The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton Harpers Magazine
Jan. 18, 2009

1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”


When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore
the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have
made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive
order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo
Naval Base “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one
year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise.
Some prisoners there are being charged with crimes, others released, but the
date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future.
Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young
administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush
presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to
investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible
homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died
suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven.
Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal
Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned
at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men
had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger
strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being
held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly
troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into
lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to
leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear
Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual
move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this
was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare
waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers
for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only
the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has
primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report
supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in
command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report
public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it
disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily
redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully
cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of
Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in
November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its
conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of
unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a
reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets
and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh
wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least
one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat.
We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on
those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose,
tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The
NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in
non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost
simultaneously.

Al-Zahrani, according to the report, was discovered first, at 12:39 a.m.,
and taken by several Alpha Block guards to the camp’s detention medical
clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor the phone number for one, so a
clinic staffer dialed 911. During this time, other guards discovered
Al-Utaybi. Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later. Although
rigor mortis had already set in—indicating that the men had been dead for at
least two hours—the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer
attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his
jaw, broke his teeth.

The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to
their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their
mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating
procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to
“conduct a visual search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The
report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their
activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping
in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so
much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy
guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from
permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to
hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty,
having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never
disciplined.

A separate report, the result of an “informal investigation” initiated by
Admiral Harris, found that standard operating procedures were violated that
night but concluded that disciplinary action was not warranted because of
the “generally permissive environment” of the cell block and the numerous
“concessions” that had been made with regard to the prisoners’ comfort,
which “concessions” had resulted in a “general confusion by the guard and
the JDG staff over many of the rules that applied to the guard force’s
handling of the detainees.” According to Harris, even had standard operating
procedures been followed, “it is possible that the detainees could have
successfully committed suicide anyway.”

This is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and
reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense
Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now
four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta,
including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as
sergeant of the guard the night of June 9–10, have furnished an account
dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were
neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to
speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated
a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph
Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews
with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who
died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their
deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously
unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events
that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.


2. “Camp No”


The soldiers of the Maryland-based 629th Military Intelligence Battalion
arrived at Guantánamo Naval Base in March 2006, assigned to provide security
to Camp America, the sector of the base containing the five individual
prison compounds that house the prisoners. Camp Delta was at the time the
largest of these compounds, and within its walls were four smaller camps,
numbered 1 through 4, which in turn were divided into cell blocks. Life at
Camp America, as at all prisons, was and remains rigorously routinized for
both prisoners and their jailers. Navy guards patrol the cell blocks and
Army personnel control the exterior areas of the camp. All observed
incidents must be logged. For the Army guards who man the towers and “sally
ports” (access points), knowing who enters and leaves the camp, and exactly
when, is the essence of their mission.

One of the new guards who arrived that March was Joe Hickman, then a
sergeant. Hickman grew up in Baltimore and joined the Marines in 1983, at
the age of nineteen. When I interviewed him in January at his home in
Wisconsin, he told me he had been inspired to enlist by Ronald Reagan, “the
greatest president we’ve ever had.” He worked in a military intelligence
unit and was eventually tapped for Reagan’s Presidential Guard detail, an
assignment reserved for model soldiers. When his four years were up, Hickman
returned home, where he worked a series of security jobs—prison transport,
executive protection, and eventually private investigations. After September
11 he decided to re-enlist, at thirty-seven, this time in the Army National
Guard.

Hickman deployed to Guantánamo with his friend Specialist Tony Davila, who
grew up outside Washington, D.C., and who had himself been a private
investigator. When they arrived at Camp Delta, Davila told me, soldiers from
the California National Guard unit they were relieving introduced him to
some of the curiosities of the base. The most noteworthy of these was an
unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound nestled out of sight between
two plateaus about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America’s
perimeter. One day, while on foot patrol, Hickman and Davila came across the
compound. It looked like other camps within Camp America, Davila said, only
it had no guard towers and it was surrounded with concertina wire. They saw
no activity, but Hickman guessed the place could house as many as eighty
prisoners. One part of the compound, he said, had the same appearance as the
interrogation centers at other prison camps.

