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Yeah. So they also get some snack type items based on their compliancy status. We need to gather information. These are the people that we need to get it from. They would talk. They would be like, why am I still here? Can you send me home? We don't know what's going to happen. It's like there's no foreseeable outcome. There's no like how long am I going to stay in this prison?
From Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is Serial Season 4, Guantanamo. One prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. Mike Bumgarner was on a plane on the tarmac waiting to take off when his BlackBerry buzzed. He wanted to ignore it, but then he saw it was his boss, a general. When the general calls, you generally answer. He scooted to the back of the plane. So I'm hiding back there on my BlackBerry and talking to the general. He says, Mike, I need you to go down to Guantanamo and take command.
His own command meant he'd be in charge of a whole brigade, boosted into the rarer air of the senior officers. This was the call he'd been waiting for. And he said, will you accept it? I said, yes. He said, you don't want to think about it? He said, it's got some issues. This was early spring of 2005. Mike Bumgarner was in his mid-40s. He'd spent the last two decades rising in the military police corps, stationed all over the place.
Guantanamo would be his biggest assignment yet. He'd be the de facto warden of one of the most controversial prisons on the planet. But the place had been operational a few years already. And a prison's a prison, right? To be honest, I didn't really think it was going to be that hard. It would be hard. It would be the worst year. Not just Mike Bumgarner's worst year. Some former detainees agree it would be Guantanamo's worst year.
By the end of Bumgarner's tenure, hand-to-hand combat would break out between guards and detainees. Severe new protocols would prompt worldwide condemnation. And the worst would happen. Three men would die. Apart from the superlative designation of the worst year, about the only thing the U.S. military and the prisoners agree on about that time is that before it got horrible, it was going pretty well for Guantanamo. A fragile detente was taking seed.
Until they betrayed us. Or until they betrayed us. Depending on who you ask. This episode is part one of the worst year. The less worst part. Mike Bumgarner's first months on the job. When each side took stock of the other's power. About a week after the call, Bumgarner arrived at Guantanamo. A week. No prep. Just get down here. Stat.
From the airport, they whooshed him across the bay on a fast boat straight into a waiting car that delivered him straight to his new commander, Army Brigadier General Jay Hood, who has a kindly face and does not suffer fools. And he doesn't beat around the bush. When I came in that office, there maybe have been four seconds of courtesy of like, hey, how are you doing? Good trip? Yes, sir. Right to business. General Hood gave him a rapid fire rundown. 540 some detainees. Here's how many in segregation. Here's how many in discipline blocks.
General Hood didn't want to be interviewed for this story, but Bumgarner said Hood's main point was about PR. Bumgarner says Hood told him the military was losing the public relations war over Guantanamo. Hey, we're under a lot of scrutiny right now. The U.S. public, our government, internationally, we're not trusted. When Bumgarner's previous commander mentioned that this assignment had some issues, this is what he was talking about.
By April of 2005, when Bumgarner arrived at Guantanamo, General Hood had withstood several scandals. The worst one was Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison in Iraq. Hood had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib, but appalling photos had come out, proof that guards had inflicted sadistic abuse and humiliation on prisoners there. And the shadow of that abuse fell over Guantanamo. Critics were saying, if it was happening in Iraq, if it was happening in CIA black sites — because news of that torture was leaking out too —
Surely it was happening in Guantanamo. So that was one thing. Then there were allegations that guards and interrogators at Guantanamo were intentionally mishandling the Quran, an issue that would very soon inspire deadly protests in Afghanistan and then in the Middle East, Sudan, Indonesia, Afghanistan.
And on top of all that, right in Hood's backyard, a good old-fashioned sex scandal. Turned out four male officers, including a one-star general, were having swingy affairs with a female nurse and other female civilian contractors on the base. That's why Bumgarner had to hightail it to Guantanamo to take charge. His libidinous predecessor had been booted off the island.
Meanwhile, human rights groups were starting to call the place a gulag. Even some influential congressional Republicans were wavering on their support for Guantanamo. President Bush and the DOD were feeling the pressure. So now General Hood was saying, we got to change the narrative about Guantanamo. We need to show the outside world what compliance looks like. We've got to convince, one, make sure it is right, continue to make it better.
And at the same time, get the world to understand that we are doing it in a first-class manner, professionally the way it should be done, with no detainee abuse occurring. So the mission, as Bumgarner understood it from that first meeting with General Hood, was nothing short of, don't let the critics close down Guantanamo. Make sure this place stays open. The president's counting on you.
Mike Bumgarner didn't take this metaphorically. He took it literally. He was the son and grandson of military men. That's how he was raised. If you're in charge, you fulfill the mission. No excuses. From here on out, he thought, I got to make this place the best possible version of itself. Before he made any changes, Bumgarner reviewed the whole operation. A few things about the place displeased him. First, he found it surprisingly uptight in some respects. As an example,
When I arrived, they could not have a straw because some felt it could be fabricated to make a weapon. The senior staff seemed to think anything could be turned into a weapon, as if these detainees had superhuman skills.
