Below is the rest of Persiankiwi’s account of the anti-government protests in Iran, edited from his Twitter feed. The first part of his account is here.

WHAT IS A PRESIDENT WITHOUT A COUNTRY?

ordinary ppl in Iran have no reliable info – gov is trying to break all communication routes

11:41 AM Jun 17th from web

news – Mousavi & Khatami have delivered joint letter to Ministry of Justice demanding release of protestors

11:52 AM Jun 17th from web

Tomorrow March is in memory of those killed by Government – Mousavi will lead Sea of Green

1:59 PM Jun 17th from web

What is a president without a Country?

2:22 PM Jun 17th from web

THEY ARE REMOVING FROM PUBLIC PROFILE ALL PEOPLE WHO OPPOSE THEM – ARRESTING AND TORTURING

last night we had computer problems and could not give you report

12:39 AM Jun 18th from web

We have a question for Iranian State Broadcaster (IRIB.ir)?

12:43 AM Jun 18th from web

IRIB.ir – How is it possible that 2Million people march in your country and you say NOTHING?

12:48 AM Jun 18th from web

Today in Tehran & all over Iran the Sea of Green will be the biggest March in 30 years of Iranian history

1:04 AM Jun 18th from web

IRIB.ir watch – The Sea of Green is peaceful – we have no enemies

1:07 AM Jun 18th from web

IRIB.ir said that we are all violent thugs – we are showing you everyday that we are peaceful Sea of Green

1:28 AM Jun 18th from web

All the violence in Iran now is ONLY by Baseej – they are beating people walking in the street, for no reason

1:31 AM Jun 18th from web

Gov has closed Iran to all foreign communication and news coverage

1:43 AM Jun 18th from web

They are removing from public profile all people who oppose them – arresting and torturing

1:46 AM Jun 18th from web

TODAY – SEA OF GREEN – IMAM KHOMEINI SQ (S ) – 4PM – TEHRAN – ALL WEAR BLACK – WE PRAY TOGETHER

Every night in Tehran millions of people stand on their balcony and support Sea of Green by chanting ‘Allah Akbar’

1:49 AM Jun 18th from web

Today Sea of Green will wear black in respect of those who have been killed by Gov

2:10 AM Jun 18th from web

Today ALL major universities in Iran are CLOSED for Sea of Green

3:37 AM Jun 18th from web

Confirmed – Tomorrow FRIDAY prayers in Tehran will be led by Khamenei

3:39 AM Jun 18th from web

You can follow Mir Hossein MOUSAVI official updates on his own facebook page

3:41 AM Jun 18th from web

Today – Sea of Green – Imam Khomeini Sq (s) – 4pm – Tehran – All wear BLACK – we pray together

3:47 AM Jun 18th from web

MOUSAVI SAYS: I HAVE COME DUE TO CONCERNS OF CURRENT POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS – TO DEFEND THE RIGHT OF THE NATION

Baseeji – In memory of Imam show your respect – Join us to pray – wear Black

4:05 AM Jun 18th from web

Everybody is peaceful and quiet – everybody is wearing black – the number of people is unbelievable

5:48 AM Jun 18th from web

Mousavi needs your help – he needs a film sub-titled into English and emailed back to him - will send u the link

7:09 AM Jun 18th from web

Mousavi has asked for this to be subtitled for him for ALL Foreign press to show  – http://www.youtube.com/watc...

7:09 AM Jun 18th from web

MOUSAVI launches direct attack on ANejad for insulting his wife

7:16 AM Jun 18th from web

Mousavi says: I have come due to concerns of current political and social conditions – to defend the rights of the nation … I have come to improve Iran’s Intl relations … I have come to tell the world and return to Iran our pride, our dignity, our future … I have come to bring to Iran a FUTURE of FREEDOM, of HOPE, of fulfillment … I have come to represent the poor the helpless the hungry … I have come to be ACCOUNTABLE to you my people and to this world  … Iran must participate in FAIR elections, it is a matter of national importance  … I have come to you because of the corruption in Iran … 25% inflation means IGNORANCE – THIEVING – CORRUPTION – where is the wealth of my nation? … What have you done with $300 BILLION in last 4 years – where is the wealth of the nation? … The next Gov of Iran will be chosen by the people … Why do all our young want to leave this country? … I know of no creation who places HIMSELF ahead of 20 million of the nation … We are Muslims – what is happening in Iran Gov is a sin … This Gov is not what Imam Khomeini wanted for Iran  I will change all this – This is the SEA of GREEN

7:19 AM – 8:24AM Jun 18th from web

@Google – Mr Mousavi has designed for your use a new Sea of Green logo – pls see his facebook for a copy

8:26 AM Jun 18th from web

MOUSAVI asks GOOGLE to change logo to GREEN for 1 day  – to give hope to all Iran

