500 Days (64 page)

Despite everything that had been inflicted on him, Almalki hadn’t been crippled or emotionally incapacitated. His tormentors had been careful not to kill him or leave him in catatonic despair; they wanted him talking, not dead or incapable of speech. And so, they followed only the most time-tested torture techniques, making sure to avoid inflicting long-term damage to Almalki’s major organs and body parts or causing permanent and profound harm to his senses and personality. If they knew about the classified standards being used by the Americans to define torture, the Syrians could reasonably argue that they were in compliance.

•  •  •  

Almalki was brought upstairs a few hours later for more interrogation about Arar. Salloum again handled the questioning. For him to be involved day after day signaled that, whatever was going on with Arar, the Syrians considered it important.

“I want to know if Arar has been to Pakistan or Afghanistan,” Salloum said.

Almalki feebly shook his head. “No, not that I know of.”

Salloum kept rephrasing the question, but Almalki’s answer never changed.

“I want you to say that Arar is with al-Qaeda!” Salloum snapped.

“I don’t know anyone with al-Qaeda.”

“You’re lying!”

“I don’t know anyone with al-Qaeda,” Almalki repeated, sounding weak.

Salloum turned to one of the other interrogators.

“Send a report about these questions to headquarters, so they can be faxed by noon,” he said.

Faxed where?
Almalki thought. Someone in Damascus? Canada? The United States? Who was involved in this?

Salloum turned back to Almalki.

“Arar will be here soon,” he said. “And if I find out you’ve lied, I’m going to put you in a barrel of human excrement, and cut your food rations, and torture you until you’re paralyzed.”

Almalki’s chest clutched in fear. “I’ve told you everything I know!” he cried. “If you want more, give me a blank paper and I’ll sign it. You can fill it in yourself.”

Salloum stared at Almalki in silence. He turned to leave the room, glancing at another interrogator on his way out the door.

“Torture him,” Salloum said. “And be ruthless.”

•  •  •  

Maher Arar couldn’t stop sobbing.

He was in a cell-like room at the Brooklyn prison, sitting at a table across from Maureen Girvan, the Canadian consul in New York. It was October 3, Arar’s eighth day in detention and his first chance to speak with a government official from his home country.

He described to Girvan what had happened to him since his arrival in New York. He told her of being chained and unfed, of his captors’ refusal to allow him to contact a lawyer. The Americans wouldn’t even let him have a
toothbrush. At one point, he said, he was taken to a doctor and given a shot, but no one would tell him what it was.

They had, however, finally given him papers with the allegations against him—that he was inadmissible to the United States because he was a member of al-Qaeda. He showed Girvan the documents.

“This is insane!” he cried. “I’m innocent!”

He was not an enemy of America. He had always admired the United States, he said, and had never experienced trouble in the country before.

“I’m very scared,” he said. “They’re talking about sending me to Syria.”

The meeting ended. Girvan returned to her office and prepared a case note for her superiors in Ottawa. It consisted of eleven words.

“Mr. Arar is alleged to be a member of al Qaeda.”

•  •  •  

Girvan spoke with Arar’s wife about an hour later, describing her visit to the prison. “He was disoriented, he cried a lot and wanted to know how you all were,” she said.

The description of her husband’s anguish tore at Mazigh. “Have the Americans given a reason for his arrest?” she asked.

“He showed me a sheet of paper saying that they were denying him entry to the United States because he belongs to the terrorist group, al-Qaeda.”

Al-Qaeda!

“But he’s innocent!” Mazigh cried. “Maher doesn’t belong to al-Qaeda or any terrorist group.”

There was a long silence.

The Americans had made their decision, Girvan finally said. Arar needed to get a lawyer as fast as possible.

•  •  •  

Later that day, the CIA sent a fax to Corporal Rick Flewelling, an officer with the Mounties who monitored AO Canada. The intelligence agency was seeking any information the Canadians might have that could be used by the Americans to charge Arar with a crime and keep him locked up. Flewelling assigned some officers to see if they could pull something together.

