The Men Who Stare at Goats (18 page)

Jamal is a web site designer. He lives with his sisters in Moss Side. He is thirty-seven, divorced, with three children. He said he pressumed that MI5 had followed him there to the hotel, but he’d stopped worrying about it. He said he kept seeing the same man watching him from across the street, leaning against a car, and whenever the man thought he’d been spotted he looked briefly panicked and immediately bent down to fiddle casually with his tire.

Jamal laughed when he told me this.

Jamal was born Ronald Fiddler, into a family of second-generation Jamaican immigrants. When he was twenty-three he learned about Islam and converted, changing his name to Jamal al-Harith for no particular reason, other than that he liked the sound of it. He said that al-Harith basically means “seed planter.”

In October 2001, Jamal visited Pakistan as a tourist, he said. He was in Quetta, on the Afghanistan border, four days into his trip, when the American bombing campaign began. He quickly decided to leave for Turkey and paid a local truck driver to take him there. The driver said the route would take them through Iran, but somehow they ended up in Afghanistan, where they were stopped by a gang of Taliban supporters. They asked to see Jamal’s passport, and he was promptly arrested and thrown in jail on suspicion of being a British spy.

Afghanistan fell to the coalition. The Red Cross visited Jamal in prison. They suggested he cross the border into Pakistan
and make his own way back home to Manchester, but Jamal had no money, so instead he asked to be put in contact with the British embassy in Kabul.

Nine days later—while he waited in Kandahar for the embassy to transport him home—the Americans picked him up.

“The Americans,” Jamal said, “kidnapped me.” When he said “kidnapped” he looked surprised at himself for using such a dramatic word.

The Americans in Kandahar told Jamal he needed to be sent to Cuba for two months for administrative processing, and so on, and the next thing he knew he was on a plane, shackled, his arms chained to his legs, and then chained to a hook on the floor, his face covered in earmuffs and goggles and a surgical mask, bound for Guantanamo Bay.

In the weeks after Jamal’s release, two years later, he gave a few interviews, during which he spoke of the shackles and the solitary confinement and the beatings—the things the outside world had already imagined about life inside that mysterious compound. He said they beat his feet with batons, pepper sprayed him, and kept him inside a cage that was open to the elements, with no privacy or protection from the rats and snakes and scorpions that crawled around the base. But these were not sensational revelations.

He spoke with ITV’s Martin Bashir, who asked him (off-camera), “Did you see my Michael Jackson documentary?”

Jamal replied, “I’ve, uh, been in Guantanamo Bay for two years.”

When I met Jamal he began to tell me about the more bewildering abuses. Prostitutes were flown in from the
States—he didn’t know whether they were there only to smear their menstrual blood on the faces of the more devout detainees. Or perhaps they were brought in to service the soldiers, and some PsyOps boffin—a resident cultural analyst—devised this other job for them as an afterthought, exploiting the resources at the army’s disposal.

“One or two of the British guys,” Jamal told me, “said to the guards, ‘Can
we
have the women?’ But the guards said, ‘No, no, no. The prostitutes are for the detainees who don’t actually
want
them.’ They
explained
it to us! ‘If you want it, it’s not going to work on you.’”

“So what were the prostitutes doing to the detainees?” I asked.

“Just messing about with their genitals,” said Jamal. “Stripping off in front of them. Rubbing their breasts in their faces. Not all the guys would speak. They’d just come back from the Brown Block [the interrogation block] and be quiet for days and cry to themselves, so you know something went on but you don’t know what. But for the guys who did speak, that’s what we heard.”

I asked Jamal if he thought that the Americans at Guantanamo were dipping their toes into the waters of exotic interrogation techniques.

“They were doing a lot more than dipping,” he replied.

And that’s when he told me what happened to him inside the Brown Block.

Jamal said that, being new to torture, he didn’t know whether the techniques tested on him were unique to Guantanamo or as old as torture itself, but they seemed pretty weird to him. Jamal’s description of life inside the Brown
Block made Guantanamo Bay sound like an experimental interrogation lab, teeming not only with intelligence agents but with ideas. It was as if, for the first time in the soldiers’ careers, they had prisoners and a ready-made facility at their disposal, and they couldn’t resist putting all their concepts—which had until then languished, sometimes for decades, in the unsatisfactory realm of the theoretical—into practice.

