hearing started badly. I was so nervous I even made the comedy-routine mistake during the swearing in of repeating “I,” then “State your name.” Everyone in the room was laughing. From then on, though, I just tried to listen to the allegations and debunk them, one by one. Because detainees weren’t allowed to attend tribunal sessions where the so-called secret evidence was presented—how something can be “secret” and “evident” at the same time I still don’t understand—it felt as though I was defending myself against an invisible army of attorneys. But a member of the tribunal had asked Amy to leave the room during the proceedings, which I took as permission not to follow her instructions, and soon I was just concentrating on presenting the facts of my life as clearly and plainly as I could, in my rather poor English.
The result of the CSRT hearing was no shock; just about everyone got a negative result. But I was emboldened. Defending myself hadn’t hurt me. It was clear that Amy had access to the transcript afterward, but she never scolded me. And more important, some of my guards openly supported me. One of my escort guards, a corporal everyone called “Marine,” was making fun of the allegations after the tribunal, and he and a colleague I knew as “Big G” told me I won the argument in the CSRT. I gained credibility among the guards as an innocent man. I was recovering my voice. I began to think again about my story reaching someone outside of Guantánamo.
That opportunity came thanks to the landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of the British citizen Shafiq Rasul, in which the court first ruled GTMO detainees can challenge their detention in habeas corpus proceedings in courts in the United States. Finally, we would be able to present our cases and be judged by Americans who were not in the military or intelligence services.
My first meeting with my attorneys was in mid-June 2005. I prepared for it by writing a summary for them of the full story of my detentions. One of the guards gave me a green spiral notebook that I used for that purpose, filling it with dates, names, and detailed notes about my life and five years’ worth of interrogations. I handed it to Nancy Hollander and Sylvia Royce at our meeting. I consider myself very lucky: detainees had no choice in who their lawyers would be, and for some it took years to build trust with their attorneys. But I could tell right away that my team would listen to me. They took the notebook with them and asked me to write more.
I began again, this time writing the full narrative. To ensure my manuscript would not be seized or destroyed, I wrote it in chunks, as a series of letters to my lawyers. This meant what I wrote became protected attorney-client material that my interrogators couldn’t read. I would finish a section, ask for an envelope, wrap the papers as tightly as I could and send them off. The letter would be delivered to a secure facility just outside Washington, D.C., where all GTMO’s protected attorney-client materials are held. I wrote day and night in the isolation hut that I shared with my guard team in Camp Echo, bombarding my lawyers with writing.
I knew my story, but I didn’t know all the words to express it. So I often sat with my guards, playing cards or drinking tea and writing at the same time. If I got stuck on a word or an expression, I’d simply ask them.
“How do you say in English that someone suddenly starts to cry loudly?”
“Burst into tears,” a guard who was a Navy petty officer told me.
“What do you call the person who speaks on the radio?” I asked. I was remembering the woman I heard on the radio when I was being transported from the Amman airport to the Jordanian intelligence prison. I could hear her sleepy voice through my earmuffs; she kept interrupting the wonderful music with comments about the day’s weather. When the Jordanian rendition team realized I could hear the radio, they jumped to turn it off and played a tape instead.
“Presenter?” one would say.
“I don’t know. When they play music?”
“DJ?” one would volunteer.
“What do you call the things they put on your ears?”
“Earmuffs?”
“When you cook, when you put something on your hands to protect them from the heat?”
“Mittens?”
“Oh, yeah!”
I wrote section after section, keeping track of page numbering so that my attorneys could assemble the whole manuscript in the secret facility. I had in my head everything I wanted to write: just the truth as I remembered it, without embellishing. I came to understand that you can convey everything in your head in any language, as long as you have the will and people around you who speak the language, and you are not afraid to ask questions or make mistakes. I wrote until I was finished, and on September 28, 2005, I simply wrote, “The End.”
When I began those pages, I thought I was writing for my lawyers, so they could know my story and defend me properly. But I soon saw I was writing for different readers, ones who could never set foot in Guantánamo. For way too many years, the U.S. government had shut me up and done the talking for both of us. It told the public false stories connecting me to terrorist plots, and it kept the public from hearing anything from me about my life and how I had been treated. Writing became my way of fighting the U.S. government’s narrative. I considered humanity my jury; I wanted to bring my case directly to the people and take my chances. I wasn’t sure if the pages I wrote and gave to my lawyers would ever become a book. But I believed in books, and in the people who read them; I always had, since I held my first book as a child. I thought of what it would mean if someone outside that prison was holding a book I had written.
Nine years would pass before that happened. But just writing those pages empowered me. Now when Amy encouraged me to report my mistreatment, I agreed. She notified her boss, a Marine lieutenant colonel named Forest. They sat with me and questioned me about my yearlong, secret “Special Projects” interrogation and told me they were filing formal reports. Late in 2005, when I appeared again before another board assigned to review our cases, I felt safe and confident enough to tell the board many of the things I had written in the manuscript and reported to Amy. It’s strange to me today to realize that in those days I may actually have been more interested in getting my story out than in getting out of GTMO. I told the board I had written a book about everything I was telling them, suggesting they should read it. They listened to me for hours, asking many questions. Only at the end of the session did I learn that the board had no power to decide my case. And still later, when my lawyers were allowed to get a transcript of this Administrative Review Board hearing, we discovered that much of what I had told them about the mistreatment was missing. Exactly when I started to describe the worst abuses, the government claimed, the recording equipment “malfunctioned.”
Any hope for justice from the GTMO system faded again, and I again doubted whether my story would ever get past the U.S. government censors. But my lawyers kept working. Because my manuscript had been sent confidentially to them, the power to clear it for public release rested with the so-called Privilege Team, a group of mostly retired intelligence officers and government employees who were granted access to view correspondence between lawyers and detainees. But the Privilege Team refused to clear the letters that made up the manuscript. Instead, it suggested that my lawyers send everything back to me in GTMO and have me try to send it to them through regular mail. I had learned from trying to send letters to my family that putting something in the mail was about as effective as throwing it away, or at least sealing it inside a time capsule. And we knew that, like those letters, anything I tried sending through regular mail would be open to the U.S. government to read and to use against me in any way it chose.
My lawyers filed secret motions in the court in Washington, D.C., to force the Privilege Team to clear the manuscript for release. Everything happened behind closed doors between my lawyers, the government’s representatives, and the judge.
