PHONE CALL FROM HELL
He’s tortured in his cell, punished for feeding kittens and banned from Raisin Bran for breakfast ...but reads Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and letters from a Pink Floyd star. The first riveting account from the Guantanamo Briton since THAT damning US repor
IT IS exactly 13 years since The Mail on Sunday drew the world’s attention to conditions at Guantanamo Bay by publishing a front-page photograph of shackled detainees in bright orange jumpsuits kneeling before American guards.
In all that time, one UK resident has languished in isolation at the infamous terror jail camp.
Shaker Aamer, from Battersea, South London, has been called the lost Briton of Guantanamo, though his guards refer to him more prosaically as Detainee 239.
While America’s Bill of Rights guarantees the ‘right to a speedy trial... and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation’, Mr Aamer, now 46, has never been brought before any court of law.
It was claimed that he fought with Al Qaeda against the US in Afghanistan. He has always denied this. In any case, the US has never tested the claim in court and, now, never will.
Barack Obama is committed to emptying the Cuban detention facility and many inmates have been freed in the past few months. Rumours abound that Mr Aamer, who was cleared for release in 2009, might soon be returned to Britain to be reunited with his wife and family. Yet for now his 13-year ordeal continues.
Today, in extraordinary testimony obtained by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Aamer gives his most detailed account yet of his life in captivity. In a phone call to his British lawyer, he delivered his response to last month’s devastating US Senate report on CIA torture – and revealed that one particularly brutal technique deployed by interrogation teams was common at Guantanamo.
His account begins with a description of an argument with his guards last Friday over what he should be allowed for breakfast...
I GET to argue with Colonel Heath [Camp Commander Colonel David Heath] and his lackeys over anything I like. This morning it was over a packet of cereal. They insisted on giving me low-calorie Rice Krispies rather than Raisin Bran.
You might think this was a foolish thing to argue about. You are right. I should not have to argue. They had the Raisin Bran right there and they could have just given it to me. It is a sign of how this place is that I had to argue for 40 minutes about it. But if a soldier did that he would lose his rank. At least I have the freedom to challenge every absurd violation of basic decency.
The guards are pretty stressed too nowadays. I tell them that my life is better than theirs and that much is true. I do not have to bow down to the Colonel and do the things that he orders me to do when he is being unjust. Yet they have to.
The guards are all scared. It is as if they are slaves. Now they have a dog called Titan who is their stress dog – they are meant to stroke him and feel better.
I recently read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres. I was touched by the gay soldier who takes the worst of the bullets and saves Corelli, and the woman who
cares for the baby that was not hers. I feel I wasted time reading some American authors. I think Europeans have a passion and a broader experience of life that translates into literature.
[Many books are banned at Guantanamo, among them George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and, bizarrely, the fairytale Jack And The Beanstalk. Magazines deemed acceptable include Yachting Monthly – but Runner’s World is forbidden.]
We are no longer allowed to get near to the cats who wander around near the exercise yard and we get punished if we feed them. I used to be able to stroke Sou-Sou, but it is harder now. But sometimes I see her tumbling around outside the wire and that allows me to escape in my mind for a few moments. The new rule is that we are not allowed pens. They told me that it was because it is dangerous, but that is not the case. After all, a pen is four inches long and made of flexiplastic. It’s hard to stab anyone
‘If a man leaves there is happiness – and despair’
with that and do much damage. Yet now they give us cheap Chinese plastic toothbrushes, which you really could file down to a shank if you had a mind to. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to, and anyway there are 20 soldiers for each prisoner, and they have M16
rifles, so a sharpened toothbrush would not be much of a threat.
I was very inspired to receive a letter from Roger Waters of Pink
Floyd recently. [Waters is one of the many celebrities who have campaigned for Mr Aamer’s release.]
He wrote about the Magna Carta and how King John got in trouble for locking people up who had not had a trial. Would someone mind telling President Obama about this? It was, after all, only 800 years ago this year that the point was recognised.
There is a sense that President Obama does want to empty the place, if only because it makes him look so weak to keep saying he will and never getting around to it.
But when each person leaves, there is a mixture of happiness for that man and, for some, despair at remaining here. In many ways the regime is worse than before. There are a number who are like zombies because they have been on hunger strike so long.
Ahmed Rabbani, from Pakistan, is only 6st 8lb. He has been on hunger strike for well over a year, and he is not even demanding they stop force feeding him, which would be his right. All he wants is to be force fed humanely, rather than the intentionally torturous way they do it here.
