‘DON’T LEAVE UNTIL HE BLEEDS’On Joshua Colangelo-Bryan’s ‘Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantánamo Bay’
One of the initial proposed sites for the prison for alleged Al Qaeda terrorists, I was told more than two decades ago by a senior Army general, as the United States went to war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was a deserted island in the South Pacific that had been used after World War II for testing nuclear weapons. But the islands there were still too hot—too radioactive—and so the prison was set up at a once obscure US Navy base on the eastern tip of Cuba known as Guantánamo Bay. The United States, initially shocked and enraged by the murder unleashed by Al Qaeda on 9/11, looked away as hundreds of suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere were sent to a hastily assembled prisoner-of-war camp with nothing close to due process. It was later reported that the US military had paid, sometimes handsomely, for many of the alleged Al Qaeda members who ended up at the prison and were treated brutally. President Barack Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to shut down Gitmo, as the prison was known—there were 242 detainees still there—and issued an executive order to do so on his third day in office. The Congressional and public opposition was intense, and Obama retreated, as the military would say, in the face of fire. It wouldn’t be his only retreat. Soon enough the abuses at Gitmo were no secret. I was told early on by a knowledgeable American official that the promised rest and relaxation for some prisoners amounted in some cases to being tied in a straitjacket and flung into a secure outside area for an hour spent in the blistering tropical heat of midday. One group that continues to monitor the prison is the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, a nonprofit that is renowned for its continued efforts to protect the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its most recent summary of the situation in the prison doesn’t flatter either Democrats or Republicans. In 2023, the CCR reported:
A forgotten prison in a forgotten place is the subject of Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantánamo Bay, a new book by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a former corporate lawyer who is now special counsel at Human Rights First in New York. It is the story of a pro bono client from Bahrain, given the name of Jaber for this book, who was seized early in the US war against Al Qaeda and called by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld one of “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, similarly described the captives as being willing to chew through hydraulic cables to bring down airplanes. ‘‘I pictured myself,” Colangelo-Bryan writes, “sitting alone with a big, bearded, menacing Arab who would try to reach across the table for my throat.” Instead, Jaber, surrounded by guards, “when he saw me, broke into a warm smile” and “struggled to get halfway to his feet.” One of his legs was shackled to the floor. “As I walked toward him, I sized him up, a habit I had developed as a kid on New York subways and school playgrounds. I guessed he was about five foot six and 140 pounds—not exactly a gladiator’s build. I started to feel a little embarrassed for worrying about meeting a vicious trained killer.” At the end of that first meeting, Colangelo-Bryan was astonished to hear Jaber conclude his goodbye by saying, “See you later, alligator.” “It was as if I had been struck dumb,” Colangelo-Bryan writes. “I knew I was supposed to say something in response, but hearing a ‘vicious killer’ at Guantánamo Bay say ‘See you later, alligator’ proved too much.” In subsequent meetings, Jaber would describe the abuse and torture he had gone through. Colangelo-Bryan would eventually be allowed to study the specific charges the Army lawyers had filed against his client. In each case, the allegations were flimsy, poorly drawn, and easily refuted. There turned out to be, in Jaber’s telling, no differentiation between those who had been captured in battle and those who had been paid for and flown to the prison at Guantánamo. The original detention facility there, constructed in a few weeks, was known as Camp X-Ray. It was a hell hole: a series of open cages with rats, snakes, and scorpions, but no toilet facilities. Jaber tried to commit suicide within months by breaking off a metal piece in his cell and swallowing it. He survived, and after a few days was returned to his cage, which had been stripped of his few belongings. A complaint was made to a staff sergeant and the camp’s Immediate Response Force was called in. In Jaber’s telling to Colangelo-Bryan, “A very big guard wearing all his gear ran in. He jumped in the air and landed on my back. He held my neck, and two others held my legs. A female guard hit my head on the floor repeatedly. The staff sergeant said, ‘Don’t leave until he bleeds.’ The guard kept choking me and I thought I was going to die. Blood gushed out of my nose and I lost consciousness. Other detainees told me later that the female guard held my face up for the camera.” Many meetings later a teary and exhausted Jaber would tell his increasingly trusted New York lawyer that he had been stripped and interrogated in Afghanistan before being sent to Cuba. Soldiers there had even injected gasoline into his rectum. Colangelo-Bryan became convinced that the American military command had no evidence linking the increasingly depressed Jaber to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, and he decided, after consulting with colleagues, that outside pressure from the media and senior government officials in Bahrain, where Jaber’s wife and family were living, was needed. Jaber was losing hope and made further suicide attempts. The Army command at Guantánamo wasn’t interested in freeing him, but very interested in keeping him alive. After yet another failed suicide attempt, Jaber told his lawyer, he’d been kept tied to a hospital bed for two months. When Colangelo-Bryan finally was given access to the government’s files on Jaber, he found, no direct evidence of his client’s involvement with bin Laden or 9/11: “No fingerprints, no DNA samples, no voice print analyses, no photographs, no intercepts of communications—just nothing that substantiated the government’s case.” At this bleak moment, the pressure from Bahrain, home of the headquarters of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, suddenly paid off. Jaber was released in July 2007 to the custody of Saudi Arabia and flown to his home in Bahrain. Colangelo-Bryan would go there to meet with Jaber, the father of two since his release from prison, and his extended family. “We had fought against a hugely powerful array of forces,” the lawyer wrote, referring to the Bush administration, Congress, the federal courts, and the majority of the American public, which “saw nothing wrong with indefinite detainment in Cuba even if it meant that some innocent people were locked up. And abused.” I got a similar message when I wrote Colangelo-Bryan a few days ago and asked about lessons learned. “The biggest lesson,” he responded, “which we clearly haven’t learned, is that when the government demagogues people and denies them process . . . there will be abuses that have tragic human costs and no arguable relation to national security. . . . Once more we have a government engaging in expensive performative theater that does nothing to make anyone safer.” Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |