The Prisoner of Guantanamo (3 page)

On his eighteenth birthday, a month after graduating from high school, he hitchhiked to Bangor, where he moved into a flophouse just long enough to get a new driver's license with a local address to show to the local recruiter. After basic training he arrived at Gitmo with the requisite shaved head and sunburned face. He had never been back to Maine, nor sent word of his whereabouts.

Falk owed plenty to the Corps—his balance, his patience, enough money from the GI Bill to put him through college. He made friends with a few good men who even now he would trust with his life. But having endured his harshest trials well before basic, Falk was resistant to the Corps' deeper strains of indoctrination. Not even three years of Semper Fi convinced him to wear a tattoo or post a bumper sticker. He still retreated when necessary.

It was that independent outlook, as well as his progress with Adnan, that soon earned Falk a reputation as having just the right touch for detainees adrift in Camp Delta's lower-to-middle reaches. This meant he almost never got a look at the few dozen detainees considered to be Gitmo's prized possessions, the “worst of the worst.”

Instead he often held court with lonely and grizzled old men, or disturbed fellows in their early twenties—bricklayers, cabdrivers, cobblers, and farmers who had enlisted as foot soldiers of the jihad—subjects of dubious intelligence value whom the skeptics sometimes referred to as “dirt farmers.”

In the course of these sessions he discovered the taming power of food—sweets in particular—and lately he had turned that weapon on Adnan. Just last week a dripping wedge of baklava had elicited a lengthy discussion of explosives techniques, plus a better-than-average description of Adnan's weapons trainer, which ending up matching that of another detainee who actually remembered a name. Somewhere out there, presumably, others were now acting on this tip.

“Meat to the lions” was how one Army psychologist on the Biscuit team described the technique of swapping food for information. In Adnan's case it was more like cookies and milk after a long day at school, a treat to soothe the soul and get him busy on his homework. Falk had once even fetched a Happy Meal from the base McDonald's.

“You deserve a break today,” he said, handing over the bright red box. The Madison Avenue joke whizzed over Adnan's head, but the young man wolfed down the tiny burger in gratitude, mustard smearing the corner of sun-chapped lips as he chewed. The only awkward moment came at the end, when Falk had to reclaim the plastic toy. It was a tiny Buzz Lightyear—even Happy Meals were out of date at Gitmo—and Adnan wouldn't let go until an MP stepped forward with a truncheon.

There was a brief sulk, a few muttered imprecations.

“Sorry, Adnan. It's contraband,” Falk crooned in good-cop Arabic.

The plastic Buzz Lightyear now stood on the sill above Falk's kitchen sink, his resolute partner in the search for Truth.

Others were predictably skeptical of Falk's progress with Adnan.

“Why bother?” Tyndall had said a few weeks ago at lunch, speaking through a mouthful of Army fries. “He's out of his freakin' mind. The one time I had him we had to sedate him. Then he was like some nut talking in his sleep. Probably chewed too many qaat leaves as a boy. Fought one too many battles.”

“Hell, Mitch, he's nineteen.”

“Exactly. Too far gone, but not old enough to really know what he's seen—who trained him, or who made a difference in his network. Not worth the effort.”

“Then let him go. Send him home if he's so goddamn worthless.”

“Fine with me. Not my call, though. Draft a telegram to the SOD and I'll sign it.”

That would be the secretary of defense, who had the final word on all such decisions.

Falk was foolish enough to take the idea to heart, but in the course of his inquiries on Adnan's behalf the brass learned of their rapport, which only doomed Adnan to further detention.

“Work with him,” a visiting desk jockey from the Defense Intelligence Agency said. “Make him a personal project. Everybody else, hands off, and we'll see how it goes.”

Translation: He'll go home only when he tells us what he knows, and it's up to you to deliver the goods. Leaving Falk, as it were, the master of the young man's fate. So earlier that week Falk had decided on a new course of action. He would rouse Adnan from his sleep in the wee hours—a technique the Pentagon liked to call “sleep adjustment”—in hopes of tapping into a different stream of consciousness from the one Adnan offered by day.