The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was
chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said,
“This place does not exist,” and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge
of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site.
Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers—many of whom were required to
patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America—had seen the compound, and many
speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some
of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the
camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.

A friend of Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound “Camp No,” the idea being
that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” He and
Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once,
Hickman said, he heard a “series of screams” from within the compound.

Hickman and his men also discovered that there were odd exceptions to their
duties. Army guards were charged with searching and logging every vehicle
that passed into and out of Camp Delta. “When John McCain came to the camp,
he had to be logged in.” However, Hickman was instructed to make no record
whatsoever of the movements of one vehicle in particular—a white van, dubbed
the “paddy wagon,” that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled
prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta. The van had no rear
windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner.
Navy drivers, Hickman came to understand, would let the guards know they had
a prisoner in the van by saying they were “delivering a pizza.”

The paddy wagon was used to transport prisoners to medical facilities and to
meetings with their lawyers. But as Hickman monitored the paddy wagon’s
movements from the guard tower at Camp Delta, he frequently saw it follow an
unexpected route. When the van reached the first intersection, instead of
heading right—toward the other camps or toward one of the buildings where
prisoners could meet with their lawyers—it made a left. In that direction,
past the perimeter checkpoint known as ACP Roosevelt, there were only two
destinations. One was a beach where soldiers went to swim. The other was
Camp No.


3. “Lit up”


The night the prisoners died, Hickman was on duty as sergeant of the guard
for Camp America’s exterior security force. When his twelve-hour shift
began, at 6 p.m., he climbed the ladder to Tower 1, which stood twenty feet
above Sally Port 1, the main entrance to Camp Delta. From there he had an
excellent view of the camp, and much of the exterior perimeter as well.
Later he would make his rounds.

Shortly after his shift began, Hickman noticed that someone had parked the
paddy wagon near Camp 1, which houses Alpha Block. A moment later, two Navy
guards emerged from Camp 1, escorting a prisoner. They put the prisoner into
the back of the van and then left the camp through Sally Port 1, just below
Hickman. He was under standing orders not to search the paddy wagon, so he
just watched it as it headed east. He assumed the guards and their charge
were bound for one of the other prison camps southeast of Camp Delta. But
when the van reached the first intersection, instead of making a right,
toward the other camps, it made the left, toward ACP Roosevelt and Camp No.

Twenty minutes later—about the amount of time needed for the trip to Camp No
and back—the paddy wagon returned. This time Hickman paid closer attention.
He couldn’t see the Navy guards’ faces, but from body size and uniform they
appeared to be the same men.

The guards walked into Camp 1 and soon emerged with another prisoner. They
departed Camp America, again in the direction of Camp No. Twenty minutes
later, the van returned. Hickman, his curiosity piqued by the unusual flurry
of activity and guessing that the guards might make another excursion, left
Tower 1 and drove the three quarters of a mile to ACP Roosevelt to see
exactly where the paddy wagon was headed. Shortly thereafter, the van passed
through the checkpoint for the third time and then went another hundred
yards, whereupon it turned toward Camp No, eliminating any question in
Hickman’s mind about where it was going. All three prisoners would have
reached their destination before 8 p.m.

Hickman says he saw nothing more of note until about 11:30 p.m, when he had
returned to his preferred vantage at Tower 1. As he watched, the paddy wagon
returned to Camp Delta. This time, however, the Navy guards did not get out
of the van to enter Camp 1. Instead, they backed the vehicle up to the
entrance of the medical clinic, as if to unload something.

At approximately 11:45 p.m.—nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first
body was discovered—Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, preparing for a
midnight shift in Tower 1, was approached by a senior Navy NCO. Penvose told
me that the NCO—who, following standard operating procedures, wore no name
tag—appeared to be extremely agitated. He instructed Penvose to go
immediately to the Camp Delta chow hall, identify a female senior petty
officer who would be dining there, and relay to her a specific code word.
Penvose did as he was instructed. The officer leapt up from her seat and
immediately ran out of the chow hall.

