I head up before we start that this episode deals with suicide, which I know can be a hard
thing for some people to hear about in any context.
So if you're not ready for that right now, this might be when you want to come back to
later.
You're not leaving.
Previously on cereal.
You're going to be here and I can try to help make your life a little better while you're
here or you continue to be miserable.
Today we're like, hey, I thought we were friends.
Yeah, in a way, I can why you're complaining and just beating, dragging it on the floor,
beating it everywhere.
I thought maybe I'm giving the wrong message that these guys just wanted better food and
better treatments.
You're going to think that we are okay.
You can keep us here for the rest of our lives.
It was peaceful as it could be.
From cereal productions in the New York Times, it's cereal season four, Guantanamo.
In prison camp, told week by week, I'm Sarah Canig.
This is part two of Colonel Mike Bumgarner and the worst year.
Early on May 18th, 2006, Bumgarner was in his morning meeting when someone came in with
urgent news.
So the meeting was interrupted with me.
We got a suicide attempt here.
Three minutes later, no one came in.
We got another suicide attempt here.
They were being found unconscious, frothing at the mouth.
I think in both instances.
A suicide attempt on its own shocked no one.
Suicide attempts happened constantly, Bumgarner said.
So routine that somebody's trying to cut their wrists or somebody's trying to hang himself.
I mean, that was an everyday battle.
They was always somebody trying to kill himself.
Which Bumgarner worried about, but not over much.
He didn't think most of the people attempting really wanted to die.
Besides, suicide isn't allowed in Islam.
Most of the detainees wouldn't abide it.
Anyone trying to hang himself, for instance, would be discovered immediately, usually because
other detainees would stop him.
They wouldn't let him do it.
I mean, they had proven it time and time again.
They always told him.
They always told us.
Someone's those trying to hang it.
He felt like there's a backstop.
Yes.
Absolutely.
But May 18th was different.
First off, these guys weren't found hanging.
They were reportedly frothing at the mouth, which meant poison.
And not just one, but two people.
Bumgarner said his mind flew straight to a Guantanamo prophecy.
Okay, if there's two, there's got to be a third one out there somewhere.
That influential Saudi prisoner, Shacker Amar, had told him about it a while back.
Shacker was in hospital at the time, on a hunger strike.
He said, you know about this, don't you, about the dream?
And he told Bumgarner that another detainee had had a dream that if three detainees died,
they'd all get to go home.
The dream had made its way through the camp.
Lots of people heard about it.
Several former detainees told us they didn't put much stock in it.
It just seemed whatever, unlikely.
But Bumgarner believed it.
He believed that the detainees believed it.
But he also believed the substance of the dream.
But what it laid out was probably true.
I honestly did believe that if they got there way and the three guys died from the vision
that there would be such, I don't know why I talked to myself in the believe, but I
did believe there's going to be such tremendous pressure now that that's such a hellhold down
there that people are killing themselves.
It's got to be shut.
And that it would force the facility to be closed.
And if we had to close it, the guy that is really responsible for letting it happen was
me.
That's the way I felt.
That's such a huge responsibility that you're putting on yourself.
Well, it is.
And it may be arrogant to think that you ever thought of that.
That the world's dependent on me.
Maybe I'm crazy.
It's like the captain of the ship though, you know.
Everything that happens on my ship I'm responsible for.
If we succeed, you know, it's me in the crew.
If we fail, it's me.
And under this skipper, the USS Guantanamo was currently enjoying Bumgarner's signature
achievement, the period of peace.
He wanted to keep it that way.
He could not be, would not be.
The men found unconscious had taken overdoses of anti-anxiety medication, not their own
medication.
In all four detainees had become sick, but only two seemed to be genuine suicide attempts.
They were hospitalized and recovered.
The prophecy Bumgarner dreaded about three detainees dying was averted.
Still, he failed to recognize this May 18th crisis for what it was.
A prelude.
Instead, the headline that day for Bumgarner was that detainees had somehow managed
to hoard medication, which freaked him out.
What with the medical protocols and the regular cell searches, they should not have been
able to do that.
So right away on May 18th, Bumgarner ordered a facility-wide search.
Which has happened all the time at Guantanamo, but not like this.
Every single cell, every single person, some 460 detainees at that point, now, all hands
on deck.
Reports vary about what they found, but Bumgarner remembers they discovered a bunch of people.
He thinks it was in the low teens, had secreted pills.
In mattresses, that's probably the prime place.
The folds of the edges of a sheet, where the thing goes around.
Oh, like the hem?
The hem?
Up inside the hem.
I mean, you take out a few stitches.
Sure.
Stick out.
They didn't actually.
They would sew them back up.
One guy had a stash of pills hidden in his prosthetic leg.
So yeah, we found quite a bit.
Again, detainees were used to having their cells tossed, but this time, Bumgarner made
a risky call.
He directed his personnel to search all Korans, too.
In case contraband was hiding inside the pages or the spine.
He knew it would cause tension.
Complaints about personnel disrespecting or desecrating the Koran were legion.
The previous Guantanamo commander had ordered an investigation into various allegations
in an effort to separate rumor from justified fury.
It was such a sensitive issue.
The camp had instituted a rule that only Muslim staff, interpreters or the camp's new cultural
advisor, were allowed to touch it.
Obviously, detainees weren't happy about having to hand over their Korans that day.
But Bumgarner said nobody made too big a stink until they got to camp for.
We told them it was going to happen.
They didn't like that.
And so it started getting rowdy then.
Rowdy in camp for was not supposed to happen ever.
Camp for was the communal camp, their showcase.
It's where a Bumgarner could bring distinguished visitors and boasts.
See, even though the Geneva conventions don't apply here, we still treat these men
humanely.
