My Guantanamo Diary (26 page)

“The ability to disprove these allegations rather easily calls into question the credibility of other allegations,” she said.

But that was just one of many obstacles Mujahid faced. During his combatant status review tribunal, he requested that eight witnesses be allowed to submit testimony on his behalf. Four of them were Gitmo detainees, including Ali Shah Mousovi, and the other four were high-profile officials in the Karzai cabinet. But the military almost never gave detainees access to the witnesses they believed might help their cases. Instead, the presiding officer routinely said that attempts had been made to find the requested witnesses but they could not be contacted. Mujahid got the same song and dance.

“The Afghan government was contacted on or about November 26, 2004. As of this date, the Afghanistan government has not responded to our request. . . . Without the cooperation of that government, we are unable to contact those witnesses and obtain the testimony that you requested,” the tribunal president announced.

The
Boston Globe
, however, investigated and found three of the four requested witnesses within three days. Two were found immediately in Afghanistan; the third was a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. The fourth witness had reportedly died.

On February 22, 2007, the military abruptly announced that it had decided to clear Mujahid to be released and returned to Afghanistan. The DOD sent Carolyn an e-mail that said, in part, “Your client has been approved to leave Guantánamo, subject to the process for making appropriate diplomatic arrangements for his departure.”

Carolyn was ecstatic and thought it would be only a matter of weeks before Mujahid was heading home. I delivered the good news to Mujahid’s brother, Farid Ahmad, in Gardez. He was overjoyed; the family thought their prayers had been answered. When we gave Mujahid himself the news, a meek smile spread across his face.

“Thank you for all your efforts,” he said. He told us he didn’t dare to hope that he might go home and be reunited with his family until it happened, until he was on that eastbound flight back to Afghanistan. He asked us please not to raise his family’s hopes either. He knew how his arrest had broken their lives.

“I don’t want them to be disappointed,” he said. “I’ve been lied to so many times.”

All the while, though, his eyes were saying something different. They shone. I thought that for the first time, Mujahid had hope. He believed the good news about going home.

I didn’t think much about the rationale for his fears, but over time, I understood. As the weeks turned into a month, and a month became three, then four, then six, then eight, I was bombarded by calls from Mujahid’s anxious brother. Every time I answered the phone, he had just one question: when?

“When is my brother coming home? Have you heard anything?” Farid would ask impatiently. “Is there any news?”

I would have to apologize and tell him that we had no idea. “The military has not disclosed dates, only that he’s cleared for release,” I’d say.

Slowly, as the months dragged on, Farid grew sullen. He was disappointed and upset that he had allowed himself to believe that his brother was coming back. Mujahid’s hope gradually dissipated too. One grim morning, he was particularly depressed. He didn’t understand why he was still being held when it had already been decided that he would be released.

I brought him a selection of Odwalla fresh juices on the last trip in June 2007 and told him to drink the carrot juice—it was good for him.

“The doctors in Afghanistan tell us that carrots are good for your eyes,” he said. “I never knew whether I should believe them or if it was a strange myth. What do our doctors know?” “The doctors in America say the same thing,” I said, pushing the bottle toward him. “It is good for your eyes.”

He took a hesitant sip.

“You don’t like it?” I asked.

“It’s not that. But why should I care about my eyes?” he replied. “All I see are the walls of my cell all day long. You go ahead and have it. Your eyes see the sky and the ocean.”

I wished I knew how to distract him from his sadness.

“Okay, then have some Pepsi!” I said, handing him a plastic bottle.

He chuckled.

Mujahid had another reason to feel despondent. Right after the military declared that he had been “approved to leave,” they moved him into Camp 6, where he was held in solitary confinement for twenty-two hours a day. When they took him outside for recreation, he was put in a small outdoor cage by himself.

Otherwise, he was held in a concrete box fifty-six feet square. In that small space, his steel toilet was positioned strategically in front of the small window in the door through which guards regularly peered in at him. Next to the toilet was a concrete slab that served as a bed. If he was “cooperative,” he got a thin foam mattress to lay on the concrete. When he longed to speak to another human being, he crouched on the ground and put his mouth to the crack beneath the door and shouted someone’s name to get his attention, then quickly put his ear to the crack and listened for any response.

