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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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20 January 2010 By Scott Horton
1.
“Asymmetrical Warfare”
When President Barack
Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore
the standards of due process and the core
constitutional values that have made this country
great.” Toward that end, the president issued an
executive order declaring that the
extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall
be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than
one year from the date of this order.” Obama has
failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are
being charged with crimes, others released, but the
date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily
into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now
emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration
with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency,
evidence that suggests the current administration
failed to investigate seriously—and may even have
continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of
three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
Late in the evening on
June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died
suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from
Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from
Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani,
also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been
imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the
age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged
with a crime, though all three had been engaged in
hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their
imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block,
known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly
troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths
emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into
lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the
reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to
turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral
Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In
an unusual move, he also used the announcement to
attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of
desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical
warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the
official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners
appeared to believe that they had killed themselves.
Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen
rejected the notion.
Two years later, the
U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has
primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval
base, issued a report supporting the account
originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in
command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to
make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed
with Freedom of Information Act demands did it
disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of
documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly
incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully
cross-referenced and deciphered by students and
faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in
New Jersey, and their findings, released in November
2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling
to make its conclusions public. The official story of
the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged
contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a
reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.
According to the
NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn
sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his
cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner
was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at
least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags
deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to
believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on
those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his
head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from
the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS
report also proposes that the three prisoners, who
were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of
these actions almost simultaneously.
Al-Zahrani,
according to the report, was discovered first, at
12:39 a.m., and taken by
several Alpha Block guards to the camp’s detention
medical clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor
the phone number for one, so a clinic staffer dialed
911. During this time, other guards discovered Al-Utaybi.
Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later.
Although rigor mortis had already set in—indicating
that the men had been dead for at least two hours—the
NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer
attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in
attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth.
The fact that at
least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks
affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the
expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went
unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard
operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy
guards on duty after midnight to “conduct a visual
search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes.
The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets
or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more
sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in
their beds, but it did not explain where they were
able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly
controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would
allow such an obvious and immediately observable
deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report
explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected
for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on
duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed
in their duties, were never disciplined.
A separate
report, the result of an “informal investigation”
initiated by Admiral Harris, found that standard
operating procedures were violated that night but
concluded that disciplinary action was not warranted
because of the “generally permissive environment” of
the cell block and the numerous “concessions” that had
been made with regard to the prisoners’ comfort, which
“concessions” had resulted in a “general confusion by
the guard and the JDG staff over many of the rules
that applied to the guard force’s handling of the
detainees.” According to Harris, even had standard
operating procedures been followed, “it is possible
that the detainees could have successfully committed
suicide anyway.”
This is the
official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command
and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal
pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and
press releases, and by the State Department. Now four
members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to
guard Camp Delta, including a decorated
non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as
sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have
furnished an account dramatically at odds with the
NCIS report—a report for which they were neither
interviewed nor approached.
All four
soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding
officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers
provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up
within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff
Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision
have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s
Magazine that strongly suggests that the three
prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to
another location prior to their deaths. The guards’
accounts also reveal the existence of a previously
unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths,
or at least the events that led directly to the
deaths, most likely occurred.
2.
“Camp No”
The soldiers of
the Maryland-based 629th Military Intelligence
Battalion arrived at Guantánamo Naval Base in March
2006, assigned to provide security to Camp America,
the sector of the base containing the five individual
prison compounds that house the prisoners. Camp Delta
was at the time the largest of these compounds, and
within its walls were four smaller camps, numbered 1
through 4, which in turn were divided into cell
blocks. Life at Camp America, as at all prisons, was
and remains rigorously routinized for both prisoners
and their jailers. Navy guards patrol the cell blocks
and Army personnel control the exterior areas of the
camp. All observed incidents must be logged. For the
Army guards who man the towers and “sally ports”
(access points), knowing who enters and leaves the
camp, and exactly when, is the essence of their
mission.
One of the new
guards who arrived that March was Joe Hickman, then a
sergeant. Hickman grew up in Baltimore and joined the
Marines in 1983, at the age of nineteen. When I
interviewed him in January at his home in Wisconsin,
he told me he had been inspired to enlist by Ronald
Reagan, “the greatest president we’ve ever had.” He
worked in a military intelligence unit and was
eventually tapped for Reagan’s Presidential Guard
detail, an assignment reserved for model soldiers.