Bumgarner thought, a lot of the security stuff we're doing, it's over the top. The way we transported them to Guantanamo, for instance, and on occasion around the camp. With the earmuffs, the blacked-out goggles, the many chains, the nutty secrecy over stuff he didn't think mattered. Leadership would freak out if anyone said anything to an outsider about the computer system, where they logged their notes about daily activity inside the prison blocks. It was called DIMS. DIMS, Detainee Information Management System.
Dims is where we put he ate his nut bar and he had two cartons of milk. He got moved to rec at this time. I mean, that's how benign all the stuff that's—I mean, not all the stuff. But for me to say 293 moved over to Echo and we gave him an extra pair of socks. All that classified. You can't mention Dims. Can't talk about it. His second observation was about discipline. He thought, you guys are doing it wrong. It was crazy. It was bizarre.
We had items that we called privileged items that you were given additionally. Privileged items were anything extra a detainee had on top of the basics. Prayer beads, for example, or an extra sheet. Down to how many ketchup packages you get or hot sauce or sugar or whatever. We would regulate those and that's you're going to lose your ketchup for two weeks. Wow. Big whoop, in other words.
When fewer condiments didn't correct a detainee's behavior, the detainee was supposed to get moved to the discipline blocks. The prison was organized into areas called camps, Camp 1, Camp 2, and so on. And then we had, oh, we're going to take you over to Camp 3. Camp 3 was the discipline camp. Camp 3 was huge. Camp 3 would hold 300, 350 people. And it was full. And we had people waiting in line to go to Camp 3. Everybody in the whole place came.
oh, discipline time, where they had to go to Camp 3. And I said, okay, what makes Camp 3 so different? I mean, they looked just like the same. It really was no different. I mean, there wasn't any real difference in being in Camp 3 as in being in Camp 2, just right across the little walkway. The third thing, and hardest to deal with, was the attitude of the guards, what Bumgarner called the guard culture. In candor, I don't think I've ever said this publicly before,
You would find among the greatest bulk of the guards, I'd say more than half, they truly despise the detainees. I hate to say that number. It may have been smaller. Some, if they, you know, if the life was hard on the detainee, that was okay with them. I mean, if we didn't respect the Islamic religion, that was okay with them. As one guard commander told me, it just seemed like a big babysitting operation. We were babysitting so they could get intel.
The worst detainees, he said, and Bumgarner agreed, would holler and spit at you, throw shit and piss at you, call you vile names, incessantly bang on their metal cages, break their toilets, demand this and that, have you trotting up and down the tiers. Some of these guards were right out of high school, on their first deployment. They're working 12-hour shifts. It's Cuba, blazing hot and dripping humidity. The prison tiers were like hothouses, powered by provocation and retaliation. Tit for tat.
So that was the state of the place when Bumgarner got there. Weirdly strict, weirdly lax, weirdly tense. Bumgarner had done some detention work before. He'd run security at different bases, including overseas. He'd been a director at the Army's military police school, even worked as a sheriff's deputy for a minute during college. He thought, all due respect, General Hood's an artilleryman. These senior guys making the rules, they don't have a background in corrections, so they don't get it.
I was a military police. I felt like I understood the insides. Detainee, that I understood prisoners and how you do this kind of stuff. He thought he could fix it. Massive reset for the prisoners. That was Bumgarner's first big move. We reset all discipline. Everybody got amnesty or whatever. They were all forgiven. All prior events are forgiven. Clean slate. Start anew today.
Baumgartner's strategy was to double down on the carrots and sticks, make the compliant camps more comfortable and the non-compliant camps more miserable. He'd make the differences stark. A big bright line, big bright line. Good is over here, bad is over here. And bad, within the conventions, I'm going to make bad as bad as I possibly can. Within the conventions means the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war.
which defines international standards and protections for POWs. During Bumgarner's first meeting with General Hood, Hood had explicitly told Bumgarner, go look at the Geneva Conventions. We're taking so much public heat over allegations of abuse and unfairness. Look at the conventions. See what you can implement here.
Bumgarner was familiar with the Geneva Conventions. He'd written a thesis about it just a couple years earlier at military college. The topic of his paper was topical. What set of laws are we supposed to follow when fighting terrorists? And now here was Bumgarner on the ground floor of that still unanswered question, walking not just a fine line, but an invisible one.
The Bush administration's position so far had been that Geneva didn't apply to the men held at Guantanamo because they weren't prisoners of war in the traditional sense. They weren't typical soldiers. They were rogues, terrorists. So we didn't have to extend them the Geneva protections, especially the ones prohibiting torture or coercion, or crucially, the one about giving POWs access to the courts. But the ones about food, water, religion, reading material, medical care, those seemed okay, right?
Baumgartner had to figure out what else was okay. How far should he go? How far could he go? That's after the break. Hey, serial listeners, go deeper into one detainee's story in Letters from Guantanamo on Audible. Mansour Addaifi was 18 when he was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to the CIA. As one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, he endured unbearable
I'm Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at The New York Times. I try to find out what the U.S. government is keeping secret.
Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at The New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.
It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle, and that's why it requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers. If The New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.