But other prisoners were also trying to shout to one another, and it was often hard to communicate. When Mujahid
gave up on that, he’d go to sleep. That was how he passed days: Sleeping, then sleeping some more. Thinking about when he would be released. Shouting to others in the adjacent cells— Abdullah Wazir Zadran, Chaman Gul, Wali Mohammad.

If he was given permission to have his box of personal correspondence, he would reread letters from his family. Then, he would sleep again.

“That’s what I do all day,” he murmured.

“Telling him that he has been approved to leave, but then moving him to solitary confinement and doing nothing, is a new, cruel form of torture for him,” Carolyn said to me. “It is unconscionable that Mujahid has not been returned to Afghanistan. Our government has claimed that it does not want to hold prisoners any longer than is necessary. Yet, more than several months later, he remains in Guantánamo and in solitary confinement.”

It was always hard to leave Abdullah Mujahid, as it was to leave so many of the prisoners. Sometimes I wished he were more hostile or angry, more doubtful of a lawyer’s ability. I wished that he would turn us away once in a while. But he never did. He was always gentle, almost to the point of submissiveness. The last time I saw him, he was peering through the Camp 6 meeting room window as we were ushered out by guards. I got close and gave him a smile. He grinned back, the biggest smile I’d seen so far.

Meanwhile, Carolyn accepted a new job. Once she left Dechert, she wouldn’t be able to work on the prisoners’ cases or visit them any longer. She fretted about how to tell Mujahid and other clients that she wouldn’t be coming back. I knew it would be hard because it had taken them so long to
trust her and to believe that she was on their side. She worked tirelessly for them and wrote them long, detailed letters to help them pass the time. She didn’t like to think about leaving the men she had grown to care so deeply about, and she hoped that they’d be released before she left. She especially hoped that Mujahid would remember their conversations.

“I hope they’ve helped support his belief that there are good people in the United States,” she said. “We’ve had many discussions about the differences between Afghanistan and America, although I think Abdullah Mujahid would say that we have actually discussed the similarities. Because it is his constant argument that we are all not so different.”

By the time I first arrived at Guantánamo, they had become something of a legend—two brothers who had found a unique way of surviving three years of imprisonment: writing poetry.
¹
Poetry was a lifeline to sanity for many detainees; it allowed them to express the suffering and confusion they felt. But Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and his brother Badr Zaman were a phenomenon. They had written tens of thousands of lines of verse—on Styrofoam cups, on bits of paper—and circulated them through the prison or written them down in the margins of Red Cross stationery, hoping to slip them past the military censors to their families in Afghanistan.
²

Both Pakistani and American government officials refused to discuss the brothers’ case, so I searched public sources, from newspaper reports to public records and Web site accounts, for anything on them. They had been released before lawyers obtained access to Guantánamo in 2004, so I asked
friends, acquaintances, and released prisoners in Afghanistan and Pakistan about them. Gradually, I was able to piece together some of the remarkable stories of their creativity. I never met them, but I heard so many speak of them with fondness and admiration that in the end, I felt that I, too, had come to know them and their remarkable gift.

No one knows exactly what got the two brothers into the most trouble: internal Pakistani politics, their advocacy for an independent Pashtunistan, or a joke about President Bill Clinton. During the three years they spent at Guantánamo, their U.S. interrogators focused laserlike on the last: what had they said about Clinton?
⁴

It was, admittedly, a bad joke. It popped up in one of the dozens of articles the two had written as journalists in Peshawar. In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Abdul Rahim wrote a short parody that was published in a Peshawar newspaper. Clinton had offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Osama bin Laden, who had been identified as a threat to the United States for the terrorist training camps he
ran in Afghanistan.
⁵
What, Abdul Rahim asked, could the Afghans offer in return as a reward for the capture of the man dallying with Miss Monica Lewinsky? They could offer as much as five million afghanis, the joke being that Afghanistan was so poor that five million pieces of its currency were worth the vast amount of $113.
⁶

