From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel (29 page)
Read From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel Online
Authors: Alex Gilvarry
When we were finished with the list he unplugged me from his machine and left the room. That was it. I never saw him again.
Writing out my confession, I have tried to capture the essence of my life. Because everything I write about is in the past, I don’t see myself as living anymore. This is what happens to you when you are arrested. The present is shifted instantly into the past, and what had once seemed unfathomable—torment, misery, profound suffering—is now actual. “An omnipotent actuality,” my special agent would call it, quoting one of his beloved Russians.
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Now that I approach the end of my confession, I find that I am beginning to lose hold of my character. I have become removed from the hero of my own story, you see. To lose hold of your own
character must be part of the natural order of things in No Man’s Land.
All the same, I have tried to capture myself, or my character, as sincerely as possible. To re‑create what it was like to live in my skin.
After several minutes alone in the room at Newark Airport, I was once again hooded and shackled by two unidentifiable men whose faces were obscured by the brims of their military caps. No headphones this time, just the black shroud over my head covering my eyes. The two men carried me outside. We were on the tarmac. I felt the wind and heard the noise of propellers as I was carried along. They placed me in the back of a van and sat across from me. I was getting used to the feeling of metal under my feet and around my wrists and ankles. The chains rattled against the floor as the van moved fast and smooth across the tarmac.
One of them said, “Don’t say anything.” He wasn’t addressing me but the other man.
“Don’t,” the other one answered back.
I heard the click of a picture being taken with a cell phone. It was the recording of a click. A simulation. That’s how I knew it was a cell phone and not a real camera.
“I’m taking it off,” one said.
“Don’t.”
“Who will ever know?”
“If they ever find out it’ll be our ass. Mine and yours. Mine because I let you do it.”
“No one will know. We’re already on the runway.”
“Shut up.”
“Like he doesn’t know.”
The man reached over and yanked the shroud off of my head. They were young, white, well built. The one holding the shroud covered his nose and mouth with it and waved a camera phone in front of me. I stared into the panel of his little mobile device, the tiny lens in its corner. It was a Samsung. He was trying to take a picture, but the van was swerving. We were speeding. The other guard covered his face with his hat.
“Welcome to Newark, you terrorist fuck,” the guard with the phone said through his shroud. “This is your last moment of freedom. Say cheese.”
“Don’t look at me,” the other one said. “Look at the camera.” I was looking at neither. I was looking at the guard holding the camera, the one who accused me of being a terrorist fuck. I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
He took the picture.
Somehow I knew this would be my last opportunity to speak freely. “Where are we going?” I asked him.
“
We?
We’re not going anywhere.”
“Where am I going?” I said.
I could tell he was smiling behind the shroud. I could tell by the shapes his eyes made. “Somewhere…,” he sang. “Over the rainbow
…
”
This made the other guard laugh. The coward still hid behind his cap.
“Where?” I demanded.
The one with the camera looked at his colleague and then turned back to me.
“No Man’s Land,” he said.
1.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from
The Gulag Archipelago.
Today I received a visit from the colonel. He was much shorter than I had expected.
What had I done to deserve such an honor?
The colonel informed me that tomorrow I would be moved to another camp, where I would not be allowed the provisions I’ve been permitted here. It all sounded very official, like it was really going to happen. (By “provisions,” I assume he meant my pen and paper.)
They have a saying here in No Man’s Land, something of a greeting between a higher official and one of his subordinates. It’s a call and response.
“Honor bound!”
the high official will say.
“To defend freedom!”
is the response given. Until now, I never gave it much thought. One hears it so often on the block that one forgets to listen. Only when the colonel greeted Win this morning did I start to contemplate the meaning of the phrase. Why now, all of a sudden? Why, it was the way the colonel said his lines, with the delivery of a powerful stage actor. He spoke to Win with such bravura, such authority—such grace!—that I thought he must have authored the words himself. “Honor bound, soldier!” said the colonel.
“To defend freedom, sir!” said Win.
Win saluted the colonel with a quick slice of the hand at a
downward angle, swift, precise. The colonel returned the salute; then with a nod, he motioned Win at ease.
In a few days, my tribunal will begin. When I told the colonel that I would like for my confession to be submitted as evidence in my CSRT,
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he informed me that he would see to it, personally. “You have my word.”
“Scout’s honor?” I quipped.
“My word alone is enough. You will find that when I give my word, it produces results. Decisions are made; people move on my command. Lives are at stake—”
“Et cetera, et cetera,” I said.
“Why don’t you ask the private?” he said, nodding over at Win. “Private, what happens when I give my word?”
“Sir, decisions are made, sir,” said Win. “People move ASAP on your command, sir.”
“Why’s that, private?”
“Sir, lives are at stake, sir!”
“You see. There you have it,” said the colonel.
So far, none of my cohorts on the block have had their tribunals.
“It is quite a new process,” said the colonel. “But you shouldn’t worry yourself. The process is being perfected every day.”
“When will I meet my personal representative?” I asked. “The one that I was promised.”
“Any day now,” he said.
“Before my tribunal?” I asked.
“Oh absolutely. The process requires it.”
“And what if I choose to defend myself?”
“That, of course, is one of your options, but it is not encouraged. It may hold up the proceedings to have to explain everything to you and so forth. It could be very confusing for all parties. Your representative in this matter will inform you of all you need to know.”
“And what about my lawyer in New York?”
“What about him?”
“Why can’t he defend me?”
“I believe he needs to be cleared by the Pentagon first. Even so, this is a military tribunal—a proceeding of the United States military. Nonmilitary personnel are prohibited. It is a matter of national security, you understand.”
“Then I will defend myself,” I said.
Something in the motto for this godforsaken place has got me thinking about my captors. They are men who have dedicated themselves to what they believe to be a just cause, a righteous cause, a cause buried in a few simple words. I say buried, because breaking the phrase into a call and response, punctuated with “sir, yes sir,” confuses a fairly respectable ideology: “Honor bound to defend freedom.” I am beginning to see how these words could be applied to my own situation. Be free or die trying.
“I shall defend myself,” I repeated.
“That is your right. But again…it’s not encouraged.”
“Tell my personal representative not to bother coming.”
“I don’t think it will take. Your representative in this matter is essential so that you may better understand the process. Even if you were to choose to defend yourself, he would still need to be at the tribunal.”
“But you understand what I’m saying, colonel. I no longer wish to meet with him. I’m through waiting.”
The colonel didn’t move. He just stood there, hardened, looking me in the eyes.
“There’s a real shit storm brewing because of you,” he said.
“Come again?”
“A shit storm. That’s parlance for one fucked‑up situation. You’re back in the media again. Congratulations. A real Patty Hearst. America’s heart bleeds. But I won’t let you burn me. Mark my words. I’m a fair man, but I won’t be walked all over.”
“I don’t—”
“I know you don’t know what I’m talking about. But listen. Accept. To listen is divine—that’s what I tell my men. And my men listen, comply, act. Lives are at stake. I am not one to be humiliated, son. I run a secure facility housing the worst criminal masterminds of our time. This is a place of routine and discipline. Hitler would be here today. So would Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh. Bin Laden himself will be here very soon. Wait and see. We’ll get him. This will blow over. I don’t mean the war, but this media shit storm we’re about to enter together. It will not be remembered. With the right actions anything can be extracted from hearts and minds. Suppressed then forgotten. Mark my words. Whatever happens, mark my words.”
The colonel turned swiftly and he was gone. Win came to attention and saluted an empty corridor.
1.
Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
BY GIL JOHANNESSEN
I began my story where it ends. On the windward side of the bay, where the banana rats run rampant, where the iguanas live under a protected order like the American bald eagle, where men train other men to crawl like dogs, to eat and shit on command, and then to stand hind-legged for long, intense intervals. It’s a controlled nightmarish evolution, a weird science of cruel and unusual punishment. For us bent over on the wrong end of the red-hot poker, it’s madness and chaos. Delta’s infernal inferno. Death. No, worse. Death uncertain.
—Boyet R. Hernandez
From “Closing Statement,”
Combatant Status Review Tribunal,
Camp Echo
I.
On the morning of November 11, 2006, at approximately 0400, Boy Hernandez was awoken by the sound of chains. It was Veteran’s Day, an occasion celebrated in Camp America with an early morning ceremony scheduled to follow the Pledge of Allegiance. Two MPs arrived, dropping the shackles at the foot of Boy’s cell door. Private First Class Jeffrey Cunningham, Boy’s night guard, had dozed off for a few minutes and was startled awake. One of the MPs, a lance corporal, reprimanded Cunningham for snoozing on duty. He informed Cunningham of their orders, that they were taking the detainee to another facility. Cunningham knew that Boy was to be moved that day, though the transport was originally slated to take place after Cunningham’s shift. The men had come several hours early. That was when one of the MPs whispered into Cunningham’s ear a code word: “catwalk.” Cunningham understood the order and stepped aside. He knew if this code word was ever spoken to him he was not to notate anything in the detainee’s logbook. Hernandez would be taken from his cell without record.
When Private Winston “Win” Croner arrived to relieve Cunningham at 0600 as he did every morning, he found Cunningham guarding an empty cell. “They took him,” he said to Croner.
Win Croner looked in the logbook for the latest entry.
“Don’t bother,” said Cunningham. “He’s gone. My orders are to wait.”
And so the two men waited through the call to prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance. They listened to the trumpets of the veteran’s ceremony outside the blocks. No one came to explain to Cunningham what the next steps were, and he never saw Boy again. He left the logbook with Croner and went back to the barracks, frustrated. The next day Cunningham was reassigned to the isolation ward Quebec, where he guarded, among others, the Australian David Hicks and Omar al‑Shihri.
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In December 2006, the Pentagon released an official time line of that day. The record indicates that Boy was moved to a new cell in Camp Echo and arrived on schedule at 1100 hours.
Camp Echo lies to the east of Camp Delta and was once the harshest camp in all of Camp America. During Boy’s term it served as a holding facility for prisoners who were scheduled to meet with their lawyers, personal representatives, or interrogators. The ride from Delta to Echo on a good day takes approximately fifteen minutes by jeep.
The Pentagon’s records are in opposition to the story Cunningham would tell me when we met in New York in the fall of 2007. After his deployment ended, Cunningham left the service and moved to New York City, where he has pursued a career as a male
model. Cunningham possesses classic American good looks, a dimpled smile, and short-cropped blond hair. Boy, apparently, had turned his night guard on to the prospect of working in fashion. He had recommended a booking agent at Elite Model Management, which now represents Cunningham.
If the time line the Pentagon released were accurate—that Boy was in fact delivered at 1100 to his cell in Camp Echo on November the eleventh, and if what Cunningham told me was also true—that Boy was taken at 0400—then there are still seven hours from that morning unaccounted for.
Cunningham didn’t speculate as to where Boy was taken in the interim. He said he stopped thinking about Hernandez once he was transferred to isolation ward Quebec. He did, however, hint at the practice of secret interrogations done in a facility off the map. When I asked who ran the interrogations, he laughed. “Take a guess,” he said.
“The military?” I asked.
“OGAs.
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Everybody knows that.”
OGA is military parlance for the CIA.
II.
The picture that was taken of Boy by the MP, Lieutenant Richard Flowers, on the night of Boy’s transport on the tarmac of Newark Airport is by now a famous portrait of human injustice. The dimly lit 1.3 megapixel snapshot was taken with a model LRT Samsung mobile flip phone. Boy’s desperation in the photo is unnerving. His
hair is matted down, he has been sweating, his face is gaunt, and his eyes are concave from lack of sleep. His white shirt collar is stained yellow, either by sweat or puke. It took several months for the photo to finally surface, but when it did, Boy’s story, which had been reduced to a short-run Broadway satire involving a vapid trust-fund brat and a fashion designer turned terrorist loosely based on Boy Hernandez, was once again headline news.
The photo’s going public explains the appearance of Colonel Albert T. Windmaker, high commander of the Guantánamo naval base, in the final pages of Boy’s confession. Windmaker was known to see prisoners only when there was discord on the blocks, or if the base was playing host to a high-profile guest. It is plain to see, as the colonel readily admitted, that his visit was inspired by the media situation in the United States that was about to become unruly. Within twenty-four hours of Windmaker’s session with Boy, the detainee disappeared for an unknown block of time.
