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</font><h1><font size=4><b>The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta
sergeant blows the whistle</b></font></h1><font size=3><i>By
<a href="http://www.harpers.org/subjects/ScottHorton">Scott
Horton</a><br>
</i>
<a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368" eudora="autourl">
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368<br><br>
</a>This is the full text of an exclusive advance feature by Scott Horton
that will appear in the March 2010 <i>Harper’s Magazine</i>. The issue
will be available on newsstands the week of February 15.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>Harper’s Magazine</i> 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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>2. “Camp No”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>3. “Lit up”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>4. “He Could Not Cry out”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<h3><b>5. “You All Know”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
That evening, Bumgarner’s boss, Admiral Harris, read a statement to
reporters:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>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</i>’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.”<br><br>
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</i>, the Joint Army Navy Task Force
“granted the Factor</i> 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</i>, 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</i>
it had been expecting a “puff piece,” which is why, according to the
Observer</i>, “Bumgarner and his superiors on the base” had given them
permission to remain.<br><br>
Bumgarner quickly returned to his theatrical ways. As Gordon reported in
the June 13, 2006, issue of the Observer</i>, 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.”<br><br>
Something about Bumgarner’s Observer</i> 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</i>: “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.<br><br>
Less than a week after the appearance of the Observer</i> 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.<br><br>
On June 27, two weeks later, Gordon’s Observer</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>6. “An Unmistakable Message”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>7. “Yasser Couldn’t Even Make a
Sandwich!”</b></h3><font size=3>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.”<br><br>
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!”<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>8. “The Removal of the Neck
Organs”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>9. “I Know Some Things You
Don’t”</b></h3><font size=3>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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>10. “They Accomplished Nothing”</b></h3><font size=3>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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