Falk had arrived at Camp Delta's front gate at 2:20 a.m. A bored and surly MP checked his ID against a list of scheduled visitors, then unlocked the gate to the first sally port. These transactions never involved an exchange of names. The interrogators signed in with numbers. The MPs, for their part, covered their names with strips of duct tape across their uniforms, lest their identities be passed along to a shadowy network back in the Middle East that might someday hunt down their families in Ypsilanti, Toledo, or Skokie.

Before opening the next gate, the MP relocked the one behind him, then repeated the process through two more portals. All of this chain-link jangling made it sound as if Falk were entering a suburban backyard and gave the place the feel of a kennel. It smelled like one, too, stinking of shit, sweat, and disinfectant. With showers strictly rationed, and no air-conditioning to counteract the Cuban heat, every cellblock stank like a locker room in need of hosing down.

By day the place could be unruly. Detainees didn't always take their punishment meekly, especially when you were moving them around. There were scuffles and staredowns, hunger strikes and shouting matches. When anyone got too unruly the MPs called in their version of an air strike—an IRF, or Initial Reaction Force. It was a sort of combat conga line of five guards decked out in helmets, thick pads, and black leather gloves, fronted by pepper spray and a riot shield. Whenever they trooped into action, rhythmically stamping their boots, the prisoners answered with the rallying cry of
“Allahu Akbar!”
—“God is great!”

Although you heard a lot about Delta's status as a sort of Babel Tower with its nineteen languages, the majority tongues by far were Arabic and Pashto, and it was the Arabs who ruled the roost, sneering down upon the gaunt Pashtun tribesmen from the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was a viewpoint strangely in tune with that of the interrogators and analysts, who regarded most of the Pashtuns as dirt farmers.

A few of the Arabs had become jailhouse evangelists, and they could silence entire cellblocks with their sermons, calling down the wrath of God with fiery Quranic verse. It drove the MPs nuts, although Falk found the exhibitions oddly entertaining, maybe because it reminded him of listening to Sunday morning radio broadcasts as a boy, dire warnings of doom and damnation beaming through the static and whine of the AM dial.

But in the wee hours Camp Delta was quieter, calmer. It even smelled different. Sometimes you picked up a briny whiff of the sea. Falk figured it must be tantalizing for the inmates to be reminded that waves were breaking a mere hundred yards beyond the fence. Because if Gitmo was claustrophobic, Camp Delta was downright airless, a bell jar. A few hours inside the wire and his head was ready to explode.

In his first weeks here he had often visited Camp Delta after dark, mostly to check on his charges as they slept. Familiarize yourself with their nocturnal rhythms, he told himself, and maybe you'll discover a hidden point of entry to their memories. So he had strolled past their cells, glancing through the mesh and listening to their breathing, to their coughs and snores, vainly trying to crack their codes of silence in the dead hours before the dawn prayer.

In the higher-security blocks that he liked to patrol, each prisoner was curled on a narrow bunk, arm thrown across his face against the constant lighting. A few were always awake, an open eye watching from the pillow. Falk never acknowledged that he noticed, but as soon as he passed from sight he cleared his throat. It was partly to let them know they weren't dreaming, partly to plant the thought that—just maybe—he was always out there, lurking beyond the door.

Now and then he had come upon one of them writhing in some private passion, either masturbating or dreaming of a lover. Falk wondered what it must be like to emerge from that, journeying so far afield from this rocky edge of Cuba only to wake up back where you started, groggy from the heat, while some nineteen-year-old Reservist from Ohio shouted in English that it was time to get up. First for prayer, then for breakfast, and then over to interrogation, which was where Falk reentered their lives, the cellblock stalker now showered and shaved in the full light of day.