8:26 AM Jun 18th from web

TEHRAN IS ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF PEOPLE ON THEIR BALCONY SHOUTING ‘ALLAH AKBAR – YA HOSSEIN – MIR HOSSEIN’ … WE HAVE UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT THERE IS DISSENT AMONG COMMANDERS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GUARD FORCE

Hospital source – 12 killed and 29 injured on Monday in Azadi Sq

10:41 AM Jun 18th from web

MOUSAVI : http://www.flickr.com/photo… – photo stream

11:32 AM Jun 18th from web

Hospital source – increase in admission of people injured and beaten by Baseej – all Tehran hospitals in high alert

11:44 AM Jun 18th from web

to protect us all followers pls change your twt location to IRAN GMT+3.30

11:46 AM Jun 18th from web

Tehran is alive with the sound of people on their balcony shouting ‘Allah Akbar – Ya Hossein – Mir Hossein’

11:51 AM Jun 18th from web

MOUSAVI APPEALS TO THE WORLD TO PARICIPATE IN SEA OF GREEN IN ALL CAPITAL CITIES THIS SUNDAY – confirmed

1:44 PM Jun 18th from web

Mousavi – Khatami – Karoubi – will all lead Sea of Green on Saturday at 4pm in Enghelab Sq, Tehran  – confirmed

3:32 PM Jun 18th from web

We have unconfirmed repos that there is dissent among commanders of the Revolutionary Guard Force

3:56 PM Jun 18th from web

unconfirmed reliable source – several commanders of Revolutionary Guard Force arrested today

3:58 PM Jun 18th from web

HOSPITAL SOURCE – SEVERE SHORTAGE OF BLOOD SUPPLIES ACROSS ALL IRAN HOSPITALS – PLS DONATE BLOOD

confirmed – the wife of Saeed Rajaie, a prominent Iranian waime martyr, has been arrested while praying in Qom

4:10 PM Jun 18th from web

Thursday Sea of Green was more than ONE MILLION people

4:11 PM Jun 18th from web

The security situation in Tehran is very dangerous – 100’s arrested every day

4:14 PM Jun 18th from web

CONFIRMED – MOUSAVI & KAROUBI ask suppoers NOT to attend Friday prayers inTehran

4:19 PM Jun 18th from web

hospital source – Tehran hospital doctors are on 24 hour standby

4:30 PM Jun 18th from web

hospital source – severe shoage of blood supplies accross ALL Iran hospitals – pls donate blood  -

4:32 PM Jun 18th from web

NOW IS DAWN – WE MUST GO – LOCATION NOT SAFE – THANK U FOR SUPPORTING SEA OF GREEN – PEOPLE OF IRAN NEEDS YOUR HELP

cannot reply to all our followers but pls be aware that all info we provide is 100% accurate – situation here is serious

4:52 PM Jun 18th from web

political situ in Iran is v/complex – for every decision there are reasons – some we cannot mention here

5:10 PM Jun 18th from web

Advice – travel in groups – always tell someone where u are going – dont go out unless needed

5:20 PM Jun 18th from web

Advice – NEVER log onto any proxy posted on twitter – u will be traced

5:23 PM Jun 18th from web

now is dawn – we must go – location not safe – thank u for suppoing Sea of Green  – people of Iran needs your help

5:28 PM Jun 18th from web

THE SITUATION IN IRAN IS NOW CRITICAL – THE NATION IS HEARTBROKEN – SUPPRESSION IS IMINENT

Confirmed – Saturday Sea of Green rally – Enghelab Sq – 4pm – Mousavi, Karoubi and Khatami will attend -

4:45 AM Jun 19th from web

Confirmed – Mousavi calls on people of the world to march on SUNDAY in suppo of Sea of Green -

6:03 AM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – the Gov has refused to issue a permit for Sea of Green march at 4pm on Saturday in Tehran -

6:08 AM Jun 19th from web

The situation in Iran is now CRITICAL – the nation is heartbroken – suppression is iminent -

6:16 AM Jun 19th from web

MOUSAVI – CONFIRMED – CALLS FOR ALL THE NATION TO STAND ON BALCONYS TONIGHT AND SHOW SUPPORT WITH ‘ALLAH AKBAR’

unconfirmed reports – Revolutionary Guard has been mobilised to secure Tehran -

6:24 AM Jun 19th from web

English language intro to Mir Hossein MOUSAVI – http://bit.ly/9prbq -

6:30 AM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – Shahab Talebani has been arrested today -

8:07 AM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – Ebrahim Yazdi has been released by Gov due to poor health -

8:54 AM Jun 19th from web

Mehdi Karoubi letter to National Security Council – http://www.etemademelli.ir/…

8:57 AM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – 2 student activist arrested – Alirezah Khshbakht & Zahra Toheedi -

9:01 AM Jun 19th from web

Mousavi – Confirmed – calls for ALL the nation to stand on balconys TONIGHT and show support with ‘Allah Akbar’

9:03 AM Jun 19th from web

Mousavi – confirmed – show support for Sea of Green from balcony staying 9pm to midnight tonight -

9:05 AM Jun 19th from web

OF COURSE MOUSAVI HAS BEEN SILENCED – BUT HE HAS NOT YET BEEN ARRESTED – TODAY EVERYBODY WAS SILENCED!