Another thirty minutes passed. Then, as Hickman and Penvose both recall,
Camp Delta suddenly “lit up”—stadium-style flood lights were turned on, and
the camp became the scene of frenzied activity, filling with personnel in
and out of uniform. Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the
center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a
distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners
had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had
died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them
was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the
men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

Hickman was concerned that such a serious incident could have occurred in
Camp 1 on his watch. He asked his tower guards what they had seen. Penvose,
from his position at Tower 1, had an unobstructed view of the walkway
between Camp 1 and the medical clinic—the path by which any prisoners who
died at Camp 1 would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose told Hickman, and
later confirmed to me, that he saw no prisoners being moved from Camp 1 to
the clinic. In Tower 4 (it should be noted that Army and Navy guard-tower
designations differ), another Army specialist, David Caroll, was forty-five
yards from Alpha Block, the cell block within Camp 1 that had housed the
three dead men. He also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that
connected the cell block itself to the clinic. He likewise reported to
Hickman, and confirmed to me, that he had seen no prisoners transferred to
the clinic that night, dead or alive.


4. “He Could Not Cry out”


The fate of a fourth prisoner, a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named
Shaker Aamer, may be related to that of the three prisoners who died on June
9. Aamer is married to a British woman and was in the process of becoming a
British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2001.
United States authorities insist that he carried a gun and served Osama bin
Laden as an interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer’s fluency
in English soon allowed him to play an important role in camp politics.
According to both Aamer’s attorney and press accounts furnished by Army
Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, Aamer cooperated
closely with Bumgarner in efforts to bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end.
He persuaded several prisoners to break their strike for a while, but the
settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer was sent to solitary
confinement. Then, on the night the prisoners from Alpha Block died, Aamer
says he himself was the victim of an act of striking brutality.

He described the events in detail to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, who was
permitted to speak to him several weeks later. Katznelson recorded every
detail of Aamer’s account and filed an affidavit with the federal district
court in Washington, setting it out:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight.
Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he
had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me
that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and
legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going
to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples,
just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him.
They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break.
They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held
his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating
intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed,
they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating
pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his
airway cut off and a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is
alarming. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the
three deceased prisoners.

The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British
subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British
has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this
request, U.S. authorities have cited unelaborated “security” concerns. There
is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military
commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no
meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be
concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in
criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on
June 9, 2006, and during his 2002 detention in Afghanistan at Bagram
Airfield, where he was subjected to a procedure in which his head was
smashed repeatedly against a wall. This torture technique, called “walling”
in CIA documents, was expressly approved at a later date by the Department
of Justice.


5. “You All Know”


By dawn, the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners
had committed suicide by swallowing rags. Colonel Bumgarner called a meeting
of the guards, and at 7:00 a.m. at least fifty soldiers and sailors gathered
at Camp America’s open-air theater.

Bumgarner was known as an eccentric commander. Hickman marveled, for
instance, at the colonel’s insistence that his staff line up and salute him,
to music selections that included Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the reggae
hit “Bad Boys,” as he entered the command center. This morning, however,
Hickman thought Bumgarner seemed unusually nervous and clipped.

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech,
Bumgarner told his audience that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha
Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags,
causing them to choke to death. This was a surprise to no one—even
servicemen who had not worked the night before had heard about the rags. But
then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something
different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by
hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that
servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the
official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and
email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than
twenty minutes. (Bumgarner has not responded to requests for comment.)

That evening, Bumgarner’s boss, Admiral Harris, read a statement to
reporters:

An alert, professional guard noticed something out of the ordinary in the
cell of one of the detainees. The guard’s response was swift and
professional to secure the area and check on the status of the detainee.
When it was apparent that the detainee had hung himself, the guard force and
medical teams reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee’s life. The
detainee was unresponsive and not breathing. [The] guard force began to
check on the health and welfare of other detainees. Two detainees in their
cells had also hung themselves.