•  •  •  

The call wasn’t memorable, just a two-minute chat that sealed Maher Arar’s fate.

Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was in his office when a secretary told him Larry Thompson, Ashcroft’s deputy, was on the line.

“We’ve got a man named Maher Arar detained up in New York,” Thompson said. “He’s a member of al-Qaeda, and he has dual citizenship, Canadian and Syrian. We want to send him to Syria, but wanted to check whether State had any foreign policy objections.”

“He’s not an American citizen?” Armitage asked.

“No, just Syrian and Canadian.”

This didn’t strike Armitage as a hard issue. Syria had been secretly aiding the Bush administration in the fight against al-Qaeda. Relations between the two countries were improving. There was no reason to think that Syria would object to taking one of its own citizens, even if he had ties to terrorism.

“Okay,” he said. “There’s no problem. We don’t have any objections.”

Green light.

•  •  •  

“Resist!” the detainee yelled in Arabic. “Resist with all your might!”

The military police inside an interrogation booth at Camp Delta in Guantanamo screamed at the detainee to shut up. But the man just ignored them, and continued calling out to his fellow prisoners. Finally, the chief of the detention center’s Interrogation Control Element came out of his office to find out who was causing the ruckus. He arrived at the booth and looked inside. The detainee was still screaming, but the interrogator, the translator, and some guards were frozen in place, unsure of what to do.

“Keep that detainee quiet!” the chief shouted.

A moment passed. “I have some duct tape,” one of the MPs said.

After consulting with a superior, the chief told the soldiers to go ahead and tape the detainee’s mouth shut.

•  •  •  

Down the hall, two supervisory special agents from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit were watching agents question another detainee. The head of military interrogations walked into the observation room and signaled to them.

“Hey, come here,” the officer said. “I want to show you something funny.”

The agents followed him to another observation area, which was packed with military personnel watching events unfolding in an interrogation room.

A detainee was inside, handcuffed and chained to the floor. Two bands of duct tape wrapped his head, covering his eyes and his mouth. The man had a beard and a full head of hair; when the duct tape was eventually ripped off, it would tear hair from his flesh. Four Americans were in the room—two
interrogators and two guards. One interrogator was yelling at the detainee. The scene both perplexed and disturbed the FBI agents. How, they wondered, could the man answer questions with his mouth taped shut?

“Was he spitting on someone?” an agent asked.

“No,” the officer replied. “He just wouldn’t stop chanting the Koran.”

“How do you plan to take the tape off without hurting him?”

The officer just laughed, saying nothing.

The agents left the room and contacted the FBI’s Office of Special Counsel to report that they might have just witnessed a crime.

•  •  •  

Ben Bonk was sitting in his office at the CIA, his heart sinking as he read a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq.

What happened?
For weeks, Bonk had spent most of his time hunkering down with his staff to produce a lengthy analysis shooting down the administration’s contention that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda. But now it felt as if there had been a switch-up—al-Qaeda was almost irrelevant in the Iraq debate; it was all “weapons of mass destruction.” Bonk hadn’t even considered the issue worth discussing. There was analysis dating back years that demonstrated Saddam had no such arsenal. Yet even though it was his group that handled Iraq, it hadn’t been asked for input on the National Intelligence Estimate.

Was Bush even getting all of the intelligence? And was the Pentagon burying its own findings? The Defense Intelligence Agency had
just
issued an analysis that had made its way up the line to Rumsfeld. Bonk had reviewed it—the report showed that no one knew a damned thing. Every piece of information they knew about Iraq’s weapons was, at best, hazy.

The Pentagon report acknowledged that 90 percent of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear capabilities was imprecise; that the existence of biological facilities could not be proved and the supposed “mobile weapons labs” could not be found; that the presence of sites to produce chemical agents for weapons could not be confirmed; and that there was no proof that Iraq had
any
facilities to produce chemical devices. This was the best that the saber rattlers at the Pentagon could do?

