military base where we’re surrounded by soldiers everywhere. How would it make any sense for us to flee? And even if one of us managed to escape this place and get past all these soldiers, the Afghans will catch us. Why would any of us think of escaping?”

“If you’re not thinking about escaping, others are.”

“I haven’t heard anything about that,” I told them, adding, “Everyone knows me and perhaps they’ve been warned about me. None of them has passed on any secret like that to me.”

Then they made their real request: “We want you to help us. If you hear anyone saying they want to escape or do anything bad, or see someone acquiring unusual status, then tell us or the guards. We’ll bring you here and give you food, blankets or whatever else you want.”

I repeated that I didn’t know any of what they wanted and I didn’t need anything, that what I needed was to be released and to return to my wife and son and work.

“We’ll release you soon,” they said. “Until then, we’ll take care of you and provide for all your needs in exchange for what we asked of you.”

I apologised again for not being able to help them with this: “I don’t know those people. I can’t help. They know who I am, but they don’t trust me. All I

67 know about them is that they are ordinary people, far from any thoughts of fleeing and the likes of it.”

They ended the meeting and returned me to the tent. Whenever one of us came back from an interrogation, three people (the maximum number allowed) would gather around to hear what happened. The rest would sit nearby and try to listen to their tent-mate who spoke loudly so everyone could hear.

This time, when I returned to the tent, Hamza the Tunisian was there. “The interrogators were asking about you,” I told him, “You’re extremely respected. I told them that you’re a normal, good person who performs his prayers regularly.”

He replied: “I convinced them that I’m a vegetable salesman in Italy and that I have nothing to do with anything religious. Try to confirm that if you see them again in the future.”

Another interrogation began with: “Do you know who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud?”

I replied that I didn’t know. They repeated the question, and I repeated my answer.

“No,” they said. “You’re a journalist and find out information. Who do you think killed him?”

“If it’s about my opinion,” I said, “then Ahmed Shah Massoud was killed by a leader who had an interest in that. America might have done it because they have an interest. It’s known he had a special relationship with France, and America wasn’t happy with that.”

The interrogator asked about any other possibilities and made notes in his log.

68 “The Taliban also had interest in his death,” I said, “since he quashed them in the north.”

“Who else?” he said.

“Al-Qaeda,” I said. “They were an ally of the Taliban and concerned for their interests.”

“Who else?” he said.

“Pakistan”, I said. “Ahmed Shah Massoud resisted Pakistani influence, and it wouldn’t be unusual for Pakistan to target someone who was hostile to it and its Pashtun tribal allies. I also can’t exclude the civil war; the parties are armed and side-conflicts are common. We also can’t rule out the revenge factor, this being a tribal society where revenge crimes take place regularly. Nor can we forget Russia, since the two groups were in confrontation during the Soviet occupation of the country.”

Then I added: “Every one of these possibilities is credible. But who carried out the operation? And for whom? That is something I can’t answer.”

The investigator wrote, then returned to the question: “Any other possibilities?”

“This is as far as I can analyse things,” I said. They returned me to my tent at the end of the unusual session, which we could also call an investigation into the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud.

The interrogations were normally restricted to questions about people and requests for cooperation, as I explained. At every stage, I would tell them: “I am cooperating completely to the best of my knowledge,” and repeat that all I wanted was to return to my family.

69 Every time, they would tell me: “It’s imminent,” but would say that my cooperation was still insufficient. Towards the end, most of the questions dealt with people and places of which I was ignorant.

Over the six months I spent in Kandahar, most of the prisoners were transported to Guantánamo. The first plane to transport prisoners to that place of ill-repute did so on January 11, 2002. Was this a coincidence, or did they chose the four-month anniversary of September 11, 2001, to transport those they thought responsible for those attacks?

Each transport group was around twenty prisoners and they left about two or three days apart. We later learned that the transfers had caused temporary overcrowding in Guantánamo, which forced them to build Camp Delta. Whenever they built a new prison unit, they would take us from Kandahar to fill it; eighty percent of the prisoners were taken from Kandahar to Guantánamo over about five months.

New prisoners were still arriving, and we heard their stories. I met a group of Afghans accused of joining the Taliban and preparing for military combat. The reality - as confirmed following investigations - was that they had gathered in a mosque to discuss social issues. When they heard about this, the Americans surrounded the mosque and arrested them, only to release them later after investigation, torture and punishment. Groups of Afghans kept coming in, only to be released later. But the Arabs or other non-Afghans were less lucky, as the error of their detention didn’t occur to the American authorities at the time.

Once, they brought in an Afghan-Uzbek warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, in military clothing. We were prevented from talking to him, but found out later that he and his forces had fought the forces of a different warlord, General Fahim, to take control of a cement factory in the north, and that American forces had intervened and detained them.

70 By the end of May, only ten to twenty percent of the prisoners in Kandahar remained, no more than seven per tent. On June 13, it seemed there had been an order to transport everyone to Guantánamo and close Kandahar for good. Journeys began every other day.

They would call the numbers of the prisoners to be transported during noon prayers and take them to a different tent where they would remain until after dusk. Then, they would be put on a plane and shipped to Guantánamo.

They called my number at mid-afternoon on an extremely hot day, the kind of heat that makes a man think the sun is bearing down on him alone. I was with some other prisoners, we were bound with rope and knelt on the floor, then they covered our heads as we waited for the rest of the prisoners in that heat. Our hands and feet were bound and each line of prisoners was tied to another with a rope that held us together.

After the sun had set, they took us to another tent and began a new episode in insults and humiliations, tearing the clothes off us until we stood there as naked as the day we were born. Then, they began an extremely humiliating inspection of every part of our bodies. Every part.

They handed the prisoners orange jumpsuits and took their pictures with their old and new numbers; I was now number 345, no longer 448. They repeated their DNA tests with blood samples, hair and saliva, then scanned our eyes and took fingerprints. After that, we were transferred to the plane, bound with a short chain that forced our heads down, our hand and leg restraints tight enough to stop blood flowing, black hoods over our heads and a muzzle over our mouths.

We were led in a line, guard dogs barking and the soldiers’ shouts following us with insults. On the plane, they sat us on a long wooden bench and attached

71 us by our bound feet to the floor with a heavy chain. There we remained until the plane touched down at the airport.

72 THE REALITY OF BEING IN GUANTÁNAMO

At approximately 9pm, I stepped off the plane where I had been tormented for four or five hours. During that first flight, we were forbidden from eating, relieving ourselves or sleeping by the soldiers who watched, cursing and beating whenever one of us leaned on the other.

The only thing they allowed us was a mouthful of water, which the soldier poured into our mouth after removing the muzzle, reminding me of being in the cradle and the life of infants. You could refuse it with a gesture of your covered head, which I did, just as my companions refused when we learned that using the toilets wasn’t permitted. It wasn’t the toilet I needed, but to move my leg to relieve the ache in my knee and the pain of the restraints.

We landed at an airport and were moved onto another plane. It was cold as we were loaded onto the plane the same way. We sat on a wooden seat, and our legs were connected to the floor with a heavy chain for the second journey, which took twelve or thirteen hours.

It was an exhausting journey that froze our limbs and distressed us since we were prevented from sleeping or moving an inch. Life is strange, while thumbing through our prayer beads there are no limits to our wishes or dreams, but in a situation like this, my greatest wish was to move my leg, turn my hands or open my eyes.

The flight ended finally, and we were taken off the plane to the sound of shouts and screams: “You are in the hold of the US Marines. Don’t speak. Don’t move.”

I was feeling very weak and distressed, but I wasn’t able to put words to it. They took us off the plane and told us to walk, something our legs couldn’t

73 bear to do. They tried to stop one of us from falling, and the others would fall because our legs had lost all sensation and weren’t used to movement.

They beat us all over, no matter how we moved, kicking and punching us until they had dragged us onto a bus waiting on the airport tarmac. There were no seats on the bus, so they sat us down on the floor in rows. I was uncomfortable and tried to straighten my legs, but a soldier beat me whenever I moved throughout the journey to the military-base-turned-into-a-prison unlike any other. No, it was more than that, it was a clear affront to humanity.

Guantánamo … a place filled with injustice and hatred. It saw the crushing of every single principle and belief to which believers are called. An ugly face that sent humanity down a slippery path worse than life in the jungle, and worse than what history says about the Middle Ages. Guantánamo was the embodiment of the beating heart of force’s dominion, a nightmare.

The island we landed on was not our destination, so they took us on a ferry to another island that lasted roughly ten minutes. Then, we were put on another bus where we remained stationary for an hour, during which we heard the sounds of planes, helicopters and cars. Then, the bus finally moved, and we drove for a while then taken somewhere where the restraints around our legs were loosened, and they allowed us to stretch our legs after the anguished and distressing journey from Kandahar. We remained handcuffed, but the situation was more merciful than it had been on the plane.

Sometime around noon, I felt a sharp pain in my chest and asked for help, telling them about the pain. They initially beat me and then told me: “You’re strong. You don’t feel a thing.”

When I insisted and repeated my complaints, one of the soldiers came over and placed his hand where my heart was and felt my weak heartbeat. He and

74 another soldier took me straight into the building and asked me, “What hurts?”

I explained to him that I was feeling pain in my heart and weakness in my heartbeat. The two soldiers cut off all the clothes I was wearing. They brought me into a room with a doorless toilet and told me I needed to take a shower quickly under the watch of a guard. They turned on the water and aimed it at my body. After some minutes I told them, “I’ve finished washing now. I would like to go to the toilet.”

“There is no toilet,” they said.

They took me to another soldier who did the routine tests in an insulting manner I’ve never been exposed to before. After that, they gave me some other orange clothes and put on hand and leg restraints once again.

Then they took me to an office with interrogators who asked me my name, age, country of origin and date of birth. They took my picture and made a card for me; then they surprised me by handing me a small piece of paper and telling me, “Write a letter to your family telling them what’s happened.”

I wrote five lines that went roughly like this:

Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim

To my dear wife, Umm Mohammad,

As-salamu aleikum wa barakatuhu.

I am now on the island of Guantánamo, in Cuba. I was transported here, and I reckon they will check our files and will find out that they have taken me by mistake. They will return me home or to Qatar in the near future.

As-Salamu aleikum wa barakatuhu.

75 I remember that I added my greetings to my son Mohammad and stressed how important they were. They took me to a clinic next, still restrained. The doctor asked me what I was complaining of so I explained the weakness in my pulse and the pains in my chest.

He ran some quick general tests and asked if I was suffering from any specific illnesses. I explained that I had some problems with my glands and had regular medication on the advice of my doctors. I told them I suffered from a rupture in the neck and some symptoms of chronic rheumatism. He wasn’t interested in those ailments, saying, “We’re not asking you about any of those illnesses. We’re asking if you suffer from any contagious diseases.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Do you have AIDS?” he said.

“God forbid!” I said. “I don’t have any illness like that.”

“Do you suffer from malaria?” he said.

“That’s becoming increasingly rare for me,” I said.

“We’ll give you some pills to take care of that,” he said.

He asked the soldiers to take me away, and they brought me directly to the investigation room. My life in Guantanamo had begun.

We live in a world that has cracked apart because what has been done to elevate its values caused its collapse.

The prevailing belief towards the end of the last century was that the civilised world was moving towards the ideal in its respect for human rights, but this belief was the beginning of a terrifying regression recently, especially in the shadow of the so-called “war on terror”. This has resulted in a retreat of

76 respect for the recognised values of human rights, and flagrant violations of these values.

This wasn’t only done by totalitarian dictatorships, but by the governments and nations that had consistently called for the protection of human rights, freedoms and liberalism.

The “war on terror” produced new forms of rights abuses, contrary to all international treaties and conventions: Torture, detention in secret facilities, handing over suspects to countries practising torture, and extended detention without trial. All based on mere suspicion.

The prisoners of the “war on terror” were deprived of the right to litigation and the right to silence, to retain a lawyer or legal representation. One could never have imagined that it would be the United States (democratic protector and leader of the free world) that would resort to authoritative practices, would run secret prisons, carry out cross-border prosecutions and kidnappings on the slightest suspicions, and use physical and mental torture as a matter of course.

But President Bush led the United States down that path, the path to war. In victory, he said, “It is fundamentally necessary to obtain information from known terrorists and those suspected of terrorism.”

Four days before that statement, his deputy Dick Cheney explained in an interview for Meet the Press on NBC that in order to prevail over America’s new enemy it was necessary “to work, through, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful.”

77 MY SUDANESE BROTHERS

It was especially comforting to me to meet fellow Sudanese prisoners in Guantánamo, even though I was saddened that they had met the same fate I had. I met a total of twelve Sudanese men there, each one caused my lonely heart to take flight a bit and taught me something.

At one point, I was moved to Charlie and found to my delight that there were two Sudanese Brothers there, Hammad Amanoh and Mohammad Rashid. They both worked for a Kuwaiti aid organisation in Peshawar, Hammad as an accountant and Mohammad an administrator. Local authorities raided their office and took them, then handed them to the Americans. In similar raids, three other Sudanese Brothers were taken from the aid organisations they worked in: Adel Hassan Abu Diyana, Mohamed al-Ghazali and Salem Abu Ahmed, all Sudanese, all fated for Guantánamo.

Being moved in with Hammad and Mohammad relieved a lot of the mental pressure I was under. It was like opening a floodgate, and I started to talk and talk to them. In fact, I talked so much that they must have complained to each other about how much I was able to talk!

We asked each other about news from Sudan, and since Hammad was taken later than I was, he was able to give me a more recent idea of what was going on at home.

One Brother, whose fate pains me to this day, was known to us as Ibrahim al- Sudani. I think his story hurt us all because, when he lost his mind, we all knew that we could easily follow suit any day.

Ibrahim’s mind gave up after trying to withstand the physical and mental torture of Guantánamo, and the constant humiliation we had to live through. How many times had I contemplated madness and longed for the dark oblivion it brought? How many times had I teetered on the edge of insanity, wishing that it would engulf me and spare me from the daily agony that was life in Guantánamo?