After praising the guards and the medics, Harris—in a notable departure from
traditional military decorum—launched his attack on the men who had died on
his watch. “They have no regard for human life,” Harris said, “neither ours
nor their own.” A Pentagon press release issued soon after described the
dead men, who had been accused of no crime, as Al Qaeda or Taliban
operatives. Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon’s chief press
officer, went still further, telling the Guardian’s David Rose, “These guys
were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people
they tried at Nuremberg.” The Pentagon was not the only U.S. government
agency to participate in the assault. Colleen Graffy, a deputy assistant
secretary of state, told the BBC that “taking their own lives was not
necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move.”

The same day the three prisoners died, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly
completed a reporting trip to the naval base, where, according to his
account on The O’Reilly Factor, the Joint Army Navy Task Force “granted the
Factor near total access to the prison.” Although the Pentagon began turning
away reporters after news of the deaths had emerged, two reporters from the
Charlotte Observer, Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin, had arrived
that morning to work on a profile of Bumgarner, and the colonel invited them
to shadow him as he dealt with the crisis. A Pentagon spokesman later told
the Observer it had been expecting a “puff piece,” which is why, according
to the Observer, “Bumgarner and his superiors on the base” had given them
permission to remain.

Bumgarner quickly returned to his theatrical ways. As Gordon reported in the
June 13, 2006, issue of the Observer, the colonel seemed to enjoy putting on
a show. “Right now, we are at ground zero,” Bumgarner told his officer staff
during a June 12 meeting. Referring to the naval base’s prisoners, he said,
“There is not a trustworthy son of a bitch in the entire bunch.” In the same
article, Gordon also noted what he had learned about the deaths. The
suicides had occurred “in three cells on the same block,” he reported. The
prisoners had “hanged themselves with strips of knotted cloth taken from
clothing and sheets,” after shaping their pillows and blankets to look like
sleeping bodies. “And Bumgarner said,” Gordon reported, “each had a ball of
cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices.”

Something about Bumgarner’s Observer interview seemed to have set off an
alarm far up the chain of command. No sooner was Gordon’s story in print
than Bumgarner was called to Admiral Harris’s office. As Bumgarner would
tell Gordon in a follow-up profile three months later, Harris was holding up
a copy of the Observer: “This,” said the admiral to Bumgarner, “could get me
relieved.” (Harris did not respond to requests for comment.) That same day,
an investigation was launched to determine whether classified information
had been leaked from Guantánamo. Bumgarner was suspended.

Less than a week after the appearance of the Observer stories, Davila and
Hickman each heard separately from friends in the Navy and in the military
police that FBI agents had raided the colonel’s quarters. The MPs understood
from their FBI contacts that there was concern over the possibility that
Bumgarner had taken home some classified materials and was planning to share
them with the media or to use them in writing a book.

On June 27, two weeks later, Gordon’s Observer colleague Scott Dodd
reported: “A brigadier general determined that ‘unclassified sensitive
information’ was revealed to the public in the days after the June 10
suicides.” Harris, according to the article, had already ordered
“appropriate administrative action.” Bumgarner soon left Guantánamo for a
new post in Missouri. He now serves as an ROTC instructor at Virginia Tech
in Blacksburg.

Bumgarner’s comments appear to be at odds with the official Pentagon
narrative on only one point: that the deaths had involved cloth being
stuffed into the prisoners’ mouths. The involvement of the FBI suggested
that more was at issue.


6. “An Unmistakable Message”


On June 10, NCIS investigators began interviewing the Navy guards in charge
of Alpha Block, but after the Pentagon committed itself to the suicide
narrative, they appear to have stopped. On June 14, the interviews resumed,
and the NCIS informed at least six Navy guards that they were suspected of
making false statements or failing to obey direct orders. No disciplinary
action ever followed.

