Think you know how bad Gitmo really was? A teenage detainee’s story, part II

Detainees at Camp X-Ray

So we learned from President Obama’s big speech that he will place Omar Khadr in one of five legal categories. Khadr probably won’t face Obama’s fantastically oxymoronic “lawful … prolonged detention” (Category 5). He has not been ordered released by a federal court (Category 3). He can’t be said to have violated any “American criminal law” (Category 1), which would qualify him for trial in federal court. Military prosecutors claim that he has violated “laws of war” (Category 2), in which case he would be tried “through [a] military commission.” Obama doesn’t use the word “tribunal” because of its star-chamber connotations and because “commissions” have wartime precedent in America, but these are clearly Bush’s totalitarian tribunals. According to military defense attorneys, Obama’s reforms amount to feather-dusting.

Khadr must hope that the government deems him “safely transferable” to another country (Category 4). He is a Canadian citizen; his country’s highest court has demanded his repatriation. If Obama’s lovely words about the rule of law—about “enlist[ing] the power of our most fundamental values,” values that project “a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity”—have any meaning, Khadr will be sent back to Canada with a recommendation that he be reintegrated into society.

Meanwhile, in a rebuttal to Obama, chief “enhanced interrogation” engineer Dick Cheney uttered words that, in their glib torturing of reality, induce speechlessness:

The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work … It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation … The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently.

Part II

The design of Omar Khadr’s life at Guantanamo began as a theory in the minds of Air Force researchers. After the Korean War, the Air Force created a program called SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape—to help captured pilots to resist the interrogation techniques of the Chinese, which were developed to generate propaganda. SERE’s founders wanted to know precisely how this kind of torture eroded the human psyche, so that they could train pilots to withstand it. The answer turned out to have two components: pain and harm delivered in utterly unpredictable, sometimes illusory environments—an absolute denial of physical comfort and spacial-temporal orientation; and a removal of the inner comfort of identity—“personality disruption,” achieved by humiliating people and coercing them to commit offenses against their own religion, dignity and morality, until they become unrecognizable to and ashamed of themselves.

SERE scientists imitated a variety of totalitarian stress-torture techniques: sleep deprivation, temporary starvation, sound overexposure, waterboarding, sexual mortification, religious desecration. SERE methods were to be administered only in small inoculating doses to American military personnel. The soldiers would consequently develop a degree of resistance, and be less likely to produce propaganda for the enemy.

At Guantanamo, however, at the request of Bush administration officials, these techniques were reconverted and expanded on by the military and CIA. The techniques were used in concert and continuously—coercive interrogation as life experience. To be held at Guantanamo Bay was, per se, to be tortured. Psychologists there, including at least one SERE psychologist, might manage every aspect of a detainee’s life. In one case, a psychiatrist reportedly told guards to limit a detainee to seven squares of toilet paper a day.

While he was at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr was beaten to the head, nearly suffocated, threatened with having his clothes taken indefinitely, and lunged at by attack dogs while wearing a bag over his head. “Your life is in my hands,” an intelligence officer told him during an interrogation in the spring of 2003.

During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. The man spat in his face and threatened to send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria—places where they tortured people the old-fashioned way: very slowly, analytically removing body parts. The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa—Soldier Number Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who specialized in raping prisoners.

Omar’s chair was removed. Because his hands and ankles were shackled, he fell to the floor. His interrogator told him to get up. Standing up was hard, because he could not use his hands. When he did, his interrogator told him to sit down again. When he sat, the interrogator told him to stand again. He refused. The interrogator called two guards into the room, who grabbed Omar by the neck and arms, lifted him into the air, and dropped him onto the floor. The interrogator told them to do it again. He told them to do it again, and again, and again. Then he said he was locking Omar’s case file in a safe: Omar would spend the rest of his life in a cell at Guantanamo Bay.

Several weeks later, a man who claimed to be Afghani interrogated Omar. He wore an American flag on his uniform pants. He said his name was “Izmarai”—lion—and that he was from Wardeq. He spoke in Farsi, and occasionally Pashto and English. Izmarai said a new prison was under construction in Afghanistan for uncooperative detainees. “In Afghanistan,” Izmarai said, “they like small boys.” He pulled out a photograph of Omar and wrote on it, in Pashto, “This detainee must be transferred to Bagram.”

Omar was taken from his chair and short-shackled to an eye-bolt in the floor, his hands behind his knees. He was left that way for six hours, during which time he soiled himself and guards and intelligence officers came in and laughed at him.

(Next: Khadr’s security status is downgraded.)