78 CELL NUMBER 40

In cell number 40, my first cell in Guantánamo, I was put in with Afghans who were the victims of crimes carried out by American forces against the Afghan people, with the help of their ally, Rashid Dostum. Their arrest in Afghanistan by General Dostum began at the time of the American air strikes and seemed coincidental at first. They were placed in Sheberghan prison, which belonged to Dostum’s forces.

They told me of the frightful conditions there. The prison building didn’t protect them from the harsh weather, and when it snowed, snow fell on them in their overcrowded cells where they never had enough food and water. Every prisoner got less than a quarter of an Afghan loaf of bread a day, and two small cups of water.

There were seriously wounded prisoners among them, too, some with severed limbs and open wounds, but there was no treatment available. They suffered, untreated, until many passed away from their injuries. Thousands of corpses are buried in mass graves around many Afghan cities, they died in American aerial bombardments or to artillery shelling by Dostum’s forces, or because of their suffering in Sheberghan prison.

This was confirmed by a forensics official from the United Nations, William Haglund, who discovered the mass graves. He disinterred three corpses to perform an autopsy, after which he concluded that the cause of death was strangulation. “It was impossible,” he said, “to count the number of bodies contained in that mass grave, but the estimated number approached thousands.”

He also indicated that Dostum’s forces had handed over or, rather, sold, people they detained to the Americans for five hundred dollars per prisoner. They

79 convinced the Americans that those prisoners were Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters to seal the deal, and the Americans deposited them in prison in Kandahar. They were interrogated while being made to kneel with guns pointed at their heads, punched and kicked the whole time.

After interrogations, the prisoners were transported to Bagram and Camp X- Ray (later Delta X) in Guantánamo to continue the torture, degradation and humiliation that was contrary to all laws and international customs.

I remained in cell 40 with the Afghan prisoners for roughly four months, June to October, not leaving the cell except for interrogations. During those months, a medical team came to us one afternoon. One of them said: “We’ve come to inoculate, immunise and vaccinate you.”

One of them approached me with an injection in his hand, and I asked: “What is this against?”

“Tetanus,” he said.

“I had one before I left Doha,” I said. “The doctor told me it would last five to ten years. So, I don’t need it.”

“You must take it,” he said.

I was afraid of their “vaccinations”. I worried that they were injecting us with diseases not vaccines. I didn’t trust them, no matter how often they said it was for our protection. They had already been forcing us to take extremely strong pills against malaria and tuberculosis.

My fears increased with their insistence. They said: “If you aren’t willing to take what we order you to take, you will take it forcibly and involuntarily.”

“You can give it to me by force,” I said, “I won’t give you my arm to vaccinate me. I told you that I had this vaccination previously.”

80 They consulted amongst themselves and spoke with the administration, then decided to punish me with a three-day confiscation of all my things. They moved me to an empty cell without even the small plastic mat that I uses as a cover when using the toilet.

I requested to speak to the official in charge. He came after a while, and I said: “You are preventing me from praying. Is prayer now forbidden here?”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t forbidden.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You confiscated my mat. I can't go to the toilet and am not able to pray on the metal floor. I need the mat, at the very least.”

He told me he’d speak to his higher-ups, but when he returned he said that they wouldn’t give me any of my things unless I accepted the vaccination, but I refused. That was my very first punishment.

The war machine in Afghanistan drew in inexperienced US military personnel (many with no more than sixteen weeks of training and no military experience) who relied on translators from private companies to interrogate and doom thousands of innocents. These wretched souls were caught up in the Northern Alliance’s dragnets (under General Dostum’s leadership) that rounded them up and sold them to the inexperienced Americans, who in turn panicked and hurled them into the abyss of Guantánamo.

During my first four months in cell number 40, the meals they gave us seemed to have been prepared in the early 1990s: the “cake” was rotten and had layers of bacteria on it. We weren’t sure what the ingredients were either, so it was considered lucky to get a bag of beans or some fish. Everything was eaten cold, which didn’t improve its taste or feel.

Twice a week, we got ten minutes to walk in the sun and take a shower. It was all calculated with precision so we didn’t exceed the time even by a second.

81 We showered as fast as we could so we could have as much of the ten minutes as possible outside.

We had to whoer under the eye of a soldier, male or female, depending on our luck that day. If you were embarrassed being naked in front of a female soldier, you showered in your trousers, not removing them until you returned to your cell. Shaving was equally unpleasant, done once a week with rusty blades, no cream or soap to help us shave.

Every camp had a special block for the most special punishment, isolation. But our section had two: November and Oscar. They were steel containers converted into entirely closed-off cells, so you couldn’t see who was next to you. The cells were kept extremely cold, and intense lights glared at us in a black-painted room. The solitary confinement cell … Oh, Allah!

These cells sent you into distress, anxiety and panic. All your things were taken away from you, leaving you in the harsh cold and total isolation. They would reduce of our food - in spite of its deficiency - as a punishment. You had only five minutes to finish eating, and if you didn’t manage it, they’d take your meal anyway. There were also the repeated sudden inspections every night, when they would wake you up, often beating you for no reason.

I didn’t receive any messages during that period and did almost nothing except for the interrogations that were continuous, most revolving around Al Jazeera. In that darkness, a warm surprise came to me from the east, giving me joy in Guantánamo for the first time. That day will remain carved into my memory.

It was September 20, and a message arrived from my wife, Umm Mohammad, via the Qatari Red Crescent. It came in the military post system and contained a picture of my son, Mohammad, and good news about the family and the world. I won’t hide from you that I was overwhelmed by happiness and reduced to tears.

82 I had seen a vision of this in a dream before the message arrived. In it, a soldier stood in front of my cell, asked me for my number and handed me a message from my family. I was delighted by the dream and waited for that day, which came on September 20.

The person who came to me was the same person who I had seen in my vision, down to the last detail. I was sleeping when he called out to me, so I was bemused for a few minutes when I woke up and saw him; then I looked at his hand to see if he had come bearing letters.

He asked for my number, and I told him what it was, then he opened the grate in my cell and passed me the message. I was delighted, and when I opened it and found it was from my wife with a picture of my son, it was impossible to stop myself from bursting into tears. I cried for a long time, and my neighbours started crying with me, although they didn’t know what was going on. They asked me and I told them I had received a letter from my family that included a picture of my son from whom I had been separated for more than a year.

I knew from my wife’s message that she was in Doha and they knew what had happened to me. They were comforting themselves by pleading with the Almighty to release me. They reassured me that I would be released soon and that they were confident that I wouldn’t do anything that would justify my continued imprisonment.

Umm Mohammad reassured me that Al Jazeera was giving them a regular stipend and they were provided for. They were in contact with their family in Azerbaijan and with my colleagues from Al Jazeera, who were in touch often to reassure them.

83 A few days later, a delegate from the ICRC came and handed me an exact copy of the first message which had reached me through the prison. It also came with a photo of Mohammad.

There had previously been some confusion with my messages. When I was still in Kandahar, I had written messages addressed to the Doha headquarters of Al Jazeera, telling them my situation and that I was hoping to be released at any moment. I got no reply.

When I reached Guantánamo, an ICRC delegate was supposed to meet me upon my arrival, but that did not happen. Two months later, a delegate finally came to see me, and I asked him why I hadn’t received any replies to my messages.

“Didn’t anyone meet you?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“I’ll set up a meeting for you,” he said.

After less than a week, I met the ICRC delegation in their office inside the prison. They gave me a serial number for my case, and I asked them about my messages. Their response was interesting: They said none of my messages had been delivered because they were under the impression that I didn’t want anyone in Sudan to know about my detention.

I responded: “Who told you that? I didn’t ask anyone to hide anything. Actually, I want the opposite. I want my country know about my case. Why would I have written messages? You’re playing games with us, and I will no longer cooperate with you.”

They apologised and told me that now that the situation was clarified, they would inform their Geneva offices to deliver my messages.

84 “WE WANT YOU TO WORK WITH US” THE INTERROGATORS

I was moved to Charlie block soon after I received the messages from my family. After a month there, a new team of investigators - wearing civilian clothes - took over my interrogations. Their style was kinder, they said they were from British intelligence.

They asked me about people I didn’t know, some of whom they said I had met in Britain when I was there.

"I’ve never visited Britain," I replied.

Then they asked me who I met while I was working in Kandahar, if they were British. A stream of questions, including questions about my in-laws in Azerbaijan.

One of them introduced himself as an Arab-American living in London. His name was Dr Fadi, he had a doctorate in media studies, and had come especially to meet me. He said his purpose wasn’t interrogation but to talk about Al Jazeera. He asked a lot of questions, including: “How did Al Jazeera succeed? How did they get to where they are now?”

I told him: “Al Jazeera succeeded for three reasons.

“Firstly, it began with trained staff. Most of them had worked for BBC Arabic service and had long experience working in media. Secondly, they had everything they needed to help them produce their reports. Thirdly, and most importantly, the channel came upon a groundswell of strong moral support and found a space of free expression in which it flourished.”

“You know,” I said, “every channel is governed by red lines it cannot cross, Al Jazeera had none of those red lines, it enjoyed full journalistic professionalism and applied it to its news coverage. It became the most important source of

85 verified news for tens of millions around the world. It added a new style to media in the Middle East, forcing people out of the cycle of official media clichés. It focused on the demands of viewers, and covered news that was other organisations didn’t consider important enough.”

I added “Al Jazeera was one of the first regional channels to cover conflicts such as the second Gulf war and Afghan war. The viewer felt its distinctive presence, and Al Jazeera surpassed Western media, becoming an indispensable source.”

We talked for a while, and he ended by saying: “We could say that Al Jazeera put Qatar on the map. One thing I can tell you,” he continued, “is that when you leave, you will find that Al Jazeera has spawned many channels in its image.” Then he left.

Shortly after this meeting, they called me again for interrogation and took me to a special place, by Guantánamo standards. It was a room with seats, a television, and a table covered with newspapers and magazines. On the wall were pictures of Mecca and Medina, a prayer mat and a large copy of the Quran. It was a room that - at first blush - was arranged for any purpose other than interrogation.

I sat, and soon a man in his fifties came in. He was of middling height with flowing, greying hair, a light tan and clean-shaven face. His movements were gentle, his voice quiet, overall he looked quite smart and kind, and resembled the Egyptian actor Omar al-Hariri a bit.

This was Stephen Rodrigues, a seasoned Cuban-American intelligence agent. In the 1980s, he worked in West Germany, debriefing defectors from East Germany during the Cold War. He turned them and sent them back as spies to East Germany and other Soviet Bloc countries.

86 Overall, it was a nice meeting. He began with flattery: “I met Dr Fadi, and he said 345 is open-minded. I came to you, not for an interrogation,” he said, “I’m going to make you an offer, but before that, think about this: In a man’s life there are opportunities for luck and wealth. If you miss them, your life is that much harder and less successful. In the raging seas we’re sailing in now, if we don’t grasp the opportunities the tide brings, we will lose all.

“You have a great opportunity ahead of you,” he said, “it can change your life, an opportunity for you to do work that will change the course of your life, your family’s as well. Think about what I said until we meet next week.”

He gave me the magazines that were in the room. There was a copy of al- Sharq al-Awsat newspaper and some Egyptian magazines that had been published in the past two weeks. I hadn’t read or heard the news for so long, so I grabbed them eagerly, flicking through quickly, scanning headlines. I was in an indescribable state. I wanted to quench my thirst for news and to share it with the other prisoners.

I returned to my cell, where I lived with some Arabs, including Abu Abdullah al-Kuwaiti and others. The Brothers asked me what had happened, noting that I was still bemused by what had happened. I asked for a minute to catch my breath, then recounted as much as I could of what had happened. I told them the news I had read, and they were as happy as I was to hear fresh news of the world.

A week later I met Rodrigues again and he was more frank: “Sami, we want you to work with us.”

“Who is ‘us’?” I said.

“We are the American intelligence services.”

“I will not work with intelligence services,” I said.

87 “Intelligence work isn’t like what you see in films,” he said. “We want you to work with us in exchange for American citizenship for you, your wife and your son. You’ll have a large house, a car and savings in American banks. We’re not talking about one or two million; it can go up to twenty million, depending on how hard you work. If you bring valuable intelligence, your bank account will increase. We’ll train you, when you leave you’ll be a journalist of the highest calibre. We’ll prepare a book for you to publish too. We’ll make you a distinguished personality who wins global prizes. We’ll realise all your aspirations and dreams in no time.”

“How would this work?” I asked him.

“That’s easy,” he said. “You’ll get your job back at Al Jazeera when you leave here. Then when you’re asked, for example, to interview Muammar Gaddafi, you’d describe to us the location, security precautions, his movements, expressions, and observations on what you see. If al-Qaeda contacts you to do an interview, look around where the interview is happening; describe the room and manner of those you meet, their thoughts and behaviour.

“We wouldn’t need you to tell us your movements, we can plant devices in your body to follow you, and we can hear the conversation around you. We’d want reports from you on what the devices can’t see. We’ll train you to memorise numbers, to describe people and ways to win their trust. We’ll organise a lot of training for you, and when you’re back, there will be people in Qatar and in Al Jazeera to help you, you won’t be alone. There are large financial incentives, and you’ll be happy, you’ll get what others haven’t been able to after long years of hard work.”

“Fine,” I said. “You want me to work against al-Qaeda and against those you mentioned.”

“Yes,” he said. “But in a diplomatic way.”

88 “I fear Allah,” I said, “and He is my witness: No Muslim is to cast their eye towards the sins of Muslims, and I am certain whoever does this work will quit the circle of Islam, lose his religion and his world.”

In Guantánamo, my interactions with Americans taught me to talk to people according to their mentality. Americans are materialistic, like their life. If I said: “this isn’t permitted in my religion,” they wouldn’t care because they’re distanced from religion, it means nothing to them. The same was true of most of the soldiers and interrogators we met. Materialistic people who spoke to the prisoners using their logic only.

I continued, “I went to Afghanistan to cover the war. But what you’re asking me to do is extremely dangerous.I would make money, but I would lose my soul, and I have one soul; if I lose it there’s no point in money. I fear for my safety and my family’s.”

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We here in America will protect you.”