@mousavi1388 Please join Mousavi, Khatami and Karoubi Sat 4pm Enghelab Sq. to Azadi Sq. Tehran for a crucial green protest

11:41 AM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – IRIB.ir – HACKED – Dos Dos Dos Dos

11:54 AM Jun 19th from web

Tehran is alive with the Sea of Green

3:12 PM Jun 19th from web

Mir Hossein Mousavi is safe and well – preparing for tomorrow – Sea of Green

3:16 PM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – sms text messaging is working again in Iran after 1 week of disconnecsion

3:26 PM Jun 19th from web

Of course Mousavi has been silenced – but he has not yet been arrested – today everybody was silenced!

3:56 PM Jun 19th from web

KAROUBI: AS A FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER WHO WAS TORTURED I KNOW THAT INSULTING A NATION WILL TURN THEM INTO A RAGING FIRE

58 scholars & lawyers condemn the recent killings & arrests in Iran as illegal – http://ghalamnews.org/news-…

4:19 PM Jun 19th from web

Advice – your location can be identified from mobile signal – + delete all sms after sending in case u are arrested

4:33 PM Jun 19th from web

Advice – remove sim and use mobile to film ANY violence or attak against Sea of Green

4:38 PM Jun 19th from web

Karoubi – As a former political prisoner who was toured I know that insulting a nation will turn them into a raging fire -

4:41 PM Jun 19th from web

Karoubi – Recognize the will of the nation and void the 10th Presidential Elections to return order to the country

4:44 PM Jun 19th from web

KHATAMI: IT IS THE TIME OF TWILIGHT – BUT I LOVE THE DAWN!

Iranian scholars and uni Proffessors write joint letter to Secretary General of UN condemning violation of Iran Human Rights

4:47 PM Jun 19th from web

Hossein Obama – The world is watching

4:57 PM Jun 19th from web

Shirin Ebadi – Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate – condemns harsh treatment of protesters in Iran

5:00 PM Jun 19th from web

EU – condemns threats of Ayatollah Khamenei

5:01 PM Jun 19th from web

Khatami: It is the time of Twilight – but I LOVE THE DAWN – Sea of Green -

6:36 PM Jun 19th from web

People of the world – Today Saturday 20 June 2009 – Iran will again make HISTORY -

6:38 PM Jun 19th from web

MOUSAVI – CONFIRMED – I HAVE PREPARED FOR MARTYRDOM

confirmed – Mousavi – SATURDAY 4pm Enghelab Sq – HISTORY will be watching us -

6:40 PM Jun 19th from web

confirmed – Mousavi – SATURDAY is a big day for fighting fascism -

6:41 PM Jun 19th from web

The world must not watch us – you must all join us wherever you are

6:43 PM Jun 19th from web

Google – thank you – NOW CHANGE YOUR LOGO FOR TODAY – Sea of Green

6:49 PM Jun 19th from web

Dawn is upon us – Allah Akbar – Let us pray together today – http://bit.ly/4dKQjX

7:14 PM Jun 19th from web

today the world can see why we want our freedom from fascists -

7:37 AM Jun 20th from mobile web

tonight to the streets – for freedom -

7:41 AM Jun 20th from mobile web

Mousavi – Confirmed – I have prepared for martyrdom

8:35 AM Jun 20th from web

TEHRAN IS BURNING WITH THE BLOOD OF OUR MARTYRS – THE STREETS ARE FULL OF DEAD

Helicopters pouring acid on people from the sky

8:37 AM Jun 20th from web

Today is the day of rekoning – the day of GHIAMAAT – Allah Akbar -

8:38 AM Jun 20th from web

Mousavi declares results of 10th Presidential Election null and void

8:40 AM Jun 20th from web

Mousavi speaking to suppoers in the street NOW

8:43 AM Jun 20th from web

Tehran is burning with the blood of our Mayrs – The streets are full of dead

8:44 AM Jun 20th from web

SODIUM METABISULFITE Na2S2O5 MIXED WITH WATER (5% SOLUTION) CURES CS TEAR GAS. WASH EYES WITH SOLUTION

People of Iran – be ready to take people from the streets tonight and give protection -

8:46 AM Jun 20th from web

Unconfirmed – The Army will not follow orders to kill the people -

8:47 AM Jun 20th from web

Advice – Tear Gas – cover mouth/nose – remove gased clothes immedietly – wash face and inside mouth/eyes/nose with water fast

8:50 AM Jun 20th from web

hospital source – Tehran hospitals report hundreds of casualtys

8:50 AM Jun 20th from web

@stopahmadi #gr88  Sodium metabisulfite Na2S2O5 mixed with water (5% solution) cures CS tear gas. Wash eyes with solution

