My Guantanamo Diary (11 page)

There were some talented poets among the habeas team— as there were among the prisoners. Portland federal defender Chris Schatz wrote this poem to his friend and client Chaman Gul, in which he imagines Chaman’s Gitmo experience:

• I am a prisoner in a foreign land,
  the circumference of my life reduced to a cage not fit for a
  dog,
  
• a prisoner of despair that is not of my own making—
  for I was betrayed.
  
• When the soldiers from the West first brought me to this
  maze of tombs
  my heart was still young,
  now my beard is gray and the rose of my life is withering,
  day after day my captors try me with their questions,
  insisting that I be other than what I am,
  when I answer, the voice I hear is no longer my own,
  my soul has become a wisp of smoke, my heart—a stone.
  In the lunar landscape of my solitary room
  I walk in silence with fear following hard upon my every
  step,
  fear not only that I will be forgotten, but that in time I will
  myself
  
• forget the rhythm of life and death,
  the touch of my aged mother’s hand,
  the warmth of home and marriage bed,
  until my memories are as if fallen into a dry well—
  buried in sand.
  
• Only when the gentle face of my sister hovers in the air
  before me,
  comforting me with her tears, do I remember that I still love.
  From my cell I cannot see the sea though she is near,
  her dark eyes haunt my dreams
  and when I pray I hear her song of freedom—
  wave upon wave.
  
• Someday the sea will cast herself against these walls
  and break them down,
  and I will float away upon her breast
  under the blue sky of day and the star-pocked void of
  night
  
• until I am at last returned to the mountains and valleys of
  my own land,
  
• to Afghanistan, where my two dear wives
  and my brave children will greet me with shy smiles and
  tender kisses,
  and I will be a man again and free.
  

Many attorneys readily admitted that the court process wasn’t going to be the magic bullet that would send their clients home. At a barbecue one night, a few lawyers said that the media and the global pressure on the administration to restore America’s tarnished image would make the difference. While lawyers helped keep Gitmo in the world’s eye via lawsuits, many of the habeas brigade felt helpless as they waged a seemingly fruitless legal battle.

Sometimes, it even seemed as though to the clients, legal counsel was beside the point. One lawyer told me that he often felt like a glorified waiter and social worker. Some of the Arab clients gave their attorneys grocery lists. One of the Kuwaitis once asked his lawyers to bring him two large pizzas, three McDonald’s fish filet sandwiches, ice cream, ten Hershey’s chocolate bars, eight KitKat bars, a package of Oreo cookies, and a half-gallon of chocolate milk. The attorneys
brought it all and stared at the young Arab man as he devoured the food later that afternoon. His interpreter told me only half a cup of chocolate milk and some cookies were left. The detainee ended up with a bad stomach ache.

Then, there were the odd and even comical situations that attorneys had to deal with. I think the prize in this category has to go to Clive Stafford Smith for his exchange with the military regarding contraband lingerie and bathing suits.

On August 12, 2007, Smith received this communication from the military regarding two of his firm’s clients, Shaker Aamer and Muhammed Hamid al-Qareni:

Clive responded at length on August 29:

Wali Mohammad was standing to shake our hands when his attention was drawn to my right ear. I handed him the flower I had tucked there, along with a bouquet of red hibiscus that I’d picked outside the Navy Exchange supermarket that morning. He held up the flowers and smelled them. They left yellow pollen residue on the tip of his nose, which stayed there for the rest of the meeting. “They are so red,” he said, holding the flowers and touching the petals. It was the first time he’d seen flowers in five years.

We sat down, and I opened a box of Klondike bars. Mohammad hadn’t had much of a chance to indulge his weakness for ice cream in years either. “I like ice cream, and this is really good ice cream,” he said, laughing in between mouthfuls.

He nudged the cardboard box toward Peter and me.

“Eat with me,” he said. But we ended up nibbling on pistachio nuts and left the ice cream for him.

It was our third meeting with Wali Mohammad. Over the months, he had slowly let his guard down, allowing himself to believe that Peter was not an agent for the U.S. government. He was beginning to treat us more like friends.