When his four years were up, Hickman returned home,
where he worked a series of security jobs—prison
transport, executive protection, and eventually
private investigations. After September 11 he decided
to re-enlist, at thirty-seven, this time in the Army
National Guard.
Hickman deployed
to Guantánamo with his friend Specialist Tony Davila,
who grew up outside Washington, D.C., and who had
himself been a private investigator. When they arrived
at Camp Delta, Davila told me, soldiers from the
California National Guard unit they were relieving
introduced him to some of the curiosities of the base.
The most noteworthy of these was an unnamed and
officially unacknowledged compound nestled out of
sight between two plateaus about a mile north of Camp
Delta, just outside Camp America’s perimeter. One day,
while on foot patrol, Hickman and Davila came across
the compound. It looked like other camps within Camp
America, Davila said, only it had no guard towers and
it was surrounded with concertina wire. They saw no
activity, but Hickman guessed the place could house as
many as eighty prisoners. One part of the compound, he
said, had the same appearance as the interrogation
centers at other prison camps.
The compound was
not visible from the main road, and the access road
was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about
the compound had said, “This place does not exist,”
and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of
security for all of Camp America, was not briefed
about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other
soldiers—many of whom were required to patrol the
outside perimeter of Camp America—had seen the
compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One
theory was that it was being used by some of the
non-uniformed government personnel who frequently
showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be
CIA agents.
A friend of
Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound “Camp No,” the
idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would
be told, “No, it doesn’t.” He and Davila made a point
of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once,
Hickman said, he heard a “series of screams” from
within the compound.
Hickman and his
men also discovered that there were odd exceptions to
their duties. Army guards were charged with searching
and logging every vehicle that passed into and out of
Camp Delta. “When John McCain came to the camp, he had
to be logged in.” However, Hickman was instructed to
make no record whatsoever of the movements of one
vehicle in particular—a white van, dubbed the “paddy
wagon,” that Navy guards used to transport heavily
manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of
Camp Delta. The van had no rear windows and contained
a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner.
Navy drivers, Hickman came to understand, would let
the guards know they had a prisoner in the van by
saying they were “delivering a pizza.”
The paddy wagon
was used to transport prisoners to medical facilities
and to meetings with their lawyers. But as Hickman
monitored the paddy wagon’s movements from the guard
tower at Camp Delta, he frequently saw it follow an
unexpected route. When the van reached the first
intersection, instead of heading right—toward the
other camps or toward one of the buildings where
prisoners could meet with their lawyers—it made a
left. In that direction, past the perimeter checkpoint
known as ACP Roosevelt, there were only two
destinations. One was a beach where soldiers went to
swim. The other was Camp No.
3.
“Lit up”
The night the
prisoners died, Hickman was on duty as sergeant of the
guard for Camp America’s exterior security force. When
his twelve-hour shift began, at 6
p.m., he climbed the ladder to Tower 1, which
stood twenty feet above Sally Port 1, the main
entrance to Camp Delta. From there he had an excellent
view of the camp, and much of the exterior perimeter
as well. Later he would make his rounds.
Shortly after
his shift began, Hickman noticed that someone had
parked the paddy wagon near Camp 1, which houses Alpha
Block. A moment later, two Navy guards emerged from
Camp 1, escorting a prisoner. They put the prisoner
into the back of the van and then left the camp
through Sally Port 1, just below Hickman. He was under
standing orders not to search the paddy wagon, so he
just watched it as it headed east. He assumed the
guards and their charge were bound for one of the
other prison camps southeast of Camp Delta. But when
the van reached the first intersection, instead of
making a right, toward the other camps, it made the
left, toward ACP Roosevelt and Camp No.
Twenty minutes
later—about the amount of time needed for the trip to
Camp No and back—the paddy wagon returned. This time
Hickman paid closer attention. He couldn’t see the
Navy guards’ faces, but from body size and uniform
they appeared to be the same men.
The guards
walked into Camp 1 and soon emerged with another
prisoner. They departed Camp America, again in the
direction of Camp No. Twenty minutes later, the van
returned. Hickman, his curiosity piqued by the unusual
flurry of activity and guessing that the guards might
make another excursion, left Tower 1 and drove the
three quarters of a mile to ACP Roosevelt to see
exactly where the paddy wagon was headed. Shortly
thereafter, the van passed through the checkpoint for
the third time and then went another hundred yards,
whereupon it turned toward Camp No, eliminating any
question in Hickman’s mind about where it was going.
