At Bagram air base in December 2002, two suspected terrorists were so violently kicked, punched, and slammed by U.S. soldiers that their muscle tissue disintegrated.
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At Guantánamo Bay that same month, al-Qahtani's interrogation log suggests that his psyche underwent an analogous fate. What did this treatment accomplish? In June 2004, Gonzales, Haynes, and Haynes's deputy, Daniel Dell'Orto, told a press conference that the enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Qahtani (and later others) had worked to elicit crucial intelligence and keep the nation safe. It is too generous to call this claim misleading. The only valuable information al-Qahtani divulged came from the FBI interrogation that preceded the deployment of the new techniques.
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By the time the detainees arrived at Guantánamo in January 2002, construction was already under way on a more permanent camp out on Radio Range, site of a large refugee camp from the mid-1990s, where sewer, water, and electrical lines were already in place. At this time in the Afghan war, the Bush administration did not intend to run a long-term prison operation at Guantánamo Bay. Norman Rogers was ordered to make the first three compounds of what became known as Camp Delta out of shipping containers, thereby ensuring their portability. Camps 1, 2, and 3, as the Delta units were called, were no less “half-assed” than X-Ray, Rogers remarked. SOUTHCOM intended to use Camp Delta “just long enough to build a real brick and mortar prison over on Leeward,” Jeffrey Johnston explained, referring to the less-developed side of the naval base. By the time Johnston departed SOUTHCOM for a three-year stint in Barstow, California, “we had a master plan and pretty pictures that included not only prisons but a courthouse, housing, recreational facilities and all kinds of new development.” Just as Rogers had originally predicted, the JTF did not like combining a detention mission with the everyday activities of the Guantánamo community. On the Windward Passage side of the base, “detainees in transport were treated like hothouse flowers.” When detainees were on the move, all everyday activities came to an immediate halt.
But, like Guantánamo projects extending all the way back to those proposed by Spain's Mopox Commission over two centuries earlier, Leeward Prison “was a great plan not funded.” Granted the money to construct a single “brick and mortar” prison at Leeward, General Geoffrey Miller declined. “On this the much-criticized Miller was spot-on,” Jeff Johnston observes. “He didn't want to get stuck with half his operations at Windward and half at Leeward. So he built what became Camp 5 on Radio Range.”
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And there the prison has remained.
Brandon Neely left Guantánamo in midsummer 2002, several months before the enhanced interrogation techniques were deployed on al-Qahtani. Muslim chaplain James Yee, a native of Seattle, Washington, arrived at Guantánamo in November, just as the new techniques were being finalized. His precise role in the detention operation was less than clear, and right away Yee felt uneasy. Some of his uneasiness stemmed from the ambiguity about the Geneva Convention that
Neely himself noted. The president's announcement that Geneva would apply to detainees “to the extent allowed by military necessity” afforded the administration considerable “flexibility,” Yee recognized. “One could argue that everything happening at the facility could be considered an act of military necessity.”
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Geneva mandated that prisoners receive religious support, but if Geneva didn't apply at Guantánamo, what did this mean for Yee's mission? “It seemed I was here to do something that was not wholly supported,” Yee remembers thinking. Was the point of assigning a Muslim chaplain to Guantánamo simply to give the world the impression that the United States was abiding by the dictates of Geneva? Yee's misgiving was exaggerated by the absence of clear marching orders. His predecessor at the prison cautioned that there was a notable absence of standard operating procedures “for the chaplain's operation inside the wire, nor is there a job description outlining the Muslim chaplain's duties and responsibilities.” To compound matters, his predecessor warned Yee that Guantánamo was “not a friendly environment for Muslims, and I don't just mean prisoners.” Sharing the detainees' religion and language automatically made the Muslim chaplains suspicious in the eyes of many GIs. In time, Yee would come to realize that the Muslim chaplains were as scrutinized as the detainees themselves. “We called the people watching us the âsecret squirrels,'” he noted. “We never knew who exactly they were.”