During this meeting, he was also in particularly good spirits. Instead of the usual Camp Echo meeting room, we were in Camp Iguana. It was a far cry from the solitary-confinement setting of Camp 6, where Mohammad spent his days and nights. We met with Mohammad there once. Claustrophobia overtook me as we were led through a narrow passageway to a tiny soundproof meeting room. The walls in the hallway were bare cement. I felt as though I was in a dank dungeon (I was in fact) and was relieved to get out of there once the meeting was over. Mohammad didn’t complain about the conditions, but I felt badly about leaving him behind. When prisoners were held in those solitary conditions, their mental decline became apparent from visit to visit. One Afghan told Dechert lawyer Rebecca Dick that the military had shot rays into his head. Moments later, the absurdity of his statement dawned on him. He looked at her and said, “I am fighting for my sanity.”

By contrast, Iguana was Gitmo’s version of the Four Seasons Hotel. When prisoners were escorted to the bathroom there, they could peer through the high fences and see the endless Caribbean Sea.
¹
Sometimes, if they were lucky, they might even spy a ship sailing in the distance.

Prisoners meeting their lawyers in Camp Iguana sat on sofas in a large room with wood floors, instead of on white plastic lawn chairs. There were no holding cells in the meeting rooms, and we could sit close to the prisoner on an adjacent couch without the barrier of a long table between us. These small things made the meetings go better.

When I sat next to the prisoners, they often wanted to see my rings and asked who had given them to me. They noticed when I wore a new one or when I wasn’t sporting an elastic hair tie around my wrist the way I had four months before. Once I arm-wrestled an Afghan prisoner. He won and gave me a toothy grin, as if to say, don’t be fooled by my old age and graying beard, lady.

The camp was also teeming with wildlife. True to its name, it hosted iguana families that scurried around the camouflageclad guards or sunbathed in front of the meeting rooms. Sometimes during our meetings, woodpeckers hammered relentlessly at the walls. It made the prisoners laugh to see lawyers and interpreters beat their fists against the walls in a vain attempt to shut Mr. Woodpecker up.

Mohammad, No. 560, as the military referred to him, was a complex man who hid his emotions behind an abundance of hearty, animated laughter. Sitting beside him, I told him that I was planning to go to Afghanistan to collect evidence on behalf of some of the detainees represented by the lawyers I was working with. He looked at me sharply, his attention distracted from his fourth Klondike bar.

“Are you really? Will you be going to Peshawar?” he asked.

“For a few days, yes.”

He got very excited, and after some back-and-forth, I realized that my grandmother’s house was three blocks from his.

“You must go to my house!” he declared. “You must tell my family that you saw me and sat with me here. Tell them I looked good, I was healthy, and not to worry. Tell them that I’ll be home soon,
inshallah
.”

Finally devouring the fourth Klondike, he quipped, “Also tell them that you brought me ice cream and that I ate all of it.”

I smiled.

“If you go, you’ll see my twin girls Sara and Amina. They are the most beauutttiiful girls in the world,” he said. “I want to show the other prisoners here their photographs. When they see my girls, they will know that God is great!”

He paused to unwrap Klondike bar number five. Then, he remembered something: “When you see my wives, don’t tell them that I have any white in my beard. They’ll be upset if they know I’ve grown old here. Tell them that I look young and that my hair is still black.”

In 2002, when their father was seized by Pakistani police and turned over to the U.S. military, which accused him of having associations with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and brought him to Gitmo, Sara and Amina were only two years old. At the time of this meeting, they were nearly eight.

Mohammad told us that he was a just a businessman in Taliban-run Afghanistan who was turned in by a former business partner who wanted to avoid repaying a large loan. At the time, Mohammad said, he was a currency and gold trader on the foreign exchange market. He used to travel back and forth between Peshawar, Kabul, and Dubai to exchange currencies for profit. He became well known and had developed a good relationship with the Bank of Afghanistan, which would lend him large amounts in dollars for his investments and trade. Since Islamic banking systems do not allow interest, the bank made money by keeping 75 percent of Mohammad’s profits.