He has been vomiting for five or six hours, and he fainted next to his toilet. We told the guards but they did not do anything. After two hours, a guard came along and he had regained consciousness. The guard said: “I thought you were doing yoga.” Ahmed does do yoga, as do I, but that was pretty silly. We have a
relatively new colonel, Colonel Heath, and he seems intent on repeating all the mistakes of the past. The day after my lawyer last came to see me I was locked up in isolation for a month and a half for nothing, as usual.
I’m considered compliant at the moment: I’ve even had my orange uniform taken and am in brown to show I am not considered a “bad boy”. But they punish me all the time.
I was taken to Camp V Echo, which is the worst of the worst in this place. I asked why, and they said it was not discipline, but just one of Colonel Heath’s orders.
It’s not considered “isolation” of course, as they don’t have “isolation” in Guantanamo. Here, it’s called an SCO, which stands for Single Cell Operation. Colonel Heath has singled me out because he has four groups he wants to have buckle to his will.
One group (mine) is made up of “Bad Influences”. There are three of us and we are alone in the same cell block, but separated by many empty cells to try to stop us from
‘Since 9/11 the world has taken a wrong turn’
communicating at all. Then there are the “Risk” prisoners, who are oppositional and will disobey them at all costs. There are a group of “Co-operative Risk” prisoners, who co-operate with their orders, but are still considered a problem for control of others.
And finally there are the “Fighters” who fight the guards at every turn, refusing to obey any of the orders. It’s just like the old days.
Most people in Guantanamo, even of the 130 or so who are still here, were not involved in any terrorism. They were in Pakistan or Afghanistan trying to keep away from people like Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi or any number of despots in the Middle East and beyond.
If we are going to avoid the injustice of the past, then we need to know what happened. Everyone has the right to know what really happened. The idea of the torture report was interesting, though I don’t particularly care if I never get to read it. You may not have
heard about rectal rehydration, but we certainly had. I have lived that torture report every day for thousands of days. I used to ponder over how they [his
guards] could sit around at lunch and talk about what torture strategy they would use next. There were all the things that you would have read about. But there were also the silly things that they would do, because they were all amateurs who had no idea what they were doing.
There was one chap who would make me sit in a cold room for hours. He would come in and play chess with himself, refusing ever to say a word. Torture is ultimately a drug. You start taking it, then you lie to yourself about why you are taking it, and then you find you cannot stop taking it. The last thing you can ever do is admit to people around you that you are an addict.
[Despite rumours of his imminent release, Mr Aamer says he has not heard anything himself. In the meantime, he says he has requested a transfer to Camp Iguana, a small compound in the detention camp complex that originally held child detainees.]
Back some years ago when someone was going to be released, he was allowed to live there. Although you are locked up you can see the sea. I said that since I have long been cleared for release, I should at least not be treated like some criminal, and should be held somewhere that is not quite as bad until they let me go. But I have heard nothing as usual.
I have been thinking of what I would say to President Obama. I think it is this. The only thing a person can never have too much of is justice. We can certainly have too much hate. We can certainly have too much poverty. I think we can have too much wealth; even sometimes too much love, when someone is so jealous that he does something cruel because of his feelings.
I can guarantee you that we can have too much colour – I have had too much of the colour orange for these past few years. But we can never have too much justice.
Since 9/11 the world has taken a wrong turn, led by the US, which got angry. The US adopted the mentality of the righteous and decided that the way to deal with violence had to be more violence, combined with revenge.
In a way, what this is seeking to achieve is the first real World War – they even call it a Global War on Terrorism. The First World War was not a world war as such, more a European war. The same was mostly true about the Second World War, which did not really touch a lot of countries. But what they are trying to do now really would be world wide, which is a great shame.
When I finally get out of here, most of all I want to be with my family. But I also want to establish the King’s College Centre for Justice and Philanthropy, in London. Let me explain the name. In Islam, first you have the five pillars, which include praying five times a day, zakat
‘Torture’s a drug – and you can get addicted’
(charity) and so forth. Then you have the six pillars of faith.
But beyond that you have what is called Ihsan, which means literally ‘philanthropy’ but which means a belief in God as you see him and as he sees you all the time.
So, for example, if you are walking along and you see broken glass, you pick it up – not just because you worry that someone might tread on it, but because it is the right thing to do, and it will please God.
I have a big plan in my mind. I hope that I can bring it off. I would like to set up a bank for the college, where people can get loans without any interest to pay.
It would be recycled through the trust we would have in each student to pay the loan back, and through help from others who have graduated.
That way people can go to college without being forced to pay more and more when they graduate and it would free them up to pursue their dreams.
But it is dangerous, here in a prison cell, to think too much about the future.