All three prisoners would have reached their
destination before 8 p.m.
Hickman says he
saw nothing more of note until about 11:30 p.m, when
he had returned to his preferred vantage at Tower 1.
As he watched, the paddy wagon returned to Camp Delta.
This time, however, the Navy guards did not get out of
the van to enter Camp 1. Instead, they backed the
vehicle up to the entrance of the medical clinic, as
if to unload something.
At approximately
11:45 p.m.—nearly an hour
before the NCIS claims the first body was
discovered—Army Specialist Christopher Penvose,
preparing for a midnight shift in Tower 1, was
approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told me that
the NCO—who, following standard operating procedures,
wore no name tag—appeared to be extremely agitated. He
instructed Penvose to go immediately to the Camp Delta
chow hall, identify a female senior petty officer who
would be dining there, and relay to her a specific
code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The
officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out
of the chow hall.
Another thirty
minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and Penvose both
recall, Camp Delta suddenly “lit up”—stadium-style
flood lights were turned on, and the camp became the
scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in
and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic,
which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn
the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught
medical corpsman what had happened. She said three
dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic.
Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because
they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one
of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke
to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result
of having rags stuffed down their throats.
Hickman was
concerned that such a serious incident could have
occurred in Camp 1 on his watch. He asked his tower
guards what they had seen. Penvose, from his position
at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway
between Camp 1 and the medical clinic—the path by
which any prisoners who died at Camp 1 would be
delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and
later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being
moved from Camp 1 to the clinic. In Tower 4 (it should
be noted that Army and Navy guard-tower designations
differ), another Army specialist, David Caroll, was
forty-five yards from Alpha Block, the cell block
within Camp 1 that had housed the three dead men. He
also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that
connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He
likewise reported to Hickman, and confirmed to me,
that he had seen no prisoners transferred to the
clinic that night, dead or alive.
4. “He
Could Not Cry out”
The fate of a
fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian
named Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the
three prisoners who died on June 9. Aamer is married
to a British woman and was in the process of becoming
a British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad,
Afghanistan, in 2001. United States authorities insist
that he carried a gun and served Osama bin Laden as an
interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer’s
fluency in English soon allowed him to play an
important role in camp politics. According to both
Aamer’s attorney and press accounts furnished by Army
Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander,
Aamer cooperated closely with Bumgarner in efforts to
bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end. He persuaded
several prisoners to break their strike for a while,
but the settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer
was sent to solitary confinement. Then, on the night
the prisoners from Alpha Block died, Aamer says he
himself was the victim of an act of striking
brutality.
He described the
events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson,
who was permitted to speak to him several weeks later.
Katznelson recorded every detail of Aamer’s account
and filed an affidavit with the federal district court
in Washington, setting it out:
On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer]
was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven
naval military police participated in his beating.
Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina
scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was
strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head,
arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr.
Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs
pressed on pressure points all over his body: his
temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow
beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his
nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it
would break. They pinched his thighs and feet
constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes
open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on
end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers
until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off
his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not
cry out.
The treatment
Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces
excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks.
Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and
a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is
alarming. This is the same technique that appears to
have been used on the three deceased prisoners.
The United
Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of
British subjects and persons of interest. Every
individual requested by the British has been turned
over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying
this request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated
“security” concerns. There is no suggestion that the
Americans intend to charge him before a military
commission, or in a federal criminal court, and,
indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him
to any crime. American authorities may be concerned
that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence
against them in criminal investigations. This evidence
would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006, and
during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram
Airfield, where he was subjected to a procedure in
which his head was smashed repeatedly against a wall.
This torture technique, called “walling” in CIA
documents, was expressly approved at a later date by
the Department of Justice.
5.
“You All Know”
By dawn, the
news had circulated through Camp America that three
prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags.
Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting of the guards, and
at 7:00 a.m. at least fifty
soldiers and sailors gathered at Camp America’s
open-air theater.
Bumgarner was
known as an eccentric commander. Hickman marveled, for
instance, at the colonel’s insistence that his staff
line up and salute him, to music selections that
included Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the reggae hit
“Bad Boys,” as he entered the command center. This
morning, however, Hickman thought Bumgarner seemed
unusually nervous and clipped.