“Excuse me,” I told him. “If America was as great a nation as you say it is, why ask someone weak like me? How would you protect me, if you can’t protect yourselves without me?”

He was silent for a minute then said: “That’s right. Right now we aren’t able to do everything, but that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. We have a lot of power, but we’re in a war with a wide open front. We’re fighting ghosts, not armies. We have to use people to help us in this war. That’s why we’re asking for your help.”

“I am not convinced,” I said. “I’m hoping to get out of here and to live a quiet life with my family, a life without threats or instability.”

“You agreeing to work with us,” he said, “gets you out sooner. You haven’t done anything that would make us take you to trial, there’s no justification for

89 us keeping you here.” He added: “But, there’s no law that allows anyone to leave, even in a case like yours. If you put your hand in ours, we can push for a political decision for you to return to your family.”

“Good,” I said. “Let me think about it.”

He gave me new magazines and said: “If you want anything, we can arrange it for you. Any place you want to be transferred to, anything you want …”

“Don’t move me,” I said. “I just want time to read these magazines here.”

“I’ll give you an hour to read,” he said, “and I’ll bring you more magazines and newspapers next week when we meet. But think hard about this matter.”

I returned to my cell, hoping to sit and think, but my neighbours wanted to know about the interrogation. I told them everything was fine, not wanting to talk right away because I knew we were being monitored. I later told my Sudanese neighbour, Hammad, in whispers between our cells. I was able to give him a decent enough idea about what happened, that I had refused to work with them, and wouldn’t change my mind, although the way I phrased my reply gave me some flexibility and credibility with them.

Hammad said trying to manipulate the American would not end well, and after talking to him and seeking religious guidance, I decided to be clear. A week later, they came and took me to the same room. Rodrigues returned, smiling, bearing newspapers and magazines.

“Inshallah,” he said, “you have come to a decision.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have come to a decision.”

“And what is it?” he said.

“I have decided not to work with you,” I said. “Firstly, I fear for my family and myself. And secondly, honestly, what you do doesn’t fit with my principles.”

90 “With regards to your fear,” he said, “I told you we’d protect you, that you wouldn’t be on your own, you would be working with all of America and would know how powerful it is. There are those who are ready to protect you and your family. If you come to America to live, we wouldn’t turn you away, although we don’t encourage it as it may expose you. You can live in Doha, and we’ll protect you there. We have colleagues there now, hidden.”

He continued: “Now, your principles, don’t think this is a James Bond film where you kill people or have adventures. We are like diplomats, striving to find ways to prevent killings and major crimes. To avoid killing anyone - which we don’t do, except when forced as a last resort - we stop evil before it happens.”

“Do you remember Martin?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Martin, the British intelligence officer you met.”

I laughed: “No, I’m not talking about interrogators; I’m talking about Martin Luther King. You killed him even though he was as democratic as you and called for justice and equality. But his politics didn’t accord with yours, so you had him killed. I would never participate in something like that.”

“We didn’t kill King,” he said. “We caught the killer and he was judged and sent to prison. This is what the CIA does, work to catch the bad guys. We have two missions: The first to stop crimes before they happen, and the second to pursue and prosecute bad guys who committed crimes. Martin Luther King was murdered by a racist and intelligence officers captured him, this counts in our favour!”

“Be that as it may,” I said, “I don’t want to work with you. I will talk to you, as a friend not an interrogator. Can we not we talk as friends?”

“Of course,” he said.

91 “So, my friend,” I said, “ I want to ask you something. If you had a family - a wife and child who love you - and you were offered work like this, work you’d never done before, and knew without a doubt it would endanger you and those people, would you agree? Honestly?”

“Honestly,” he said, “I would refuse.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” I said, “See? I can only refuse your offer.”

He shook his head: “Let’s look at this another way. You’re in Guantánamo, you’re innocent, but the US sees those in Guantánamo as bad guys. No way you’re getting out of here soon unless you agree to work with us. If you did, in a matter of days you’d return to your family. Why no agree so you can leave? When you get out, you can say you’ve changed your mind. Why don’t you do that?”

I laughed and told him: “I do want to get out of here, I pray for that every day. The question is: if I accept your offer, I leave then say: ‘I’ve changed my mind and don’t want to be a journalist, I want to live and work in a small village in Sudan that is of no interest to you’, what would you do?”

He said: “Honestly, we would detain you and put you back in prison.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because you can’t leave here,” he said, “unless you sign an employment contract, which has clauses where if you deliver, you’re rewarded. If you mess up, you’re punished. The least punishment is putting you back in jail, but this time it will be legal, based on your contract.”

“So, I would have achieved nothing? Left an illegitimate prison only to return to a legal one because of this contract? In here, I have some sympathisers, but nobody would be on my side in the second scenario. No, my life would be miserable and dishonourable. I wouldn’t be able to return to my country even

92 if the US released me. I don’t want to play with fire, when I leave this place, I will be completely free. I won’t be bound to your administration or any other. That’s is my decision, and I will accept everything that results.”

He nodded and said: “After I read your file and listened to the interrogations, your situation compelled me and I wanted to help. But I respect your opinion. I hope you’ll reconsider, and if you change your mind, ask to meet with me. I can’t give you my name, just say you want to meet with the person with whom you had a special meeting. If I’m here, I’ll meet with you. If I’m not here, I’ll send you someone to meet with you. And let me assure you that you’d really like cooperating with us.”

With that, he left. I asked him for the magazines he had, and he gave them to me reluctantly. After a few minutes, a soldier came and took me before I had a chance to read anything. They returned me to my cell, and I went gladly, a great weight dissipated from my shoulders.

93 ABU SHAYMA AND ABU SHIFAA: ON LOSING OUR CHILDREN WHILE WE WERE IN PRISON

Allow me to tell you the story of a forty-year-old Bosnian man of Algerian origin, who we called al-Hajj, from Bosnia. He was my neighbour in prison, a wise, calm and quiet man. I could see a deep sadness in his eyes, but he was distant and calm, not speaking of his pain. I learned his story when a letter to him from his wife arrived:

“To my absent husband, Abu Shayma, may Allah keep him from all that is harmful.

May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon you.

I hesitated before writing this letter to you. I don’t want to pour oil on the fire, or to add an ordeal to the ordeal you are enduring! But I need to divulge something to you, even if it is heavy and cruel. We must accept it even if it is bitter.

My absent husband,

I took up the pen to write to you, so I’m stumbling over my words and hesitating over how I convey this. Here I am, writing this letter to you. The tears flowing down my sad face are my release.

My flower, Shayma … I woke our seven-year-old up in the early morning to give her breakfast. She said to me: “Mama, it’s normal for parents to die before their children, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “But why are you asking that?”

“I feel that I will die before you,” she said.

I put my hand on her mouth so that she wouldn’t get carried away.

“Breakfast is ready, little one,” I said. “Come now, so that you’re not late for school.”

94 I left so she wouldn’t see the tears flowing from my eyes. I returned after I had pulled myself together and found her in bed, still asleep. I asked: “Why are you being so lazy, my flower?”

She answered me weakly: “Mama, I feel tired. I can’t go to school today.”

I looked at her eyes and realised that she was telling the truth. I ran to the telephone and called the hospital. It wasn’t long before Shayma was in the ambulance instead of the school bus, and its siren was guiding us through early morning traffic. Shayma finally arrived at Sarajevo’s specialised hospital. Allah be praised, one of Shayma’s cardiologists was present in the hospital at that time. After some quick tests and tremendous efforts, Shayma was transported to the ICU.

Our little one lay there, in a complete coma. I watched her and followed her condition from behind a window for two nights - don’t ask me how long those nights were.

On the third day, the sun came up in the morning and set on the life of our little one. The moon left our home. Shayma’s soul was received and passed away.

After that, I don’t know what happened. I only recall that I witnessed her burial in Sarajevo cemetery among a large crowd, some of whom I knew and some I didn’t. Shayma’s young school friends escorted her to her final resting place with their heads bowed and teary-eyed.

I came home but wasn’t able to enter. I felt like a monster. I stopped at the threshold of the house in which she had lived, unable to enter. This was even worse as - since you departed over four years ago - I haven’t been able to sleep in our bedroom. I had fled from it to Shayma’s room, but now there wasn’t anywhere in the house left for me to take refuge.

I decided to flee the house and to stay with my father until you return. We light lamps for you once again. I hope that will happen soon, with the permission of Him who hears and answers all.

Your wife, Umm Shayma

95 The lawyer had travelled thousands of kilometres. After a long struggle, he delivered the letter to Guantánamo, this sad message for the father of Shayma.

Abu Shayma sat on a solid steel chair facing his lawyer. His hands were handcuffed, his legs tied to a metal rod in the ground.

This wasn’t the first meeting Abu Shayma had with his lawyer, but the task this time was painful. The lawyer began the session by welcoming him and as usual, asked him how things were going. Abu Shayma told him about the ongoing injustice and oppression he was being subjected to, day and night.

Abu Shayma told his lawyer about the ongoing daily interrogations, more than ten hours straight in a harsh, cold room. They wanted him to admit he was in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, during the barbaric war that the US launched on the defenceless Afghan people in 2001.

The lawyer patted Abu Shayma’s shoulder and said: “It’s all right. Tomorrow, I’ll expose it all, and we will reveal the truth to the whole world.

“The US administration is trying to gain public opinion as a short-term tactic that will inevitably fail. But forget about those things for now. You have a message from your family in Bosnia.”

Full of eagerness to hear the news of his family, Abu Shayma took the message and began reading. But he realised the tragedy and felt the catastrophe from the beginning of the message. A waterfall of tears rained down from his eyes. He began to mutter: “We belong to Allah, and to Him, we shall return. We belong to Allah, and to Him, we shall return.”

The lawyer remained silent; then he left to ask the soldiers to return him to us. When he returned, dragging his feet, his tears were still flowing, his tongue repeated, “We belong to Allah, and to Him, we shall return.”

96 We realised immediately that something serious had happened, and asked him what happened. He wasn’t able to reply.

“Did the cruel one hit you?” we asked him.

He kept looking at the ground. A terrible silence prevailed, everyone looking at him with sadness, anxiety and anticipation.

“What happened? Please, tell us, Abu Shayma. What happened?”

He raised his tear-filled eyes to us. With a rattle, he stopped crying and said: “My dear Shayma has died.”

Our eyes fell, our mouths agape, the shock didn’t allow for any expression. That night we slept with our hearts almost broken in two.

The following morning, Abu Shayma told us that his daughter was born with a hole in her heart. He had wanted her to have surgery when she was younger, but doctors advised him to wait until she was five. He had started to put aside a modest amount of money to cover the $13,000 the operation would cost. Before he was able to put together a third of the amount, the Americans imprisoned him, or we should say they kidnapped him.

“My efforts were wasted,” he said. “My travails were lost in the wind. I thought about my daughter and her condition after I was arrested and these shameful circumstances.”

Two weeks passed, and ironically letters arrived that were over three months old. One contained pictures of that little flower with sleepy eyes, a bashful smile and the innocence of children on her cheeks. There was also a letter written by the hand of that little one, in the wondrous phrases of a child. Shayma wrote to her father:

My dear Baba,

97 Al-salaamu aleikum.

I miss you really a lot. Really really.

I’m fine, don’t worry. I’m still waiting for you. I look forward to your return and you taking me for a visit to grandmother in Algeria. Baba, recently we have celebrated peace day at school, and the tenth anniversary of the Dayton peace accords. My teacher thanked America for being the guardian of peace.

Before the party ended, I asked my teacher: “If America is the guardian of peace, why do they imprison people and take them far away from their families?”

She answered: “America, my little one, only detains war criminals to keep the peace.”

“But baba,” I said, “hasn’t been a war criminal at ever! Baba worked in orphanages and to help the sick. Baba handed out food and medicine and clothes. Why have they deprived me of baba for more than four years?”

The teacher was quiet for a moment, and then she said: “Baba will return to you soon, Shayma.”

Baba, you’ve taken a long time. You’ve been away for a long time.

We can’t live without you, baba.

I wait for you every day and remember you in the morning and the evening.

Baba…

Goodbye, and my warmest kisses,

Shayma, who misses you very much.”

I read Shayma’s letter (Allah rest her soul) with sadness and sorrow, then passed it to the other prisoners. We shared in Abu Shayma’s sorrow and partook in his ordeal.

98 One of them, my Sudanese Brother Adel Hassan Abu Diyana (Abu Shifaa), read Shayma’s letter and let out a long moan. The letter tore the scab off his own wound, leaving behind raw pain.

A year earlier, a message had arrived from his family in Sudan informing him that his daughter, Shifaa, had passed away. She was born after he was imprisoned - as was the case for tens of prisoners who had never seen their children. She died after a bitter struggle with her illness which lasted a year and a half. The family hadn’t been able to provide the drugs she needed.

Abu Shifaa told me: “I worked over fifteen years in the humanitarian field, in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. I had official residence papers issued by the Pakistani authorities and certified by UNESCO. I worked for orphans, never thinking the day would come when my own family would be in need.”

He paused, pensive and pained: “In the end, I worked as an official of one of the hospitals that offered free services to refugees. I never thought that the day would come when my daughter would be just like those poor girls I saw, without a father to take care of them. I never thought my daughter would die, suffering the pain of illness, tossing and turning on her sickbed. Just for a few hands, the inability to provide for medicine!! And now, why are the Americans holding me? Isn’t the death of my Shifaa, enough for them?”

99 THE FIRST RAMADAN

In Guantánamo, we didn’t hear boats, only saw dead bodies leaving, and lifeless bodies entering. The persecution continued as we fasted during Ramadan. It wasn’t the hunger of fasting, but the humiliation, neglect and other things we were exposed to. Add to that the psychological pressure, sessions of temptation and seduction, and endless interrogations.

I felt as if the skies had fallen down on the earth, and I was between the two, breathing through the eye of a needle. In our world, Guantánamo, the sadists didn’t feel alive unless creatures were falling to the ground under their feet, and they could urge on their screams until they died.

We prepared for the first Ramadan, and the guards were told that we would not be eating anything until sunset. Seemingly deliberately, they were always late delivering our meals, coming four hours after the azan had sounded. The Ramadan meals weren’t canned, although they remained painfully small.