First there were the noises.

“I would describe them as industrial noises,” Jamal said. “Screeches and bangs. These would be played across the Brown Block into all the interrogation rooms. You can’t describe it. Screeches, bangs, compressed gas. All sorts of things. Jumbled noises.”

“Like a fax machine cranking up into use?” I asked.

“No,” said Jamal. “Not computer generated. Industrial. Strange noises. And mixed in with it would be something like an electronic piano. Not as in
music,
because there was no rhythm to it.”

“Like a synthesizer?”

“Yes, a synthesizer mixed in with industrial noises. All a jumble and a mishmash.”

“Did you ever ask them, ‘Why are you blasting these strange noises at us?’” I said.

“In Cuba, you learn to accept,” said Jamal.

The industrial noises were blasted across the block. But the strangest thing of all happened inside Jamal’s own interrogation room. The room was furnished with a closed-circuit TV camera and a two-way mirror. Jamal would be brought in for fifteen-hour sessions, during which time they got nothing out of him because, he said, there was nothing to
get. He said his past was so clean—not even a parking ticket—that at one point someone wandered over to him and whispered, “Are you an MI5 asset?”

“An MI5 asset!” said Jamal. He whistled.
“Asset!”
he repeated. “That was the word he used!”

The interrogators were getting more and more cross with Jamal’s apparent steely refusal to crack. Also, Jamal used his time inside the Brown Block to do stretching exercises, keeping himself sane. Jamal’s exercise regime made the interrogators more angry, but instead of beating him, or threatening him, they did something very odd indeed.

A military intelligence officer brought a ghetto blaster into his room. He put it on the floor in the corner. He said, “Here’s a great girl band doing Fleetwood Mac songs.”

He didn’t blast the CD at Jamal. This wasn’t sleep deprivation, and it wasn’t an attempt to induce the Bucha Effect. Instead, the agent simply put it on at normal volume.

“He put it on,” said Jamal, “and he left.”

“An all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers band?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Jamal.

This sounded to me like the tip of a very strange iceberg.

“And what happened next?” I asked.

“When the CD was finished, he came back into the room and said, ‘You might like this.’ And he put on Kris Kristofferson’s greatest hits. Normal volume. And he left the room again. And then, when that was finished, he came back and said, ‘Here’s a Matchbox Twenty CD.’”

“Was he doing it for entertainment purposes?” I asked.

“It’s interrogation,” said Jamal. “I don’t think they were trying to entertain me.”

“Matchbox Twenty?” I said.

I didn’t know much about Matchbox Twenty. My research revealed them to be a four-piece country rock band from Florida, who do not sound particularly abrasive (like Metal-lica and “Burn Motherfucker Burn!”) or irritatingly repetitive (like Barney and “Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain”). They sound a bit like REM. The only other occasion when I had heard of Matchbox Twenty was when Adam Piore from
Newsweek
told me that they too had been blasted into the shipping containers in al-Qā’im.

I mentioned this to Jamal and he looked astonished.

“Matchbox Twenty?” he said.

“Their album
More Than You Think You Are,”
I said.

There was a silence.

“I thought they were just playing me a CD,” said Jamal. “Just playing me a CD. See if I like music or not. Now I’ve heard this, I’m thinking there must have been something else going on. Now I’m thinking, why did they play that same CD to me as well? They’re playing this CD in Iraq and they’re playing the same CD in Cuba. It means to me there is a
program.
They’re not playing music because they think people like or dislike Matchbox Twenty more than other music. Or Kris Kristofferson more than other music. There is a reason. There’s something else going on. Obviously I don’t know what it is. But there must be some other intent.”

“There must be,” I said.

Jamal paused for a moment and then he said, “You don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes, do you? But you know it is deep. You know it is deep.”