After signing up to see Adnan, Falk glanced over his notes while waiting at the interrogation booth. His place of business wasn't much to look at—twelve feet by twelve feet, with a white linoleum floor, pale gray paneling, and fluorescent lighting, just like the other seven booths in the trailer. No windows, just a two-way mirror along one wall for whoever was watching from the observation room, which was usually nobody. There were no adornments, and no knickknacks, although lately the Army had taped up posters depicting a grieving Arab mom with a caption saying how much she wanted her son to come home. Those were displayed on the wall facing the detainee, with the implicit message being, “If you talk, maybe Mom will get her wish.” Falk had already earned a reprimand for taking one down before his last session with Adnan. He did the same thing now, rolling it into a tube and placing it by the door.

The subject always sat in a steel folding chair behind a folding table with a wood grain Formica top, just like the ones you saw at church suppers and youth soccer sign-ups. The interrogator got a cushy office chair that rolled and swiveled, making him the room's CEO. If not for the eyebolt in the floor—for attaching the detainee's leg irons—the room would have looked like a place where you filled out loan applications or insurance forms.

None of this blandness had stopped Falk from cooking up a more dashing vision of the place the first time he laid eyes on it. Like virtually every other interrogator who arrived at Gitmo, he had come ashore certain that he would make a difference. He vowed that this booth would become The Room Where Secrets Came To Die, with him, of course, as the model executioner, lopping the heads off troves of vital information while armed only with patience and guile, cunning and wit.

One of his FBI instructors had compared it to cutting gemstones. You didn't set out to “break” a subject; that was mere brutality, an act of force that rendered everything the subject said as unreliable. Instead it was all about preparation—studying the angles, then searching for the point of cleavage where a firm but precise tap would turn the rough stone into a thing of beauty, revealing its secrets. You established rapport, built trust, and sprinkled your questions like crumbs upon the path to revelation.

His confidence in these methods was based more on pragmatism than altruism. His techniques were not just cleaner, they were better. But by the time Falk had arrived, most of the prisoners had been there for months, many for more than a year. The most precious gems had been set aside for others, and the remaining few of value had been subjected to the same questions so many times, and via so many different approaches—including some that were downright bizarre—that they had turned silent, uncooperative or, worse, said virtually anything they thought you'd want to hear.

Adnan arrived sleepy, hair tousled, which only added to his aura of boyishness.

“Want me in or out, sir?” the MP asked, in a tone that said he couldn't care less.

The MPs weren't always surly, even this late in the day, but they reserved a special scorn for those who spoke Arabic, as if it was a mild form of betrayal. If you spoke the language of the terrorists, then maybe you'd imbibed in other ways from their cups of poison.

“Out. And, soldier, unlock his handcuffs, please.”

“Your funeral,” he said, complying sullenly. Falk wondered if he talked like that to interrogators in uniform. Doubtful.

“So why did you get me up so early?” Adnan began, more annoyed than angry.

“I thought it might do us both some good. We've been in sort of a rut lately, don't you think?”

Adnan shrugged, then yawned. Falk almost wished that he had brought along some food. A glass of milk for bedtime. Maybe this was a stupid idea.

But he had already noticed at least one promising sign. In their many conversations Falk had noted that Adnan displayed some fairly simple tics and tendencies, habits that at times made him an open book.

Whenever the young man looked upward and to his right, he was almost always lying, as if that was where he looked for inspiration while searching his brain for a cover story. Glancing up and to the left meant he was stalling, waiting for the subject to change. When he stared down at the table he was usually lost in thought, having drifted to some other part of his life. At those moments you could rely on his every word. It was when Adnan was at his best. During those interludes Falk could almost pretend that neither of them heard the leg irons sliding on the floor when he moved in his chair. They were just shooting the breeze in a bar, perhaps, or at least that was the preferred location for Falk's imagination. He wondered where Adnan would have placed them. Maybe in a market stall off the souk, sipping a cool yogurt on a warm day, with the mud-wall architecture of Sana all around, casting him in shadow. A strong Arab coffee at hand with its dark sludge and its bite of cardamom. They would be seated before a backgammon board, or a folded copy of the daily paper, while the lottery sellers and tea vendors shouted their prices as they passed.

Relaxed moments like those had led to the few times Adnan had offered genuine revelations. And as those moments progressed Adnan tended to gaze up from his reverie straight into Falk's eyes.