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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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January 18th,
2010 - Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle |
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The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A
Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle By Scott Horton Harper’s Magazine January 18, 2010 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.” External link: http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368 |