Then came this CIA report, roaring with certitudes that put the Pentagon’s timid findings to shame. The agency’s analysts stated they had “high confidence” that Iraq was continuing and even expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs; that it possessed chemical and biological
missiles; and that it could make a nuclear weapon in a matter of months once it obtained weapons-grade fissionable material.

Weighing the two reports against each other was dizzying. The CIA had no doubt that the weapons were there, while the Pentagon was unsure whether the capacity to make them even existed. It was as if the intelligence analysts were saying that they were confident that Saddam’s wife was ready to give birth, but remained uncertain if she was pregnant.

Bonk finished reading, then walked down the hall to confront one of the agency’s senior people who had been involved in preparing the intelligence estimate.

“How did we get to this point?” Bonk asked. “What are we saying here? This isn’t even what we said four months ago.”

His colleague fumbled for an answer, but all he could do was mutter some vague generalities. Bonk walked away in near despair. Maybe he could have stopped this if he had seen it coming. It just seemed so obvious to him that Saddam’s arsenal was an illusion. He never anticipated that anyone would conclude this imaginary threat was real.

•  •  •  

After twenty-four hours of hunting, Canadian police had come up dry in their search for information to give the CIA. There wasn’t a lot of evidence that could be used to keep Arar locked up.

At 6:10
P.M.
on Saturday, October 5, an FBI official called the home of Corporal Rick Flewelling, the RCMP official who was coordinating the search. He told the American that his force hadn’t found anything that could definitively tie Arar to al-Qaeda.

“Well,” the FBI official replied, “Washington’s afraid that we don’t have enough evidence to charge Arar with anything.”

If neither country could conjure up an irrefutable link to the terrorist group, couldn’t the Canadians come up with
something
to indict him with so that Arar could be locked up or barred from returning home? the FBI agent asked. The bosses in Washington wouldn’t be happy if the guy was allowed to wander around Canada at will.

There wasn’t much he could do, Flewelling said. They couldn’t imprison Arar without evidence.

“And since he’s a Canadian citizen, he would have to be readmitted to Canada,” Flewelling said.

The call ended without a resolution of their conundrum and with both men
befuddled by the difficulty of nailing down Arar’s terrorist leanings. Neither considered the obvious explanation—the evidence didn’t exist because Arar was an innocent man.

•  •  •  

About an hour later, Arar was taken from his cell to a visiting area at the prison. A woman who appeared to be Moroccan was waiting for him on the other side of a wall of glass. He picked up a handset so they could speak.

“My name is Amal Oummih, and I’m an immigration lawyer,” she said. “I’ve been speaking with your family, but I haven’t been formally retained yet.”

Arar started crying again. “They want to send me to Syria!”

“You need to calm down. You will be allowed to choose where you want to go, and there will be a hearing where you can argue your case. You don’t need to be worried about this.”

Arar didn’t believe her. The Americans had made no secret of the fact that they wanted to ship him to Syria.

“Please,” he begged. “Please do everything you can.”

The meeting lasted about an hour and a half. Before she left, Oummih again told Arar not to worry. This would all be straightened out.

•  •  •  

As Arar was meeting with Oummih, INS headquarters contacted asylum officers in New York with instructions to interview Arar the following day. It was standard procedure for a foreigner like Arar who was being forcibly removed to a country where he thought he would be tortured. Arar couldn’t just declare that he was scared; he had to provide specific evidence to support his fear.

But Arar would be hard-pressed to produce any grounds by himself. He had been locked up for days. Only his lawyer could gather the proof.

•  •  •  

Twenty-four hours later, after 4:30 on a Sunday, an e-mail arrived at the INS Command Center in Washington. A lawyer for the service instructed officials at the center to contact Arar’s lawyers immediately. They needed to be informed that an asylum hearing would be held for their client in four hours.

A call was placed to Oummih’s office about five; unsurprisingly, she was not there late on a Sunday afternoon. The INS official left a voice-mail message. A second call reached a Canadian lawyer who had worked with Arar, but he pointed out there was no way he could get to New York in four hours. If the hearing were rearranged for the next day, the lawyer said, he could attend.