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Yee's first encounter with Camp Delta left a strong impression. Like Neely, Yee thought initially of animals as he headed into his first block. “I had the distinct feeling of walking into an outdoor stall,” he recalled. “The prisoners were held in two long rows facing each other across a narrow corridor. The cages were open-air and there was a tin roof overhead that trapped and baked the air.” It smelled “like a locker room.” There was no air-conditioning, no circulation. “At Camp Delta, the cages measured eight feet by six feet and the prisoners shared a mesh wall with two prisoners on each side and were in plain view of the detainee in the cage across the corridor.” There was no privacy, and in an awkward moment, Yee met eyes with one of the detainees squatted in the corner of a cell and started to say a greeting before realizing “that he was using the toilet.”
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When Yee arrived at the camp, detainees were allowed out of their
“cages” for a quarter hour, every three days. Allowed “out” meant having access to a small pen less than two hundred square feet, into which the guards sometimes tossed a soccer ball. Bathing opportunities were limited to the detainees' day out. Religion was really all the prisoners had. And this is where Yee came in. The detainees were desperate to talk to him, and not just about religion, but about their innocence. Like Neely, it didn't take long before Yee began to question the accusations against some of the detainees in particular. Take the case of Omar Khadr, for instance, the fifteen-year-old Canadian citizen Yee first encountered with “a Disney book” in his hand, provided him by the detainee library. In the face of skepticism about the detainees' culpability, Guantánamo officials routinely point to an al Qaeda training manual known as the Manchester Document (found among the belongings of a terrorist cell in Manchester, England), which advises members, should they be detained by enemy governments, to make a claim of innocence. To Yee, the existence of the Manchester Document was inconclusive, to say the least. “Perhaps the act of steadfastly claiming innocence was a practiced al Qaeda strategy,” he remarked, “but it would also be the response of an innocent person. How were these prisoners to prove their innocence if the act of seeming innocent was deemed a measure of their guilt?”
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Yee's testimony suggests that the systemic abuse Brandon Neely reported early on at Camp X-Ray overlapped with the initiation of the systematic torture of al-Qahtani and other Guantánamo detainees. With scarcely any degree of agency left to confirm their humanity, some of the detainees hurled insults at the guards (along with water, spit, urine, and feces). By the time Yee arrived, standard operating procedures enacted by the military dictated that guards not retaliate precipitously to detainee abuse. The SOPs were rarely followed. “General Miller had a saying that he'd often recite to guards when visiting Camp Delta,” Yee recalled, “or whenever seeing troopers around the base. âThe fight is on!'” Miller would holler outâ“a subtle way of saying that rules regarding the treatment of detainees were relaxed and infractions were easily overlooked.” Just as he intended, Miller's remarks “pumped up” the guards, and many headed off to work “looking for trouble.”
Cruelty took many forms at Guantánamo. As Immediate Response
Force beatings mounted over the course of the first six months, Yee made a point of visiting the detainee hospital. In one wing of the hospital not frequented by politicians and the press, Yee witnessed the force-feeding of a hunger striker reduced to eighty pounds. As one male nurse restrained the detainee, “another globbed petroleum jelly up his nose.” The detainee's “screams could be heard throughout the hospital.” On another visit to the hospital, the detainee engaged Yee. “Why am I here, Chaplain? This is no use. I've told them everything, and they keep asking the same questions. What more do they want?”
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Over the ensuing months, Yee's relationship to the MPs, never warm, deteriorated. He recognized that their job was very difficult and their preparation (like his own) inadequate.
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But he also found it impossible to conceal his disapproval of the harassment to which the detainees were constantly subjected by the guards. His disapproval of the guards, in turn, was met by growing suspicion that he was on the wrong side. MPs began to follow him around the blocks, in violation of SOPs and despite his outranking them.
