S04 - Ep. 6: Part 2, Asymmetry

Early on May 18, 2006, Bumgarner was in his morning meeting when someone came in with urgent news.

The dream had made its way through the camp. Lots of people heard about it. Several former detainees told us. They didn't put much stock in it. It just seemed whatever unlikely, but Bumgarner believed it.

He believed that the detainees believed it, but he also believed the substance of the dream that what it laid out was probably true.

If we succeed, you know, it's me and the crew, if we fail, it's me.

The men, found unconscious, had taken overdoses of anti-anxiety medication, not their own medication. In all, four detainees had become sick, though prison personnel said only two seemed to be genuine suicide attempts. They were hospitalized and recovered, and the prophecy Bumgarner dreaded about three detainees dying was averted. Still, he failed to recognize this May 18th crisis for what it was a prelude. Instead, the headline that day for Bumgarner was that detainees had somehow managed to hoard medication, which freaked him out.

What with the medical protocols and the regular cell searches, they should not have been able to do that so right away. On May 18th, Bumgarner ordered a facility-wide search. Cell searches happened all the time at Guantanamo, but not like this. Every single cell, every single person. Some 460 detainees at that point, now all hands on deck.

Reports vary about what they found, but Bumgarner remembers they discovered a bunch of people he thinks it was in the low teens had secreted pills.

It was such a sensitive issue. The camp had instituted a rule that only Muslim staff, interpreters or the camp's new cultural advisor were allowed to touch it. Obviously, detainees weren't happy about having to hand over their Qurans that day. But Bumgarner said nobody made too big a stank until they got to Camp 4..

One former detainee told us You could save leftovers for a couple days and then invite friends over for brunch. Admission to Camp 4 depended on good behavior. It was a reward for compliance, but just because you followed the Americans rules, it did not follow that you necessarily trusted the Americans. We talked to half a dozen detainees who were in Camp 4 that day in May, and they told us they had the distinct impression the Americans were up to something.

This didn't feel like a normal search, it felt more like a deliberate provocation, possibly for some dark purpose they couldn't decipher.

One day, the guards came to us in a weird way, They started talking loud, they started hitting doors. They wanted to take the holy book. That's Mustafa Ayat Adir, originally Algerian, later from Sarajevo, where he lives now.

They would grab it by the covers and they would shake it in a disrespectful way, the way you wouldn't do it to any regular book. Again, only Muslim personnel were supposed to touch the Qurans, that was the rule, and Bumgarner had suspended it.

Mustafa said he tried to broker an agreement with the guards whereby he would search the Qurans himself, but it didn't hold. And then, as Bumgarner would say, it started getting rowdy. Even the Afghan prisoners, who had a reputation for lying low, even they got rowdy at the prospect of the Quran under attack.

So they told him, We will fight, or you can kill us, we can sacrifice. When it comes to the Quran, that's Samuel Hajj from Sudan, a journalist. And they used also the tear gas abundantly, they used the tear gas.

I thought they would listen to the colonel, they could care less. Actually, it got them madder, I think.

They never had to actually engage with detainees. Most of the time, they sat around bored in their hut, watching movies on DVD or whole seasons of the office. The force-feeding chairs were stored in there, too. Hickman said he'd sometimes take a nap in one of them. But May 18th, when they hustled over to Camp 4, Hickman said. They could hear people yelling and banging and breaking stuff in all the different buildings, which ringed a large central yard.

About 200 Navy guards were staged there, waiting. The QRF team lined up outside the door of one particularly agitated block, Zulu Block. There's a whole wind-up protocol they're supposed to go through before they physically enter an enclosed space. But that got short-circuited when a guard started yelling about yet another suicide.

Yeah, with the ground, so when they wanted to enter the room and march forward, they would slip on this ground.

Again, there's some disagreement, especially between the Americans and the detainees, about some of the fine points here, Omri said. There was no ruse to lure them in, no ambush, no advance excretion gathering. He said they were reacting in the moment to being attacked, but everyone involved agrees they got pretty vicious.

So the prisoners started to break stuff like the light fixtures and stuff the light fixtures and the water bottles. The prisoners started throwing it at the guards.

It was comical to see a body go flying like that, he said, which he feels kind of bad about now.

They'd all been called over to Camp 4 to help.

S We had to take from them, and that's the God-honest truth. And they don't—we never would have said it like that, and they probably even to this day, don't like—wouldn't like us to put it like that. But if you ask any guard that was involved in that, that's what they'll tell you.

We finally had our day, you know?

