inmates. Human rights groups have called such measures “sensory deprivation,” citing such levels of restraint as unnecessary and inhumane.
Never mind that most of them had been caught trying to kill, maim, or murder U.S. servicemen or civilians and were meeting a far less onerous fate than prisoners of the jihadists so often do. It might have been tough or even humiliating, but no one had their head cut off. Or worse.
Within a couple of years, there were six separate detention camps at Guantanamo (named 1, 2, 3, 4, Echo, and Iguana), three of them maximum security, capable of holding eight hundred prisoners between them, all living in solitary confinement.
Inside these camps, there were numerous detention blocks, each holding twenty-four units. These oppressive cells are eight feet long by six feet eight inches wide, and eight feet high, constructed of metallic wire mesh on a solid steel frame. A couple of hundred prisoners were released to other governments in 2005, but over five hundred were left.
Ramon Salman landed in Guantanamo after a direct flight from the U.S. Naval Air Station at Boca Chica, near Key West, fifty miles off Florida’s south coast. He was immediately manacled and walked to a reception area, where he was issued the usual prisoner’s gear: two orange boiler-suits, a foam sleeping mat, one blanket, two buckets, a pair of flip-flops, wash-cloth, soap, shampoo, and a copy of the Koran, in case he thought Allah might have abandoned him.
Salman was then walked slowly to a detention block, a separate one from either of his two cohorts, neither of whom did he realize was in captivity less than two hundred yards from where he stood.
And from there he was, for a while, left to his own thoughts. And these were private. Salman had not uttered one word since the New York cops had grabbed him in the Houston Street apartment the previous day. He must clearly have been stunned by the experience, seeing his two colleagues bound and gagged in the presence of Officers Carman and Pallizi.
But he had offered nothing, refused to give even his name, and was identified one hour later only by the police photographs which had been taken outside his apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. Since his arrest: nothing. Not a word on the military aircraft. Not a word to anyone since the flight. His entry card to Guantanamo read simply:
At 1900, they brought him an evening meal with the rest of the prisoners. It consisted of white rice, red beans, a banana, bread, and a bottle of water. The guards stared at him for a while, noting his unshaven, dark, swarthy Middle Eastern appearance, the pure hatred in his eyes, and the defiant curl to his upper lip.
This was the man, they knew, who had made the phone call from his apartment to Syria, the call that had betrayed so much. This was a critical figure in the al Qaeda system. He was, as yet, undetected as a disciple of bin Laden, and nothing was known about him. But he had been coldly planning to blow apart hundreds of innocent American citizens in the airport. But for the sharpness of the Boston financier Donald Martin in spotting the briefcase, he would have succeeded.
Salman’s current plight may have incensed, or at least drawn sympathy from, the human rights groups. But it did not impress the U.S. guards, one of whom muttered, as they walked away, “For two bits, I’d kick the little fucker’s nuts into his lungs.”
Happily for Salman, there would be the kind of legal restraint common in the United States military, but there would be little mercy when the interrogation began at 0100. Still, they probably would not behead him.
The lights in his holding pen went out at 2100. It would be a long time before he was allowed out of the darkness, since the principal objective of interrogation, in its initial stages, is total disorientation, the prisoner not knowing whether it’s day or night.
They came for him on time at 0100, and immediately placed a hood over his head. He was then manacled, placed in a chair, and the senior interrogator said quietly, “Okay, Ramon. We know you speak English, and we also have in custody your colleagues, Reza Aghani and the Palm Beach baggage man Mohammed Rahman.
“They have both been sensible and told us everything we need to know, including details of your own part in the attempted atrocities against the United States on January 15. However, I would like to clarify your personal details. I believe you are Syrian, like Mohammed?”
That last remark was a wild swing in the dark, based upon Mohammed’s admitted job in the Syrian embassy in Caracas and the almost certain destination of that phone call from Commonwealth Avenue.
Salman made no reply. Was he related to Osama bin Laden, whose Saudi-based cousin still owned the Boston apartment? Nothing. Had he worked for Osama? Nothing. Was he an active jihadist? And, if not, why had he delivered the critical phone message back to Syria? Zero. No response. No reply to anything.
They kept it up for four hours, never threatening. Just probing. Then they took him back to his holding cell, still manacled, still hooded, still in the dark. Every half hour, someone came in and shook him awake. He ate his meals in the dark, he drank his water in the dark. Four times a day, and every night, he was questioned. Ramon Salman was never allowed to sleep.
At midnight on Friday, January 21, they turned on the pressure. Salman was by now completely disoriented. He did not know whether it was night or day. He did not know what day of the week it was; he had lost count of the number of days he had been in captivity.
He had not spoken, but he was clearly becoming distressed and was beginning to hallucinate, mumbling incoherently, the guards assumed in Arabic. As Friday turned into Saturday, they suddenly piped deafening music into his cell, cheap rock ’n’ roll, blasting in the confined space. He was not manacled at the time, and the guards watched him clamp his hands over his ears.
At which point, they walked in and grabbed him, replacing the manacles and the handcuffs and the hood, and then left him for one hour with the music still blaring. When they returned, the tone was very different. “SALMAN! GET UP! SIDDOWN! And listen carefully, because our patience just ran out, and if we don’t get some answers we’re going to beat the living shit out of you.”
Right then they pulled off his hood, and Salman’s eyes, accustomed only to the dark, almost exploded as they were hit by viciously bright interrogation lights, aimed right at him.
Simultaneously, from out in the corridor came penetrating screams of pure terror, the sounds of hell, the unmistakable sounds of the torture chamber. There were sounds of men being beaten, of slashing whips, cries and whimpers of appallingly injured people. As fake tapes go, this one often did the trick down there in Guantanamo. The wretched Salman gritted his teeth, clenched his fists, and said nothing.
“SALMAN!” roared the interrogator. “Right here I’m holding a U.S. Army officer’s baton, and two minutes from now I’m going to smash it right across your mouth. You got just one way out. Answer this question: are you Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, or al Qaeda?”
Ramon Salman spoke not one word. He just sat there, hunched up, listening to the screams echoing in the corridor. He was shivering now, but something seemed to tell him the Americans were not going to smash his face. Everyone knew the West was soft.
He kept up this defiance for one hour. And the guards began to think he never would give in. They were wrong. The following night, Salman cracked.
Reza Aghani had been kept outside under the hot Caribbean sun all day. He’d been kept in one highly uncomfortable position for more than ten hours. They gave him food and water, but he was not allowed to move, and there he had remained, isolated, disoriented, hallucinating, probably wishing to hell he had never asked Elliott Gardner to look after that briefcase in Logan’s Terminal C.
They took him back to his cell and fed him his evening meal at 1900, just bread, beans, rice, and an apple. Then they turned up the music, and left him under rock ’n’ roll assault for an hour. When the guards returned, they turned off the music, manacled and handcuffed him, and asked him the questions he had refused to answer maybe a hundred times.
Aghani had had enough. The wound in his upper arm, where he had been shot by Officer Pete Mackay, was
