Soon after I graduated law school in 2012, I joined two lawyers at my firm in their representation of Adel el-Ouerghi, a Tunisian man who had been held at Guantanamo for eleven years. He had never been charged with any crime; in fact, he had been cleared for release three times. It was not a popular case at my firm. Two partners asked me why the firm had devoted resources to representing a terrorist; a third questioned our work. Another, when my officemate discussed Adel’s case, told him, “Check your facts. There must be some mistake; he must have done something wrong, our government wouldn’t just hold him for no reason.”
The American judicial system reflects this attitude. Even now, US courts have ducked the question of whether Guantanamo detainees have the basic constitutional right to due process. Federal courts ruling on habeas corpus petitions have condoned detention on the flimsiest of pretexts: spending a few days at a “suspicious” guest house or learning English in the wrong part of Pakistan can make someone “part of Al Qaeda or associated forces” and justify decades in prison. Department of Justice lawyers across four administrations, from Bush through Biden, have argued that the US government can detain these men as long as it deems necessary.
Our justice system regularly performs injustice and systematically silences those whom it victimizes. And so Mansoor Adayfi’s memoir of his fourteen years at Guantanamo, Don’t Forget Us Here, is a rare and remarkable document. Written over six years on scraps of paper hidden under his mattress and relayed to his lawyers, Adayfi’s book is a firebolt, a blistering, meticulous account of what happened to him and others at the hands of the American government — and of what it means to live as the subject of jargon used to justify your ongoing imprisonment.
At first, Adayfi thought his was a case of mistaken identity, easily sorted out. It was late 2001 or early 2002, and Adayfi, fresh out of high school in Yemen, had gone to Afghanistan for the summer to earn money for his studies; he would start as a computer science student in the fall. While he was working in northern Afghanistan, the US invaded. Local warlords, drawn to bounties the US paid for foreigners (especially Arabs), captured and sold him to the US. At a CIA black site, he was electrocuted, beaten, and thrown into an oil drum and tossed around like clothes in a dryer. Finally, he confessed to being “Adel,” a middle-aged Egyptian general who supposedly took direct instruction from Osama bin Laden. Confession secured, he was shipped off to Guantanamo Bay.
Adayfi told all of his Guantanamo interrogators, repeatedly: They had the wrong guy, and they’d coerced a “confession” from him. But this story was not what they wanted to hear. “You’re one of the big fish,” they told him. They wanted him to admit that he had planned the US Embassy bombings in East Africa years earlier, when he was just a teenager; that he was recruiting for bin Laden in Yemen; that he had conducted operations in Palestine; that he was Al Qaeda.
The US is a country for which “democracy” and “human rights” are supposed to be foundational principles. Yet few Americans have come to terms with the fact that the US runs a torture camp where men are condemned for decades without even the semblance of any rights. Inside the corridors of power, fewer still seem interested in dismantling it. As Adayfi’s story shows, to have human rights, you need to be recognized as human.
Released in 2016, Adayfi now lives effectively under house arrest in Serbia (“Guantanamo 2.0,” as he describes it), where the Serbian government treats him like a dangerous criminal. We spoke recently about his time in America’s grip, whether innocence and guilt have any meaning, and the importance of his resistance to survival.
—Anil Karim Vassanji for Guernica
Guernica: Guantanamo has been portrayed as a place to keep the “worst of the worst,” the most dangerous terrorists in the world. When did you realize the prison had nothing to do with the guilt of its prisoners or the danger they supposedly posed?
Adayfi: American airplanes used to drop fliers advertising large sums of money for the capture of Arabs or foreigners, like me. Not just in Afghanistan: Pakistan handed over a lot of people. Iran handed over some detainees, and Saudi Arabia. People were brought from Bosnia, from Africa, from the United Arab Emirates. I met a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden who had left Al Qaeda and started his own business. He was sent to the United Arab Emirates, tortured, hung from his limbs for three days, then shipped to a black site, then to Guantanamo. There was a Yemeni business man who was sent from Egypt. Another Pakistani man was sent from Thailand.