9:03 AM Jun 20th from web

Advice – Wash face/mouth/eyes/nose/ears with lemon juice if gassed - cover face

9:17 AM Jun 20th from web

MOUSAVI – CONFIRMED – IF I AM ARRESTED THE NATION IS TO STRIKE INDEFINITELY

Mousavi – tehran TODAY http://bit.ly/TgIJf -

9:18 AM Jun 20th from web

Karegar St S – Tohid sq – Arya Shahr – Azadi Sq – Valli Asr Ave/Sq – Are alive with Sea of Green and fighting -

9:22 AM Jun 20th from web

confirmed – riots in Shiraz

9:24 AM Jun 20th from web

The nation has awoken TODAY – the Sea of Green is marching

9:25 AM Jun 20th from web

confirmed – Riots in Tabriz, Mashad, Isfahan, Ahwaz – Gov using violence -

9:27 AM Jun 20th from web

Mousavi – confirmed – IF I AM ARRESTED THE NATION IS TO STRIKE INDEFINITELY

9:31 AM Jun 20th from web

WE ARE WASHED IN THE PURE WATER OF HEAVEN AND STAND BEFORE YOU ALLAH TO BE MARTYRED

Good morning people of the world - the day of the new dawn has arrived

5:04 PM Jun 20th from web

Mousavi – it is the duty of the people to keep the fire of hope burning

5:06 PM Jun 20th from web

today the world witnes this Gov burn the nation with acid from the sky -

5:07 PM Jun 20th from web

we have seen today pain and suffering like never before in Iran – our nation – our love -

5:09 PM Jun 20th from web

The magnificent nation of Iran has spoken – the Gov of Iran has reacted

5:11 PM Jun 20th from web

We are the soldiers of Allah – peace be upon him – and we shall fight until justice of God is upon this nation -

5:12 PM Jun 20th from web

We are washed in the pure water of heaven and stand before you Allah to be martyred – Allah Akbar

5:14 PM Jun 20th from web

Allah you are the creator and to you we shall return -

5:16 PM Jun 20th from web

We are of peace for all man – we are the blood of Allah – we stand for that which you Will and decide – Allah Akbar

5:20 PM Jun 20th from web

CONFIRMED – RASOUL HOSPITAL TEHRAN – AT LEAST 11 DEAD … CONFIRMED – BANK MELLI HOSPITAL TEHRAN – AT LEAST 9 DEAD

Hojateleslam bin Moslemin Rafsanjani holds the honour of the army of this great nation - Allah Akbar

5:26 PM Jun 20th from web

We have no future – no life – no hope – without you Allah – our creator – our leader Enna Allah va Analieh Rajeoon

5:30 PM Jun 20th from web

Brothers and sisters were killed before our eyes today – the innocent blood of the mayrs of Allah

5:34 PM Jun 20th from web

We are the bird of freedom of Iran – but we have no wing without you Allah – peace be upon you

5:39 PM Jun 20th from web

We know that the army is not ready to kill the people of Iran

5:46 PM Jun 20th from web

confirmed – hospital source – hundreds injured Saturday

5:48 PM Jun 20th from web

confirmed – Rasoul Hospital Tehran – at least 11 dead -

5:52 PM Jun 20th from web

confirmed – Bank Melli hospital Tehran – at least 9 dead

5:54 PM Jun 20th from web

MOUSAVI WE WILL STAND BESIDE YOU – WE WILL DIE BESIDE YOU

Mousavi calls on Sea of Green – DO NOT take act violently

6:00 PM Jun 20th from web

Rafsanjani has stayed silent until now – he has the support of the army – our hope is that the army will protect us -

6:03 PM Jun 20th from web

We must rest – Tehran is burning with the fire of freedom – but tomorow we fight again – we have injured ppl

6:08 PM Jun 20th from web

we have no confirmation of tank in Tehran – that is a rumor from Gov -

6:10 PM Jun 20th from web

Khatami – Today is the dawn – Allah Akbar

6:14 PM Jun 20th from web

Mousavi – we have gone too far to stop now

6:14 PM Jun 20th from web

Again we thank you for support – pls see our video links for violence in Tehran today -

6:18 PM Jun 20th from web

again it is dawn- we go to pray to Allah – pls people of the world pray with us – God is but one – Allah – of all creation

6:21 PM Jun 20th from web

Mousavi we will stand beside you – we will die beside you – Allah Akbar – peace be upon all man

6:26 PM Jun 20th from web

I love Twitter; I hate Twitter.

Twitter pins people to little screens, truncates thoughts and attention spans, encourages people to write stupid stuff, etc. (Also, in combination with “twitter,” the verb “tweet” suggests “weenie,” “tit,” and “twit.”)