Bumgarner and his team developed a sort of caste system among the detainees, demarcated by the color of their clothing. Initially, they put everyone in a tan outfit. Consistent good behavior would get you a coveted white one. Bad behavior, a dreaded orange one. If you followed the rules, your sleeping pad would be softer, closer to a mattress than a yoga mat. You could keep more stuff in your cell, talk to your neighbors more. Guards are nicer to you. There's less...
urgency placed on things. You know, they'll talk to you. If you don't do this, they may be more of a discussion. You go over to a discipline camp or November. November Block, over in Camp 3, was Bumgarner's discipline innovation, where he sent the most unruly detainees. He refurbished it to make it as isolating and unpleasant as possible. November Block was called Administrative Segregation, or ADSEG, designed to break you down.
In the courtyard, parked like a harbinger, was a barber chair. Upon arrival, your hair would get cut, your beard shaved off, all your stuff taken away, including your clothes, your underwear, all that remained to ward off the blasting AC. No sleeping pad. Every single item had to be handed back after you used it. A cup, a toothbrush, the blanket they gave you at night. The only human beings you interacted with on November block were guards, who'd periodically open the little flap on your door.
And the guards in November block? Bumgarner said they were handpicked for qualities he characterized as, quote, hard robot. No personality, no discussion. I tell you once, you do it, or else I'm going to send in a five-man IRF team and riot gear to make you do it. In November, you can't talk to any other detainee. If you start trying to talk to somebody, we're not going to allow that. How do you not allow somebody to talk to you? And what we would do, we'd drown it out. Either from the guards would just start yelling, and all the guards would just start yelling.
Or we would turn on the big fans on the end of the halls, vacuums. Noise from the vacuum. I forgot to mention, a huge, giant vacuum cleaner is on. That is Ahmed Erashidi, formerly known as detainee number 590, formerly nicknamed the General by U.S. personnel at Guantanamo. A nom de guerre, he says, caused him nothing but strife.
Ahmed Arashidi was a talker, a troublemaker, a big personality who could influence others to make trouble too. That's how his jailers saw him. He's originally from Morocco, but he spoke English. He'd worked in London as a cook at a couple fancy hotels. He told Dana he remembered his first encounter with Bumgarner. It was a couple months after Bumgarner's arrival. Arashidi and a handful of other detainees had been stewing over in the new discipline setup, November Block.
This is not a normal isolation. This is different isolation. This is isolated from isolation. Rashidi says he'd organized a protest. They'd all rip up their shirts, and when they got replacement shirts, they'd rip those up too. Super annoying for the staff. Pretty soon, who should appear on his block but Mike Bumgarner himself. The big chicken, some detainees called him, because of the eagle insignia on his army colonel's uniform. And he walked in down the corridor.
And he was on his own. And it's very unusual for the colonel to walk on his own. Usually he's with someone, you know? As I walked under this tier, he had a plastic shield in front of his cell. And that normally meant that he was prone to throwing stuff or spitting on guards. And so we'd put you where there's a shield there.
Well, he had his face pressed up against it. It was the weirdest, most bizarre sight to me, seeing that face pressed up against that thing and yelling at the top of his lungs. I even called him a Nazi. I called him all kind of names, bad names. You are a torturer. You are this. You are this. And he keeps on walking to the end of the block and came back. And he stood by the door of my cell.
And he was smiling. He looks almost happy, as if I was praising him. I stopped. I did not know he spoke English, but I started talking to him. I was just short of breath, trying to tell him everything all at once. A torrent of complaints, especially about the guards. Your soldiers are abusing us. You are soldiers. You're doing this to us. You're doing that to us. Why are you allowing your soldiers to abuse us?
He says, "No, I'm not." I said, "Yes." And you are encouraging them to do that by allowing them to be anonymous. The guards at Guantanamo covered the name tags on their uniforms, ostensibly so that the terrorists couldn't track them down later or harm their families. The result of the no names was that detainees had a hard time complaining if a specific guard beat them up because they couldn't identify them. Arashidi says he asked Baumgartner, "Why don't you give each guard a number in place of the name tag?"
Mike Bumgarner and Ahmed Arashidi differ on some of the details of this encounter. When exactly the name tag issue came up, for example. It was a long time ago. But their memories agree on the main elements. Mike Bumgarner was astonished by this eloquent yeller, Ahmed Arashidi. And Ahmed Arashidi was astonished by this new colonel, Mike Bumgarner, who was listening.
Sitting down and talking, as far as Bumgarner knew, no warden had ever done that before. It would turn out to be his most radical move at Guantanamo. Let's sit down and talk tomorrow. He says, but first, tell your friends to stop tearing up their shirts. Tell your friends to stop tearing up their shirts. And if you have any concern, just write it down and then we can sit down and talk about it.
I said to him, did you know that we are in isolation? We are not allowed a pen and a paper? And you're asking me to write everything down. I said, no, I... And he asked God, he says, get them all a pen and a paper. And he said to me, write it down, everything, and we sit down tomorrow. Bumgarner's goal was a calm camp to keep his guys safe by getting guys like Arashidi to settle down.