When I met the other men in Guantanamo, yes, some of them were part of Al Qaeda and had fought against Americans. They admitted to the guards: “Yes, we are Al Qaeda, we fought you guys, and this is the reason we fought against you.” But many others were not fighters or high-level members. They had been drivers or bodyguards, people who just worked for money. They weren’t high-level terrorists; they didn’t want to kill Americans. Many of us weren’t in the battlefield, holding guns and shouting “Allah-u-Akbar, Al Qaeda, Taliban!”
But it’s not about Al Qaeda or anyone else; it’s about us as humans. No one should be tortured, no matter what. Americans believe they have the best justice system in the world, but they are selective about their justice. Anyone committing a crime —regardless of what kind of crime it is, whether it’s Khaled Sheikh Mohammed or others—should be treated with a basic set of standards. The US has kidnapped people, bought people, and tortured them. We’ve seen the US commit war crimes, torturing people at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites. No one has ever been held accountable for those crimes. If you are not American, if you are a Muslim, you have no rights. They can do whatever they want, they can indefinitely detain you, torture you, even kill you as “collateral damage.”
Guernica: You’re describing selective justice; if you are Muslim, are brown, have a beard, you are presumed guilty or somehow deserving of what happened to you at Guantanamo. Is this selective justice why Guantanamo remains open to this day? Some stories of torture — what happened at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, at the black sites — have been circulating in the public domain for many years now, with no real repercussions.
Adayfi: Guantanamo has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. It’s about revenge. One of the reasons Guantanamo exists is that America wanted to send a message: “We can go as far as we want. We do not abide by any rules or regulations or any obligations.” George W. Bush’s administration launched one of the biggest military campaigns in history, and they needed to give their people something to make them feel safe. They packed us in orange jumpsuits and surrounded us with barbed wires, green tarps, cages, telling everyone, “We’ve captured the worst of the worst terrorists.” But it was never about protection. They had captured these Al-Qaeda-Taliban-killers-murderers-suicide bomber people, put them in orange jumpsuits, locked them up in total secrecy in a dark place nobody could find, and classified everything about them. No names, no profiles, no pictures, no information, nothing. Even the guards were shown pictures of Ground Zero before meeting us and were told, “These are the guys who did this.” When we arrived, many of us had already been tortured at black sites. They tortured us so badly. So by the time we arrived at Guantanamo, we were already programmed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear.
They weren’t interested in justice. If they were really interested in justice, they would have brought us to the United States and prosecuted us. That’s why we were there at Guantanamo, deliberately outside any legal system; there was no law, not domestic law, or international law.
Guernica: This is an important point, about how language can be twisted. What is a “terrorist”? It sounds like you felt that the Americans were trying to transform you all into “terrorists,” to turn you into the right kind of bogeymen in order to tell everyone they were doing the right thing, to establish why they needed to keep you in Guantanamo in the first place.
Adayfi: What makes a person a person? Your name, your faith, your values, your morals, your language, your memories, your emotions, your relationships, your experiences, your knowledge, your family, your identity. They wanted to change us into something we weren’t. They brought us to this place, disconnected from the world, and stripped everything away. You’re not allowed to talk, you’re not allowed to stand, you’re not allowed to pray, you’re not allowed to express yourself. We weren’t even allowed to sleep. You can’t put your head here, you can’t put your feet there. It is designed to drive you crazy, to turn you into a shell of a human being, into something you are not.
Of course you will resist! Of course you try to push back, because this is about who you are. But they would use our reactions against us, and say, “Look, we have these dangerous terrorists here, look how they behave.” If you hunger strike, you’re a terrorist. If you’re in pain, you’re a jihadist. If you pray, you are a terrorist. Every little thing was controlled; everything was designed and supervised by psychologists. Everything was controlled, even our reactions.
Guernica: In addition to overt acts of resistance — hunger strikes, refusal to comply with orders, throwing excrement at the guards — you describe more existential forms of resistance in a place designed to destroy your humanity: practicing your faith and creating art. Tell me about that.
Adayfi: For us, surviving itself became an act of resistance. If you die, that means they succeeded. But it’s more than just avoiding death. If you are alive, that’s different than not being dead. It means you are able to smile, to talk, to protest. If you are alive, you still have resistance within you. And, at Guantanamo, if you’re alive, you’re also a fucking terrorist.
