It is Sunday. I open my Washington Post, B Section, and on the inside is a piece with a long introduction by Josh White, explaining of his long interest in a man originally known as Detainee #261, who tried to kill himself when his lawyer stepped out of the room, whom the U. S. long asserted was a dangerous terrorist who had tried to recruit others and who was arrested in Afghanistan, where he had ostensibly gone to fight for the Taliban. And yet, despite having been held at Gitmo since January 2002 and having been subjected to brutal treatment,
Nevertheless, he was never charged with a crime, never admitted any connection to terrorism and was ultimately released to Saudi Arabia in July 2007.
White has stayed in touch with the man, whose real name is Jumah al Dossari. And the bulk of the piece are his words, and they are entitled I'm Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo. Remember, he was in the custody of our government, held and mistreated by our personnel. This was done in our name. And miraculously, he offers no bitterness in his words.
I'm not sure I would not be bitter, even though I have striven to be as generous as possible in my actions. I don't doubt that had I been subject to what al Dossari suffered, I also would have tried to end it, as he did in his suicide attempt.
Consider this
He was turned over by Pakistanis, he suspects for a bounty, when he had been in Afghanistan to assess the progress of a mosque-building project funded from his native Saudi Arabia. He was crossing into Pakistan to escape the US bombing of Afghanistan, asked for help getting the Saudi embassy, was arrested, shackled and imprisoned, then after several weeks blindfolded and sent, along with several other detainees, to a US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Upon our arrival there, we were thrown to the ground. Someone hit my head and forced his boot into my mouth. Despite the freezing Afghan winter, I spent several weeks in an open tent circled with barbed wire. I still have scars from my time in Kandahar. One is from a cigarette that was extinguished on my wrist and the other from the time I was pushed to a floor covered with broken glass.
And he was not yet in Guantanamo, although several weeks later he had his clothes cut off, and as we now know was the practice with rendition had his sensory organs covered and plugged as he was flown halfway around the world, to Guantanamo.
The litany of abuses began almost immediately:
Imprisoned in these cages, we were forbidden to move and sometimes forbidden to pray.
He reports being beaten so badly he spent several days in intensive care"
My face and body were still swollen and covered in bruises when I left the hospital. During one interrogation, my questioner, apparently dissatisfied with my answers, slammed my head against the table. During others, I was shackled to the floor for hours.
And while the physical assaults subsided, the brutality did not:
I was deprived of human contact. For several months, the military held me in solitary confinement after a suicide attempt. I had no clothes other than a pair of shorts and no bed but a dirty plastic mat. The air conditioner was on 24 hours a day; the cell's cold metal walls made it feel as though I was living inside a freezer. There was no faucet, so I had to use the water in the toilet for drinking and washing.
When the Courts ordered that the detainees be given Court hearings (about which he was not informed), instead his captors gave him a paper outlining the allegations against him, most of which were silly.
He did find out that a Yemeni detainee had made allegations about him in hopes of having his own detention ended or ameliorated. Al Dossari has since learned that there were stories in papers that he had tried to recruit others to go to Al Qaeda training camps, but that there were no such allegations in the paper he was shown.
There is one paragraph that summarizes the worst of his experience:
There were many times in Guantanamo when I felt as though I was falling apart, like a sandcastle being washed out by the tide. I lost all hope and faith. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I was destroyed. I decided that I preferred death to life, and I attempted suicide several times.
Later in his captivity he says that a female guard appeared at his cage, and
looking to make sure that no other guards were watching. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," she whispered to me. "You're a human being just like us." These words were a temporary balm for my bruises and loneliness. Ultimately, though, I believe it was God who did not allow me to die.
He was returned home to Saudi Arabia without explanation, and was greeted by his family, not realizing that the young woman who hugged him was not his sister, but instead his daughter who in the interim had grown from 7 to 13.
Stop for a moment, and imagine you had experienced all this and somehow managed to survive. How would you feel? Might not the sudden impact of the years of the childhood of your daughter you had missed not be a final crushing blow, ensuring your bitterness?
He had been angry in Guantanamo. Fortunately he did not extend his anger to all Americans, because there had been Americans like his lawyer who tried to help.
But I could scarcely comprehend how U.S. policy had allowed me to be treated as I had been.