To do that, he'd need more than the threat of November block. He figured maybe it's a little unusual to meet one-on-one with a detainee, but let me just hear what he wants. That night, Arashidi gathered the concerns of his fellow detainees. He said some of them were upsetting to hear, as if the men were falling apart or maybe already broken. One guy asked, please, can you let us have more than 24 hours between the 30-day stretches of isolation?
Another guy, one of his demands. Not so upsetting. In one of his demands, he says, can you ask them to bring some mixed nuts? Because I miss eating nuts. We're talking about degradation, you know what I mean? And this guy is talking about nuts. We miss having nuts. I miss having nuts. I want some nuts.
Next day, Bumgarner and some of his staff, dressed in their desert camouflage, and Arashidi in his orange detainee scrubs, sat down at a little picnic table near Bumgarner's office. The two men weren't so far apart in age. They both had a lot of confidence and a temper. As Arashidi remembers it, they met for a few hours, and then again the next day. Arashidi said he was impressed by the consideration Bumgarner showed his staff. With each detainee request, he'd turn to his colleagues, ask their opinions.
For his part, Bumgarner said Arashidi seemed smart and a little strange. He was a different fellow. Mercurial comes to mind. He's the one that drew me a map. It was a drawing of a path, representing an aspirational timeline for the prison.
At the beginning of the path was the past, which Arashidi labeled the Dark Ages. Bad food, poisoned water, lack of respect for their religion. Everything bad, and he's got these all along this path. And then it transitions to where, you know, good food, you know, respect for our faith. And it leads to, I don't know, nirvana, but, you know, happiness on the far right. He got the picture. The talks were fruitful.
The camp administration would end up adopting a new prisoner design menu with four daily options, including one for those with delicate digestion. They'd provide detainees with bottled water. Wall clocks would be installed in the camps so that detainees wouldn't have to rely on the guards, who typically answered daytime or nighttime when you asked them the time. Even better? For the first time, we were allowed to have the light dimmed in our cells for the first time after 9 o'clock.
Blessed dimness after years of blazing lights 24-7. Wreck time expanded, Arashidi said, to two hours instead of 20 minutes. And instead of 20 sheets of toilet paper, a guy could get a whole roll. Bumgarner wasn't about to get rid of November block or abolish IRFINGS, but he agreed to some new guard protocols. To fix the name tag problem, he agreed to Arashidi's number solution. Each guard would wear an assigned number on his or her uniform.
Baumgartner agreed to stop the guard force from calling the detainees packages when moving them around the camps. And he agreed to Erashidi's proposal for how to stop the guards from stomping up and down the metal floors during prayer time. He said, why don't you put out prayer cones?
And that became accepted where General Jay Hood and Admiral Harry Harris was talking to the White House about the prayer columns. And it just became accepted. Prayer columns, of course. I always thought that was so crazy. I remember when he said prayer column, I go, what is a prayer? He goes, I don't know. Why don't you take a traffic cone and put a big P on it and put it out whenever it's prayer time. And so that'll tell everybody to be quiet on the tier. And the guards saw that and they respected it too. It got to the point though, they say,
Well, it squeaks over here, and your guards continue to walk up and down the tier, but there's a squeaky part right here, so quit walking over there. And they would put a prayer cone over the squeaky part. I mean, that's the extent it went to. It's not like we were blowing them off. We were trying to cooperate with them. Arashidi, though, was conflicted about his own role in this extraordinary two-day summit. On one hand, he said he felt like a hero. The prisoners had won important concessions.
On the other hand, maybe he was selling his fellow prisoners short in some way, negotiating over small practical questions, toilet paper, rather than the actual shit, the biggest, most pressing question. Why are you still holding us, illegally, without charge? So I thought, maybe I'm giving the wrong message to Bumgarner and Prym.
The prospect of indefinite detention, no clear system for how this all ends, that trumped every other complaint, every other demand. When would Bumgarner negotiate about that?
A major aspect of the Bush administration's campaign to show the world that Guantanamo wasn't Abu Ghraib was to beckon visitors inside the camp. Dignitaries, politicians, reporters. During one press conference a few months after Baumgartner's arrival, President Bush said it about four times. Go down there, take a look, see for yourself. And people did.
The charm offensive, helped along by Bumgarner's soothing North Carolina accent and folksy manner, was working pretty well. Occasionally, Bumgarner told me, he misstepped. On a bus full of visitors, he once described a young female guard as, quote, cute as a puppy. General Jay Hood was standing right next to him and gave him, quote, one of the worst ass-chewings I've ever had in my life.
But at the same time, three months into the worst year, prisoners at Guantanamo were hunger striking. Hunger strikes were not new. They'd been going on sporadically since the camp's earliest days. But this one persisted, and the outside world noticed, which of course was the point. The timing of the hunger strike was opportune. It seemed the detainees were wise to the uptick in visitors.
Also, one of the organizers of the strike told us, they knew that news reports of hunger strikes, nonviolent protests in which detainees hurt their own selves, seemed to penetrate the American consciousness in a way other news from Guantanamo didn't. Some of the most in-depth reporting came from Tim Golden at The New York Times. He wrote a great magazine story about this period, which is how I know that it was late July when Bumgarner broke this first hunger strike, in a maneuver that would shape the rest of his time at Guantanamo.