He dealt with the May 18th debacle not as an existential problem, but as a disciplinary one. That night, Camp 4 was emptied out completely, all those supposedly compliant detainees sent to punishment blocks. From now on, fewer people would be allowed to congregate at any one time. And as for suicide prevention, Bumgarner focused on overdosing.

Medical staff only to distribute medications, not guards. But honestly, Bumgarner said, he felt like he had things back under control.

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That night, the Joint Task Force Commander, Admiral Harry Harris, hosted the camp's top officers at a dinner party. A rare break for Bumgarner.

So, sitting out on his little deck, looking out over Guantanamo, the actual bay itself, beautiful, relaxed evening. That sticks with me. So bad that while all this is building up in the camps, I am sitting probably for the first time and only time it happened in my time there, I am actually sitting relaxed at the Admiral's house.

All three had been found by guards hanging at the back of their cells near their sinks. Which they'd evidently stepped off of in such a way as to suspend themselves. They'd concealed themselves by attaching sheets or blankets to the ceiling in front of the sink. Their hands were tied and each had a piece of paper in a pocket, a couple of short, furious sentences written in Arabic. By the time Bumgarner arrived, the camp was in a state the guards were frantic.

One said he comforted a colleague and then puked in a trash can. Medical personnel were working on the three men, though they all appeared to be past saving. Within an hour of Bumgarner's arrival, they were pronounced dead.

This was very bad for the prison. That's where Bumgarner's head went. No detainees had died since the camp opened, and now three in one night. This is bad for us.

For me.

The immediate answer seemed to be run-of-the-mill incompetence. The guards were supposed to be walking the tier every three minutes, making sure to see skin and movement from each detainee in each cell. But as one guard later admitted to investigators, it gets old and boring. And it turned out two guards had gone to chow at the same time, which was against the rules. Eventually, Admiral Harris would conclude that prison personnel violated six procedures that night, some of which might have contributed to the detainees ability to kill themselves.

I can't tell you which six because redacted in any case by Dawn, Washington was waiting.

Just a month earlier, the U.N. Committee against Torture had issued a report saying the prison violated human rights law and should be shut down. The EU Parliament had also called for its closing, in part because of the inhumane conditions of confinement. Now, the Germans, the Danes, the British were reiterating, close it down.

The U.

S government, though, in an abundance of confidence, spun its weakness into a strength. These deaths didn't reflect badly on Guantanamo, just the opposite, these deaths justified Guantanamo.

Hours after the conference call with the Bigwigs in D.

C.

Admiral Harris went big. He told CNN the suicides were proof that these men were still in the fight, a continual threat to the United States. They are smart, they are creative, they are committed.

They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us. Asymmetrical warfare, meaning the wily, adaptive strategies guerrilla fighters or terrorists use to attack a bigger, stronger enemy. That was the government's story about the suicides, they were an act of war.

For his part, Bumgarner told me he didn't cotton to the asymmetrical warfare language. But he was certain the deaths were coordinated and that they were calculated to harm not necessarily the United States, but to harm Guantanamo. For one thing, he knew all the men on that particular block, alpha block of Camp one, he said. They were all instigators, manipulators, as he called them, hand-in-the-back-of-the-room types.

It was all about fulfilling the prophecy.

You don't plan suicides that way, that's not the way you do.

Amnesty International straight up blamed the Bush administration for the deaths.

Eventually, inevitably, yet another story emerged about what had happened to the three men. Some people began wondering aloud whether they'd in fact been killed. Maybe these weren't suicides at all, maybe they were homicides.

My name is Talal Al-Zahrani, I'm the father of the youngest man who died. My name is Talal Al-Zahrani Talal Al-Zahrani, a former general in the Saudi police and the father of the youngest man who died, Yasser Al-Zahrani. He openly challenged the U.S.

Government's account of what happened to his son. In a remarkably polite video statement, he implored the president and the courts and the American people to investigate. I never believed this story. There are many signs and pieces of evidence that show this story is false and that these individuals were killed at Guantanamo. There was some weirdness about their deaths.

Even if the guards were phoning it in that night, for instance, how could these hangings have gone unnoticed for so long? A couple of the men's bodies were showing the beginnings of rigor mortis. When guards cut them down, which takes about two hours to start to set in. The logs the guards made of their rounds that night were a little off. Someone seems to have falsified a head count about an hour before the first detainee was found hanging.

But when investigators asked the guards about it, they all claimed implausibly not to know who wrote the entry. In 2010, Harper's Magazine published an award-winning investigation into the Guantanamo suicides, with the word suicides in scare quotes. And it was intriguing. The reporter's main source was introduced as a whistleblower, Joe Hickman, the former sergeant in charge of the QRF team that fought the detainees in Camp 4, Hickman said some personnel were acting oddly that night. And that while he was on duty in a guard tower, he saw an unmarked white van coming and going from Camp 1, which appeared to him to be secretly moving individual prisoners to and fro Hickman's hypothesis.