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Most of Yee's colleagues at Guantánamo were strikingly ignorant of Islam and disdainful of the elements they knew. MPs used this ignorance to their advantage, and seemed to delight in offending the detainees' beliefs. One thing both the guards and the intelligence staff knew well, however, was the strictures in Islam against inappropriate contact with women. These the U.S. military studiously exploited. “Female guards were often used to provoke the detainees,” Yee noted. “Knowing that physical contact between unrelated men and women is not allowed under Islamic law, the female MPs would be exceptionally inappropriate in how they patted down the prisoners and how they touched them on the way to the showers or recreation.”
Australian detainee David Hicks reported that he was offered prostitutes in exchange for intelligence. Yee couldn't confirm the presence of prostitutes at Camp Delta, but fellow interpreters described female interrogators disrobing during questioning of detainees. “One was particularly notorious and would pretend to masturbate in front of detainees. She was also known to touch them in a sexual way and make them rub her breasts and genitalia,” while guards stood behind the prisoners, forcing them to watch. “Detainees who refused were kicked and beaten.” U.S. officials' abuse of religion itself was no less pornographic.
One detainee described to Yee a ritual in which “prisoners were forced to sit in the center of a satanic circle drawn on the floor of an interrogation room. Lit candles outlined the circle and the prisoners were ordered to bow down and prostrate” themselves in the center. Then “interrogators shouted at the detainees, âSatan is your God, not Allah! Repeat that after me!'”
In the several investigations the U.S. military has conducted of itself at Guantánamo Bay, it has conceded an incident or two in which a Qur'an was accidentally mistreated, after which rioting ensued. Yee testifies that the mistreatment of Qur'ans was a regular feature at Camp Delta. One particularly egregious incident set off a mass suicide attempt. Continued mistreatment of the Qur'an prompted the detainees themselves to propose a solution: we'll surrender our Qur'ans to you, so long as you cease abusing them. Not allowed; every cell must have a Qur'an. New SOPs authored by Yee specifically to end the abuse did little. Guards warned not to touch the Qur'ans themselves delighted in knocking the Qur'an stands to the ground.
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Yee's Sisyphean task to help the U.S. military distinguish between Muslim beliefs, on the one hand, and acts carried out by a few Muslim criminals, on the other, is perhaps best symbolized by an incident in which a staff member in the local chaplain's office approached him concerning an article about to come out in the next JTF newsletter. Produced by an outfit called the Servants of the Persecuted Church, the article told the story of an “Egyptian Muslim” named “Mohammed Farouk.” Now, Farouk “hated Christmas,” and “in an attempt to obey the Koran and please Allah,” he and some friends “began to assault and harass Christians in their village.” The group then “broke into Christian businesses, robbing, and vandalizing them,” and so on. When Yee took this to the head chaplain, noting its violation of army regulations prohibiting religious intolerance, the chaplain agreed to withhold the news-letter's distribution, but only after checking first if indeed the Qur'an ordered the murder of all Christians.
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Yee's account of life at Guantánamo is corroborated by the linguist Erik Saar. An Arab-speaking sergeant in the U.S. Army, Saar was a graduate of the Defense Language Institute assigned to Guantánamo in December 2002 to assist the intelligence operation. Like Yee, Saar found himself underprepared for the assignment he'd been given, and
surrounded by colleagues no more adequately prepared.
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Like Yee, Saar found his first encounter with the MPs inauspicious, and his impression of MP treatment of detainees grew worse over time.
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“The MPs just thought the detainees were treated too well,” Saar remarked; “they were terrorists, responsible for 9/11, and their lives should be miserable.”
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In general, Saar found the MPs hostile to interrogators and linguists alike. Where the first were “screwing up the mission,” ostensibly by constraining the punishments MPs could inflict on detainees, the linguists earned the MPs' undying enmity for talking to detainees. “What the fuck is wrong with you,” Saar was asked; “are you one of them detainee lovers?”
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