500 Days (63 page)

And now he had dropped out of sight.

Climbing out of bed, Mazigh stepped into the living room and glanced at the phone. Maybe the line was disconnected—maybe that was why she hadn’t heard from Arar. She lifted the receiver and listened to the hum of the dial tone.

•  •  •  

“What do you think about Osama bin Laden?”

Arar stared at the FBI agent who had asked the question.
What in the world is he talking about?
Arar responded with angry words about the al-Qaeda leader.

One day had passed since Arar’s arrival in New York. His interrogation had resumed that morning at eight when two FBI agents took him out of his cell to another room. They wanted one more chance to interview him before he was sent back to Zurich.

Again, the questions came fast, not only about bin Laden, but also about
the Palestinians and Iraq. They asked for information about the mosques he attended, his bank accounts, and his e-mail addresses. They inspected his Palm-Pilot. But they still refused to tell him why he was being held.

The agents broke for lunch, although no one brought food for Arar. Instead, he was returned to his cell in shackles. He was famished—his last meal had been on the plane. When he asked to be fed, he was ignored.

•  •  •  

By five o’clock, the agents and investigators with the Joint Terrorism Task Force had finished with Arar. The interviews and searches turned up nothing. The information in the government computers was vague and unpersuasive. This was a waste of their time.

The message was passed to immigration officials: The counterterrorism agents had no interest in Arar as an investigative subject. As far as they were concerned, they were free to remove him from the country.

•  •  •  

An order came down that same afternoon from J. Scott Blackman, the INS eastern regional director.

Following instructions from Washington, Blackman declared that Arar was not to be sent to Zurich that day, as had been planned, and his original “withdrawal of application” was canceled. Instead, he said, Arar should be told that he could withdraw his application only if he agreed to be sent to Syria.

•  •  •  

Two INS agents met with Arar to present him with the new conditions. “We want you to voluntarily go back to Syria,” one of the men said.

Back to Syria?
He hadn’t lived there for eighteen years, since he was a teenager.

“No way,” Arar replied. “Send me to Canada, where I was going.”

The agent looked angry. “You are a special interest, okay?” he snapped.

Arar didn’t understand. A special interest to
whom
? A boss? Another country? It didn’t matter—he would not willingly go to Syria.

“Send me back to Switzerland or Tunisia,” he said.

That wasn’t an option. “If you don’t agree to return to Syria,” one agent said, “you will be charged as a terrorist.”

The agents left the room. At about eight that night, Arar was chained up again, placed in a van, and driven to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He was strip-searched and dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Maher Arar, Canadian entrepreneur, was now inmate number 61339053.

•  •  •  

Still no word from her husband. After more fitful sleep, Monia Mazigh decided to stop waiting and take some action.

She telephoned the Canadian embassy in Tunis and reached a woman named Thérèse Laatar. After answering a few initial questions about where she lived in Canada and where she was staying in Tunisia, Mazigh told her story.

“My husband, a Canadian citizen, has not contacted me since leaving Tunisia two days ago,” she said. “He was scheduled to arrive in Montreal, but didn’t.”

There was a long silence. Mazigh assumed that Laatar either was taking notes or didn’t understand the situation. When she spoke, her tone was almost dismissive. She would contact the Consular Section in Ottawa, she promised.

“I’ll call you back on Monday,” Laatar said. Three days later.

Not good enough. Mazigh placed another call, this time to the office of Michael Edelson, the lawyer Arar had consulted when Mounties had sought to interview him months before. She explained the situation again. Edelson promised to call the Crown Prosecutor’s Office to find out if they knew what had happened to her husband.

Mazigh hung up. Nothing she had tried was working.

•  •  •  

In Damascus on the evening of September 30, Abdullah Almalki was brought upstairs from his cell at Far’ Falastin prison. His tormentors were waiting.

The head of interrogation, George Salloum, handled the questioning. “I want you to list everyone you know by the name of Maher,” he said.

Almalki tossed out a few names, then mentioned Maher Arar. Salloum’s eyes lit up.

“That is the one!” he said.

They needed to hear what Almalki knew about Arar, Salloum said. Almalki was handed some paper and a pencil, and ordered to write it all down.

Salloum glared at him, the wisp of a smile on his face.

“Arar is detained now somewhere, and we are going to question him,” he said. “If his story is different than your story, I will torture you myself.”

•  •  •  

Joseph Witsch was troubled.

An instructor in the military’s SERE program, Witsch had been part of a team dispatched to Fort Bragg to conduct training sessions on aggressive tactics for questioning detainees—a task they weren’t qualified to carry out and that, in any case, was worse than pointless.

SERE training was about learning to resist harsh tactics, not about effective interrogation. Sure, harsh tactics might force detainees to talk—but they couldn’t make them tell the truth. Using these methods in Guantanamo was going to produce information that was unreliable and misleading, Witsch thought. He wrote a report to Chris Wirts, senior civilian in the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, urging caution.

On October 1, he sent a more strongly worded follow-up memo to Wirts. The handling of the detainees, he wrote, “is a screwed up mess and everyone is scrambling to unscrew the mess.”

The only way they could make a contribution, Witsch wrote, would be to consult with high-level officials in the government, and not spend time with lower-level personnel who would then have to teach their own bosses how to properly use the information about SERE.

The bottom line—everyone involved in SERE needed to get away from training Guantanamo interrogators. Eventually, the whole effort was going to blow up.

“We don’t have an established track record in this type of activity and we would present an easy target for someone to point at as the problem,” Witsch wrote. “The stakes are much higher for this than what you and I have done in any activity before.”

•  •  •  

Prison guards at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Brooklyn accompanied Maher Arar to a telephone that same afternoon. He had been held for five days and had not been allowed to contact anyone; he was certain that his family was in near hysterics. He needed to calm them—and get their help.