The first and last days of Ramadan were difficult, we needed to see the crescent moon to determine the beginning and end of the holy month, but not all of us could. In the first, second and third camps, some of the cells could to see the sun and the moon, but not where I was. In this doubt, we did our best and counted out 30 days.

It was around that first Ramadan that the administration instituted the levels of punishment, as I explained earlier. The point was to punish any prisoner who objected to poor treatment, asked for basic rights or didn’t cooperate with the interrogators. They wanted us to compete over the levels, so we would be distracted from demanding decent treatment.

100 The result was that they reshuffled people often. They mixed nationalities, moving people around on the basis of these levels. The first camp was allocated for those on level 1, they put me and others in Camp Two, separating me from Hammad, Mohammad and Rashid.

I stayed in Kilo block of Camp Two for just two days. On the third day, as I was being transported, I heard someone call out my name, it was Jamal Abu Wafa, a Yemeni man who had worked as the director of the Haramein Foundation in Azerbaijan. I didn’t recognise him right away, but did a double- take and realised who he was. I greeted him, asking: “Why did they bring you here?”

I didn’t hear his answer because the soldiers hurried me out, and I soon realised it was towards Tango block, which was allocated for level 4. I asked: “Why are you taking me from level 2 to 4?”

They said they didn’t know, that they had been given orders to follow, not think about their implications. I stayed in Tango for a day and then I was moved to Sierra. As always, the prisoners there were from all over: My neighbour was Abdul Rahman al-Omari from Saudi Arabia, there was an Algerian man known as Sheikh al-Mati’ - a religious scholar who had studied in Syria - and so many others.

I soon understood why I was at level 4, it was because I had clashed with the interrogator who offered me a “job”, so they punished me. But they still hadn’t given up. One day they brought me to interrogation with an Arab man who spoke with a Kuwaiti accent and introduced himself as Adil. “I’m from Iraq,” he said, “but I lived in Kuwait.”

We spoke, and he told me he had a problem with the Americans. He’d spent seventeen months as a detainee but then started working for them as an Arabic translator.

101 There was a female interrogator in the room; her face seemed like it had been eaten up by flames of fear, cruelty and revenge. She said: “You’re prisoner number 345. I’ve read through your file, and we don’t have any problems with you. You came here by mistake, and we intend to correct that, so you can leave.”

I listened quietly. She continued: “We need to do a few things, we’ll do that after I’ve handled your file.”

“What do you mean by a few things’?” I asked.

“Didn’t you agree to work with us?” she said.

“What work are you talking about?” I said.

“To work with us like you are working with us now,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t say I would work with you; I’m not working with you right now. What made you assume that?”

“Didn’t you say that you would cooperate with us?” she said.

“Cooperation is different,” I said. “I’ll cooperate by answering your questions, but I won’t work with you in any other shape or form.”

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“That’s strange,” she said. “They told me you would and that I had to begin the programme to get you ready to leave!”

“No,” I said. “I’m only ready for questions that relate to me and my file.”

“Ok then,” she said. “Perhaps there’s been a mistake. I was entrusted with getting you ready so when you left, you would have the knowledge to do the work required of you.”

102 “I think you got something wrong,” I said, “or maybe you have the wrong file.”

“No,” she said. “They told me prisoner 345 was ready to cooperate.”

“Check with your superiors,” I said. “I am not ready to work with you.”

They returned me to my cell. Later, they brought me back to interrogation, a different woman was there.

“I’m here to ask you one thing,” she said. “Do you have a problem? I want to help you.”

“My only problem is that I am here, in Guantánamo.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that’s a problem, and we’re trying to solve it. You’ll return to your family soon. We’ll meet with you next week. Is there a specific kind of food you’d like?”

Ah, this was another pressure point they used in interrogations. In the camp, our food was bad, insufficient, and we didn’t always know what was in it. The interrogators offered us good food to attract and influence the poor, hungry prisoners.

“No,” I said. “I don’t need anything.”

“We insist,” she said.

“By all means,” I said, “give me what you have.”

“Would you like to eat?” she said.

I didn’t ask for meat because none of us ever knew if the meat was halal, if it had been slaughtered according to sharia.

“I would like some fish and vegetables,” I said.

“We’ll treat you to delicious fish,” she said.

103 Two weeks later, they took me to interrogation again, saying they had some fish for me. I walked in and they put the food in front of me.

“What are you doing?” I said to them.

“We are leaving you the food so you can eat it,” they said.

“I am fasting,” I said.

“No matter,” they said. “We’ll keep the food. When do you break your fast?”

“I break my fast at sunset,” I said, “but I don’t need this then. The food we get is enough.”

“No,” the interrogator said. “We’re treating you; we’ll prepare food for you then.”

Half an hour before sunset, they took me again. I had told the story to Sheikh Mati’, who said: “Sami, this is a blessing from Allah. Call on God Almighty and eat. Let Him deal with whoever has wronged you.”

I went, and there was quite the feast prepared for me; besides the fish and vegetables I had asked for were sweets, chocolate, juice and fruit. It was the first time I had eaten real food since my arrest, I couldn’t resist. The famished human within me took control, and I ate. I ate and implored God’s assistance with those who had wronged me, who I had not forgiven.

When I went back to my cell, the other prisoners were just being served their iftar food. The soldiers knew that I had already eaten, they had talked about what they had seen me eat as they brought me back. As we entered the cell, they asked me in a whisper if I wanted to be served iftar with the others so they wouldn’t know that I had already eaten, which could damage their opinion of me.

“Yes,” I said. “I will eat again.”

104 IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

The sound of my wife’s footsteps reaches my ear, drawing closer.

“You’re still up, Sami!” she says. The night bird on the windowsill is startled by her voice.

“Yes,” I say, “It seems that tonight my memories are coming to me easily.”

“OK,” she says, “Hand me the pen and paper, tell them to me. Your hand must be worn out from writing.”

“No,” I say, “Please go back to bed. I’m fine, and there are still things that I haven’t written.”

Our conversation seems to have disturbed the night bird. It spreads its wings, beats them and flies away. My wife says: “No, let me help you. Tell me, and I will write. I know Arabic and can write well.”

She is insistent, but I don’t want to exhaust her by making her stay up all night. However, I crave her company, too, and in the end, I say: “Fine. Take the pen and write ...”

We heard of the departure of the first batch from Guantánamo, mostly Afghans. By the mercy of God, one of them was Hajji Faizullah - he must have been over eighty - who was my neighbour in Lima block. A frail old man, he’d been with us since we arrived. He couldn’t open his food packs, or do anything else for that matter. Even the soldiers wondered: “That man can’t even help himself, how is he an enemy combatant? How did he end up here?”

The Hajji also couldn’t clean the place where he sat. When he left his cell to go to the bathroom or anywhere else, some of the Brothers would ask the soldiers to allow them to clean his cell for him. May God reward them!

105 After that batch left, I stopped answering the interrogators’ questions. They asked: “Why aren’t you answering?”

“You promised I would be the first to leave Guantánamo,” I said. “But the first batch left, and I wasn’t among them.”

They said that group was Afghans only, that there would be one for Arabs and I would be in it. I didn’t believe them any more that day than I had any other day.

A few days later, some soldiers were harassing a prisoner they had found sleeping. They woke him up and made him do silly things like moving a bar of soap around, or following ridiculous orders shouted at him. They searched him, then a soldier beat him mercilessly where a man should not be beaten. I couldn’t bear the sight, so I protested, and I was promptly dragged to solitary confinement.

The solitary confinement block - Oscar - was extremely isolated; it was my first time there. They shaved my head, beard and moustache and left me there for roughly two weeks. There I met people I spoke to only through my cell door, we couldn’t see one another. There was someone from Canada there, someone from Australia, and some Saudis: Abu Ziad al-Ghamadi and Sultan al-Madani.

We got to know each other; sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of them when their cells were opened. They would bring our food in the evening, leaving the windows open, so we were able to talk. The window was small, three by five inches, allowing only a small plate through.

Two weeks later, they transferred us to another solitary confinement block; that was so they could bring in one prisoner, Shaker from Medina. I knew Shaker from Kandahar and Bagram. We’d arrived on the same plane from Kandahar, but I hadn’t seen him since. He was an activist who lived in

106 England with his family, married to a Pakistani woman. He spoke English fluently and understood the Americans’ tricks. They brought him in after they cleared the block, but we realised who it was when we heard him shouting as the soldiers dragged him.

When we found out who he was, we undertook our own disobedience, striking the metal doors. An officer came to find out what was going on and we told him we were protesting Shaker’s transfer to a block on his own. We kept the pressure up until they brought him to join us, and we remained there together for a while.

After a couple of days, Shaker told us he had heard the soldiers saying a word they only used in cases of serious trouble and that he’d try to find out what happened. After dinner, he called out: “Brothers, it seems that one of the prisoners has died. They say he was a Saudi who was in India block, solitary confinement. The Americans are claiming he killed himself.”

That day, the windows were left open. The soldiers made their rounds of the cells, peering into the windows, watching closely, maybe they were listening to what we were saying amongst ourselves. An officer came to us and said: “Your colleague is in an external hospital. The translator can explain more about his condition; he saw everything.”

The translator came a little later: “Your colleague is Saudi. He hanged himself. They tried to rescue him, but he was clinically dead. He is currently on life support and in extremely critical condition in intensive care.”

We talked about the incident, and we agreed that we had to confirm what happened. I don’t know if the soldiers heard our conversation, or it was pure coincidence, but they brought in a prisoner who had been on India block at the time of the incident. His name was Ahmad al-Maghribi Abu Omran, and he told us what happened:

107 “It was Mash’al, the young man from Medina. He was fiercely protective and proud of his religion, a Saudi from the Harb tribe. The soldiers were bringing a new person into India block where Mash’al was being held. The new prisoner was a man called Hammad al-Turkestani, and he was carrying a copy of the Quran. At the door of his cell, opposite Mash’al’s, the soldiers took the Quran away from him and threw it on the ground. They pushed the man on his face as he cried: ‘They defiled the book of Allah!’

“That was all it took for the prisoners to start beating their doors. The soldiers spread out in the block and turned off the lights. They stormed Mash’al’s cell; he was the principal witness. Within fifteen minutes, the medical team took Mash’al out on a stretcher, blood flowing from him. Some prisoners saw that, and the noise increased as they kept protesting, beating on the doors so prisoners in other blocks would know something had happened.

“The riot police came in and beat the prisoners brutally; three were transported to hospital after Mash’al. The next day, an investigative team entered, all in white. They drew the scene of the incident and sealed off the room. Then, they emptied the block of prisoners.”

It was after that that prisoners began talking about taking collective action in support of Mash’al. The administration was trying to bury the truth; they told the media that Mash’al had tried to kill himself and the soldiers had intervened to save him. They thought they had succeeded in falsifying the truth, however, our weapons were starting to take effect. Our strikes, protests, speaking to journalists about the truth and telling them of the extent of humiliation and torture practised in the prison. As the truth came out, it took serious work on the part of the administration to try to balance that ugly picture.

They started easing up and created Camp Four, the nicest camp where those about to be released would go to relax, to silence global public opinion. They

108 filled the camp with the weak minds they had convinced to spy for them. They tempted prisoners by parading the others being transported to Camp Four in front of them. They won over a few who fell into that trap and spoke to the media about how they were happy with the American administration. They were shown on TV, wearing white and playing and having fun, a small minority that didn’t represent the prisoners, not by a long shot!

They also brought false witnesses to act like they were cooperating fully with investigators. All to cast doubt on those were still left resisting. Reality refutes that, what they did was scheming and attempts to distract the world. I wanted everyone to resist their games to foil their plans. What happened to Mash’al still seethes in our minds.

Given that what had happened to Mash’al was instigated by defiling the Quran, we decided to hand in our own copies rather than run the risk that they be defiled. The prisoners agreed, but the administration started to worry that their assault on the prisoners’ Qurans would be made public and issued a directive forcing every prisoner to take a copy.

Unbelievably, the riot squad began going into cells and leaving Qurans there. They would beat the inmate and pepper spray his face, then drag him out and leave a Quran in the cell. This was the same administration that had prohibited Qurans during Ramadan because they said they eased mental pressure on the prisoners. In reaction to these unusual measures, we organised another protest… We fought as best we could, and our protests continued.

109 PAPA, FOXTROT, MIKE, ETC.

After those incidents, I was on level 3, and they transported me to Papa block where I met Hammad, Mustafa and Abu Ahmad who were all from Sudan and some other Brothers for the first time. We stayed there for a while, then I was promoted and moved to Foxtrot at level 2. On the eighth day, they moved me to Mike, a block devoted to interrogations, which meant it was the only block where you would find prisoners from all levels.

A female interrogator who brought me to Mike told me: “I brought you here to protect you from the soldiers. I’m stopping them from hurting or humiliating you. Nobody can hurt you here.”

Abdul Aziz from Medina was on Mike block, as was Mamduh al-Australi, Adil al-Zamil al-Kuwaiti, and Mohammadou Ould Slahi from Mauritania who was handed over to the Americans by the Mauritanian authorities. He was transported via Jordan where he was interrogated and tortured for six months. Abu Maha from Mecca was also with us as was David from Australia.

This was my first opportunity to hear Mamduh al-Australi’s story. He was detained in Pakistan, then sent to Egypt and horrifically tortured there, before being sent to Kandahar, and from there on to Guantánamo. Mamduh said he had been in Egypt with a Pakistani man known in Guantánamo as Sa’ad al- Madani al-Pakistani. Back then, I remember basking in Mamduh’s language; he spoke beautiful Arabic. He was a Hafiz of God’s book, which meant he had learned the Quran by heart, and recited it in a dewy voice, sounding much like Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais.

Sa’ad the Pakistani told me his story after I told him I was a journalist. He had been seized in Malaysia and taken to Pakistan. He was a man of action and a Qari of the Quran, reciting it with all the proper nuances. He taught the

110 children of the Pakistani president and had friends everywhere. He studied the Quran in Medina while his father was ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The remarkable thing about the block was that it became a point of convergence for the Sudanese. Among them, I remember Abu Ahmed who I’ve mentioned already, and Mohammad Salih and Adil Hassan who I met for the first time. All four of us were in a single row in neighbouring cells. The female interrogator told me there were 12 Sudanese detainees in Guantánamo, nine had been cleared for travel and three were still under investigation. “I put you all together,” she said, “so you could enjoy each other’s company until you’re released.”