But in the middle of a revolution, Twitter’s pretty amazing. This obviously isn’t news, but in crisis the technology functions like telegraphy in the nineteenth century, the tightness of the dispatch pressing out superfluous information and leaving the immediate and vital. Again obviously, there’s zero lag time, except when there are connectivity/censorship issues, which allows for the cool meta narrative of the intrepid reporter eluding in various technologically clever ways the government’s fat fist. (I am accessing Twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port 80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here. spread to others.) Plus, there are pictures and video.

If you find a good reporter (perhaps an actual reporter using Twitter) who writes over a sustained period of time, the totality of his or her messages will be—I’m realizing, probably several years after most people—an encompassing, startlingly granular account of a set of events.

Along with about 32,000 other people, I’ve been following Persiankiwi, who started reporting during the Iranian elections and has been an amazing correspondent ever since. Almost immediately I had an urge to clean up the feed and edit out extraneous material and put it all in chronological order, so it would read like a diary or series of actual dispatches from the front.

Here’s the result. It’s a stretch to compare Persiankiwi’s Twitter stream to Hiroshima or Dispatches or Homage to Catalonia, but they’re not totally absurd comparisons. Pretty soon (I think) the messages unite themselves and become parts of a single work, and clearly Twitter feeds are going to be cited copiously in future dissertations.

There’s a lotta text down there; I’ve broken it up with headings and “continued” hyperlinks, and if you want to know what’s happening at this very moment you can of course go to Twitter. It’s interesting to go back and forth and see the two- or twelve- or thirty-hour antecedents of present circumstances. I’ll try to bring this as close as possible to the latest entries; I’m still playing a little catchup.

(Note: I tried to change as little as possible. I didn’t care much about grammar or spelling; I tried to maximize clarity and minimize visual busyness.)

Finally, to Persiankiwi (should you read this): Good luck, stay safe, and, on behalf of the world, thank you. continue »

Last Monday, a Yemeni detainee named Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al-Hanashi committed suicide in his Guantanamo Bay cell. Earlier this month, another Yemeni detainee tried to slit his wrists. There have been suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay every year since the camp was built. In 2003, there were 350 incidents of “self-harm”; 120 inmates tried to hang themselves.

Al-Hanashi had apparently been suicidal for some time. He went on a hunger strike in early May. To keep him alive, guards strapped him to a chair and force-fed him. Omar Khadr also participated in a hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, and had a similar experience. From my Rolling Stone article:

In the summer of 2005, Omar Khadr joined 200 other detainees in a hunger strike to protest prison conditions and unlimited detention without due process. Many strikers told their lawyers they were being force-fed through the nose with tubes as thick as a finger, and ended their strikes because of the consequent pain. Many said they were beaten on their way to and from forced-feeding sessions. Omar lost weight and grew ill. From the diary of Omar Deghayes, a fellow detainee who participated in the strike: Omar Khadr is very sick in our block. He is throwing [up] blood. They gave him cyrum [serum] when they found him on the floor in his cell. Omar was carried to the hospital. As he was being moved back to his cell, he collapsed, and was beaten. The resolve of the strikers deteriorated. The strike ended. No concessions were made.

Part V.
(Note: Since my article appeared, Muneer Ahmad and Rick Wilson, both professors of law at American University, have stopped representing Omar Khadr. They felt he would be better served by full-time trial lawyers.)

To see their client at Guantanamo Bay, Muneer Ahmad and Rick Wilson have to take a chartered single-prop plane from Miami to the base. It takes four hours to circumnavigate Cuban airspace. The bay itself is uncommonly beautiful. It is horseshoe-shaped, with the camps on one side and military and civilian housing on the other. Nothing ever moves quickly; multi-day waits, for unexplained security reasons, are standard. Ahmad and Wilson sometimes have to wait a week to see Omar for a few hours. To protect the Cuban iguana in accordance with the Endangered Species Act, the speed limit on the base is set at twenty-five miles an hour—a good metaphor, Ahmad says, for both the studied stalling techniques of the base’s administrators and its moral priorities. The camps are on a level piece of ground close to the sea. They come into view when the visitors’ bus rounds the final curve. From that distance, in the beauty of the setting, the prison complex appears to be a resort.

When Ahmad saw Omar Khadr for the first time, in October 2004, after the convoluted flight and the numberless delays and checkpoints and searches and phalanxes of armed soldiers, and after being told so many times how evil the detainees there were, his first thought was, “He’s just a little kid.” Khadr was seventeen but looked fourteen or fifteen. He was gaunt and pale, in a state of everlasting exhaustion, his senses starved by solitude. He had large gunshot-wound scars on his back and chest, and smaller scars over most of his body, several parts of which still held shrapnel.