Maybe another agency, perhaps the C.I.A. Had taken the men for secret meetings and things got out of hand and they died, and then they were strung up to look like suicides. Hickman wrote a book about it. To this day, he thinks there's a wide conspiracy to hide the truth of that night. And some of the detainees, including some of the former Guantanamo prisoners we spoke to, they also refuse to believe the men hanged themselves. They just don't see how or why they could have done it.

The Americans must have killed them somehow.

These three competing explanations for the suicides—warfare or misery or homicide—never seem to fade. People still talk about the deaths with some mystery. But there is information, a lot of it, that, to me, offers the most persuasive answer to the question of what happened. Information that lives inside the paper trail. These men left while they were still alive.

That's after the break.

Okay, so, of the three stories about what killed the men in camp one—desperation, asymmetrical warfare or homicide? —I'm going to set aside the homicide idea. Because no evidence has surfaced to support it. After all these years, and many good reporters we've spoken to told us they did take the idea seriously, tried to substantiate it, but they weren't able to. And then just the size of the cover-up we'd be talking about—all those people, all those falsified witness statements and investigative documents, and not one person has cracked in 20 years. —this seems unlikely. So to me, that leaves two options—desperation or warfare.

And if we're weighing the truth of those stories, we do have convincing evidence.

Bureaucratically speaking, I know the most about the Yemeni man, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, because I have his medical and behavioral records left over from an unsuccessful lawsuit filed on behalf of his and Yasser al-Zahrani's fathers.

Ahmed arrived in Guantanamo in June of 2002.

He was 22 years old, or possibly 33 years old. —The U.S never seems to have pinned down his birth date or his real name for that matter, but most of his Guantanamo records say he was 22. He'd worked selling clothes at the Souk in Taiz, Yemen, near his hometown.

He had a thick black beard and was married to a young woman named Hayat. The story, he told the U.S. was that he was studying at a university in Pakistan when he got arrested during a raid at the guesthouse where he was living. The U..S.

Thought he was lying, that the studying was a cover story and that? Ahmed was maybe a mid-to-high-level al-Qaeda operative and had possibly traveled with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. People said they saw him in Afghanistan, in Kandahar, he said. he'd never been there.

I have no idea whether he was mid-to-high-level Al-Qaeda, but from the records, it seems like he was a mid-to-high-level. Pain in the guard force's ass, he spits on someone, throws a cup of pee on someone, sexually harasses female guards now. And then. Early in 2004, he gets irfed a couple of times, once for refusal for reservation, meaning an interrogation session. None of which made him exceptional at Guantanamo, but it's pretty clear from the guard logs Ahmed was never okay at Guantanamo.

He wasn't inclined to settle down or wait it out, whatever it was, he was a tenacious resister. In January 2004, a guard sees him climbing the fence at the back of the Rec area, trying to see what's on the other side. The guard tells him to come down before the tower guards spot him. Ahmed tells the guard I want the infantry to shoot me so I can be with Allah. Please, MP, please.

If he had a reputation at Guantanamo, it was for hunger striking during the camp's very first hunger strike in 2002. Ahmed joins in. They have to revive him with oxygen. When he passes out. He joins the hunger strike again in July of 2005, not long after Bumgarner's arrival, he's one of the guys who stops for a couple of days when Bumgarner and Shaker Amr work out a deal.

And he's one of the guys who gets angry when that deal falls apart, believes the Americans have tricked them, lied to them. Breaks his toilet and his light fixture, goes back on hunger strike, and this time, he never really stops that fall of 2005, as Bumgarner is struggling to contain the hunger strike. Ahmed ends up in the detainee clinic a few times. He's so weak he can barely talk. He'd arrived at Guantanamo weighing about 177 pounds.

By December 20th, he's down to 124 and a half pounds by Christmas, he's hospitalized with pneumonia and a sepsis scare. At the very end of December 2005, a few weeks after the first force-feeding chairs were shipped to the island, medical personnel write this note. In his file. Patient states that he wanted to commit suicide because he does not want to be a prisoner anymore, and he lost hope. Ahmed will not stop hunger striking.

They prescribe him zoloft by January 10th. He weighs only 122 pounds. They strap him into the feeding chair.

This is how Bumgarner's period of peace looks for Ahmed. Dozens and dozens of pages of meticulous force-feeding documentation. Exact times, exact amounts of liquid nutrition, the width of the tube, the lidocaine percentage, which nostril? They snake it down. Whether he resists or not, whether he gets sick after twice a day, they're strapping him in the chair. The process is so harrowing. Most of the hunger strikers quit within a few weeks, but Ahmed doesn't.