Of course, their goal was for us to talk amongst ourselves so they could pick up what we were talking about. They thought we might talk about things that had been concealed from the interrogators, such as any connections between us we hadn’t told them about. We would sit together and say things to tease them. We would imagine what would happen if one of us became president of Sudan in the future, who he would appoint as his ministers and so on. Joking, I told them, “The Ministry of Communication will be mine.”

We continued enjoying ourselves a bit in Mike block; then they brought me back to Foxtrot, then two weeks later they brought me back to Camp Two where I was put in Sierra, then Kilo. It was there that a new series of problems began.

While I was in Kilo block, we heard what had happened to one of the finest prisoners in the camp, and immediately organised a protest. His name was Abdul Hadi, and he was one of those who went through unspeakable torture, humiliation and suffering. One day, he was with an interrogator who defiled Allah’s book with his foot, then ordered Abdul Hadi to be bound with the Israeli flag. Abdul Hadi normally suppressed the stories of what happened to

111 him, but this time, after some hesitation, he told us only because he feared he would be sinning if he suppressed it.

When we heard the story, some prisoners called for a strike, deciding not to leave their cells in protest of the desecration of Allah’s book. This was not new to us, as it had been happening since Kandahar, but it didn’t become easier to hear this. Nor was it easy to hear the ongoing provocation of them throwing the Quran on the ground and writing obscene things on it. They left the marks of their shoes on its pages.

The prisoners on Kilo block chose me to lead them, and we carried out our plan, as agreed with the neighbouring blocks, not to come out of our cells. Since the detention facility was searched daily and we refused to leave our cells, the riot squads appeared. Six soldiers would burst into the cell, wearing helmets and armour, with officers.

The officers would talk to the detainee while a soldier sprayed their eyes and body with pepper spray that burned intensely. They would spray our bodies, too, since adding water to try to wash it off would activate the spray and make it burn more. They would, of course, beat the prisoner at the same time. Happily, it seemed, and then they would drag him out.

When the protests continued, they focused their efforts on Kilo block, but we persisted for a few days. Then, they came and told us that they had decided to move me out. After consulting with the brothers, we agreed that I shouldn’t resist the move, so I left quietly. They planned to beat me, so I they took me to Oscar block, where they tried to push me down a flight of metal stairs. I clung to a column by the steps and managed not to fall, they tried to push me again towards the ground, which was filthy with hair from prisoners who had been shaved there. Still, I didn’t fall …

112 One of the soldiers pushed me to the ground while I had my hands above my head, so the others could bind my arms and legs. The front of my body struck the cement floor, unprotected because my hands were on my head. The shock coursed through my body and a deep gash opened above my eyes. The soldier who had pushed me down kicked and punched me.

They shaved my hair, beard and moustache and put me in a solitary confinement cell. There they removed the restraints from my legs and took turns beating me. By this point, there were over ten soldiers there, and blood was pouring from the many wounds on my body. They left, closed the cell door, and watched me through the window.

When they noticed that I was bleeding badly as I sat, calling on God Almighty, they called a doctor from the hospital. He came to the window to look at me, but couldn’t see me well with all the blood covering my face and clothes. He asked me to come closer to the window, and I refused; the soldiers offered to storm the cell, but he forbade that.

I stayed that way until I fainted against the door. The doctor came to the window, turned my head towards him, and through that tiny window grate, he stitched the wound on my head which was bleeding profusely.

I was left there for three days. On the fourth day, they brought me out for interrogation. I refused to speak, and when the interrogator saw the wounds on my body, he demanded I be moved to the hospital. They took me to the clinic, bandaged my wounds and opened a file on the incident, but not a single soldier was ever investigated for it.

In fact, they accused me of having resisted the soldiers. How could I have resisted, bound hand and foot as I was? The most I could have done was refuse to respond to their orders. The soldiers had attacked me because,

113 according to them, I incited the Brothers on the block, “This is the penalty,” they said.

I refused to despair, alone in that cold, solitary confinement cell for two weeks, in pain. My wounds had swollen, and some of them began to fester. After two weeks, they transferred me to Tango, then Sierra, where I remained for a few months. Eventually, I was moved to Papa, and later on to Foxtrot, a level 2 block, where I stayed for a long time.

After Foxtrot, there was Mike again, and it was there where I met Jamal the Ugandan, who had been living in England; he was my neighbour for a while. Our other neighbour was Mohammad al-Qaraani, a young man from Chad, born in Medina and seized in Pakistan.

We were a band of Brothers, not just because we were prisoners and suffered together, but because of our black skin. The soldiers didn’t spare us the racist taunts, making sure to refer to us as “negroes” whenever they could.

114 THE SIT-IN

Midnight arrives, and I feel sympathy for my wife. I take the pen and paper from her, bringing them into my study, saying: “If you want me to rest, please go to sleep.”

I close the door and return to my session, contemplating the Arabian night. The poor bird returns and perches on the windowsill, singing for me.

The barbaric cruelty of Guantánamo crowded my mind, where our gaolers thirsted for violence, where they beat and insulted us as if we threatened them. They liked to shackle us after stripping the clothes off our feeble bodies, leaving us naked in front of each other. Once, they stripped Jumah al-Dossari of his clothes for two months. I suppose they were trying that punishment out on a single prisoner to see if they wanted to apply it to the other prisoners. If they deemed it effective, they would apply it to everyone.

Romeo block was specially designed for that experimentation: forty-eight cells built to be completely isolated; we couldn’t see anything out of the one window that was covered with a dense grille. Light shone on us from every side, and we were kept naked except for our underwear. The toilet was a small hole with water flowing from one side. You may be shocked to read that that was the water we used for drinking and washing. Or perhaps, by now, it’s not so shocking to you. Food was distributed to us on toilet paper, a little bit of dough mixed with vegetables, no taste or smell.

After Romeo was built, prisoners from neighbouring blocks were transported to it. When the news reached other blocks, the prisoners began talking amongst themselves to decide on how to protest against being moved into that terrible block, naked and humiliated, all our sensibilities - including the

115 religious - violated. After a day of discussion, the prisoners decided to refuse to leave their cells in protest.

Even though I thought a sit-in wouldn’t work - given the uneven distribution of power and the fact that it only made the guards hurt us more - it served our purposes best. Only a few people opposed the idea, so we went ahead; the lack of movement paralysed the camp. The administration, of course, decided to send in the riot squad, the experts in the ways of beating and abuse. My arms and legs were broken, and my face swelled to twice its size.

We kept it up and they continued the torture, for nearly a month. They came up with new ways to violently abuse our bodies every day. I was shot in both arms and all around me, night and day, I could hear groans and see blood. The unjust were never far, and their hands knew no restraint.

ICRC officials came to visit us, but their role didn’t really go beyond transmitting messages with sentences struck out by interrogators who wanted to restrict access to information about the prisoners. Our conversations with the ICRC were eavesdropped on.

A tiny ray of hope came in late 2003 when a delegation from Sudan came to the camp. The soldiers asked me if I wanted to meet them and brought me to the interrogation room. They removed my handcuffs, but left my leg restraints on.

There were two Sudanese men, Usman and Khaled. Before we began, I asked them to show me their identification papers. In Guantánamo, we had grown accustomed to meeting people of different nationalities (including from Sudan) working for the Americans. I rebuked them for taking so long to come visit. Delegations from other countries had been visiting the prison since 2002.

116 Usman went to get their passports while Khaled stayed and we began a general chat about Sudan. It was 2003, and I was hearing news of Sudan for the first time in a long while. Khaled assured me that everything in Sudan was looking positive. Oil was being exported and was beginning to bring in good returns.

Half an hour later, Usman came with documents that confirmed they were from the Sudanese foreign ministry. That business taken care of, they said: “We came here to find out about your situation and form a true picture of why you’re here.”

I told them the story, from the moment I was detained to when I was brought to Guantánamo. I explained life in the prison, the interrogations and how the administration had been stringing me along by promising to release me.

They listened attentively then said: “We can see that there has been a misunderstanding. We’ll do our very best to get you back to Sudan as soon as possible.”

They couldn’t do anything on that trip; it was a scouting mission to understand the situation, and they would raise the matter and get it moving when they left. I told them about the other Sudanese in Guantánamo, about the insults, about being stripped down to our underwear, about defacing the Quran. I was honest, clear and precise.

I told them the Americans asked me to work with them and that I refused, that they were still trying to convince me, and I was still refusing. At the end of the interview, they asked me if I had any letters to send. When I met them the next day, I handed them a letter to President Omar al-Bashir asking him to intervene in my case.

In that letter, I told of the suffering of the other Sudanese prisoners, especially those of them who had heard nothing from their families for a long time,

117 adding that I knew I was better off; I knew where my family was and that Al Jazeera was giving them my salary.

118 THE TRIAL

My wife returned: “Either go to sleep or let me sit here with you.”

I gesture for her to sit: “Take the pen and paper, then, and write, Umm Mohammad.”

“I was hoping you’d say that, Abu Mohammad.”

A question the media asked constantly was: Is Guantánamo on American soil, where American laws apply? Or is it Cuban, outside American jurisdiction? The judgment issued said that it was on American soil, but that its prisoners were not protected by American law.

To deal with criticism, the US set up a kangaroo court to calm public opinion. It was a military tribunal usually made up of a judge, a public prosecutor, and a military officer representing the prisoner. They were under pressure to explain the hundreds of prisoners in custody without any charges against them that could explain their detention.

The prosecutor would lay out accusations that had no connection to reality, and the judge would inform the prisoner he was not allowed to hear the “secret evidence” against him or the deliberations. The military officer was there to stand in for the accused.

Over 700 people were tried in this way, to determine if they were “military combatants” or not. We were told that all prisoners in Guantánamo would undergo preliminary classification before being presented to the military tribunal. The classification would determine the threat posed by the prisoner to the security of the US.

Court proceedings began; we were told there would be two military judges from the Department of Defense presiding and that each detainee would be

119 provided with a DoD lawyer. The soldier representing us would be our guardian and the main source of information for the judges.

I stood accused in late 2004, political accusations of which I was completely innocent and despaired of being defended adequately against. Even my lawyer, who was supposed to be my advocate, seemed to be on the prosecution’s side. That was Guantánamo; we learned to expect that kind of thing.

How can a prisoner of America trust an American military tribunal and the military law it applied? Added to that was the mysterious “secret evidence”. How could we defend ourselves against secret evidence?

We asked these questions, but nobody could answer because they knew the procedures were contrary to the logic of law and courts, contrary to any logic. When I received notice of my trial, I asked the military official who served me: “How can I go before a military tribunal as a civilian? You know that I was detained while fulfilling my duties as a journalist. I have no military activity, what gives you the right to send me to a military tribunal?”

Hi curt reply was: “I can’t answer your question. My mission is to hand you these papers and tell you the military tribunals will be within the next few months.”

A few months later, they took me to meet someone in a military uniform. He said: “I’m Clive, I’ll be helping you in the military tribunal. I want to inform you that I cannot hide anything you say to me from the judge. The law states that I must inform the judge everything that transpires between us.”

I replied: “You introduce yourself saying you’re here to help me, but at the same time destroy your legal qualification. You’re conspiring with the judge against my interests. How are you an advocate? You advocate for the government, not the accused.”

120 He tried to continue: “I want to tell you that you can summon witnesses to the sessions.”

“Will bringing witnesses from outside Guantánamo be permitted?”

“Yes,” he said, “but there are obstacles. Non-Americans cannot enter the island except with special passes.”

“That means,” I said, “whoever I want to testify won’t be able to attend, and if they can, it would be with great difficulty. What help and witness are you talking about, then?

“Are there any guarantees that the witnesses will be able to go home, or that they won’t find themselves in the cells next to us?”

“I can’t answer that question,” he said. “The US detains everyone they suspect of supporting terrorism or communicating with terrorists. Even your witnesses, if we find any reason to detain them we won’t let them leave Guantánamo.”

I wanted to embarrass this so-called “advocate”: “So you want to make us catch the others.

“I want to get in touch with my family, they can provide papers confirming I’m a journalist working for Al Jazeera. This will help me refute the allegations and accusations against me.”

“Communication isn’t permitted,” he said. “But you can tell me the questions you want to send, and I will try to contact them from my side.”

I considered whether to stop embarrassing him, but decided to continue: “If you get in touch with them, what would you say?”

“I would tell them I’m helping prisoner number 345, and he needs this and that from you.”

121 “They won’t cooperate with you,” I said, “nor would they trust you. You’re in the American army! If I don’t get in touch with them, they won’t cooperate with you.”

“But we can’t!” he said. “The rules don’t allow you to contact your family.”

“I don’t see any other way,” I said.

“We will have to see about that,” he said, “But I can’t promise anything.”

“Why can’t you help me,” I said, “even though that’s why you came?”

“My help is limited to informing you of the accusations against you and letting you know how the tribunal sessions will be conducted.”

“You should admit that you’re just an informant, that you came to tell me your bosses’ requests. And on top of that, you aren’t even pretending to help me.”

“That’s all I have,” he said. “Let me inform you of the accusations.”

The first accusation was that I was detained and stopped by Pakistani authorities when I tried to enter Afghanistan on December 15, 2001, then handed over to the US.

“That’s an accusation?” I asked, laughing. “That’s a description! And it counts for me. I entered Pakistan on a visa. I had a press card. I followed the law, presented my travel documents so I could exit. I didn’t forge documents; I didn’t impersonate anyone. I didn’t go to Afghanistan to fight, buy drugs or do anything illegal. I went there as a journalist. That day, there were over seventy journalists there from media organizations from around the world.

“What else do you have?”

He said: “There’s an accusation that after your entry into Afghanistan you were trying to buy Stinger missiles to ship to Chechnya.”