According to
independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the
speech, Bumgarner told his audience that “you all
know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1
committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags,
causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to
no one—even servicemen who had not worked the night
before had heard about the rags. But then Bumgarner
told those assembled that the media would report
something different. It would report that the three
prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves
in their cells. It was important, he said, that
servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any
way undermined the official report. He reminded the
soldiers and sailors that their phone and email
communications were being monitored. The meeting
lasted no more than twenty minutes. (Bumgarner has not
responded to requests for comment.)
That evening,
Bumgarner’s boss, Admiral Harris, read a statement to
reporters:
An alert,
professional guard noticed something out of the
ordinary in the cell of one of the detainees. The
guard’s response was swift and professional to
secure the area and check on the status of the
detainee. When it was apparent that the detainee had
hung himself, the guard force and medical teams
reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee’s
life. The detainee was unresponsive and not
breathing. [The] guard force began to check on the
health and welfare of other detainees. Two detainees
in their cells had also hung themselves.
After praising
the guards and the medics, Harris—in a notable
departure from traditional military decorum—launched
his attack on the men who had died on his watch. “They
have no regard for human life,” Harris said, “neither
ours nor their own.” A Pentagon press release issued
soon after described the dead men, who had been
accused of no crime, as Al Qaeda or Taliban
operatives. Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the
Pentagon’s chief press officer, went still further,
telling the Guardian’s David Rose, “These guys
were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku
Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.” The
Pentagon was not the only U.S. government agency to
participate in the assault. Colleen Graffy, a deputy
assistant secretary of state, told the BBC that
“taking their own lives was not necessary, but it
certainly is a good P.R. move.”
The same day the
three prisoners died, Fox News commentator Bill
O’Reilly completed a reporting trip to the naval base,
where, according to his account on The O’Reilly
Factor, the Joint Army Navy Task Force “granted
the Factor near total access to the prison.”
Although the Pentagon began turning away reporters
after news of the deaths had emerged, two reporters
from the Charlotte Observer, Michael Gordon and
photographer Todd Sumlin, had arrived that morning to
work on a profile of Bumgarner, and the colonel
invited them to shadow him as he dealt with the
crisis. A Pentagon spokesman later told the
Observer it had been expecting a “puff piece,”
which is why, according to the Observer,
“Bumgarner and his superiors on the base” had given
them permission to remain.
Bumgarner
quickly returned to his theatrical ways. As Gordon
reported in the June 13, 2006, issue of the
Observer, the colonel seemed to enjoy putting on a
show. “Right now, we are at ground zero,” Bumgarner
told his officer staff during a June 12 meeting.
Referring to the naval base’s prisoners, he said,
“There is not a trustworthy son of a bitch in the
entire bunch.” In the same article, Gordon also noted
what he had learned about the deaths. The suicides had
occurred “in three cells on the same block,” he
reported. The prisoners had “hanged themselves with
strips of knotted cloth taken from clothing and
sheets,” after shaping their pillows and blankets to
look like sleeping bodies. “And Bumgarner said,”
Gordon reported, “each had a ball of cloth in their
mouth either for choking or muffling their voices.”
Something about
Bumgarner’s Observer interview seemed to have
set off an alarm far up the chain of command. No
sooner was Gordon’s story in print than Bumgarner was
called to Admiral Harris’s office. As Bumgarner would
tell Gordon in a follow-up profile three months later,
Harris was holding up a copy of the Observer:
“This,” said the admiral to Bumgarner, “could get me
relieved.” (Harris did not respond to requests for
comment.) That same day, an investigation was launched
to determine whether classified information had been
leaked from Guantánamo. Bumgarner was suspended.
Less than a week
after the appearance of the Observer stories,
Davila and Hickman each heard separately from friends
in the Navy and in the military police that FBI agents
had raided the colonel’s quarters. The MPs understood
from their FBI contacts that there was concern over
the possibility that Bumgarner had taken home some
classified materials and was planning to share them
with the media or to use them in writing a book.
On June 27, two
weeks later, Gordon’s Observer colleague Scott
Dodd reported: “A brigadier general determined that
‘unclassified sensitive information’ was revealed to
the public in the days after the June 10 suicides.”
Harris, according to the article, had already ordered
“appropriate administrative action.” Bumgarner soon
left Guantánamo for a new post in Missouri. He now
serves as an ROTC instructor at Virginia Tech in
Blacksburg.