The investigators conducted interviews with guards, medics, prisoners, and
officers. As the Seton Hall researchers note, however, nothing in the NCIS
report suggests that the investigators secured or reviewed the duty roster,
the prisoner-transfer book, the pass-on book, the records of phone and radio
communications, or footage from the camera that continuously monitored
activity in the hallways, all of which could have helped them
authoritatively reconstruct the events of that evening.

The NCIS did, however, move swiftly to seize every piece of paper possessed
by every single prisoner in Camp America, some 1,065 pounds of material,
much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence. Several weeks later,
authorities sought an after-the-fact justification. The Justice
Department—bolstered by sworn statements from Admiral Harris and from Carol
Kisthardt, the special agent in charge of the NCIS investigation—claimed in
a U.S. district court that the seizure was appropriate because there had
been a conspiracy among the prisoners to commit suicide. Justice further
claimed that investigators had found suicide notes and argued that the
attorney-client materials were being used to pass communications among the
prisoners.

David Remes, a lawyer who opposed the Justice Department’s efforts,
explained the practical effect of the government’s maneuvers. The seizure,
he said, “sent an unmistakable message to the prisoners that they could not
expect their communications with their lawyers to remain confidential. The
Justice Department defended the massive breach of the attorney-client
privilege on the account of the deaths on June 9 and the asserted need to
investigate them.”

If the “suicides” were a form of warfare between the prisoners and the Bush
Administration, as Admiral Harris charged, it was the latter that quickly
turned the war to its advantage.


7. “Yasser Couldn’t Even Make a Sandwich!”


When I asked Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his son, he
was direct. “They snatched my seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment,”
he said. “They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for five years.
They tortured him. Then they killed him and returned him to me in a box, cut
up.”

Al-Zahrani was a brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed the
Pentagon’s claims, as well as the investigation that supported them. Yasser,
he said, was a young man who loved to play soccer and didn’t care for
politics. The Pentagon claimed that Yasser’s frontline battle experience
came from his having been a cook in a Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that
this was preposterous: “A cook? Yasser couldn’t even make a sandwich!”

“Yasser wasn’t guilty of anything.” Al-Zahrani said. “He knew that. He
firmly believed he would be heading home soon. Why would he commit suicide?”
The evidence supports this argument. Hyperbolic U.S. government statements
at the time of Yasser Al-Zahrani’s death masked the fact that his case had
been reviewed and that he was, in fact, on a list of prisoners to be sent
home. I had shown Al-Zahrani the letter that the government says was
Yasser’s suicide note and asked him whether he recognized his son’s
handwriting. He had never seen the note before, he answered, and no U.S.
official had ever asked him about it. After studying the note carefully, he
said, “This is a forgery.”

Also returned to Saudi Arabia was the body of Mani Al-Utaybi. Orphaned in
youth, Mani grew up in his uncle’s home in the small town of Dawadmi. I
spoke to one of the many cousins who shared that home, Faris Al-Utaybi.
Mani, said Faris, had gone to Baluchistan—a rural, tribal area that
straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—to do humanitarian work, and
someone there had sold him to the Americans for $5,000. He said that Mani
was a peaceful man who would harm no one. Indeed, U.S. authorities had
decided to release Al-Utaybi and return him to Saudi Arabia. When he died,
he was just a few weeks shy of his transfer.

Salah Al-Salami was seized in March 2002, when Pakistani authorities raided
a residence in Karachi believed to have been used as a safe house by Abu
Zubaydah and took into custody all who were living there at the time. A
Yemeni, Al-Salami had quit his job and moved to Pakistan with only $400 in
his pocket. The U.S. suspicions against him rested almost entirely on the
fact that he had taken lodgings, with other students, in a boarding house
that terrorists might at one point have used. There was no direct evidence
linking him either to Al Qaeda or to the Taliban. On August 22, 2008, the
Washington Post quoted from a previously secret review of his case: “There
is no credible information to suggest [Al-Salami] received terrorist related
training or is a member of the Al Qaeda network.” All that stood in the way
of Al-Salami’s release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic relations
between the United States and Yemen.