So to be alive — for us at Guantanamo, that meant remembering what makes a person a person: our emotions, relationships, memories, knowledge. At Guantanamo, we only had each other. We had no shared life from before, so we started developing friendships, a kind of brotherhood. We started sharing our memories, our emotions, our knowledge, our faith with each other. Some of us, or our family members, were doctors, nurses, psychologists, scholars, journalists, paramedics, all kinds of people, so we shared those stories with each other.
My faith tells me that I should take care of my neighbors. I should respect my elders, I should take care of the young, I should respect everyone regardless of who they are, even my enemies. I should not lie, and I cannot attack anyone unjustly. I should not hate anyone. I may hate only ugly actions, wrong actions, but I never hate the person. This is just who I am. This is practicing my faith.
Art also became a means for us to survive. In 2010, when it became clear that Obama wasn’t going to close the prison, we began hunger striking. After years of hunger strikes and force-feeding, we negotiated with the administration for some kind of peace in the prison. Our lives became, temporarily, a bit better. For example, we started holding art classes, where the men could paint.
When we created art, we were trying to escape the feeling of being in jail. We were trying to escape to some world we created. Imagine being kept for years and years in solitary confinement. No trees, no animals, no sky. We would draw the sky, flowers, animals, ships on the sea; our art connected us to life outside detention. We even changed the physical space of the prison. We turned our prison blocks into a museum, with walls of artwork and flowers everywhere. Even the guards were like, “Wow, this doesn’t look like a prison anymore!”
Guernica: Yet even that was used against you, wasn’t it? One of the hardest parts of the book to read is where you describe how, after the US Army took over administration of Guantanamo from the Navy, the new guards retaliated against the men for their artwork, gleefully destroying everything you had created.
Adayfi: When the army took over in 2013, many of the new guards had been in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of them had lost friends there, and they viewed us as the enemy. They were full of hate and rage against us. They stripped us naked, one by one, put us back in orange jumpsuits, and made us watch while they destroyed everything.
But we created the paintings not knowing what would happen to them. For so long, art wasn’t even allowed. When we made a painting, there was no assurance of what would happen to it. We painted just to paint.
They took our own art and created a little art gallery at the Guantanamo visitor’s center for tourists, for government officials, for journalists, to say, “Look, they are being treated so well.” Our own art being used to improve the American image! A little artwork escaped; some of us had given our lawyers a few pieces, and in 2017 we created the first art exhibit of works created by Guantanamo detainees, held in New York. Even then, the US government created a huge fuss. They said this work was propaganda for terrorism and thus belonged to the US government. They threatened to burn and destroy the art. (Thankfully their threats never materialized.)
Guernica: You wrote this book twice: The first time it was confiscated, and you recreated it with pages and pages of notes, from interviews with other men, your own recollections, your conversations with your lawyers. The book stands as a critical record of what happened to you and the other men, when what has been said about you has otherwise been controlled by the US government. While the government reduced you to abstractions — indefinite detention, terrorist, enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition — your book tells detailed stories.
Adayfi: This is the only book that records the first fifteen years of Guantanamo. It brings people into life in detention, that secretive place. There are stories about guards, about detainees; how it’s changed, how it’s evolved, and how it’s changed people too. Guards and staff were also victims of that dehumanizing system. A system that should serve humanity and justice was turned into a tool for destruction and injustice. The system only serves the personal interest and narratives of the people in power.
When I was writing this book in Guantanamo, I found many challenges and difficulties from even my own brothers. They didn’t like the way I was talking, asking questions, researching. They would ask, is he working with the CIA? Is he a snitch? The atmosphere in that jail forced people to be afraid and suspicious. But I told them we should write our own history with our own hands. We shouldn’t let other people write our stories. Keeping silent is another way of oppression, because you are victimizing yourself and helping the victimizer to victimize you. At the same time, you give legitimacy to whatever they have done to you. Writing, talking, screaming, shouting, that’s a way of resisting. That’s a way of staying alive.