Bumgarner’s
comments appear to be at odds with the official
Pentagon narrative on only one point: that the deaths
had involved cloth being stuffed into the prisoners’
mouths. The involvement of the FBI suggested that more
was at issue.
6. “An
Unmistakable Message”
On June 10, NCIS
investigators began interviewing the Navy guards in
charge of Alpha Block, but after the Pentagon
committed itself to the suicide narrative, they appear
to have stopped. On June 14, the interviews resumed,
and the NCIS informed at least six Navy guards that
they were suspected of making false statements or
failing to obey direct orders. No disciplinary action
ever followed.
The
investigators conducted interviews with guards,
medics, prisoners, and officers. As the Seton Hall
researchers note, however, nothing in the NCIS report
suggests that the investigators secured or reviewed
the duty roster, the prisoner-transfer book, the
pass-on book, the records of phone and radio
communications, or footage from the camera that
continuously monitored activity in the hallways, all
of which could have helped them authoritatively
reconstruct the events of that evening.
The NCIS did,
however, move swiftly to seize every piece of paper
possessed by every single prisoner in Camp America,
some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged
attorney-client correspondence. Several weeks later,
authorities sought an after-the-fact justification.
The Justice Department—bolstered by sworn statements
from Admiral Harris and from Carol Kisthardt, the
special agent in charge of the NCIS
investigation—claimed in a U.S. district court that
the seizure was appropriate because there had been a
conspiracy among the prisoners to commit suicide.
Justice further claimed that investigators had found
suicide notes and argued that the attorney-client
materials were being used to pass communications among
the prisoners.
David Remes, a
lawyer who opposed the Justice Department’s efforts,
explained the practical effect of the government’s
maneuvers. The seizure, he said, “sent an unmistakable
message to the prisoners that they could not expect
their communications with their lawyers to remain
confidential. The Justice Department defended the
massive breach of the attorney-client privilege on the
account of the deaths on June 9 and the asserted need
to investigate them.”
If the
“suicides” were a form of warfare between the
prisoners and the Bush Administration, as Admiral
Harris charged, it was the latter that quickly turned
the war to its advantage.
7.
“Yasser Couldn’t Even Make a Sandwich!”
When I asked
Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his
son, he was direct. “They snatched my
seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment,” he said.
“They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for
five years. They tortured him. Then they killed him
and returned him to me in a box, cut up.”
Al-Zahrani was a
brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed
the Pentagon’s claims, as well as the investigation
that supported them. Yasser, he said, was a young man
who loved to play soccer and didn’t care for politics.
The Pentagon claimed that Yasser’s frontline battle
experience came from his having been a cook in a
Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that this was
preposterous: “A cook? Yasser couldn’t even make a
sandwich!”
“Yasser wasn’t
guilty of anything.” Al-Zahrani said. “He knew that.
He firmly believed he would be heading home soon. Why
would he commit suicide?” The evidence supports this
argument. Hyperbolic U.S. government statements at the
time of Yasser Al-Zahrani’s death masked the fact that
his case had been reviewed and that he was, in fact,
on a list of prisoners to be sent home. I had shown
Al-Zahrani the letter that the government says was
Yasser’s suicide note and asked him whether he
recognized his son’s handwriting. He had never seen
the note before, he answered, and no U.S. official had
ever asked him about it. After studying the note
carefully, he said, “This is a forgery.”
Also returned to
Saudi Arabia was the body of Mani Al-Utaybi. Orphaned
in youth, Mani grew up in his uncle’s home in the
small town of Dawadmi. I spoke to one of the many
cousins who shared that home, Faris Al-Utaybi. Mani,
said Faris, had gone to Baluchistan—a rural, tribal
area that straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—to
do humanitarian work, and someone there had sold him
to the Americans for $5,000. He said that Mani was a
peaceful man who would harm no one. Indeed, U.S.
authorities had decided to release Al-Utaybi and
return him to Saudi Arabia. When he died, he was just
a few weeks shy of his transfer.
Salah Al-Salami
was seized in March 2002, when Pakistani authorities
raided a residence in Karachi believed to have been
used as a safe house by Abu Zubaydah and took into
custody all who were living there at the time. A
Yemeni, Al-Salami had quit his job and moved to
Pakistan with only $400 in his pocket. The U.S.
suspicions against him rested almost entirely on the
fact that he had taken lodgings, with other students,
in a boarding house that terrorists might at one point
have used. There was no direct evidence linking him
either to Al Qaeda or to the Taliban. On August 22,
2008, the Washington Post quoted from a previously
secret review of his case: “There is no credible
information to suggest [Al-Salami] received terrorist
related training or is a member of the Al Qaeda
network.” All that stood in the way of Al-Salami’s
release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic
relations between the United States and Yemen.