122 “How would I buy Stinger missiles for Chechnya after September 11?” I said. “After September 11, things changed in Afghanistan and around the world. You know I went as a journalist. I didn’t have the money for missiles, or the time to do what you are claiming. How would I send them to Chechnya? To whom? What was the price? How could I interact with the Afghans without understanding their language, on my first trip to Afghanistan?

I explained to him that the story was likely a distortion of the Stinger argument between the Afghan man and the Pakistani intelligence officer adding: “Whoever put this accusation together twisted the story. I didn’t come to Afghanistan to buy weapons, you can review the records of my interrogations. You’ll see that I told that story in telling what happened to me during my detention by Pakistani intelligence services.”

“Tell this to the judge in your session,” he said.

“Are there any other accusations?” I said.

“That you travelled to hotspots in the Middle East between 1996-2001,” he said, “and to the Balkans and countries in the former Soviet Union. Finally, you reached Afghanistan in 2001.”

“Let’s look at basic facts,” I said, “without these extra spices. My travel in the Middle East: I went to Saudi Arabia for the Umra and Hajj. The trip is real, the embellishments are not. I went to Syria as a tourist; it wasn’t a warzone or training ground. Is tourism an act of terrorism? The same applies to Lebanon, I went as a tourist. The same for Jordan. I visited the Emirates for work. No problems happened during those trips, you can check with those countries if you want.”

The fourth accusation was that I refuted the existence of any connection between my former boss, Abd al-Latif al-Umran and al-Qaeda. So even though I had denied having knowledge or information, I was accused anyway. What

123 they wanted was that I agree that Mr Abd al-Latif al-Umran had ties to terrorism, that I renounce him to give them proof to accuse him, even if it wasn’t true. I knew that were were no such ties. I believed that then, and I believe it now.

What I know about Mr Abd al-Latif al-Umran is that he is a successful man who dedicated his life to charity, to building mosques and supporting orphans. He was the ideal Muslim believer. I said: “I won’t implicate him or distance myself from him. I will not condemn his actions, I know him well. I would wish to be in his position, to help those in need. He is a man of good character and behaviour.”

The last ridiculous accusation was that I was the Imam for the detainees who were praying and that I had taught some of them how to speak English.

Before I entered the court, I sat with Clive for a bit. I entered the courtroom with my hands and feet restrained, a translator was seated beside me and microphones were set up in front of me.

The committee entered, and I was surprised to see that the prosecution representative on was Clive himself, my military advocate. The advocate for the accused had become the representative of the prosecution!

I refused to rise. When it came time to ask me to swear an oath, I refused at first, saying: “I don’t believe in your court. We Muslims do not lie, whether under oath or not. We don’t need to take an oath to avoid telling lies; they are a great sin.

“I will take the oath, but only so you don’t think I’m avoiding it.”

I swore by Allah that I would tell the truth, then asked to be allowed to explain my case.

124 They asked me many questions, which I didn’t answer, simply saying: “I’m obliged to follow the guidance of my lawyer.” Discontent showed on the faces of the judge’s assistants who regarded and spoke to me with contempt.

As I had expected, the result was that I was still seen as a threat to the US and that my detention would continue for another year.

125 CLIVE

Clive was my lawyer, and I never envied him his task of defending me.

He tried his best to help me though, and he managed to get some messages through to my family and back. Speaking to Umm Mohammad was wonderful, and it was thanks to him.

I had told him the obstacles I had encountered reaching out to her and my family, that I had sent many letters via the Red Cross, but not one seemed to have reached them. The first letter to reach me via the Red Cross arrived on September 20, 2002, more than ten months into my detention. Other messages came, but sporadically, dismembered and distorted. Even photos were deliberately distorted to make them so you couldn’t distinguish their contents.

Photos of my son that Umm Mohammad sent me were impossible to make out, there was no reason for them to be damaged other than deliberate tampering. Why? It was their policy, they deliberate hurt me however they could. They wanted to stop me from sending my news, expressing my feelings. They didn’t want the story of my tragic reality to get out.

Out of necessity and a sense of duty, Clive became my link to my family, he would visit them and reassure them that I was still alive and doing all right, and in turn he brought me their news.

Clive and I agreed that I would tell him precisely what was happening to me. We, the prisoners, knew the American administration was spreading spurious news about what happened in the prison. We needed our lawyers’ help to send our news out and to talk about our wretched, miserable prison.

126 I would write letters and give them to Clive when he visited me every three months; about six or seven per visit. He would then hand them to those carrying out oversight in the prison. After they had been cleared, he would try to publish them.

In my articles, I tried to tell the prisoners’ stories. One was about my prison neighbour, an Algerian-Bosnian man by the name of Hadj Boudella. He was single, a simple man who lived in Bosnia with no ties to any group, but found himself swept up in a criminal investigation and then sold on to the Americans who brought him to Guantánamo. He never knew what he had done to end up there, up to the day he returned to Bosnia in December 2008.

One of the most important messages I passed on to Clive was the first letter I sent my family:

“To Basma, my dear, and to ‘Atr, my life..

To my son and darling Mohammad..

May the peace of Allah enclose you, may His eye take care of you..

I know that you - last night - blew out your fifth candle, but the candles of my sorrows are still burning. The fire of my longing for you still ablaze.

I know that now it’s time to take you to school, but my hands and legs are bound.

Do you remember, my son, when we put out your first candle, all three of us? Is there still a trace of the warmth of my kisses on that day that turned your cheeks all red and filled your cheeks?

I don’t think you remember that day, but I do - the ney flute of the old country playing; now there is the disruption of the news, the seas and oceans between us, the deserts and wastelands ...

Even with all of that, the image of your face has not left my memory nor departed my eyes.

127 What renewed the memory and fuelled the fire of my longing and yearning to see you: even your face in a photo. Unfortunately, my wounds have not quite healed yet, and the bleeding increased when I read your words over and over again in each message, your restless questions:

Where is baba?

Why doesn’t baba come home?

Baba, come.

Forgive me, my dear son, fruit of my heart. You won’t find an answer to your bitter question except what your poor mother tells you: Baba will come back, and you will see him.

If this poor woman ever has another answer, she won’t hesitate to tell you!

The truth, my son, is that your father is abandoned in the abyss of prison, overloaded with the restraints of inequity, enchained with injustice and oppression on an island thousands of miles away from you.

The island is isolated from the world; it no longer emanates any sounds other than jangling chains, and the groans of the downtrodden who are tied up.

You can only see frowning jailers or the faces of the locked-up oppressed ones.

On the island … inside, my son! I am lost, lost, lost.

Outside the island, my son! I am born, born, born.

Your father is the victim of a new global power; one that only speaks in threats, planes and battleships bristling with steel.

With their bunches of dollars, they became slaves, abandoning near and far.

They even abandoned the language of condemnation!

128 Those patient men locked up to await glorious release from suffering.

My bereaved hope, my one son. I told you that in this life there is justice, brotherhood, love, faithfulness, respect and expectation. I thought that these were the ingredients of life. But I was stricken when I realised that those who claim justice, to who call on freedom, and to who bring up democracy …

They told me repeatedly: you will not leave this place until we are satisfied with you, and we will not be satisfied with you until you do what we want!

And do you know what they wanted, my son?

They wanted to corrupt me in the afterlife just as they have corrupted me in this world: but no way!

Allah is my helper, on Him, we must rely, and to Him, we must direct our pleas. He is sufficient for us, and He is the Best Disposer of affairs. He has the power, before and after.

Your father, prisoner number 345, Abu Mohammad, Sami Muhi al-Din Alhaj.”

129 TALAL AND YASIR AL-ZAHRANI

There was a young prisoner from Saudi Arabia in the camp; his name was Yasir al-Zahrani. He spent five years in Guantánamo, during which time he was tortured mercilessly and eventually died under mysterious circumstances, his body returned to his family and buried in Medina, where he was from.

An investigation into the death of Yasir and two other prisoners (one was Saudi and the other Yemeni) was held and Rear Admiral Harry Harris, camp commander, reported that the three deaths had been suicides, although nobody believed it.

Yasir’s father, Abu Talal al-Zahrani, was a Brigadier-General in the Saudi police force. He told me his son had been kidnapped by a group in Afghanistan who sold him to the Americans. In a voice he could barely control, he said: “They returned him to me in a box, in pieces.”

Abu Talal absolutely refused the Pentagon narrative that his son had taken his own life. He told me of a young, dynamic man, a Hafiz of the Quran, who had gone to Afghanistan to spread the message of Islam. He had been arrested and taken by the Americans, never to be seen again.

He said his son had taught him a lesson, “The important thing is the truth, to confirm that the Americans arrested, tortured and killed Yasir, and they didn’t obtain any information from him or the others. In the end, nothing was gained. The file on the death of the three in mysterious circumstances is still open. This wasn’t suicide, there are still questions.”

The bodies of Yasir and the other Saudi man were repatriated to Saudi Arabia, of course, and the Yemeni man was returned to Yemen for burial. There, Alkarama arranged for an autopsy on his body which found that he hadn’t died

130 by hanging and that there were parts and organs missing from his body. I told Abu Talal about this and that he should follow up with the Yemeni organisation to bring those responsible to justice.

Abu Talal did follow up, especially as the pathologists in Saudi Arabia confirmed that there was no point autopsying his son’s body because of the missing organs. He worked through his pain and collaborated with a Norwegian filmmaker to make a film about his son; it aired on Al Jazeera in English and Arabic. On June 30, 2011, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed “Al-Zahrani vs Rumsfeld” at the Washington, DC, appeals court to seek justice for Yasir.

131 ON THE DEATH OF INMATES

On June 10, 2006, three prisoners were found dead in their cells: Salah Ahmad al-Salami, Mani’ bin Shaman al-Oteibi and Yasir Talal al-Zahrani, who I spoke of earlier.

The circumstances surrounding their deaths were obscure. Each one was found hanged in his cell, hands and feet restrained and a piece of cloth stuffed in his mouth. The three had been on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions; Salah al-Salami, who was one of three who had the longest hunger strikes, had been the last of the three to end his hunger strike. He was returned to Alpha, where Mani’ al-Oteibi and Yasir al-Zahrani were.

On the night of June 10, 2006, the prisoners were entertaining themselves with nasheeds or poetry as usual. Everyone had eaten, and many were asleep. At around one or two in the morning, a female soldier began to shout: “Help… Help!”

Soldiers and doctors streamed in, and soon the stretchers streamed out, the first brought out Salah - Allah have mercy on him - hands bound behind him with a gag in his mouth. Then came Yasir in the same condition, and then Mani’.

The crime scene, Alpha block, was made up of 48 cells, open steel containers separated by windows. Each cell was a meter and a half by two meters with a bed, toilet and washbasin. The rules in force in the camp categorically forbade covering the front of the cell or hanging anything up inside other than a towel and a mat. Soldiers did rounds of the cells every hour. Fixed surveillance cameras in the corridors watched over everything.

132 One of the three martyrs was in cell 9, the second in cell 11, and the third in cell 21. Official military declarations say they had hung themselves, but what did they use to hang themselves? Where were the soldiers when they hung themselves? Where were the cameras? Who tied them up from behind and gagged them? They were found several hours after their deaths, where had the soldiers been for those hours?

Another mystery that I touched upon in telling Yasir’s story earlier: Pathologists in Yemen and Saudi Arabia mentioned that the corpses were hollow when they arrived home. The pathologists surmised that this was done to make an autopsy to determine the cause of death impossible. Why was the administration afraid to reveal the true cause of their death?

The three weren’t in neighbouring cells, they were separated from one another by three or four cells. So what was it that brought them together in death at the same time, using the same method? These questions are yet unanswered by the US Defense Department.

In an attempt to explain what happened in Camp Delta, Admiral Harry Harris, the official responsible for the prison at the time, said he didn’t believe these were suicides. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

The media accepted Admiral Harris’ justification and forgot their case, the file slamming shut after that announcement. Prison authorities didn’t take any action to punish the guards for neglecting their duties on the night the three died.

Two years later, a criminal investigator from the US Navy opened an investigation into the incident, but the investigation confirmed the prison commander’s account and refused to allow the Pentagon to release the report. Later, the law faculty at Seton Hall University in New Jersey obtained the

133 report and investigation documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Pentagon redacted much of the contents in red ink.

There were 1,700 documents, so heavily redacted they were almost impossible to read. But the students, supervised by their teachers, figured them out and published a detailed report in December 2009 titled “Death in Camp Delta.” The report showed the weakness of the US Navy criminal investigative division’s investigation and pointed to “many unanswered questions.”

It also showed that the chain of events, as recounted by the unit, was not credible. It concluded that the description of how “the prisoners killed themselves” was not plausible. The description gave the impression that the prisoners planned down to the last detail: from making a rope out of their shirts to stuffing cloth in their mouths to the very backs of their throats and closing off their pharynx, then raising themselves on the washbasin - bound hand and foot - and sliding off so the rope strangled them.

In another report, Harris did state that the guards had violated the standards of discipline, but that he wouldn’t recommend any punitive measures against them. The security services asked the four soldiers who had been guarding the sector not to discuss the matter.

One of those was Sergeant Joseph Hickman, who later spoke to Scott Horton at Harper’s magazine and published an article in March 2010 about what he had witnessed. Hickman’s account confirmed the existence of a “non-existent” camp used for interrogating prisoners. He and a friend, Tony Davila, had nicknamed it “Camp No”, their answer if anyone were to ask them if it existed.

He told of a car driving from Camp No to other parts of the prison that night, and other suspicious movements. Because he was stationed in the observation tower often, Hickman had seen prisoner transfers to Camp No before. Satellite

134 photos of Guantánamo show a place that fits Hickman’s description. He and Davila said that they went by there whenever they could. Once they heard screams of torture coming from within, but they couldn’t tell from how many throats.

Thus was the tragedy of the prisoners of Guantánamo. Torture and torment, all done to them under the cloak of alleged American justice and “human rights”. We, the prisoners, gave up on the unjust earthly courts and looked to the just court of the heavens, where all true criminals will be known - us or them - and this day will come soon!

I related these stories in one of the letters which I wrote from inside the prison. I gave them to Clive but learned after I got out that the censors had prevented him from taking them.