A typical transaction meant that Mohammad would take out a large dollar loan from the Bank of Afghanistan, drive across the border to Pakistan, and exchange his dollars for kaldars, the Pakistani currency. With the cash in his briefcase, he would fly Afghan-run Ariana Airlines to Dubai, where he would exchange the money for dollars at a profit since dollars sold more cheaply in Dubai than in Kabul.

Then, he would go to the local Dubai gold dealers and buy several pounds of gold bars. Dubai’s gold markets, or souks, are notorious for their inexpensive, high-quality twenty-two-and twenty-four-karat gold, which is about as close to pure gold as you can get. He would take his gold bars and hefty profits, return to Pakistan, and sell the gold to local jewelers at much higher rates.

This trade of turning cash into gold and gold into cash was big business, and most of the time, Mohammad lived well. He had a beautiful two-story house decorated with imported furniture and Persian rugs and bought his family whatever they needed. But then, during one of his transactions, he took out a loan in the amount of $1.5 million. He borrowed in dollars and converted to kaldars.

The problems began when the value of the dollar suddenly skyrocketed and devalued the kaldars that Mohammad had just purchased. To make matters worse, the value of gold also dropped before he could sell. Within a short period, he lost about $500,000. And the Bank of Afghanistan, the government bank run by the Taliban regime, wasn’t happy.

The Taliban arrested Mohammad and ordered him to pay back the sum in dollars. He agreed and borrowed from his family and friends to pay off the huge debt. His business
partner, Assef, owed him a large amount of money, and Mohammad started demanding repayment. But Assef had no intention of paying. The two were about to go before a tribal court, or
jirga
, of village elders to settle the matter.

But the night before the big meeting, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani secret police, came to Mohammad’s home and tried to extort $100,000. Mohammad owned a large house, and the ISI agents suggested that he sell it and pay them off to avoid arrest. This sort of extortion is something I’ve heard many wealthy Afghans allege.

Mohammad was furious and started shouting at the police. He cursed at them and told them to get out. Instead, they arrested him and took him away. Then, he was accused of having ties to the Taliban and turned over to the U.S. military.

The Department of Defense accused Mohammad of taking money from the Taliban. In his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT), the presiding officers accused him of associating with al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and of having links to Osama bin Laden. As for his gold sales to Pakistani jewelers, the presiding officer accused him of “smuggling gold for al-Qaeda.”

Mohammad had explained his case over and over to military interrogators, to the tribunal, and to us.

“I took loans from the Bank of Afghanistan, which happened to be controlled by the Taliban government at the time,” he said. “I didn’t take money from the Taliban, but from my country’s bank. I was a businessman taking a loan from a bank.”

That bank, he said, had been around for decades and had been controlled by various governments: the Communistbacked Najibullah regime, the Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and now the American-backed government of Hamid Karzai.

He maintained that he had never had anything to do with the Taliban’s politics and that he was in business long before the Taliban came to power. The allegations against him were roughly comparable to accusing an American with a Bank of America loan of taking money from the Bush administration and being in cahoots with its war policies.

“This has no logic at all,” Mohammad told the panel at his CSRT. But like most of the other detainees, he was declared an enemy combatant.

Each year, after his initial appearance before the CSRT panel, Mohammad went before another panel to determine whether he was an ongoing threat to the United States. And every year, the panel came up with outlandish new allegations. In 2007, he told us, the panel accused him of working with Osama bin Laden in 1996. But he was in Peshawar in 1996, he said. And while he admitted having heard the name Osama, he said it wasn’t until he got to Guantánamo Bay that he learned that Osama was an Arab. The whole military court system, he said, was a big joke.

“It’s drama! These hearings are a big game they’re playing,” he said, bursting into laughter and shaking his head. “The lies they accuse us of are crazy! They aren’t small lies; they reach the sky!”

He pulled out a piece of folded white paper. It was the result of his latest hearing, once again declaring him an ongoing threat to the United States. He shrugged. “These decisions are meaningless,” he said. “It’s just a stupid game they play.”