8.
“The Removal of the Neck Organs”
Military
pathologists connected with the Armed Forces Institute
of Pathology arranged immediate autopsies of the three
dead prisoners, without securing the permission of the
men’s families. The identities and findings of the
pathologists remain shrouded in extraordinary secrecy,
but the timing of the autopsies suggests that medical
personnel stationed at Guantánamo may have undertaken
the procedure without waiting for the arrival of an
experienced medical examiner from the United States.
Each of the heavily redacted autopsy reports states
unequivocally that “the manner of death is suicide”
and, more specifically, that the prisoner died of
“hanging.” Each of the reports describes ligatures
that were found wrapped around the prisoner’s neck, as
well as circumferential dried abrasion furrows
imprinted with the very fine weave pattern of the
ligature fabric and forming an inverted “V” on the
back of the head. This condition, the anonymous
pathologists state, is consistent with that of a
hanging victim.
The pathologists
place the time of death “at least a couple of hours”
before the bodies were discovered, which would be
sometime before 10:30 p.m. on
June 9. Additionally, the autopsy of Al-Salami states
that his hyoid bone was broken, a phenomenon usually
associated with manual strangulation, not hanging.
The report
asserts that the hyoid was broken “during the removal
of the neck organs.” An odd admission, given that
these are the very body parts—the larynx, the hyoid
bone, and the thyroid cartilage—that would have been
essential to determining whether death occurred from
hanging, from strangulation, or from choking. These
parts remained missing when the men’s families finally
received their bodies.
All the families
requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners
were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based
in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected
by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland.
Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure
that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy:
the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed
Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing
body parts and more information about the previous
autopsies. The institute did not respond to their
requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a
series of calls I placed requesting information and
comment.)
When Al-Zahrani
viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a
homicide. “There was a major blow to the head on the
right side,” he said. “There was evidence of torture
on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand.
There were needle marks on his right arm and on his
left arm.” None of these details are noted in the U.S.
autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement professional,”
Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when
examining a body.”
Mangin, for his
part, expressed particular concern about Al-Salami’s
mouth and throat, where he saw “a blunt trauma carried
out against the oral region.” The U.S. autopsy report
mentions an effort at resuscitation, but this, in
Mangin’s view, did not explain the severity of the
injuries. He also noted that some of the marks on the
neck were not those he would normally associate with
hanging.
9. “I
Know Some Things You Don’t”
Sergeant Joe
Hickman’s tour of duty, which ended in March 2007, was
distinguished: he was selected as Guantánamo’s “NCO of
the Quarter” and was given a commendation medal. When
he returned to the United States, he was promoted to
staff sergeant and worked in Maryland as an Army
recruiter before settling eventually in Wisconsin. But
he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo.
When Barack Obama became president, Hickman decided to
act. “I thought that with a new administration and new
ideas I could actually come forward, ” he said. “It
was haunting me.”
Hickman had seen
a 2006 report from Seton Hall University Law School
dealing with the deaths of the three prisoners, and he
followed their subsequent work. After Obama was
inaugurated in January 2009, he called Mark Denbeaux,
the professor who had led the Seton Hall team. “I
learned something from your report,” he said, “but I
know some things you don’t.”
Within two days,
Hickman was in Newark, meeting with Denbeaux. Also at
the meeting was Denbeaux’s son and sometime co-editor
Josh, a private attorney. Josh Denbeaux agreed to
represent Hickman, who was concerned that he could go
to prison if he disobeyed Colonel Bumgarner’s order
not to speak out, even if that order was itself
illegal. Hickman did not want to speak to the press.
On the other hand, he felt that “silence was just
wrong.”
The two lawyers
quickly made arrangements for Hickman to speak instead
with authorities in Washington, D.C. On February 2,
they had meetings on Capitol Hill and with the
Department of Justice. The meeting with Justice was an
odd one. The father-and-son legal team were met by
Rita Glavin, the acting head of the Justice
Department’s Criminal Division; John Morton, who was
soon to become an assistant secretary at the
Department of Homeland Security; and Steven Fagell,
counselor to the head of the Criminal Division. Fagell
had been, along with the new attorney general, Eric
Holder, a partner at the elite Washington law firm of
Covington & Burling, and was widely viewed as
“Holder’s eyes” in the Criminal Division.