Whatever governed Lieutenant Flowers’s intentions in taking Boy’s photo on May 31, 2006, has by this point become completely diluted by political statements and apologies made on both individuals’ behalf. The conclusion of Boy’s memoir leads us to believe that it was Flowers’s intention to humiliate his prisoner. Instead, the image became a symbol for everything that had gone wrong in America since January 11, 2002, the day the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened its doors. Boy’s portrait surpassed the images that had already haunted us, those of men in orange uniforms down on their knees in the gravel, masked with blackout goggles and noise-canceling headphones. What Flowers did was put a face on the abused, the face of an up‑and-coming designer of women’s clothing.
Days after the photo’s release, the artist Sheriff Michaels took the notorious photo of Boy and superimposed it with damp shades of red, white, and blue—“cartoonifying” it, as Michaels calls it (a process that only takes a few minutes) and stamping the word
BEHAVE
at the foot of the image. A poster boy for the decade was birthed. As Boy’s long-delayed CSRT got underway, the
BEHAVE
image spread. It was stenciled on buildings and construction barricades throughout New York City, Miami, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and even Tallapoosa, Missouri, where, ironically, the Hernandez scandal had set off a minor scare just five months before.
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BEHAVE was the antithesis to what Boy (the person) had symbolized for the presidential administration. Hernandez, the fashion terrorist who had been the administration’s much publicized prized capture in the global war on terror, was now a martyr for justice.
III.
When I began to investigate Boy Hernandez’s detainment, the officials at Guantánamo and the Pentagon had no comment to offer. No one at the White House press secretary’s office would return my calls. In fact, as a fashion writer, I was not taken seriously by anyone (though this was something I was used to).
W
magazine wasn’t even willing to publish my idea for a follow‑up piece on Boy and his indefinite detention. The magazine deemed it far too political, even though it involved a well-regarded fashion designer, one who had graced their pages less than a year earlier.
None of the other majors I pitched it to would back the project either. My intent at the beginning was to do a bit of investigative journalism, something totally different from the fashion puff pieces I was known for. Call it my own political awakening. I would say that I even felt an emotional attachment to the story, equating the news of Boy’s detainment to word of an unexpected death of a friend. Indeed, when I began my investigation, it was as if the fashion world had simply accepted that Boy was already dead.
When the
BEHAVE
movement erupted, Boy’s cause was coopted by the mainstream press, where I held absolutely no influence or clout.
Still, I pursued the trail, and in late December of 2006, one soldier, not Jeffrey Cunningham, finally came forward, calling me from a pay phone in Miami. The soldier, whom we will call Coco, was willing to talk to me as long as he could remain anonymous. I immediately boarded a plane for Miami.
IV.
There is an automobile in Camp America described to me by Coco as a white van with blacked-out, tinted windows. Many of the guards call it the “mystery machine,” after the vehicle in the Scooby-Doo cartoons. Inside the van is a cage big enough for one prisoner. It is common knowledge among the guards that the mystery machine moves freely in and out of Camp America, transporting prisoners and OGA agents without being recorded at the various checkpoints.
It seems likely that Boy was moved in this van at 0400, when Cunningham says he was taken from Camp Delta. However, on
November 11, Boy was not driven directly to Echo, as the Pentagon claims, but to an off-site facility north of Camp America, known by some as Camp No. Camp No is its unofficial name; the government currently denies its existence. But according to Coco and two other guards who have since come forward, Camp No does exist, and Boy was held there not only for seven hours but for seven
days
before his transfer to Echo.
Boy arrived just before dawn. The cells in No are built for isolation. It is a solitary facility designed to break prisoners. Unlike the steel-caged blocks of Camp America, No’s cells are made of concrete. Boy would spend the next several days in a four-foot‑by‑seven-foot concrete box with no natural light. There were two buckets, one for him to defecate in, and another to urinate. There was a spigot for cold water that was sometimes shut off, and a thin mat on the ground where he was to sleep. On the walls of Boy’s cell was what appeared to be blood spatter. To him it must have looked like the last prisoner had been beaten to death.