A guard unchained Arar.

“You have two minutes,” the guard said.

Two minutes.
Not enough time to reach his wife in Tunis. Or a lawyer. Or anyone in the Canadian government. The best choice was his mother-in-law in Canada.

The call connected and she answered. Arar quickly told her that he was being held in a Brooklyn prison and gave her a short summary of what had happened.

“I’m not being treated well,” he said. “And I’m scared, because they’re talking about sending me to Syria. I need a lawyer. Somebody needs to help me.”

The guard interrupted. “Time’s up.”

•  •  •  

Arar’s mother-in-law immediately telephoned her daughter in Tunis. “Maher just called,” she said. “He’s being held in the United States.”

The words echoed with malevolent force through Mazigh’s head. “What did he say?” she asked.

“He wants a lawyer. He’s afraid he’ll be sent back to Syria. That’s all he told me.”

“Didn’t he tell you why he’s in prison, what he’s charged with?” Mazigh asked.

A sigh. “No. No, he hung up right after that.”

•  •  •  

The next morning in London, an official with Britain’s diplomatic service finished editing a travel advisory warning of a heightened danger in Indonesia. The information had been received days before from M15, but the e-mail hadn’t been ready to send until now.

Much of the advisory was filled with routine language that had appeared in official warnings for months. No key points were highlighted; the text was paragraph after paragraph of mind-numbing bureaucratese. The new information was slipped in almost haphazardly, worded in the same cumbersome language.

In the run up to the fasting month which starts around 5 November, activists are more likely to show their disapproval of many of the bars and nightclubs which are popular with Indonesians and foreigners, especially on Friday nights. British citizens should avoid these establishments.

Terrorists
had become
activists. Attack
had become the more delicate
show their disapproval. Ramadan
had become
the fasting month.
And neither
Islamic
nor
Muslim
—words that would have leaped out at any reader who waded through the familiar verbiage—appeared at all. Someone had couched the alert in terms so benign that they seemed almost designed
not
to sound an alarm.

•  •  •  

The next afternoon at 1:40, military and intelligence officials met at Guantanamo to again discuss how to break detainees during interrogations. They began with a review of tactics used on soldiers in the SERE program.

“Harsh techniques used on our service members have worked and will work on some detainees,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jerald Phifer, the director of intelligence at Guantanamo. “What about those?”

“Force is risky,” replied Major John Leso, an army psychologist.

Just being in this room, having this conversation, filled Leso with anguish. Young, slender, and earnest, he had been delighted when he was deployed to Guantanamo, assuming that he would be providing counseling to soldiers. But after he arrived, Leso was ordered to teach interrogators psychological tactics that might force detainees to talk. The assignment threw him—Leso knew nothing about interrogations. Since then, he had witnessed harsh questioning—involving sexual humiliation, stress positions, and the use of dogs—and the experience had left him distressed. Now he was sitting at a table, listening as plans were hatched for even more abusive methods. His dedication to helping people had been twisted into an ugly quest to hurt them.

Leso stayed mostly silent as the group reveled over the success of aggressive interrogation in breaking the resistance of al-Qahtani, the suspected twentieth hijacker. Their self-congratulations were misplaced—al-Qahtani had said nothing that he hadn’t already told the FBI before the military took over the questioning. None of the intelligence interrogators had so much as glanced at the FBI agents’ notes of their interviews with al-Qahtani and so never knew that he was simply repeating himself. And there was no one at the meeting to stress that point—the criminal interrogators had not been invited to attend.

The camp needed to be shaken up, one of the participants said, by creating an environment of controlled chaos. But they would have to be careful—the International Committee of the Red Cross was occasionally checking to see if detainees were being treated in accordance with international standards.

Dave Becker from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that there were already plenty of reports being issued by the ICRC about the use of sleep deprivation against detainees held at Bagram Air Base.

“True,” said Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the top legal advisor to the military’s interrogation unit at Guantanamo. “But officially, it’s not happening. It is not being reported.”

Beaver then repeated that ICRC inspections at Guantanamo were a serious concern. “They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave,” she said. “That would draw a lot of negative attention.”

A CIA lawyer, John Fredman, mentioned that the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department had offered a lot of guidance on the issue of rough tactics. As for the ICRC, the Department of Defense had already found ways to work around any problems.

“In the past when the ICRC made a big deal about certain detainees, DOD just moved them away,” he said. “Then when the ICRC asked about their whereabouts, the DOD’s response has been that the detainees merit no status under the Geneva Conventions.”

There were other laws protecting detainees, of course, but based on the Justice Department analysis, those weren’t matters of much concern.

“Under the Torture Convention, torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” Fredman said. “Severe mental and physical pain is prohibited. But the mental part is explained as poorly as the physical part.”

Fredman then recited the definitions for “severe pain” that had been cobbled together by the Office of Legal Counsel based on interpretations of health care laws. For an action to count as physical torture, he said, it had to cause permanent damage to major organs or body parts. Mental torture had to meet similarly high standards—the tactics were illegal only if they led to permanent and profound damage to the senses and the personality.

“It basically is a matter of perception,” he said. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

•  •  •  

That same day in Damascus, Abdullah Almalki was lying in his prison cell, aching and exhausted. He had been interrogated about Arar for two days, but hadn’t given Salloum the answers he wanted. So, they hurt him.

Almalki wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. The beatings, whippings, and other forms of torture had left him in constant pain. Even on those days when he wasn’t tortured, he endured horrors. When he tried to sleep, large rats came into his cell and crawled over his legs. Cats urinated on him from a grating in the ceiling. Lice covered his body. He had lost fifty pounds, and his ribs stuck out of his chest. The skin on the top of his mouth was almost gone from his screaming.