For more than an
hour, the two lawyers described what Hickman had seen:
the existence of Camp No, the transportation of the
three prisoners, the van’s arrival at the medical
clinic, the lack of evidence that any bodies had ever
been removed from Alpha Block, and so on. The
officials listened intently and asked many questions.
The Denbeauxs said they could provide a list of
witnesses who would corroborate every aspect of their
account. At the end of the meeting, Mark Denbeaux
recalled, the officials specifically thanked the
lawyers for not speaking to reporters first and for
“doing it the right way.”
Two days later,
another Justice Department official, Teresa McHenry,
head of the Criminal Division’s Domestic Security
Section, called Mark Denbeaux and said that she was
heading up an investigation and wanted to meet
directly with his client. She went to New Jersey to do
so. Hickman then reviewed the basic facts and
furnished McHenry with the promised list of
corroborating witnesses and details on how they could
be contacted.
The Denbeauxs
did not hear from anyone at the Justice Department for
at least two months. Then, in April, an FBI agent
called to say she did not have the list of contacts.
She asked if this document could be provided again. It
was. Shortly thereafter, Fagell and two FBI agents
interviewed Davila, who had left the Army, in
Columbia, South Carolina. Fagell asked Davila if he
was prepared to travel to Guantánamo to identify the
locations of various sites. He said he was. “It seemed
like they were interested,” Davila told me. “Then I
never heard from them again.”
Several more
months passed, and Hickman and his lawyers became
increasingly concerned that nothing was going to
happen. On October 27, 2009, they resumed dealings
with Congress that they had initiated on February 2
and then broken off at the Justice Department’s
request; they were also in contact with ABC News. Two
days later, Teresa McHenry called Mark Denbeaux and
asked whether he had gone to Congress and ABC News
about the matter. “I said that I had,” Denbeaux told
me. He asked her, “Was there anything wrong with
that?” McHenry then suggested that the investigation
was finished. Denbeaux reminded her that she had yet
to interview some of the corroborating witnesses.
“There are a few small things to do,” Denbeaux says
McHenry answered, “then it will be finished.”
Specialist
Christopher Penvose told me that on October 30, the
day following the conversation between Mark Denbeaux
and Teresa McHenry, McHenry showed up at Penvose’s
home in south Baltimore with some FBI agents. She had
a “few questions,” she told him. Investigators working
with her soon contacted two other witnesses.
On November 2,
2009, McHenry called Mark Denbeaux to tell him that
the Justice Department’s investigation was being
closed. “It was a strange conversation,” Denbeaux
recalled. McHenry explained that “the gist of Sergeant
Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.” But
when Denbeaux asked what that “gist” actually was,
McHenry declined to say. She just reiterated that
Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported.
Denbeaux asked what conclusions exactly were
unsupported. McHenry refused to say.
10.
“They Accomplished Nothing”
One of the most
intriguing aspects of this case concerns the use of
Camp No. Under George W. Bush, the CIA created an
archipelago of secret detention centers that spanned
the globe, and authorities at these sites deployed an
array of Justice Department–sanctioned torture
techniques—including waterboarding, which often
entails inserting cloth into the subject’s mouth—on
prisoners they deemed to be involved in terrorism. The
presence of a black site at Guantánamo has long been a
subject of speculation among lawyers and human-rights
activists, and the experience of Sergeant Hickman and
other Guantánamo guards compels us to ask whether the
three prisoners who died on June 9 were being
interrogated by the CIA, and whether their deaths
resulted from the grueling techniques the Justice
Department had approved for the agency’s use—or from
other tortures lacking that sanction.
Complicating
these questions is the fact that Camp No might have
been controlled by another authority, the Joint
Special Operations Command, which Bush’s defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had hoped to transform
into a Pentagon version of the CIA. Under Rumsfeld’s
direction, JSOC began to take on many tasks
traditionally handled by the CIA, including the
housing and interrogation of prisoners at black sites
around the world. The Pentagon recently acknowledged
the existence of one such JSOC black site, located at
Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and other suspected
sites, such as Camp Nama in Baghdad, have been
carefully documented by human-rights researchers.