He did it by negotiating, not with Erashidi this time, but with another detainee Bumgardner had met soon after Erashidi, a guy named Shaker Amr, a British resident, who wielded his charisma brilliantly inside and outside Guantanamo.
Shaker Amar was beloved by many of the detainees, especially Saudis like himself. And there were a lot of them. Most of the Arabs at Guantanamo were Saudis. And so Shaker had sway with Bumgarner, too. He told Bumgarner, this hunger strike, I can end it. And they made a deal. If Shaker stopped the hunger strike, Bumgarner would try to further improve whatever conditions he could inside the camps in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
And so it was. Bumgarner walked the blocks with Shacker, unshackled, a first, and saw with amazement how other detainees whooped in celebration. He watched as Shacker Amherst spread the word, surgically, among the camp's other leaders. Drop the hunger strike. The big chicken is going to work with us. And Bumgarner rejoiced when, just like that, most of the hunger strikers started eating again. Victory.
Now, instead of individual negotiations, Bumgarner was ready to start a council of detainees, which would communicate grievances to the camp administration. Rashidi says he'd suggested this to Bumgarner. I've also read versions where Shaker Amer is credited with it. But Bumgarner says he did it because Geneva Conventions. POWs have a right to self-representation.
Bumgarner knew this might be delicate to pull off. Not everyone above or below him was fully on board. Why give these detainees a sense of authority? Why let them kibitz? But Bumgarner had faith. About a week after he walked the blocks with Shaker Amir, six detainees were brought together to a rec yard outside Alpha Block in Camp 1 for a sanctioned meeting with camp administration.
And these six, according to Bumgarner, they were some of the most powerful detainees in the camp. An Egyptian religious leader named Ala Muhammad Salim. Very smart guy. He was brilliant. Abdul Zaif from Afghanistan, who'd been a Taliban cabinet minister. I mean, he was a big dog. A Saudi engineer who went to university in the States and proudly admitted his membership in al-Qaeda, Hassan al-Sharabi. Al-Sharabi, he was a very handsome fellow. Always looked like he'd just stepped out of the shower, beard perfectly trimmed, meticulous.
His clothes always, I don't know how he did it really. I mean, I wish I could have looked like him. And finally, Shacker. Effervescent. He, bubbly personality. He can charm the pants off. He seems like such a nice guy. You can hear it, right? He liked some of these guys.
Fasan and Shaker especially. He figured a couple of them would instantly kill him if they got the chance. Fasan Asharabi had said as much, without a muss of his gleaming black hair. But aside from that, Bumgarner said he respected them. Not necessarily their beliefs, but their stature. The second time the group met, Bumgarner joined. He sat with them. The prisoners had no leg irons on, no cuffs. Freestyle. I thought by this point we were doing pretty good on meeting their demands of the camp administration.
And I think they probably felt that way too because we didn't stay on that for maybe 10, I mean very briefly, if that. I mean even if at all. We went to the big issue. You gotta get us set free. Bumgarner told them, "That I cannot do." He was the warden, full stop. Freedom and justice were above his pay grade. Surely they could understand that. It's what I tried to get them to understand is you're gonna be here. You're gonna be here.
And I can try to help make your life a little better while you're here or you continue to be miserable. And that's why I was trying to understand that. You're not leaving. Remember, Bumgarner had rushed down to Guantanamo to take over. No time for language or cultural training. The prison was holding hundreds of Muslim men from umpteen countries, Afghans and Saudis and Yemenis and Pakistanis and Algerians, suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
Sure, Bumgarner was interacting with a few of the detainees individually. But on the whole, Bumgarner knew very little about his prisoners. He was endearingly, if disturbingly, frank about that. I couldn't, I didn't know the difference between a terrorist and an Arab. He lamented a few times that he deployed to Iraq after he deployed to Guantanamo instead of the other way around. That way, he would have recognized that some of the things he thought were terrorist viewpoints were simply Arab viewpoints.
He misunderstood, or maybe half understood, who he was dealing with. Agape adventure stretches to this day. For instance, Bumgarner believed, to a man, all the detainees, well, maybe not Shaker, but definitely everyone else, would be willing to die for their cause, which he understood to be entwined with conservative Islam. So he tried to keep an eye on the religious leaders among them.
These guys are very powerful, and there's only a handful of them. I can't give you any names. I can remember one of them, sort of strange. He was a, we called him the Viking. Red beard, red complexion, red hair. Murat Kurnas, a German resident whose family was from Turkey. That's funny, yeah. Was Murat a religious leader at Guantanamo? Of course not, no. No.
To hear Murat tell it, he was a nobody, only 19 when he got to Guantanamo. He didn't speak Arabic or Pashto. He could barely talk to anyone. He hadn't even been to a religious madrasa like some of the other detainees. It's funny what's said. They never would accept my religious things about between the Arabs. It's funny. Who said that? Murat struggled to remember Bumgarner, but a lot of personnel remember Murat.
He wasn't at Guantanamo that long, relatively speaking, but he stuck out to people. Because he stuck out. He was a very large person, a martial artist who missed his practice so dearly. He was once seen bench-pressing two smaller men out in the rec yard. He was sort of European. He spoke German, also some English, plus the reddish hair. Maybe that's why Bumgarner attributed special leadership powers to him.