By mid-February, he's one of only three men still on hunger strike. And the inside of his nose is infected and so inflamed. The nurse can't get a tube down, They put it down his throat instead. He's got other medical complaints as well itchiness, his ear hurts, testicular pain.

His knees were bashed during an earthing, he tells them, and now his knee pain is constant. But he is gaining weight 138 pounds, 150 pounds in his cell. He's allowed to keep a couple dozen pictures of his hometown, IBB, Yemen, a crazy beautiful city surrounded by green hills and waterfalls. All the while the behavioral health team is checking in on him, and all the while he's waving them off. A typical encounter. I'm good, everything is good.

Are you from Psych? Oh, no, I have nothing to say. I know your questions and you know, my answers. Have a good day. Ahmed keeps getting the feeding tube for another month.

After that, five months total of force feeding until lunchtime on June 2, 2006. A guard walks by Ahmed's cell, and instead of writing the usual one-word description in Ahmed's activity log, sitting, standing, sleeping, praying, the guard writes Eating. In all caps. With three exclamation points, Ahmed had voluntarily eaten a meal.

His hunger strike was over. By this time, he weighs 163 pounds. It's not clear if he's been sneaking food on the side somehow, or if the force feeding caused him to gain back the weight, but he's physically healthy. After a couple days, they determine he's ready to get off Oscar block in the discipline camp and move over to Alpha Block in Camp 1. On June 7. Two days before he kills himself, a behavioral health staffer comes by.

Ahmed is in good spirits, the report says. States that he has no mean thoughts of hurting others or himself. He's not seeing ghosts or genies in his cell, not hearing voices.

So that's how prison personnel saw Ahmed. But the clearest picture of what Ahmed himself was thinking and feeling comes from his own writing, which is part of the military's investigative record. He and the other men left letters, brief manifestos, explanations. My name is Ali Abdallah Ahmed Nasser Al-Salami. I'm 27 years old, married, my country is Yemen and I memorized the Quran. Praise and gratitude goes to Allah, Ahmed begins.

I don't know how I start my story, however, I know how I could end it. He writes of U.s greed and support for repressive regimes in the Middle East, including Iraq and Israel. Of his treatment in custody, the irfings and the tear gas and the humiliation, they desecrated our religion, our bodies and private parts.

He says he gave up his hunger strike just a few days back in order to quote, safeguard myself against the Americans. Oppression and, I mean, final relinquishment without return. God willing, I have remained repressed inside a very cold metal box. they call it a solitary cell. I have come out of this box.

And my intention was to put an end to these ordeals. I am not desperate and I swear to Allah, not afraid. The date on the letter is June 7, 2006, the same day he tells his behavioral health staffer he's feeling just fine, and two days before his suicide. In another letter addressed to Mohammed's nation, to the entire Muslim world, he says it again, Don't ever think I have been afflicted with desperation.

He hopes that perhaps by doing what he's going to do, it revives the hearts and awakens the endeavoring and victorious. He signs off with a telephone number in Yemen, but in other, more personal letters, also dated June 7. He sounds terribly sad to my dearest brother, he reminisces. Asks that he let people know what happened at home, at the shop, asks that he take good care of my parents and forgive me.

Asks my parents, too, for forgiveness to my family and the beloved ones. He writes about piety and obedience, and also his agony over being separated from them. To my dear wife, he hasn't seen her for five years. He writes of longing and devotion, and a gleaming moon and silk, and the smell of roses and sweet and fresh water.

The other men left writing, too. Yasser Azharani's letters are thematically and stylistically similar to Achmed's, but they have a little more fire. More of a raised fist, more talk of a U.S..-led conspiracy to keep them indefinitely detained, more ghastly detail. His letters, too, were all dated within days of his death from the third man, Mani Al-Utaybi. There's only one letter in the records dated June 8. Quote As you all know, the situation in this prison is worsening.

He asks Allah to release the other prisoners from captivity to diminish the infidels. His letter concludes. Forgive me.

We asked the former prisoners, we spoke to, what they remembered about the three men who died. Achmed Ereshidi, the Moroccan chef who spent five years in Guantanamo, told a story about Yasser Azharani. Ereshidi was often on the discipline blocks, he said, and that's the last place he saw Yasser.

And they removed him.

So, were the men martyrs? was this a coordinated political tactic, or were they hopeless prisoners? Sounds to me as if they were both, judging from Ahmed's letters, especially, Ahmed had thought this through.