It took Omar Khadr a while to accept that his lawyers were not part of the interrogation system at Guantanamo. Their initial visits were spent trying to get Omar to believe in them—legal strategy was secondary. Gradually, Omar revealed himself to be very shy and curious and, in most ways, still a child, with a child’s sweetness and credulous charm. Despite the rate at which his bones were lengthening, isolation and trauma seemed to have preserved him in emotional time. When he learned a new word—his experiences had left odd gaps in his knowledge—he tried to use it right away, and as often as possible. When Wilson and Ahmad offered to get him something to read, he asked for coloring books and car magazines and books with photographs of big animals in them. When they asked him what kind of juice he wanted them to bring back after a break during a meeting, he said, “Just something weird.”

Whenever Wilson or Ahmad left a pen on the interview table, Omar would pick it up and start taking it apart and putting it back together again. He always asked to play with Ahmad’s digital watch, which had a stopwatch function; he never tired of using it to test his reflexes. He wanted to know all about his laywers: their ages, their hometowns, their family backgrounds, why they had chosen to become lawyers.

When he discussed the United States’ case against him, he did not mention ideology or God. He was still devout, but he did not always manage to pray five times a day. He seemed to have drifted from the absolutism of his family.

Omar Khadr grasped legal concepts surprisingly quickly. When Wilson and Ahmad half-seriously told him he should study law, he showed something close to delight, and then laughed darkly: He was unable to contemplate a future so far removed from Guantanamo, a future in which an “enemy combatant” was acquitted and became a lawyer. On the advice of Wilson and Ahmad, Omar Khadr wrote a note to the presiding officer of his first military commission hearing: “With my respect to you … i’m boycotting thes persedures untel i be treated humainly and fair.”

Once Omar Khadr had allowed himself to believe that he had acquired committed advocates, his life bent itself around his meetings with them. They had brought him back into the forward-moving world and reminded him who he was. His accounts of mistreatment emerged slowly. At the very end of his first meeting with his lawyers, he mentioned, embarrassed, that he had been threatened with rape. He was convinced that Ahmad and Wilson would never return, and it suddenly occurred to him, during the interview’s final moments, that this might be his last chance to speak to the world. It was easier to reveal something shameful to confessors he would never see again.

Except for a brief hiatus, Omar Khadr has been alone in a very small cell at Guantanamo Bay for nearly four years. His daily life remains filled with menace: He is so conditioned to abuse in captivity that he is incapable of believing he will ever be free of it. He is also unable to believe that he will ever be released. The foundational distortions in his perspective are the product both of deliberate manipulation—childhood indoctrination and sustained torture—and simple chronology: Four years is nearly a quarter of Omar’s life. Since he was caught, he has grown seven inches.

(Postscript: Khadr is now twenty-two. His future depends, first, on how the Obama Administration classifies him as a detainee, and, second, on whether the Canadian government agrees to repatriate him. I explain Khadr’s current situation in more detail here.)

President Bush has finally broken his silence on his administration’s torture policies. “The first thing you do,” he explained to members of the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan, “is ask, What’s legal? What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I [could] say to myself, I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.”

What was possible? Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo informed the president in a memo that physical abuse was not torture unless it generated the intensity of pain associated with “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Impossibly, Yoo got this medical description from a completely unrelated federal statute that regulated Medicare benefits—and then pretended that this was how the irrelevant statute defined “severe pain.” (U.S. law partly defines torture as inflicting “severe pain.” See Gary Kamiya’s excellent evisceration of Yoo’s memo.)

Psychological methods, Yoo went on, were illegal only if they inflicted harm that endured for “months, or even years.” That was the official position of the Bush Administration until shortly before he left office, and it offered spurious legal cover for Omar Khadr’s torturers, who were very good at inflicting psychological harm that would last for years.

Part IV.

One of the chief mental defenses against harsh imprisonment is durable perspective; sanity requires a steady identity. But identity in adolescence is precarious by nature: Teenagers change their identities and beliefs all the time, and they cannot develop a secure perspective in the isolation of captivity. To figure out the world, teenagers have to be in it. For adolescents like Omar Khadr, who have already experienced radical trauma, the characteristic symptoms of months or years of barbarous confinement—paranoid delusions, suicidal tendencies, hallucinatory psychoses—can become irreversible.

Soon after Omar arrived at Guantanamo, he began exhibiting the kinds of disassociative symptoms most adolescent psychiatrists would have expected. He was startled to the point of disorientation by small changes in his surroundings. He had fainting spells. He cried frequently. When he heard gunshots at Camp Delta, he had a vision of helicopter gunships descending on him, as had happened during the gun battle in Afghanistan. These kinds of enclosing flashbacks came repeatedly. He had recurrent nightmares, often concerning the death of his father or his capture during the firefight, in which he felt, with phenomenal versimilitude, bullets piercing his chest.

His appetite diminished; he took on the appearance of the permanently malnourished. He entered what clinicians call a state of hypervigilance: He started thinking he might be attacked at any time—without reason, his heart rate would jump, and he would sweat and hyperventilate. He began hearing sounds—screams, bombs, things he could not identify—when the cellblock was silent. Every week or so, a self-generated rage possessed him. He screamed, he paced, he punched and threw things—an experience wholly foreign to his character. For long periods he felt no emotion at all. He started blaming himself for the things that had happened to him; he became deeply ashamed of what he had suffered in interrogation rooms. He developed a pronounced twich on the left side of his face, of which he remained unaware.