He spent his first two days at Camp No in complete isolation and saw no one. At night, he was kept awake by the screams of other prisoners. Often it sounded as if men were being severely tortured; other times it sounded like a woman was being raped and beaten. These were simulations intended to break prisoners. Coco said this was an effective tactic the OGA interrogators used. They would claim that what the detainee was hearing was his wife or daughter in the adjacent cell when really it was a female interrogator acting out the part.
On November 13, day three of his isolation, Boy was visited by an OGA interrogator, a man in plain clothes. These interrogators, according to Coco, are usually white males in their midforties
to late fifties. They wear black shoes with white socks. The OGA interrogated Boy on that day for approximately seven hours without break. Boy was then allowed to rest for one hour before the same interrogator returned, fresh and ready to begin again. The interrogator stayed on for another five to six hours before Boy was allowed to sleep. If there weren’t screams keeping him awake, it was loud music coming from one of the neighboring cells.
The same interrogator visited Boy for three consecutive days on similar terms. One long stretch of interrogation without break, and then a second interval into the night. By day six of Boy’s imprisonment in Camp No, Coco reported, the OGA interrogator seemed “extremely agitated.” He was not as confident or alert as he was at the beginning of their sessions. Something seemed to be weighing on him, qualities Coco rarely detected in OGA interrogators at Camp No.
During Boy’s final session, the same interrogator started early, at 0600, and came out of Boy’s cell less than an hour later shaking his head. He looked “disturbed,” according to Coco. The man walked down the dark corridor to where another interrogator on a break was smoking a cigarette. “This is a fucking reach around,” Boy’s interrogator said. “He doesn’t know jack shit.”
The smoking man made a gesture with his shoulders, indifferent, and Boy’s interrogator said, “Get him the fuck out of here.”
From what I’ve been able to ascertain, Boy was moved to Camp Echo not on November 11, as the Pentagon records attest, but on November 18, one week later.
The cells in Echo are divided into two rooms. One makes
up the prisoner’s living quarters, with a bed and a toilet-sink combo. The other half holds a steel table, two chairs, and an I‑bolt
cemented to the ground. This is where Boy would eventually meet with his lawyer.
Boy was without the pen and paper he had occupied himself with in Delta. Everything he’d been permitted to keep with him in his old cell had been taken away, including the English copy of the Qur’an that once belonged to the prisoner David Hicks. There were no longer any guards for Boy to converse with. And no one else could be heard on his new cell block. On November 27, after several grueling days in extreme isolation, and stripped of his ability to write or communicate with anyone, Boy tried to take his own life.
Using his towel and strips of cloth from a white undershirt, he fashioned a noose and tied it to the bars dividing the two rooms of his cell. He stuffed the remaining fabric into his mouth to stifle any noise he would make during the act.
When the guards, who routinely checked in on each prisoner every ten minutes, found Boy, he was still alive, struggling to hold on to the noose around his neck. He had one foot toeing the edge of the bed, barely keeping his body aloft.
The guards rushed in and cut him down.
He spent only two days in the infirmary under evaluation until he was deemed fit to return to his cell in Echo.
Boy’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal was again delayed.
Ted Catallano first met with Boy in early December 2006.
BEHAVE
was now everywhere, and the Pentagon could no longer delay Catallano’s requests to meet with his client. They were, however, able to delay the consultation just enough so that Catallano had only a week to prepare Boy for the CSRT that had been rescheduled. Catallano would not be able to defend Boy, because it was a military proceeding, but he was notified that Boy would
be defending himself. This worried Catallano for several reasons. The CSRTs had been under contention since they were created. They have been considered “mock trials” by many reputable litigators involved in these cases. Catallano has said, “At any other time these processes would be illegal. And any time we make movement in court to shut them down, the administration overrides the ruling, which in my opinion is a disgusting abuse of executive power.” What worried him even more was that Boy refused to meet with his designated personal representative, a request the command at Guantánamo honored without fuss.