8. “The Removal of the Neck Organs”


Military pathologists connected with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
arranged immediate autopsies of the three dead prisoners, without securing
the permission of the men’s families. The identities and findings of the
pathologists remain shrouded in extraordinary secrecy, but the timing of the
autopsies suggests that medical personnel stationed at Guantánamo may have
undertaken the procedure without waiting for the arrival of an experienced
medical examiner from the United States. Each of the heavily redacted
autopsy reports states unequivocally that “the manner of death is suicide”
and, more specifically, that the prisoner died of “hanging.” Each of the
reports describes ligatures that were found wrapped around the prisoner’s
neck, as well as circumferential dried abrasion furrows imprinted with the
very fine weave pattern of the ligature fabric and forming an inverted “V”
on the back of the head. This condition, the anonymous pathologists state,
is consistent with that of a hanging victim.

The pathologists place the time of death “at least a couple of hours” before
the bodies were discovered, which would be sometime before 10:30 p.m. on
June 9. Additionally, the autopsy of Al-Salami states that his hyoid bone
was broken, a phenomenon usually associated with manual strangulation, not
hanging.

The report asserts that the hyoid was broken “during the removal of the neck
organs.” An odd admission, given that these are the very body parts—the
larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage—that would have been
essential to determining whether death occurred from hanging, from
strangulation, or from choking. These parts remained missing when the men’s
families finally received their bodies.

All the families requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were
examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami,
from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in
Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would
have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists
contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing
body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute
did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a
series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)

When Al-Zahrani viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide.
“There was a major blow to the head on the right side,” he said. “There was
evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There
were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm.” None of these
details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement
professional,” Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when examining a
body.”

Mangin, for his part, expressed particular concern about Al-Salami’s mouth
and throat, where he saw “a blunt trauma carried out against the oral
region.” The U.S. autopsy report mentions an effort at resuscitation, but
this, in Mangin’s view, did not explain the severity of the injuries. He
also noted that some of the marks on the neck were not those he would
normally associate with hanging.


9. “I Know Some Things You Don’t”


Sergeant Joe Hickman’s tour of duty, which ended in March 2007, was
distinguished: he was selected as Guantánamo’s “NCO of the Quarter” and was
given a commendation medal. When he returned to the United States, he was
promoted to staff sergeant and worked in Maryland as an Army recruiter
before settling eventually in Wisconsin. But he could not forget what he had
seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, Hickman decided to
act. “I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could
actually come forward, ” he said. “It was haunting me.”

Hickman had seen a 2006 report from Seton Hall University Law School dealing
with the deaths of the three prisoners, and he followed their subsequent
work. After Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he called Mark Denbeaux,
the professor who had led the Seton Hall team. “I learned something from
your report,” he said, “but I know some things you don’t.”

Within two days, Hickman was in Newark, meeting with Denbeaux. Also at the
meeting was Denbeaux’s son and sometime co-editor Josh, a private attorney.
Josh Denbeaux agreed to represent Hickman, who was concerned that he could
go to prison if he disobeyed Colonel Bumgarner’s order not to speak out,
even if that order was itself illegal. Hickman did not want to speak to the
press. On the other hand, he felt that “silence was just wrong.”

The two lawyers quickly made arrangements for Hickman to speak instead with
authorities in Washington, D.C. On February 2, they had meetings on Capitol
Hill and with the Department of Justice. The meeting with Justice was an odd
one. The father-and-son legal team were met by Rita Glavin, the acting head
of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; John Morton, who was soon to
become an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security; and
Steven Fagell, counselor to the head of the Criminal Division. Fagell had
been, along with the new attorney general, Eric Holder, a partner at the
elite Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, and was widely viewed as
“Holder’s eyes” in the Criminal Division.