Joseph Curtis (not his real name) worked the night shift at the Abu Ghraib prison in the autumn of 2003. Then he was exiled by the army to a town in Germany. The threat of a court-martial hung over him. He had given an interview about what he had seen to an international press agency, thus incurring the wrath of his superiors. Even so, against his own better judgment, and against his lawyers’ advice, he agreed to meet me, secretly, at an Italian restaurant on a Wednesday in June 2004. I’m not entirely sure why he was willing to risk further censure. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t sit back and watch Lynndie England and the other military personnel captured in the photographs be scapegoats just for following orders.

We sat on the balcony of the restaurant and he pushed his food around his plate.

“You ever see The Shining?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Abu Ghraib was like the Overlook Hotel,” he said. “It was haunted.”

“You mean …” I said.

I presumed Joseph meant that the place was full of spooks: intelligence officers—but the look on his face made me realize he didn’t.

“It was haunted,” he said. “It got so dark at night. So dark. Under Saddam, people were dissolved in acid there. Women raped by dogs. Brains splattered all over the walls. This was worse than the Overlook Hotel because it was real.”

“In
The Shining,”
I said, “it was the building that turned Jack Nicholson insane. Was it the building that turned the Americans crazy at Abu Ghraib?”

“It was like the building wanted to be back in business,” said Joseph.

Joseph wore a University of Louisiana athletics department T-shirt. He had the U.S. soldier’s jarhead haircut—shaved at the sides, a short crop on top. He said he couldn’t believe how much money was floating around the army these days. These were the golden days, in budgetary terms. One day he had taken his truck in for repairs, and the soldier who looked it over had said, “You need new seats.”

Joseph said it didn’t look like the seats needed replacing.

The soldier replied that they had two hundred thousand dollars in their budget and if they didn’t spend it by the end of the month they had to give it back.

“So,” the soldier slowly repeated, “you need new seats.”

Joseph said I wouldn’t believe how many plasma screens there were in Iraq, for teleconferencing purposes and so on. They’d had perfectly good TVs, but trucks full of plasma screens just arrived one day, because that’s how much money was floating around.

In January 2004, the influential think tank and lobbying group GlobalSecurity revealed that George W. Bush’s government had filtered more money into their Black Budget than any other administration in American history.

The amount of money an administration spends on its Black Budget can be seen as a tantalizing barometer of its proclivity toward weirdness. Black Budgets often just fund Black Ops—highly sensitive and deeply shady projects such as assassination squads, and so on, which remain secret not only to protect the Black Operators but to protect Americans, who generally don’t want to think about such things. But Black Budgets also fund investigations into schemes so bizarre that their disclosure might lead voters to believe that their leaders have taken leave of their senses. George W. Bush’s administration had, by January 2004, channeled approximately $30 billion into the Black Budget—to be spent on God knows what.

I had to strain to hear Joseph over the late-night road-works as he told me about the darkness at Abu Ghraib, and how that darkness led to “the beast in man really coming out there” and the never-ending, bountiful budget.

“Abu Ghraib was a tourist attraction,” he said. “I remember one time I was woken up by two captains. ‘Where’s the death chamber?’ They wanted to see the rope and the lever. When Rumsfeld came to visit, he didn’t want to talk to the soldiers. All he wanted to see was the death chamber.”

Joseph took a bite of his food.

“Yeah, the beast in man really came out at Abu Ghraib,” he said.

“You mean in the photographs?” I asked.

“Everywhere,” he said. “The senior leadership were screwing around with the lower ranks… .”

I told Joseph I didn’t understand what he meant.

He said, “The senior leaders were having sex with the lower ranks. The detainees were raping each other.”

“Did you ever see any ghosts?” I asked him.

He stopped eating and pushed his food around the plate again.

“There was a darkness about the place,” he replied. “You just got this feeling there was always something there, lurking behind you in the darkness, and that it was very mad.”

I asked Joseph if there was anything
good
at Abu Ghraib, and he paused, then said it was good that
Amazon.com
delivered there. Then he remembered something else that was good. He said there was a genius at making model planes there. He made them out of old ration boxes, and he hung them from the ceiling in the isolation block. One time, Joseph said, someone came up to him and said, “You’ve
got
to see these model planes! They’re incredible! One of the guards in the isolation block has hung a bunch of them on the ceiling. Hey, and while you’re there, you can take a look at the high values!”