He was done, suffering, done with the endless force feedings, but also he hoped his death would mean something, maybe even inspire something.

Guantanamo commanders never figured out exactly how the suicides had been planned or carried out, so there was no intelligence fix. They could grab onto. All they could try to do in response to this loss of control, Bumgarner said, was to try to reassert it.

Admiral Harris began using a new phrase in interviews with the press I don't think there's such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.

Mike Bumgarner came to believe he was personally responsible for the three suicides, not because his policies were too harsh, because they were too soft. He'd relaxed the SOPs in Camp 1. So that when Yasser al-Zahrani was seen washing his own blanket in his cell and then hanging it up to dry. That was allowed. And the extra stuff they were permitted to keep in their cells, the clothing, the water bottles, the sewing area. On Alpha block. A cell where you could use a needle and thread the dim lights so you couldn't easily see the back of the cell. Plus, the No flashlights in detainees faces rule for guards so as not to disturb detainees sleep. All of that helped the detainees pull off their suicides. And all of that. Carrots planted by Bumgarner.

What he learned from the suicides was that you can't negotiate with terrorists in trying to comply with certain aspects of the Geneva conventions. Bumgarner thought he'd bent too far toward accommodating the detainees, and the detainees had manipulated his leniency. That's what some of his superiors had warned about, and some of his subordinates had groused about early on. And now he saw they were right. November block, that most miserable discipline block he instituted. Where your hair and beard would get shorn, where you couldn't talk, nothing in your cell except a merciless vent blasting cold air. That's what really worked, he said. That's what created compliance at Guantanamo.

They were always reaching for the next thing, and anything you did for them, they didn't really recognize that wasn't. There was no. Not that you would expect appreciation. People always said, Well, what do you expect from the guys? You know, I mean, there's not a trustworthy son of a bitch in there. Well, what do you expect? I mean, they're terrorists, just, you know, as we thought, What do you expect?

But I didn't really some of my treated people humans, I just I thought there was a degree.

Wasn't playing by the rules, that's what Ahmed Ereshidi explained to us. He said. The worst thing was that the U.S seemed to think it was playing by the rules.

You know, that makes you think that it's going to get worse and worse and worse.

The accusation was weak and quickly fell away. And in any case, Bumgarner considered it a pretext. He's certain what really pissed off his command were some intemperate comments he made in the days following the suicides. Captured by that reporter. The most damning thing? He quoted Bumgarner saying, "...in honor of our three dead brothers. And then biting into a pork chop sandwich.

Bumgarner was suspended from his duties and sent to his quarters pending an inquiry.

Respected, I thought by people and doing the right thing, doing right for God and country, you know? And the next second, I'm like, on the FBI's most wanted list, or at least that's the way I felt.

And when you see I'm also at age eight, I'm winning a citizenship award. I mean, I was always the good citizen, always, I was the guy. I won't say I do good, but I never got in trouble, I was always the right guy, you know, Stickler on rule following. And to know that I'm being accused of breaking the law. That I've been involved in something that is wrong, that I failed, that we let the nation because it was, I mean, Hood, would talk about it.

You know, we're not going to let anybody die. I mean, it's that was our mission, that was part of the mission. Nobody's going to escape, nobody's going to die.

Those are the things that you just don't allow to happen.

And that was the worst time of my life, to be honest. That was the absolute rock bottom of my whole life, that period. Wow, with nothing coming anywhere near close.

I was very close, very, very, very, very close. I was as close as you could be without doing it.

Life was over for me. I mean, it was horrible. I can't tell you how low I was. I can't even begin to tell you how low I was.

A coda to this story of the worst year? Guantanamo's favorite reporter, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, had toured the camp on June 9, 2006, the same day, just coincidentally, as the suicides.

Bumgardner told me he knew O'Reilly wanted a soundbite and so he exaggerated a little, gave the people what they wanted.

These folks are not what folks paint in the media out there, not at all. These are not good guys. I stake my reputation and my life as a career military policeman on this. No ifs, ands or buts.

We appreciate the hospitality of the joint task force in Guantanamo.

Bumgardner had been worried that pressure from liberals and bad press would close Guantanamo. But in hindsight, it's obvious he had nothing to worry about. Because this asymmetrical drumbeat was always stronger. The one pounding out the message to any and all wavering Americans don't believe, the human rights lawyers, the naysayers. Guantanamo is vital to our national security. When O'Reilly's tour was over, Bumgardner told me he escorted him off the island.

He said to me, he said, Colonel, don't worry about it, this place is not going to close. I said I was very deferential to him. Yes, sir, how do you know that?

He goes, I'm not going to let it happen.

That's next time.

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