For more than an hour, the two lawyers described what Hickman had seen: the
existence of Camp No, the transportation of the three prisoners, the van’s
arrival at the medical clinic, the lack of evidence that any bodies had ever
been removed from Alpha Block, and so on. The officials listened intently
and asked many questions. The Denbeauxes said they could provide a list of
witnesses who would corroborate every aspect of their account. At the end of
the meeting, Mark Denbeaux recalled, the officials specifically thanked the
lawyers for not speaking to reporters first and for “doing it the right
way.”

Two days later, another Justice Department official, Teresa McHenry, head of
the Criminal Division’s Domestic Security Section, called Mark Denbeaux and
said that she was heading up an investigation and wanted to meet directly
with his client. She went to New Jersey to do so. Hickman then reviewed the
basic facts and furnished McHenry with the promised list of corroborating
witnesses and details on how they could be contacted.

The Denbeauxes did not hear from anyone at the Justice Department for at
least two months. Then, in April, an FBI agent called to say she did not
have the list of contacts. She asked if this document could be provided
again. It was. Shortly thereafter, Fagell a Justice official [see update
<http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006395> ] and two FBI agents
interviewed Davila, who had left the Army, in Columbia, South Carolina.
Fagell asked Davila if he was prepared to travel to Guantánamo to identify
the locations of various sites. He said he was. “It seemed like they were
interested,” Davila told me. “Then I never heard from them again.”

Several more months passed, and Hickman and his lawyers became increasingly
concerned that nothing was going to happen. On October 27, 2009, they
resumed dealings with Congress that they had initiated on February 2 and
then broken off at the Justice Department’s request; they were also in
contact with ABC News. Two days later, Teresa McHenry called Mark Denbeaux
and asked whether he had gone to Congress and ABC News about the matter. “I
said that I had,” Denbeaux told me. He asked her, “Was there anything wrong
with that?” McHenry then suggested that the investigation was finished.
Denbeaux reminded her that she had yet to interview some of the
corroborating witnesses. “There are a few small things to do,” Denbeaux says
McHenry answered, “then it will be finished.”

Specialist Christopher Penvose told me that on October 30, the day following
the conversation between Mark Denbeaux and Teresa McHenry, McHenry an
official [see update <http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006395> ]
showed up at Penvose’s home in south Baltimore with some FBI agents. She had
a “few questions,” she told him. Investigators working with her soon
contacted two other witnesses.

On November 2, 2009, McHenry called Mark Denbeaux to tell him that the
Justice Department’s investigation was being closed. “It was a strange
conversation,” Denbeaux recalled. McHenry explained that “the gist of
Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.” But when Denbeaux
asked what that “gist” actually was, McHenry declined to say. She just
reiterated that Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported. Denbeaux
asked what conclusions exactly were unsupported. McHenry refused to say.


10. “They Accomplished Nothing”


One of the most intriguing aspects of this case concerns the use of Camp No.
Under George W. Bush, the CIA created an archipelago of secret detention
centers that spanned the globe, and authorities at these sites deployed an
array of Justice Department–sanctioned torture techniques—including
waterboarding, which often entails inserting cloth into the subject’s
mouth—on prisoners they deemed to be involved in terrorism. The presence of
a black site at Guantánamo has long been a subject of speculation among
lawyers and human-rights activists, and the experience of Sergeant Hickman
and other Guantánamo guards compels us to ask whether the three prisoners
who died on June 9 were being interrogated by the CIA, and whether their
deaths resulted from the grueling techniques the Justice Department had
approved for the agency’s use—or from other tortures lacking that sanction.

Complicating these questions is the fact that Camp No might have been
controlled by another authority, the Joint Special Operations Command, which
Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had hoped to transform into a
Pentagon version of the CIA. Under Rumsfeld’s direction, JSOC began to take
on many tasks traditionally handled by the CIA, including the housing and
interrogation of prisoners at black sites around the world. The Pentagon
recently acknowledged the existence of one such JSOC black site, located at
Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and other suspected sites, such as Camp Nama
in Baghdad, have been carefully documented by human-rights researchers.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture released last year,
the sections about Guantánamo were significantly redacted. The position and
circumstances of these deletions point to a significant JSOC interrogation
program at the base. (It should be noted that Obama’s order last year to
close other secret detention camps was narrowly worded to apply only to the
CIA.)