There were no conditions for release at Guantanamo—the Bush administration had suspended all the customary rules of judicial review and due process. Detainees had no way of knowing if anyone would ever get out. The human mind has tools for dealing with extreme physical and emotional stress, but it is not equipped to manage pugatorial limbo. In every POW camp in history there has been an easily imagined end-point: the end of the war. At Guantanamo, what detainee after detainee has said—and what study after study has shown—is that insanity and suicidal impulses inevitably accompany the kind of futurelessness Gitmo imposed on its inmates. The quantity of successful self-destruction among Guantanamo detainees, in circumstances so carefully designed to prevent it, indicated a suffusing despair unimaginable outside the gates of the base. Even if the detainees had all been released and received immediate psychological treatment, a great majority would have been—will be—psychologically impaired for the rest of their lives.

When Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, his future became a vacancy, and his imagination quickly lost the ability to fill it. He thought earnestly about killing himself. In January of 2003, only four months after he arrived, his guards were sufficiently worried about his suicidal disposition to confiscate his possessions. Madness was all around him. During the fall of 2004, Omar watched an Arab orthopedist named Ayman go insane. Over a period of months, Dr. Ayman became entirely mute, except for an occasional scream and a single question, asked of no one in particular: “Who is a woman here?”

The authorities at Guantanamo repeatedly refused to allow an independent medical evaluation of Khadr, so his lawyers [the Supreme Court had granted due process rights to detainees in early 2004] administered two exams to determine his mental status, and submitted the results to several experts. All concurred in their interpretations. Dr. Eric Trupin, one of the world’s foremost experts on the effects of incarceration on adolescents, concluded that Omar had been traumatized and tortured to a degree that was, in Trupin’s considerable experience, remarkable.

“The impact of these harsh interrogation techniques on an adolescent such as O.K., who also has been isolated for almost three years, is potentially catastrophic to his future development,” Trupin concluded. “Long-term consequences of harsh interrogation techniques are both more pronounced for adolescents and more difficult to remediate or treat even after such interrogations are discontinued, particularly if the victim is uncertain as to whether they will resume. It is my opinion, to a reasonable scientific certainty, that O.K.’s continued subjection to the threat of physical and mental abuse place him at significant risk for future psychiatric deterioration, which may include irreversible psychiatric symptoms and disorders, such as a psychosis with treatment-resistant hallucinations, paranoid delusions and persistent self-harming attempts.”

[Next: The last installment. If he is released, will Omar Khadr be able to recover?]

 

Two Bush-Cheney torture program developments since the last post. One, Democratic senators have said they are open to the possibility of releasing Guantanamo’s Uighur detainees. That’s swell, since the Uighurs never had anything to do with Al Qaeda. They are Muslim traders from Xinjiang Province, in northwestern China. They arrived in Afghanistan with cheap leather goods to sell, having first passed through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzystan, and Tajikistan.

In my Rolling Stone article on Omar Khadr, I explained how this could have happened. Some background: Khadr’s brother, Abdurahman, who was also captured near bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan, later became an informant for the CIA, and for a few months posed as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. (He was never housed with Omar.)

During the course of their research, [Khadr’s lawyers] learned that the CIA had pulled Abdurahman out of Guantanamo … because so few detainees knew anything about Al Qaeda or the Taliban … Abdurahman told his CIA handlers how utterly the United States had failed, in its military sweeps in Afghanistan, to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. The U.S. offered cash rewards for suspected Al Qaeda members that were sometimes equivalent to several years of local wages. The American military thus made every Arab-looking person in Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunists. Criminal gangs rounded people up and brought them en masse to American authorities. Others were turned in to settle grudges, or because they had once associated with someone from Al Qaeda. U.S. intelligence apparently took criminals and mercenaries and underpaid soldiers at their word … Abdurahman Khadr concluded that only ten percent of the detainees at Guantanamo “are really dangerous.” The rest, he said, “are people that don’t have anything to do with it.” He told the story of an innocent detainee turned in by his own son for $5,000 … When the government recently prepared Summaries of Evidence for every one of its 517 detainees in an attempt to justify its “enemy combatant” designation, only eight percent were “definitively identified” as Al Qaeda fighters. Sixty-six percent have no definitive connection to Al Qaeda at all. The detention camps of Guantanamo Bay are filled with shepherds, taxi drivers, farmers, small businessmen, drug addicts, homeless people, and children.

(Andrew Sullivan was all over this story at the time; his trenchant commentary spoke for many of us.)