We, the prisoners are convinced that those brothers of ours - in whose piety we believe - were men of wisdom, men of patience with strong faith in their Lord. We say in one voice: They did not take their own lives.

135 THE STRONGEST WEAPON

My solitary friend, the night bird, rustles its wings, a subdued, weak flutter. In that weakness though, there is strength; I have known that in weakness there is strength my whole life, they are like the two sides of a coin. Together, they help you work, through the night if need be. They make you refuse to surrender; they become your weapon.

Our weapon in Guantánamo was our hunger strikes. They were a potent weapon, a weapon that everyone possessed, a weapon that didn’t need money or power. You couldn’t buy it. Many of us used it: Some, including Ahmad al- Maliki and Abd al-Rahman al-Madani, persisted in their hunger strike for two years, others for shorter periods. We suffered indignities and torments as the administration tried to break our strike, but with Allah’s support, we were able to resist.

There was the “Old Prison Strike”, which went a long way to improving life in the camps; after it, we were allowed to talk to one another, prayers became easier and food quality improved. The symbols of those strikes, the heroes who stood until the very end, holding up the standard, were: Abdul al-Aziz al- Kuwaiti, Shaker al-Madani, Reza al-Tunisi and Muhammad Rajab al-Yemeni.

While I was on hunger strike, I was moved from my block to another for force- feeding. One day, when I was brought back to my cell, I heard that Camp 4 was in an uproar as the Brothers had begun a hunger strike in protest against the situation of prisoners in Camp 5.

Camp 5 was where the prisoners considered to be the most dangerous were held. It was made up of two floors of solitary confinement cells and electric doors. It was common knowledge that Camp 5 was for those who would remain on the island forever.

136 Interrogators would threaten uncooperative prisoners, trying to make them implicate others by lying about them. Those who resisted would be moved to Camp 5, and it would be their final move in Guantánamo. There, prisoners were so desperate and hungry that they were eating banana and orange skins, and things only got worse when the cold began. To protest their suffering, they went on hunger strike, and soon other camps went on strike too, spreading to the entire prison.

The number of hunger strikers increased and the clinic and hospital were overwhelmed. The administration became extremely embarrassed after the strike expanded to all the camps, 1 to 4. It fell back on trying dialogue with some prisoners, undertaking improvements to their situation. The prisoners responded, albeit grudgingly: They gave the administration what they considered to be one final chance to keep its promises.

Perhaps the best-known hunger strike in Guantánamo was the “Strike of the Tubes”, undertaken in support of Brother Hamza from Tunisia, who had been beaten severely on the head with a chair by an interrogator. It began on August 10, 2005, ten days or less after the truce for the Camp 5 hunger strike had been agreed upon. It was one of a kind, the participants utterly convinced of their cause, and their demands clear. They were determined not to negotiate from that day forward until the matter was dealt with.

After a battle with the Defense Department (to be specific, with the Medical Corps) that lasted six months, the hunger strike was broken, and the protest came to an end. However, three heroes persisted despite all difficulties: Ahmed al-Makki, Abd al-Rahman al-Madani, and Salah al-Salami, may Allah rest his soul in heaven.

Those were the men of the season; everyone was fascinated by them. The doctors tried every means possible to torture and break them, but eventually, the doctors surrendered because to continue would have been to kill the

137 prisoners outright. When the medical intervention and force feeding became too much for some strikers, they resorted to secret strikes, which they were convinced the only remaining way for them to resist injustice.

One night during the strike, we were served a special meal for dinner in celebration of a large group of Saudis being scheduled to leave the next day. We were overjoyed to see our Brothers leave in such large numbers, and we celebrated their release that night.

The next morning we were surprised to hear the soldiers crying out for help. Within minutes, paramedics arrived and transferred Brother Yusuf al-Shahri to the hospital in critical condition. He had been on a secret hunger strike.

The guards began an inspection of the cells and asked to search his copy of the Quran. The others refused to hand it over but were told by the translator that this was an order from the administration, that there had been suicide attempts and the administration wanted to investigate everything related to that.

We know - and they know - that there was no purpose for these actions except to humiliate the prisoners and threaten the Quran, creating problems on the wards.

As I told you, violating the Quran was one of their favourite tactics, as they searched through the holy books with all the disrespect they could muster. Eventually, the prisoners protested and demanded that a military administration officer come with the soldiers when they entered the cells. An officer showed up, and the Brothers delegated me to speak. I told him that more than 90 percent of the problems between prisoners and administration stemmed from their abuses of the Quran.

“We don’t want these problems,” I said. “Take our Qurans. Collect them yourself and take them away so there won’t be any problems.”

138 “I can’t take a decision of this magnitude,” he said, “until I go back to the administration.”

It was the middle of the night, and he asked that we break until morning, but when I asked my fellow prisoners, they insisted that he return with an answer immediately: either remove the copies of the Quran or forbid the soldiers from touching them.

The officer returned after a short while and said: “I spoke to the general and informed him of what’s going on. He decided to completely stop searching copies of the Quran.”

I told my fellow prisoners the decision, and they returned to their cells that night, happy. But the guards returned and searched the Qurans again anyway. Around May 18, 2006, they conducted a full search of Camp 4, and I heard when they reached Uniform block, where I was. One of the Brothers told me: “They want to search the Qurans. They’ve reneged on their promise and are insisting on doing it, by force if they have to.”

“If they search them,” I said, “they must take them away and not bring them back.” And that is what happened, we exited our cells to insist that they confiscate them, and they did.

The same thing happened on Whiskey, while on Zulu block the prisoners and soldiers clashed, and the emergency alarms were turned on, and soldiers came streaming in, armed with rifles they used to rain rubber bullets on the prisoners. One of our Brothers from Afghanistan was hit in the back, causing him immense suffering later. We all fought back and smashed the contents of our rooms, as well as the cameras that were in each cell. In short: a full mutiny broke out in Camp 4, and they transferred everyone out.

I was sent to Bravo, where I heard from the men in Alpha that while some of us had been moved to Camp 1 (Alpha, Bravo and Charlie blocks), most had

139 gone to Camp 3, filling it to capacity. We heard, too, that a number of the Brothers had been transferred to the hospital because they had been seriously injured. We waited anxiously to hear how they were doing.

Matters worsened after that day, and the noose tightened around the prisoners. Soldiers were granted broader authority to do what they wanted. Those were the worst days in the prison, and the starvation, beatings, humiliation and mockery of our religion intensified.

It was like a night where the dawn never came. That was when I decided to take the strongest weapon into my hands and began a struggle to regain our self-respect, of which we had been robbed. I brandished the hunger strike in the face of our executioners. My own fierce battle lasted for a year and a few months. I suffered. Of course I did, but throughout, I found the strength of the oppressed and it pushed me forward, helped me persevere and roar in the face of the administrators of that wretched, wretched place, Guantánamo.

140 MOHAMMAD AL-AMIN AL-SHINQITI

I happened one day to go to the hospital after my knee swelled up, and there I met a Mauritanian prisoner called Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti. He was on a hunger strike, and I asked him his reason for doing so, I wanted to tell Clive his story.

He said: “The reason is that many prisoners in camps 1, 2 and 3 are suffering urinary tract problems. The main reason is the lack of healthy drinking water, and the worst thing is that they will only prescribe drugs to treat this if the interrogators permit it.

“One day, on Quebec block, the idea of a strike [not drinking water]) came up, which obviously raised the matter of a hunger strike to change the poison which was destroying so many prisoners’ health.”

Al-Shinqiti then agreed with Abdullah al-Qahtani, Abu Ziad al-Makki, Adam al-Yemeni, Badr al-Sumairi (known as Gabriel) and two others to go on strike. Two days later, al-Shinqiti fell in his cell because of severe dizziness and was transported to hospital. The doctor found he was severely dehydrated and asked him if he had been drinking enough. Al-Shinqiti replied that he would drink only water that was fit for drinking and not water that harms him.

The doctor ordered safe water and told him to drink it, telling him: “You can drink this water here in the hospital. When you return to the camp, you’ll drink the other water.”

Al-Shinqiti refused to drink unless they found a solution to the whole water problem. The doctor threatened him with a fluid IV, but al-Shinqiti persevered. He returned to the camp and continued his strike.

141 Three days later, he was transported to hospital for tests, where his health was found to be severely deteriorating. A doctor ordered that they hang IV fluids for him and isolate him in the hospital.

“Do you want to kill yourself?” he asked.

“It would be better than you killing me with disease,” al-Shinqiti replied. “You drink water that is suitable for human consumption. But you order us to drink dirty water. You even put in writing that it is unsuitable for drinking. I know that it causes serious diseases.”

Al-Shinqiti stayed the course and continued his strike until the administration had no choice but to comply with his demands.

142 MY HUNGER STRIKE

I decided to begin a hunger strike at roughly the same time as the opening of Guantánamo’s Camp 6, around the first week of January 2007. It is crucial for me to remember those days and dates inside the cells. So I made an effort, to the extent that I could, to commit everything to memory. It was extremely difficult during the days of solitary confinement, spent almost continuously in the dark.

I prepared for my strike by reducing the amount of food I ate, then the number of meals, refusing some. I was slowly going down to eating nothing, determined to reach my goal of being on full hunger strike, in spite of the fact that I was severely constipated by the lack of food and that aggravated my haemorrhoids.

After I was refusing all meals, they cleared the cells to my right and left to make sure that nobody was passing me food in secret. An officer and doctor came to see me and explain that they would be testing my blood pressure every day, sometimes three times a day.

On January 6, 2007, one day before starting the hunger strike, I sent my five demands to the General: first, respect for Islam; second, our right to the rights in the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war; third, the right to advocate for ourselves in front of a civil court; fourth, to return the Brothers who had been isolated in Camp Echo; and fifth, an investigation into the deaths of the three prisoners who died mysteriously on June 10, 2006. I raised these demands and stopped eating as the sun rose on January 7, 2007.

That first month, I was exposed to the administration’s preliminary tactic, neglecting the hunger striker completely to make him despair and abandon his demands, pressured by hunger and thirst. At the end of the month, they began

143 to try to tempt me, telling me that I would leave soon. They tried to reason with me: “You’re a young man with your life ahead of you. Don’t kill yourself. Isn’t suicide haram in your religion? Your family is waiting for you.”

They were disappointed; I bore all their ploys with the support of Allah and resisted their temptation. I ended the month with unswerving determination, and they realised that I would continue my strike into the second month, especially when they saw my weight had dropped from 90 to 56 kg. So they moved me to hospital.

In the hospital, in contrast to the deliberate neglect of the days before, they began a programme of care, and force-feedings. First, they were doing it intravenously, sticking me with needles several times a day. Soon, they decided to change to using a feeding tube, as my health condition had deteriorated to a point where it was necessary.

They would threaten me during the sessions: “Those you hold dear will die, you will die as a result of your refusal to eat.”

The hunger burrowed into me, from my flesh to my bones. But I was armed with faith in Allah and remained calm while they went about their business nervously. It was time for my first force-feeding.

That was a sombre, bizarre day. The doctors and hospital staff gathered around me and held me down on a horrible seat that resembled an execution chair, restraining my four limbs so that I couldn’t move. Then, in what felt like an enormous violation, they painfully inserted the feeding tube down my nose. The feeling is indescribable, horrible suffocation as the metal-tipped plastic tube was forced down my nose, seemingly cutting off my oxygen till I felt faint. Then it passed the back of my mouth and started to go down my throat, inflaming it and irritating my oesophagus.

144 I, to this day, cannot say if what they did was intentional or a mistake, but there were several occasions when the tube ended up in my lungs instead of my stomach, and a few drops of feeding liquid would be forced into them. Even when the tube when to the right place, the intense burning pressure caused by the feeding liquid being emptied into my stomach was almost as suffocating and brutal.

To be extra cruel, an attendant would deliberately mix three or four times the required amount of water with the feeding liquid base, sending four times as much liquid as recommended rushing into my stomach, now minuscule after over a month of not eating. I would feel I had entered a state of death, life and colour receding from my face, from my body, my breath ebbing, sweat pouring out of me, then paroxysms of vomiting would begin.

They would persist in the feeding until they were satisfied, needing to follow their procedure so they could fill out their forms. My intense intestinal pain did not seem to deter them, their faces remained grim, coated in cruelty. That first day, and in spite of the pain, I was in, I asked them to remove the restraints so I could pray. They refused, citing security, claiming I would behave violently if they removed the restraints. All I could do was cry out: “What can a man in my situation do? Don’t talk to me about security!”

They retorted: “We don’t want to let you pray.”

There was a moment of complete silence. I called on God in my heart, thanking him for all my trials and for showing me the truth of their hearts.

I stayed in hospital for a few days, the hours passing slowly until I couldn’t distinguish night from day. I was shaken by the waves of suffering my body went through, but my Lord gave me patience and strength. I kept fighting whenever they came to restrain me for another force-feeding. I never managed

145 to stop them, but I never let them win easily either. This continued until the day they decided I could go back to my cell.

My hunger strike passed through four stages:

1.Hospital

2.Between Echo and India blocks

3.Charlie block

4.Delta block

All were painful, all brought me through waves of anger, and all had me searching my soul for the strength I knew was there. The first and last stages were the hardest.

After the the hospital, they moved me between Echo, where I stayed, and India where they force-fed me and other hunger strikers twice a day. Soon, the administration started to worry that proximity to other strikers in Echo would encourage me to continue my strike.

After roughly a month of this programme between India and Echo, I was moved to Charlie where only three other hunger strikers from India block were as well: Ahmed al-Makki, Abdul Rahman al-Madani and Muhammad al- Amin al-Shinqiti.

Hotel, opposite Charlie, was allocated for force-feeding while I was in Charlie, a stage that was surprisingly calm, perhaps because we were starting to get used to the baseline harassment that accompanied the hunger strike. We got used to being punished, deprived of everything except our mats and clothes, even messages from our families were withheld.

For a time, the administration eased off a bit as some of the hunger strikers ended their protests because of promises made to them. But it didn’t take long

146 for us to realise that the administration wasn’t planning on keeping those promises, and the hunger strikers increased from four to nearly twenty.