I don't mean to imply that Bumgarner's information was all wrong. I think it was partly wrong. In the same way, so much about Guantanamo was partly wrong. We craved order, rhyme, and reason. So out of scraps of information that were true, we took leaps and liberties and created narratives that often weren't true, that showed a warped picture of who these men really were.
Bumgarner trusted the information he had access to. He believed what he read in the hopped-up detainee files about their terrorist links. He believed the intelligence research about how al-Qaeda continues to organize, even in confinement. He believed the detainees had a sort of org chart, an organized org chart. Very, very organized. Organized cellular by function.
Organized, in other words, in much the same way terrorist cells out in the world are organized. You would have those that actually specialized in message passing. You would have guys who would be the muscle, if you will, the attackers, the frontline soldier, if you will. You would have a—and Shocker actually told me this— you sort of had the political affairs guys. I mean, every bloc had a leader.
That's Omar Degais, originally from Libya, but his family escaped to Britain when he was young. He and other former detainees told us, Yeah, there was some organization, but not like that. It was loose. People on the block would vote and designate someone as the go-to person to make group decisions when need be or to interact with the camp administration. It wasn't an al-Qaeda thing, Omar said. It was just a we're-in-prison-together thing.
Maybe they only vote for a person because he speaks English, or maybe he's a leader in one block, but then he gets moved to a different block, and now he's a regular Joe. And it didn't depend on his background, whether he was what he was before or who he was. It all depended on how active he was inside prison. So, like, for example, Shakir was very active, and he spoke for people, and he translated, and he helped, and he tried to... So that...
Maybe he was wrong. We never had good evidence to prove Shakir Amr was al-Qaeda.
Chakar didn't want to be interviewed for this story. He was cleared for release in 2007, though he wasn't allowed to leave Guantanamo for another eight years. And Murat Kurnas, the guy from Germany, he left Guantanamo in 2006 after spending four years there. He'd later learn both U.S. and German officials determined soon after his arrest that he wasn't Taliban or al-Qaeda or a real threat to anyone's national security.
Right or wrong, this picture Baumgartner had of detainees who were ideologically fiercer than Americans, who didn't fear death the same way we did, who were highly secretly organized, of course it influenced detainee policy, how we treated them, and how we responded when they scared us. That's after the break.
Hey, serial listeners, go deeper into one detainee's story in Letters from Guantanamo on Audible. Mansour Addaifi was 18 when he was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to the CIA. As one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, he endured unbearable
unimaginable torture. Starting as an act of rebellion, he wrote to the Pope, President Bush, MLK, and others. For the first time, hear these letters that celebrate the strength of human spirit and that ultimately bring catharsis to Mansoor. Letters from Guantanamo is free with membership at audible.com slash Guantanamo. The unprecedented coming together of prison staff and prisoners was short-lived.
The same week the detainee council was forming coincided with a flare-up of violence in the camps involving a mini-fridge. A Tunisian detainee was called in for an interrogation. Here's Erashidi again. And he's doing, after they locked him down to the ground, the interrogator starts swearing and cursing the prisoner. And then he picked up a fridge and he threw the fridge at the face of the prisoner. It sounds unlikely, I know, but there's documentation.
Some of the details differ report to report, but they all reflect the debased rage between the personnel and prisoners that Bumgardner observed when he first got to Guantanamo.
In an investigative memo dated August 8, 2005, the detainee, Hisham al-Slaity, says an interrogator came to his cell. Slaity tells him he doesn't want to talk, so the interrogator says, fuck you. Next day, he comes again. Slaity again says no. But then a fellow detainee in charge of his block, possibly Hassana Sharabi, who was participating in the nascent detainee council, tells him to go ahead. So Slaity does.
But once he gets to the interrogation room, it's not his usual team. There's a female present. Slaty says, forget it. I don't want to talk to you. The interrogator says, you will talk. Slaty says, I have the right not to talk to you. He's getting agitated. The interrogator puts his finger in Slaty's face, starts insulting his mother, calls her a bitch. So Slaty spits at the interrogator. And that's when, quote, the interrogator hit him with the refrigerator that was in the intel room and then hit him in the face with a chair, unquote.
When word got back to the prisoners in the camps, Erashidi says some people wanted to rise up right away. But the people said, look, let's not do it. Let's keep it calm, OK? Some people still hoped to break the exhausting, reactive rhythm of the camps. The council was underway. Maybe it would work. Again, accounts vary about the exact order of events during this first tumultuous week of August. But according to Erashidi, the prisoners had checked their rage over the mini-fridge incident.
But then, meeting number three of the council, Bumgarner wasn't there, but his recollection is that some of the prisoners started passing notes to each other, which was against the ground rules. Tim Golden, in his magazine account, wrote that when an officer tried to confiscate the notes, quote, some of the detainees popped them into their mouths and started chewing, unquote. When General Hood got wind of what had happened... He disbanded the council and said, he didn't like us using the word council either. He said, I never want to hear that word again.