Also, the Daily Telegraph (UK) is reporting that the unreleased Abu Ghraib torture photos include scenes of rape—many different kinds of rape. (The source is apparently a former U.S. general.) Abu Ghraib is, of course, a direct descendent of Guantanamo. General Geoffrey Miller, overseer of “enhanced interrogations” at Guantanamo Bay, was later sent to Abu Ghraib to “Gitmo-ize” it. As I wrote in Rolling Stone, Omar Khadr had the misfortune of being at Guantanamo when Miller arrived:

[Khadr’s] statements [about torture practices] correlate exactly with the methods President Bush commissioned from General Miller. From the endlessly corroborated statement of [Khadr’s fellow detainee] Shafiq Rasul: “[Things changed] after General Miller. That is when short-shackling started, loud music playing in interrogation, shaving beards and hair, putting people in cells naked … moving some people every two hours depriving them of sleep, the use of A/C air. People would be kept [in isolation] for months and months and months. We didn’t hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated before General Miller came.”

Part III

On March 31st, 2003, Omar Khadr’s security level was downgraded to “Level Four, with isolation.” Everything in his cell was taken, and he spent a month without human contact in a windowless box kept at the approximate temperature of a refrigerator.

When he was not being tortured or held in isolation, Omar spent virtually every waking minute of his captivity alone in his cell, first in a facility called Camp Delta and then in one called Camp V. His left eye, injured in the gun battle in Afghanistan, had gone blind and become immobile. Except for a Koran, there was nothing in his cells to occupy his mind. During his first year and a half at Guantanamo, Omar was permitted to exercise only twice a week for fifteen minutes, in a cage slightly larger than his own. Conversation between cells was possible, but prisoners had become so unstable and fearful of one another that they tended not to say much; there were no friendships. Omar tried to talk to his guards, about anything, but they were unresponsive. They often covered their nameplates with tape before entering detention facilities.

As Guantanamo was imposing heavy stagnation on Omar Khadr, it was also instilling in him an abiding sense of vulnerability and disequilibrium. The call to prayer was usually played five times a day, but sometimes it stopped, or changed. Exercise could come at any time of the day or night. If the guards woke you at 3:30 a.m. and you didn’t present yourself quickly enough to please them, you didn’t get to exercise. The timing and character of interrogations followed no pattern. Sometimes prisoners were woken up and moved from cell to cell for half the night for no apparent reason, a tactic so common it became known among guards as “the frequent-flier program.”

Meal portions were usually small enough to keep the prisoners in a state of low-grade hunger. Several times Omar found powder or partially dissolved tablets in the plastic glass he got with his food. The drugs produced dizziness, sleepiness or hyper-alertness. Tasteless and invisible, they were not detectable beforehand. Omar was never told what they were or why he had been drugged.

Once, when he was being transferred, Omar learned that his brother Abdurahman was in an adjacent prison yard. Abdurahman, forced by the CIA to choose between life imprisonment and cooperation, had chosen the latter. Omar had no idea that his brother was in Guantanamo to spy on detainees.

“How are you? How are you?” Abdurahman yelled, in Arabic.

According to Abdurahman, Omar told him to stick to the story the family had agreed upon—the Khadrs did charity work, and knew nothing of Al Qaeda.

“But how is your health?” Abdurahman yelled.

“It’s OK,” Omar yelled back. “I’m just losing my left eye and all. They don’t want to operate on it.”

It was the only time they encountered one another. Guards and interrogators continually reminded Omar that no one in the world knew where he was. No one would know if they decided to kill him. He was frequently threatened with physical harm and sudden execution. He heard gunshots. He heard the sounds other prisoners made when they were dragged back from interrogation rooms. Around the time of Omar’s arrival, detainees watched as guards rushed into the cell of a prisoner named Jumah Al-Dousari. As a detainee later described it:

[The first guard] ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah’s back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight, which must have been about 240 pounds … The others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah … [One] was kicking his stomach. Jumah had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation … [A guard] grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He smashed [his face] into the concrete floor. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood.

It was the kind of beating Omar witnessed regularly.

In July 2004, when Omar was seventeen, he was moved to Camp V. In his new cell, the fluorescent ceiling lights stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he went for weeks without seeing daylight. The temperature of the cell hovered around fifty eight degrees. Omar spent a lot of his time trying to stay warm: balling himself up, covering his extremities to the extent it was possible, making the best use of his blanket and mattress pad when they hadn’t been confiscated. His metal cot was a problem: It briskly gave away his body heat.

After a day in his Camp V cell, Omar had nothing new to see, touch, taste, hear or smell. He was accompanied only by his ow disordered thoughts. He tried to sleep the time away, but the cold was inimical to sleep, and the incessant lighting had divested him of his feel for night and day. Over the course of any given month, Omar did not know whether he would get to see the sun, have a conversation with another human being, or be allowed to wear clothes. For the past four years, Guantanamo has held him dead-still in the vacuum of his cell without ever allowing him to come to rest. The institution has made it clear to him that this will remain, for untold years, the form of his life.

[Next: Omar Khadr’s mental health unravels.]