“It was a lampoon . . . of the poor Afghan economy” under the Taliban, Badr Zaman said in an interview after his release. The article told Afghans how to identify Clinton if they spotted him. “It said he was clean shaven, had light-colored eyes, and had been seen involved in a scandal with Monica Lewin-sky,” Badr said.
⁷
For three years, more than 100 interrogators, including some from Washington, D.C., didn’t get the joke.
⁸
“Again and again, they were asking questions about this article. We had to explain that this was a satire,” Badr Zaman said in an interview with
Newsday
in October 2005. “It was really pathetic.”

U.S. interrogators may have focused on the joke about Clinton, but the real reason the two brothers were turned over to the United States seems to have had more to do with internal Pakistani politics. Few Americans know that Pakistan has manipulated the United States into taking care of members of the Pakistani opposition who have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or the so-called war on terror. But this is most likely what happened to the Dost brothers.

As was true for many Afghans of their generation, their lives were heavily bound up in political events in their country. They had fled Afghanistan for Peshawar during the Soviet occupation and joined an anti-Soviet political group called Jamiat-i- Dawatul Qur’an wa Sunna. Abdul Rahim became editor of its magazine, according to an account by
Newsday
reporter
James Rupert. Even then, “we were not fighters,” Badr told Rupert. “We took part in the war only as writers.”

The two became popular figures in Peshawar literary and political circles and were known for their writings. Badr Za-man, who had gone to graduate school at the University of Peshawar and earned a master’s degree in English literature, was a fan of Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
and Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
.
⁹
He later became an English professor. Abdul Rahim was a magazine editor, a religious scholar, and an avid writer; by one account, he authored more than thirty books.
¹⁰
Even at Guantánamo, according to newspaper reports, Abdul Rahim was able to write a book on Islamic law, translate an anthology of Arabic poetry into Pashto,
¹¹
and with the help of Arab prisoners, translate the entire Qu’ran into his native tongue.

In 1989, the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan, and the two brothers broke with their group, which had become involved with the Wahhabite interpretation of Islam. Abdul Rahim began writing lampoons of the group’s leader, a cleric named Sami Ullah, portraying him as a corrupt pawn of the Pakistani government, working against Afghan interests. In November 2001, as U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan, the mullah’s brother, Roh Ullah, “called us and said if we didn’t stop criticizing the party he would have us put in jail,” Badr told
Newsday
. On November 17, only six weeks after the September 11 attacks, agents from Pakistan’s feared Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) raided the brothers’ family home and arrested them.
¹²

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

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

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

Badr said his worst experiences were at these prisons, where he was forbidden to bathe,
¹⁶
threatened by dogs, deprived of sleep, and photographed naked
¹⁷
; he also had his beard and eyebrows shaved and suffered various other indignities.
¹⁸
He heard the moans of other prisoners as they were beaten and their holy book was desecrated. But he says that neither he nor his brother was tortured at Gitmo.
¹⁹

The brothers were flown to Guantánamo in May 2002.
²⁰
According to Badr, U.S. interrogators told them that Pakistani Intelligence alleged that they were al-Qaeda operatives, Taliban supporters, and a dangerous threat to former president Clinton.
²¹

Soon after their imprisonment, Badr and Abdul Rahim were separated. But Badr found a way to discover his older brother’s whereabouts. When they were first brought to Guantánamo Bay, everything was still under construction, and prisoners were kept in open-air cages or sometimes in makeshift tents. The prisoners were given plastic buckets to use for their bodily wastes. When the buckets were full, the guards selected detainees to clean and empty them. Badr was lonely and desperate to see his brother, so he volunteered for the chore. Making his way from tent to tent through the camp collecting buckets, he finally found his brother. Always the poet, Abdul Rahim greeted Badr with a bucket full of excrement and with poetry on his lips
²²
:

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

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

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

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