Regardless of whether Camp No belonged to the CIA or JSOC, the Justice
Department has plenty of its own secrets to protect. The department would
seem to have been involved in the cover-up from the first days, when FBI
agents stormed Colonel Bumgarner’s quarters. This was unusual for two
reasons. When Pentagon officials engage in a leak investigation, they
generally use military investigators. They rarely turn to the FBI, because
they cannot control the actions of a civilian agency. Moreover, when the FBI
does open an investigation, it nearly always does so with great discretion.
The Bumgarner investigation was widely telegraphed, though, and seemed
intended to send a message to the military personnel at Camp Delta: Talk
about what happened at your own risk. All of which suggests it was not the
Pentagon so much as the White House that hoped to suppress the truth.

In the weeks following the 2006 deaths, the Justice Department decided to
use the suicide narrative as leverage against the Guantánamo prisoners and
their troublesome lawyers, who were pressing the government to justify its
long-term imprisonment of their clients. After the NCIS seized thousands of
pages of privileged communications, the Justice Department went to court to
defend the action. It argued that such steps were warranted by the
extraordinary facts surrounding the June 9 “suicides.” U.S. District Court
Judge James Robertson gave the Justice Department a sympathetic hearing, and
he ruled in its favor, but he also noted a curious aspect of the
government’s presentation: its “citations supporting the fact of the
suicides” were all drawn from media accounts. Why had the Justice Department
lawyers who argued the case gone to such lengths to avoid making any
statement under oath about the suicides? Did they do so in order to deceive
the court? If so, they could face disciplinary proceedings or disbarment.

The Justice Department also faces questions about its larger role in
creating the circumstances that led to the use of so-called enhanced
interrogation and restraint techniques at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In 2006,
the use of a gagging restraint had already been connected to the death on
January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in
the custody of the Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men who
died at Guantánamo showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle
marks, and significant bruising. The removal of their throats made it
difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were
suspended by a noose. The Justice Department itself had been deeply involved
in the process of approving and setting the conditions for the use of
torture techniques, issuing a long series of memoranda that CIA agents and
others could use to defend themselves against any subsequent criminal
prosecution.

Teresa McHenry, the investigator charged with accounting for the deaths of
the three men at Guantánamo, has firsthand knowledge of the Justice
Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice
Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least
one of those memos. As a former war-crimes prosecutor, McHenry knows full
well that government officials who attempt to cover up crimes perpetrated
against prisoners in wartime face prosecution under the doctrine of command
responsibility. (McHenry declined to clarify the role she played in drafting
the memos.)

As retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of
the Navy, told me, “Filing false reports and making false statements is bad
enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command
attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even
be viewed as accessories after the fact in the original crime.” With command
authority comes command responsibility, he said. “If the heart of the
military is obeying orders down the chain of command, then its soul is
accountability up the chain. You can’t demand the former without the
latter.”

The Justice Department thus faced a dilemma; it could do the politically
convenient thing, which was to find no justification for a thorough
investigation, leave the NCIS conclusions in place, and hope that the public
and the news media would obey the Obama Administration’s dictum to “look
forward, not backward”; or it could pursue a course of action that would
implicate the Bush Justice Department in a cover-up of possible homicides.

Nearly 200 men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. In June 2009, six months
after Barack Obama took office, one of them, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni
named Muhammed Abdallah Salih, was found dead in his cell. The exact
circumstances of his death, like those of the deaths of the three men from
Alpha Block, remain uncertain. Those charged with accounting for what
happened—the prison command, the civilian and military investigative
agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general
himself—all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of
political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.

Not everyone who is involved in this matter views it from a political
perspective, of course. General Al-Zahrani grieves for his son, but at the
end of a lengthy interview he paused and his thoughts turned elsewhere. “The
truth is what matters,” he said. “They practiced every form of torture on my
son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they
find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.”