At this point, they decided to punish us, and Delta block was the place they chose for their immoral task, so they moved a number of us there. Designed like Romeo, Delta block’s cells were covered in reinforced plastic, windows sealed shut so tight that it was difficult to breathe, especially in the humid heat of Guantánamo.

The rattling noise of machinery accompanied our days and nights, punctuated by the storming of our cells and beatings that seemed to get worse every time. If the soldiers were bored, they would use pepper spray on the hunger strikers; they wore masks, but we choked endlessly in the stagnant air of our humid cells. We couldn’t dream of sleeping, beyond the attacks and the endless noise of machinery were the nightly cleanings and random searches.

147 FREE AT LAST

The lead-up to my release returned to me; I was still on hunger strike, and with each of those final days, I felt my strength waning, my body degrading and becoming less substantial. The Americans pressured me to end the strike and continued force-feeding me, making me feel that there was more to their pressure than simply wanting the strike to end.

Then April came, and at the beginning of the month, a Sudanese delegation came to see me. They confirmed that I would be released, along with two other Sudanese men. But, they told me, the Americans wanted me to end my strike.

“I will not end my strike,” I told them, “until I am back in my country. As long as I am here, on this oppressive island, they are the oppressors. I will not end this strike, even if kills me!”

They tried to convince me, but I was determined to continue. I asked them for news from Sudan and about my family, and they told me some news and that my family was fine.

I understood why the Americans were eager to fatten me up after my starvation, to care for me after long neglect and humiliation before they released me. But I had my doubts. I had become accustomed to their dirty games and lies. So I didn’t allow myself to get too optimistic about leaving until things actually started happening.

Certainly, there are things I need to explain, as Allah is my witness. Not all the soldiers were oppressors; some of them didn’t torment us. As you are no doubt aware, Americans are made up of classes. Some feel injustice; they understand oppression and inequality, especially African Americans. In our

148 oppression, they saw something resembling their own, especially in someone like me with the same skin colour. We found that some of them treated us fairly, or at least did not participate in the monstrous torture.

They are the ones who brought us news sometimes, and one of them informed me that I would be released soon, supposedly in the middle of April. They told me this while the Sudanese delegation was in Guantánamo, so, feeling cautiously optimistic, I told the Sudanese about the supposed date.

“The timing isn’t set,” they said, “but in any case, you’ll be released soon.”

On April 28, 2008, they brought me to interrogation for the first time in eight or nine months. The interrogator began to speak.

“We want to ask you a question,” he said. “What will you do if you leave Guantánamo?”

“That’s a difficult question,” I said. “You didn’t allow me to follow world events, and I won’t be able to decide what to do next until I understand what has been happening outside. Right now, I’m not in a place where I can specify what I will do.

“Most of my focus will be on my family. I’ve missed them for so many years. I will work to compensate my family, my son, in particular, for the long time we spent apart. I will strive to teach my son so he will be a just Muslim who is not oppressive. I want to raise him to be a person committed to his religion and the benefit of society.”

“Where will you find work?” they asked. “How will you support yourself?”

“Allah was our provider here in prison,” I said, “and He will provide for us once we are free.”

149 “That’s not good enough,” they said. “We need a clear answer we can write down for our officials.”

“I speak to you,” I said, “but I don’t care to satisfy your responsibilities. This is my answer. You know I won’t speak to you in interrogations, that I haven’t answered questions for a long time.”

“Fine,” they said. “Now another question: Do you still think you’re able to put out a message like a media report? We want you to send a message to stop terrorism around the world. Are you ready to do this, to benefit your and global society, by helping us stop terrorism?”

“Through my work in the media,” I said, “I have tried my best to prevent all sorts of terrorism, including the terrorism of your administration which kills innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq. I use my reporting to face down terrorism.”

“Yes,” they said, “you put your hand in ours us to stop terrorism around the world.”

“I am not putting my hand in yours,” I said. “Your hand is smeared with the blood of my society, soiled with horrors. The least wronged of our prisoners has spent more than six years here with no clear reason. And you want me to place my hand in yours?!”

“Does this mean,” they said, “that you still refuse to work for us?”

“I refused in the past,” I said, “and I refuse again, so long as you continue to oppress people, kill innocents, widow our women, assault Muslims, impoverish peoples, and force governments to oppress their people. You champion unjust governments, your double standards make me distance myself from you. I refuse to work for you.”

150 Then they informed me that the review committee had decided I didn’t represent a risk to the USA! I laughed out loud, and they asked me why I was laughing.

“I knew I wasn’t a threat seven years ago,” I said. “There wasn’t a day when I posed a danger to the United States of America. You claimed I was a danger. Now you tell me I’m not.”

“The American government has decided to hand you over to your country, Sudan. Do you have any objections to this?”

“I don’t have any objections,” I said. “On the contrary, it’s what I wanted for the past seven years.”

Afterwards, they began a series of medical tests, then they fingerprinted me, as the CIA, FBI and military intelligence had done previously. Each time they took three prints well as a scan of my eyes, followed by a photo. They brought me to a room and asked me my size in clothes, then gave me some clothes and returned me to a cell. Instead of returning me to Delta block where I had been staying with the other hunger strikers, they brought me to Charlie right next door.

They put me in a cell, and I spoke to my block-mates through the door. I found eight people: two Sudanese - Walid al-Sudani and Amir al-Sudani - Sayid al- Maghribi and five Afghans. Altogether we were nine: three Sudanese, a Moroccan and five Afghans.

A day before I travelled, they brought me in to interrogation again and told me: “So now you’re going to leave. When al-Qaeda contacts you, what will you do? Will you contact us and let us know?”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

151 “We mean that Osama bin Laden will call you on your mobile,” they said, “and he will say, ‘I am here in the hotel. Come and meet me here.’”

“Are you that naive?” I said. “Do you think Osama bin Laden is living in a hotel? If that were the case, you would have arrested him before I got in touch with you!”

“Fine,” they said. “Let’s say he was somewhere, and he sent you a message to meet him. Would you inform the Americans?”

“I would not inform the Americans,” I answered.

“Why not?” they asked. “You said you’re against terrorism and want peace.”

“Because I am a journalist, not a spy,” I said. “A journalist remains within the scope of the profession. We don’t cooperate with police forces whether we agree with them or not. We engage with them through our work, respecting their opinion and the opinion of others.”

“Osama bin Laden wants to kill.”

“Who said that?” I said.

“We know what he wants ...” they said.

“What does bin Laden want?” I asked them.

A female interrogator answered: “Bin Laden wants to coerce people into becoming Muslims.”

“I have never heard bin Laden saying that unless he said it while I was in prison!”

“OK,” she said. “If a message from bin Laden reached you saying that he wanted to meet you, what would you say?”

152 “I would wholeheartedly meet with him,” I said. “Why not? This is a risk that many journalists have taken before me. Osama bin Laden is a well-known global personality, and any journalist would wish to meet him. Even you, an interrogator, would love to meet him.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to meet him.”

“Let me ask you,” I said. “There are two doors, behind one is George Bush, and behind the other Osama bin Laden. And you could choose a door to meet the person behind and take a picture with him, would you choose the door with bin Laden?”

“No,” she said. “I would choose Bush. But why wouldn’t you say the same?”

“Because you can interview Bush in his office,” I told her. “You can meet him in the dustbin of history after the end of his term of office, at any time. But you won’t always be able to meet Osama bin Laden! The CIA hasn’t been able to pin down his location for seven years, so your meeting with bin Laden would be more of a feat than meeting Bush.”

The second interrogator said, “You’re right. I would meet with bin Laden.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Do you have anything else to say?” they asked.

“I wanted to ask,” I said. “Why such a rush to release me? I’m in no rush to leave. You’ve done me a huge service, in spite of the mental and physical pain my detention has caused my family and me.

“Don’t you realise that every journalist around the world wants to enter Guantánamo and talk to its prisoners? You won’t allow them, but you’ve let me, rather, forced me. Please pass my thanks to your superiors. Tell them:

153 ‘Prisoner number 345 thanks you for your hospitality over the years; he will not forget it.’

“Before my detention, I was unknown to many. Now, you’ve turned me into a celebrity, a hero. Journalists work fifty years for enough material to write their memoirs. But me, after Guantánamo, I reckon many people will want to read mine.

“Guantánamo is part of history’s black pages; and I will record it. The world will know the heinous crime you committed against humanity. Give me your addresses, I’ll send you a copy of the book I’m going to write. You guys are addicted to films; you’ll see a film about Guantánamo, you will see more than one insha'Allah after I leave here.”

They laughed, and I left. Later, as I was getting onto the bus, I saw them and laughed, calling out: “Which room would you have entered, the one for bin Laden or Bush?” The soldiers pushed me onto the bus, and I didn’t hear the interrogators’ answers.

The next day they came and brought me to see the Red Cross delegation who gave me my papers so I could leave. After three days on the transport block, we travelled on the evening of the fourth day, Thursday night, April 30, 2008. Some soldiers came to see us in the mid-afternoon that day, among them was the one who had told me the date when I would travel. He always called me “Al Jazeera”.

“Hey, Al Jazeera!” he said, “Is it true you refused to change your clothes?”

I was wearing the orange overalls that I had worn during my hunger strike, not the white overalls of the soon-to-be-released prisoners. They had punished me in these clothes. I answered: “Who told you that?”

He repeated his question: “Tell me! Did you refuse to change your clothes?”

154 I repeated: “Who told you?”

He shook his head and said, “Now I get it!” and left.

Half an hour later, they came and took me for my force-feeding appointment. They still cuffed my hands and legs while extracting me from my cell, and still strapped me into to the “torture chair” with the 12 straps, in spite of my great weakness.

As the nurse was getting ready to insert the feeding tube into my nose, the soldier who called me Al Jazeera entered with a more senior official; they were holding bags of clothes and shoes for the trip.

The administration did not bring travelling clothes to the prisoners until half an hour before they left so they wouldn’t know they were travelling. On that day, they came earlier, at around one or two in the afternoon. The soldier told me to take the clothes and go to the bathroom: “Wash yourself and change your clothes.”

“After the force-feeding?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Go Now!”

He winked at me, and I winked back. The attendants took me off the chair, undid the restraints and brought me to the bathroom. As usual, there were guards in the bathroom, but my friend, the soldier, ordered them to move, saying, “I’ll take over watch.”

“Wash yourself,” he said. “After that, I’ll give you your new clothes to wear.”

“Why?” I said. “What happened?”

He leaned close and said: “There are those who don’t want you to travel. They told the administration prisoner number 345 is refusing to change his clothes, wanting to delay your departure. But I’ll stay with you until you leave.”

155 I changed my clothes and returned to the feeding chair. After I was done, I returned to my cell to wait in the extreme heat. I was tired and dehydrated, and lay down until it was time to leave.

At six or seven in the evening, we prayed Maghrib and Isha’ prayers together and left with the soldiers. We walked together, connected by a chain. My friend soldier was still there, even though his shift had ended. He stayed with the observers until he saw me get on the bus when he waved to me as we drove away. We were driven about an hour to the end of the island, where we got on a ferry that took us to another island with an airport.

There was a military cargo plane there for us. After loading their cargo, they put goggles on our eyes, masks on our mouths and earphones on our ears. Then they sat us on chairs and bound us to the floor with steel restraints. Again, we weren’t allowed to move during the flight.

I asked to go to the bathroom during the flight, and they brought me there, but when I asked them to remove the goggles from my eyes, they refused. “How am I supposed to go to the bathroom with my eyes closed?”

“We will place you on the seat so just sit down. We will help you.”

I refused and said: “I want to close the door.”

“There isn’t a door to be closed,” they said. “The place is completely exposed.”

I asked them for something to cover myself with, they refused, so I asked them to return me to my seat. They did, and I informed the other Brothers what happened. We had taken precautions for a situation like this. I was on a full hunger strike, and my stomach was empty, I had no critical need for the toilet. More than anything, I had wanted to know if their treatment of us had changed. But nothing had changed, as always we spent the 18-hour flight thirsty, with only a couple of small swallows of water each.

156 We landed in Iraq as planned, and there they put us on different planes. The five Afghans went to Afghanistan, and I went with the Sudanese and the Moroccan to Khartoum.

The plane touched down at 1am on Friday, the blessed day, and we praised Allah for the blessing of being released.

157 IN CLOSING

What happened after I landed in Khartoum is well-documented. Crowds were waiting to greet me and cameras watching as I took my first steps as a free man back in my country. In a sense, I was lucky they were there because that entire time was a blank for me and my first memory in Sudan is waking up in the hospital a couple of days after my return.

I had been so weak, my body so degraded that I had lost consciousness in the airport, and was transported immediately to hospital. There, I opened my eyes and saw my wife for the first time in seven years. And there, I saw my son running towards me, a sight that that moved me and brought me to tears as I took him in my arms. I held him close, then pulled back to look at his face, it was such a wondrous sight.

Suddenly, as I sat there with Mohammad in my arms, I realised that part of my amazement was that not only had I not seen my child for seven years, I hadn’t seen any children at all. How sad, how pathetic that moment of realisation was when it struck me how truly awful the place I had been in was.

After a few days in the hospital, I was able to watch the video that had been recorded of me walking into Khartoum airport. I was finally able to see my haggard face walking towards all the anxious faces raised eagerly to greet me, and to see the moment when I collapsed under the weight of my emotions, my frail body failing me.

What remains to be told about my Guantánamo story is precisely that it is not just my story alone. There were more than eight hundred detainees in that hellish prison, each of us lived through it his way, each of us has a different story. What we lived through was our pain and our suffering - injustice, oppression, humiliation and persecution.

158 I end my story with prayers to My Dear One who I haven’t met, but whose mediation I pray for on the day of final judgment and sanction. I raise my prayers for my mother and father who I wished could have prayed for me during my ordeal, but they passed away before I was released. I raise my thanks to my family at Al Jazeera, and to the honourable media community and to free people everywhere who supported me. To all of you, I raise my thanks and pray the Lord to bless you always.

I dedicate my story of injustice and affliction to you all.

159 CREDITS

Photo credit: Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

Edited by: Hala Sadani

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