[Ppnews] The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

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The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By <http://www.harpers.org/subjects/ScottHorton>Scott Horton
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

This is the full text of an exclusive advance 
feature by Scott Horton that will appear in the 
March 2010 Harper’s Magazine. The issue will be 
available on newsstands the week of February 15.


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 
seriously­and may even have continued­a 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 
report­a reconstruction of the events­was 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 
in­indicating that the men had been dead for at 
least two hours­the 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 
report­a 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 jobs­prison 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 
soldiers­many of whom were required to patrol the 
outside perimeter of Camp America­had 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 particular­a 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 right­toward the 
other camps or toward one of the buildings where 
prisoners could meet with their lawyers­it 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 later­about the amount of time 
needed for the trip to Camp No and back­the 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 
discovered­Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, 
preparing for a midnight shift in Tower 1, was 
approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told me 
that the NCO­who, following standard operating 
procedures, wore no name tag­appeared 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 clinic­the 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 
one­even 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, 
Harris­in a notable departure from traditional 
military decorum­launched 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 Department­bolstered by sworn statements 
from Admiral Harris and from Carol Kisthardt, the 
special agent in charge of the NCIS 
investigation­claimed 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 Baluchistan­a rural, tribal area that 
straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan­to 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 
parts­the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid 
cartilage­that 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 
techniques­including waterboarding, which often 
entails inserting cloth into the subject’s 
mouth­on 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 use­or 
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 happened­the prison command, 
the civilian and military investigative agencies, 
the Justice Department, and ultimately the 
attorney general himself­all 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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