In a Senate
Armed Services Committee report on torture released
last year, the sections about Guantánamo were
significantly redacted. The position and circumstances
of these deletions point to a significant JSOC
interrogation program at the base. (It should be noted
that Obama’s order last year to close other secret
detention camps was narrowly worded to apply only to
the CIA.)
Regardless of
whether Camp No belonged to the CIA or JSOC, the
Justice Department has plenty of its own secrets to
protect. The department would seem to have been
involved in the cover-up from the first days, when FBI
agents stormed Colonel Bumgarner’s quarters. This was
unusual for two reasons. When Pentagon officials
engage in a leak investigation, they generally use
military investigators. They rarely turn to the FBI,
because they cannot control the actions of a civilian
agency. Moreover, when the FBI does open an
investigation, it nearly always does so with great
discretion. The Bumgarner investigation was widely
telegraphed, though, and seemed intended to send a
message to the military personnel at Camp Delta: Talk
about what happened at your own risk. All of which
suggests it was not the Pentagon so much as the White
House that hoped to suppress the truth.
In the weeks
following the 2006 deaths, the Justice Department
decided to use the suicide narrative as leverage
against the Guantánamo prisoners and their troublesome
lawyers, who were pressing the government to justify
its long-term imprisonment of their clients. After the
NCIS seized thousands of pages of privileged
communications, the Justice Department went to court
to defend the action. It argued that such steps were
warranted by the extraordinary facts surrounding the
June 9 “suicides.” U.S. District Court Judge James
Robertson gave the Justice Department a sympathetic
hearing, and he ruled in its favor, but he also noted
a curious aspect of the government’s presentation: its
“citations supporting the fact of the suicides” were
all drawn from media accounts. Why had the Justice
Department lawyers who argued the case gone to such
lengths to avoid making any statement under oath about
the suicides? Did they do so in order to deceive the
court? If so, they could face disciplinary proceedings
or disbarment.
The Justice
Department also faces questions about its larger role
in creating the circumstances that lead to the use of
so-called enhanced interrogation and restraint
techniques at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In 2006, the
use of a gagging restraint had already been connected
to the death on January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner,
Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in the custody of the
Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men
who died at Guantánamo showed signs of torture,
including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant
bruising. The removal of their throats made it
difficult to determine whether they were already dead
when their bodies were suspended by a noose. The
Justice Department itself had been deeply involved in
the process of approving and setting the conditions
for the use of torture techniques, issuing a long
series of memoranda that CIA agents and others could
use to defend themselves against any subsequent
criminal prosecution.
Teresa McHenry,
the investigator charged with accounting for the
deaths of the three men at Guantánamo, has firsthand
knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing
such techniques, having served at the Justice
Department under Bush and having participated in the
preparation of at least one of those memos. As a
former war-crimes prosecutor, McHenry knows full well
that government officials who attempt to cover up
crimes perpetrated against prisoners in wartime face
prosecution under the doctrine of command
responsibility. (McHenry declined to clarify the role
she played in drafting the memos.)
As retired Rear
Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general
of the Navy, told me, “Filing false reports and making
false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide
occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt
to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability.
They may even be viewed as accessories after the fact
in the original crime.” With command authority comes
command responsibility, he said. “If the heart of the
military is obeying orders down the chain of command,
then its soul is accountability up the chain. You
can’t demand the former without the latter.”
The Justice
Department thus faced a dilemma; it could do the
politically convenient thing, which was to find no
justification for a thorough investigation, leave the
NCIS conclusions in place, and hope that the public
and the news media would obey the Obama
Administration’s dictum to “look forward, not
backward”; or it could pursue a course of action that
would implicate the Bush Justice Department in a
cover-up of possible homicides.
Nearly 200 men
remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six
months after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a
thirty-one-year-old Yemeni named Muhammed Abdallah
Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact
circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths
of the three men from Alpha Block, remain uncertain.
Those charged with accounting for what happened—the
prison command, the civilian and military
investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and
ultimately the attorney general himself—all face a
choice between the rule of law and the expedience of
political silence. Thus far, their choice has been
unanimous.
Not everyone who
is involved in this matter views it from a political
perspective, of course. General Al-Zahrani grieves for
his son, but at the end of a lengthy interview he
paused and his thoughts turned elsewhere. “The truth
is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form
of torture on my son and on many others as well. What
was the result? What facts did they find? They found
nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished
nothing.”
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