And that's pretty much when he told me, I'm not, you're going to not be talking too much to the detainees. He never did say I could not totally talk, but he started reining my interaction with him in. Oh, really? He was like, shut it down now? Pretty much so. Yes, pretty much so. Baumgartner said he pushed back a little, but not much. He knew Hood was powerful. He didn't want to get fired. On the heels of that breakdown, another incident.
Erashidi said a Kuwaiti detainee was summoned to the interrogation room. Oh, you saw it? Yeah. Okay. When that happened,
automatically everybody started banging, breaking things. And a few minutes later, Bam Gana came onto myself. He came onto myself. And he wanted to say what was going on, as if he's not part of it. And he says, I've got nothing to do with that. It's not his decision to do that.
Erashidi was mad. He thought the real purpose of Bumgarner's visit wasn't to find out what had happened to make them upset, but to take the temperature of the blocks, try to get a beat on how bad this was going to be. Bumgarner had given his word that he'd curb the violence, but now he seemed to be shrugging. If he wasn't going to make his guards behave, why should the prisoners behave?
Whatever gossamer of trust and respect they'd begun to weave floated away. Prisoners broke the breakables in their cells, mostly the foot pedals on their toilets. They banged and yelled. Some prisoners suspected the violence against the Tunisian, then the Kuwaiti, was a provocation, that the guards and interrogators had sabotaged their attempt at self-representation, that Bumgarner had betrayed them. You know...
So he went away, and that's it. It started. So the hunger strike started that particular night. A renewed, reinvigorated hunger strike. Egged on by Shaker Amer. Bumgarner had had it with Shaker. They'd been working together for weeks, productively, or so Bumgarner had thought. So he's playing a very important role initially. And then when he went against me, I got Hood's concurrence to put him out in Camp Echo permanently.
Bumgarner was stressed out.
He was juggling criticism from all sides. His detainee counsel had failed. His boss had called off the experiment. He worried General Hood didn't have much confidence in him. That the interrogators also didn't appreciate him giving away comforts to detainees that they themselves wanted to use as bargaining chips. And the guards, Bumgarner's own rank and file, also grousing about Bumgarner. He wasn't a...
counsel in private, praise in public. He was a get your fucking shit together, get your head out of your ass, unfuck yourself, you know, type of guy. That's Steve Timmis, a Navy Master at Arms in charge of the Guard Force in the discipline camps.
He told me the crap morale was in large part because all the higher-ups seemed scared for their careers, scared they'd be embarrassed or blamed in the press for screw-ups. And all that fear and finger-pointing trickled down, often by a bum-garner. I was on the receiving end that once. Most of the time, I had my shit in one sock. The other guys that made mistakes, he would just go off. You know, you tell that guard, he's been trained to do it this way. Why did he do it this way?
Yeah, I was a hollerer. Yeah, I'm not proud of that. At that time, I had a very, very, very short fuse, and it built throughout the period. It is the stress. I mean, I would have told you then, no, no, everything's cool. I'm not under stress.
And I really thought that. But he was working every day until 11 p.m., midnight, sleeping maybe four hours a night, red-faced. As detainees are refusing food in protest, he's eating like a fool, his words. Bumgarner said he probably gained 40 or 50 pounds. So yes, he was stressed.
And now a big new hunger strike had started, this time with a big demand that Bumgarner had no control over because it pushed beyond menu plans and prayer cones straight to the heart of the matter: either try us for crimes or let us go. They were saying, in essence, "Treat us like proper POWs. Abide by the Geneva Conventions. Give us the protections of your laws, access to your courts." The press was all over it, tracking the upward arrow of the hunger striker numbers.
Dozens, then 76. Sometime in September, the camp says it's 131 hunger strikers. Attorneys representing the detainees say the number's more like 200. Meanwhile, controversial legislation about standards for detainee treatment is wending through Congress. Bumgarner had tried the carrots. He tried to work with the detainees, to reason with them. A big stick was nigh.
Rashidi's analysis is that during this time, Bumgarner, stymied and under pressure, made a calculated move from good guy who was genuinely trying to do the right thing by the prisoners to tough guy. I don't think that's quite it. I think it's more likely that while he was at Guantanamo, Bumgarner was always the same guy, basically a reasonable guy, but also a cop through and through. With the cops, what's the problem? Just follow the rules, logic.
Really, I'd say if the IRF team ever had to be deployed, the responsibility, in my opinion, went to the detainee because they forced the circumstance. All you had to do was comply with what you're being asked to do. And it was just a very simple type thing. Give me this back or do this. Give me your hands of that.
I understand like in an operational way why that feels very straightforward to you. On the other hand, would you also sit back and be like,
I get it. A lot of them are saying, I don't deserve to be here. I was grabbed off a bus at the border of whatever. I was visiting my whatever. I was going to teach in a school. You guys think I'm someone I'm not. I've been here for four years. I haven't talked to my parents. They don't know whether I'm dead or alive. I feel like I'm dying. I hate the food. I can't speak to anyone. I miss my sisters.