U. S. policy Consider that: our government, its policy. This was his experience, and this became the face of the U.S.
Yet despite that he decided on the plane home that to get on his with his life he would have to forgive. And he already understood that tragedies like 9-11 could cause people to act in ways they would otherwise never consider.
After he was home he was having trouble sleeping, as he tells us at the beginning of the words he offers.
In a recent restless night, I found a DVD entitled "United 93" beside the family television set. I had no idea what it was about, but I started watching. When I realized that it was about the hijacked American plane that had crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, I began to cry. It reminded me of a very simple question I had asked myself countless times during my 5 1/2 years in Guantanamo: When will humans start treating each other with respect, whatever our religion or color?
When will humans start treating each other with respect, whatever our religion or color?
I'm sorry, but I know of no justification, no ticking bomb scenario which justifies the treatment to which we subjected al Dossari. And knowing that words have power, I cringe when I hear words denigrating the religion of others, or belittle their culture, knowing how easy it is to go from those words and take the first steps of action that far too quickly lead to the kind of brutality experienced by those we have held at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo. If we paid attention to history, we would realize that the horrors of Nazi Germany began with words.
Last night both candidates were asked if evil exists and if so what should be our response. If we are not willing to confront it evil can flourish. And if we refuse to speak out, or even to look, we become complicit in what happens. For all of our outrage when we heard about Abu Ghraib, and saw a few carefully selected pictures, it was not enough. If member of the House and Senate could be disgusted by what they saw, perhaps they should have insisted on ALL of the images captured by Sergeant Darby, all of the testimony offered by Samuel Provance, being released. An honorable administration would have used that occasion to insist, as Eisenhower insisted of the German townspeople when he first encountered a concentration camp, that we look, that we see, that we acknowledge the evil. Only then might our consciences have been so shocked that the ongoing mistreatment would have ended, that the Courts would have asserted more forcefully that the administration was not unlimited in the actions that it could take.
But of course this administration was not, and still is not, honorable. Yes, some lower level people were prosecuted, but those responsible under the doctrine of command responsibility got away with it, including the deliberate coverup. To protect higher ranking officer, do an investigation headed by a 2-star who cannot investigate his superiors. Antonio Taguba was an honest man, but lacked sufficient scope to tell us all of what happened.
And no one was punished for threatening Samuel Provance with 10 years imprisonment for insisting on informing the chain of command of the abuses.
And Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent to Iraq to "Gitmoize" Ab Ghraib got a promotion.
And remember this: the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public knowledge early in 2004. Were we not entitled to full knowledge of what had been done ostensibly in our name and on our behalf BEFORE we decided who should hold the reins of power, executive and legislative, when we voted in November?
"Gitmoize" - to use the techniques already in effect in Guantanamo and spread them to other places where we detained people. That brings us back to the experience of al Dossari.
We are more fortunate than we deserve. The we is this nation, and the people who have not risen up in righteous anger and disgust at what has happened, who have not yet insisted on full disclosure so that it never happens again.
We are fortunate because there are people whose hearts are large enough, whose spirits are magnanimous enough, that rather than condemn us they forgive. And whose words of forgiveness should shame us, even as those would demonstrate something of great importance.
To his captor he was dehumanized, labeled as "Detainee #261." To me, now reading his words, he is a large-spirited man called Jumah al Dossari, whose final words to us are these:
When I was watching "United 93," I thought of the soldier who had offered me compassion in Guantanamo. Her words reminded me that we all share common values, and only by holding on to them can we ensure that there is mercy and brotherhood in the world. After more than five years in Guantanamo, I can think of nothing more important.
And unless we accept the importance of those words, we cannot hope, as usually do at the end of my diaries, for meaningful peace.
I am disgusted, ashamed, and worse. And yet the generous spirit of this man that our nation abused, who is but one of many who so suffered, challenges me beyond that disgust and shame.
And so even as I demand full disclosure, however unlikely that might be, I am required to something else: a similar level of generousness of spirit. That includes in my attitudes towards those in power who were too cowardly to confront the evil for which they were responsible.
If we are responsible to do all we can to eliminate evil wherever we encounter it, must not we begin with ourselves, our own nation, so that we not be so arrogant as to do more evil in our own claims to righteous anger?
Let me end with prayer. The words are not mine, but rather attributed to a remarkable man who lived in 13th century. Regardless of their true provenance, they speak better than can I to what al Dossari offers us, and to which I would hope that we all aspire. So, from Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen
Peace