Fuck you. I'm not going to do anything you ask me to do. Why would I cooperate? All I have, the only power I have— I was on a roll now, and I couldn't stop. His argument, it's their own fault if five guys in riot gear spray them with tear gas, rush into their cell, knock them to the ground, and hogtie them, makes me nuts. First off, because look how you made me hurt you, is the bully's faulty rationale.
but also because the part that gets left out, the part that government and the military never seem to acknowledge, is that the whole time we had all the power, an imbalance poisoned by the reality that our intel was flawed. We weren't clear in our own minds about who we had or what they knew or why we were even holding them. And so why is it surprising in any way, or even wrong, frankly, for a detainee to push back against our ill-used power, either for the sake of Islamic jihad or for the sake of due process?
Once I drew breath and apologized for my soapboxing, Baumgartner said, I don't disagree with anything you just said. But back then... I can't say that I fully took into consideration all you just described. What now in life, after 15 years, I do look back with a different perspective on it all. At that time, did I really take in large consideration there? Probably thought of it, but not much more than a few seconds. As long as it was safe and secure and I knew I wasn't harming them.
Here's what happened. Bumgarner felt he was losing control of the camp. The hunger strikers filled the detainee hospital, which is where they'd get tube fed if they refused to eat.
To be fed in a hospital sounds to me like one of the worst places to be anytime, anywhere. But Bumgarner said, oh no, it was nice in there. It was always air conditioned, cool. You had to lay on the bed. You got meals brought to you, served to you like you're the king. You got attractive nurses who paid attention to you constantly. The nurses were attractive because they were female. But for Bumgarner, it was the lozenges that broke this camel's back.
When you get the tube dropped down so many times, your throat becomes irritated. And so the nurses would give them lozenges or cough drops, and they get to choose the flavor they want. I initially thought, give them, you know, give them, make them be happy. So what? So what? They had lozenges. Who cared? But then I've slowly began, well, not slowly, I've pretty much began to see we're not running things anymore. They're running things. They were bringing us to our knees on resources and everything.
just messing, from our perspective, just messing with us constantly. I mean, we're now being, the terms are being dictated by them. They have the offensive. They're the ones dictating what's going on in the camps, which was not good. Consultants from the Federal Bureau of Prisons were brought down to assess the situation, including a forensic psychiatrist. They agreed with Bumgarner, you got to take back control. And so he endorsed a new approach to the hunger strike.
one that the camp administration would call life-saving and that prisoners and most everyone else would call horrifying, force-feeding chairs. By early December, the first five restraint chairs were shipped to the island. Soon 20 more would be en route. No more cushy hospital feedings at your convenience. If you refuse to eat, we're going to put you in the chair, your legs, arms, torso all strapped in. The camp even customized the chairs, Baumgartner said, so you couldn't move your head.
And then a tube was snaked through your nose, down to your stomach. Not everyone was voluntarily getting into that chair, so the ordeal was sometimes preceded by an earthing, then guards holding you down to strap you in. Detainees are peeing on themselves, shitting themselves. Bumgarner said they did it on purpose. Detainees who experienced it said it was because they either put too much liquid inside you or cruelly added a laxative or just left you there too long. We put a pad under it and said, what happens, happens. You're not coming out of this chair until you're fed.
I know that sounds probably hard. That's probably, if I can think of all things that we did in Guantanamo, that's probably the harshest thing we did. Matter of fact, I'm sure. The chair. The chair. Did you watch it? Oh, yeah, many times. Many, many, many, many, many times. Even some personnel were traumatized by the process, never mind the detainees who underwent this fresh hell.
You couldn't take it. Somebody pushing and inserting a tube into your nose, down your gut, and then pour it out violently and then put it again. You couldn't take it. It was the worst period in Guantanamo history. From where Bumgarner sat, though, what he saw was success. Peaceful as could be. I mean, very little misconduct. Very, very, very, very little misconduct.
When he'd arrived all those months ago, the discipline camps had been at capacity with a wait list. Now they were sparse. For a number of days, they actually closed November, an empty discipline block. There was no detainees on it. That's unheard of. To have that, that's so momentous. That doesn't mean a lot to you, but I'm telling you, that is huge. That is huge. Bumgarner had done it. His goal was a quiet camp, and he'd achieved a quiet camp.
November block was quiet. The hunger strike was broken. And from then on, for the next five months, he said all was well, the longest stretch of calm Guantanamo had ever seen. Bumgarner dubbed it the period of peace. Soon enough, he'd understand. Peace, like compliance, is in the eye of the beholder. That's next time.
Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas, and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional reporting by Cora Currier. Fact-checking by Ben Phelan. Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Original score by Sofia Dele Alessandri. Editing help from Jen Guerra and Ira Glass. Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali. Additional research by Amir Kafaji and Sami Yousafzai.
Translation by Mohamed Raza Sahibzadeh. Additional production from Katie Mingle and Emma Grillo. Our standards editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Maya Gandhi. The art from our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter. Supervising producer for serial productions is Ndeye Chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller. Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of the New York Times.
Special thanks to Janelle Pfeiffer, Brad Fisher, Maddie Maciello, Daniel Powell, Marion Lozano, Clive Stafford-Smith, Tim Golden, and Esther Whitfield.