The detainees lived together in open dorms, ten beds to a block.
They got to wear white clothing.
They could play soccer and basketball.
They could pray together and eat together.
One former detainee told us you could save leftovers for a couple days and then invite
friends over for brunch.
Admission to camp for depended on good behavior.
It was a reward for compliance.
But just because you followed the American's rules, it did not follow that you necessarily
trusted the Americans.
We talked to half a dozen detainees who were in camp for that day in May.
And they told us they had the distinct impression the Americans were up to something.
This didn't feel like a normal search.
It felt more like a deliberate provocation, possibly for some dark purpose they couldn't
decipher.
One day, the guards came to us in a weird way.
They started talking loud.
They started hitting doors.
They wanted to take the holy book.
It's Mustafa Aida dear, originally Algerian, later from Sarajevo, where he lives now.
They would grab it by the covers and they would shake it in a disrespectful way.
The way you wouldn't do it to any regular book.
Again, only Muslim personnel were supposed to touch the Qur'an's.
That was the rule.
And Bum Garner had suspended it.
Mustafa said he tried to broker an agreement with the guards, whereby he would search
the Qur'an himself.
But it didn't hold.
And then, as Bum Garner would say, it started getting rowdy.
Even the Afghan prisoners, who had a reputation for lying low, even they got rowdy at the
prospect of the Qur'an under attack.
So they told him we will fight or you can kill us.
We can sacrifice when it comes to the Qur'an.
That's Samuel Hodge from Sudan, a journalist.
They used also the Tegas.
And abundantly, they used the Tegas.
You can tell it's just hyperactivity going on.
We're yelling at us, screaming at back at us.
The guards had already evacuated out of the areas that they normally patrol.
Camp 4 was not only the most permissive camp.
For the guards, it was also potentially the most dangerous camp, because detainees could
congregate in their dorms and outside.
The upperer was getting out of hand.
Bum Garner tried to shut it down, mainly.
And then I began to personally issue an order to them.
I would not want to see footage of it.
I was ticked off.
You know, get back in your bat, calm down, you know, just all kinds of trying to bring
order to it, which I don't know why I thought that was everyone would help.
But I did.
I thought they would listen to the carol.
They could care less.
Actually, it got a matter, I think.
What happened next has been described in reports as a disturbance, a fight, a riot.
Details differ, but most of the documentation I've read settled more or less on the same
story.
But afternoon, Bum Garner decided it was time to call in the QRF, the quick reaction force,
a team of 10 soldiers equipped with riot control gear.
Sergeant Joe Hickman was in charge of the QRF that day.
He said they'd been called up before, but always the mere sight of them had quelled
whatever was stirring.
They'd never had to actually engage with detainees.
Most of the time, they sat around, bored in their hut, watching movies on DVD or whole
seasons of the office.
The force-feeding chairs were stored in there too.
Hickman said he'd sometimes take a nap in one of them.
But May 18th, when they hustled over to camp for, Hickman said they could hear people yelling
and banging and breaking stuff in all the different buildings, which ringed a large
central yard.
About 200 navy guards were staged there, waiting.
The QRF team lined up outside the door of one particularly agitated block, Zulu block.
There's a whole wind-up protocol they're supposed to go through before they physically
enter and enclose space.
But that got short-circuited when a guard started yelling about yet another suicide.
A navy guard yelled who was standing by the door.
He said, detainees in here hanging himself.
He's hanging himself.
And he opened the door real fast and we've ran in.
The navy guard was mistaken.
No one was hanging himself inside.
Instead, Hickman says what he and his QRF team encountered when they rushed in was an
expertly slipped up floor and ambush.
And we slid all over the place and we were getting bombarded with feces and urine.
Like it had been stockpiled.
Yes.
They were waiting for us.
The actual truth was that they would give detainees self-soap, the power soup for
laundry.
That's Mola Muhammad Nabi Omri, who'd been a Taliban official.
He told us he was in the dorm when the QRF came bursting in.
And he said the detainees were throwing these containers of surf soap at the guards and
the soap was spilling out onto the floor, mixing with the liquid from the tear gas.
Yeah, where did the ground?
So when they wanted to enter the room and march forward, they would slip on this ground
and fall.
This is the truth about this issue.
Again, there's some disagreement, especially between the Americans and the detainees, about
some of the fine points here.
Mola Muhammad Nabi Omri said there was no ruse to lure them in, no ambush, no advance
excretion gathering.
He said they were reacting in the moment to being attacked.
But everyone involved agrees.
They got pretty vicious.
So the prisoners started to break stuff, like the light fixtures and stuff, the light fixtures
and the water bottles, the prisoners started throwing it at the guards.
They were trying to use everything that would come in their hands.
Whatever that was, fans, bottles, beating sticks.
We took a ton of stick from him and we hit some American with that.
They had the upper hand first.
That's Joe Hickman again.
They were beatness.
And you know, when you got people caged up for years, they fight like animals.
They fight at a different level than my 18 year old kids had just graduated high school
and worked at McDonald's part time before they went in the military.
These guys are fighting.
After about five or ten minutes, Hickman says he gave the order to fire.
And they did.
Non-lethal hard pellets, though Hickman says they used them at a potentially lethal
range.
It was the first time weapons had been fired at detainees at Guantanamo.
Hickman says he hit a detainee in the chest with a rubber grenade.
Here members laughing.
Was comical to see a body go flying like that, he said, which he feels kind of bad about
now.
But in the moment, it was payback.
Violence was always in the air at Guantanamo.
But this was something else.
A straight up fight right out in the open, 10 against 10, soldiers versus detainees.
This is something that they would never have made public.
But the day of the riot, morale was never higher.
That's Steve Timis, the Navy officer in charge of the guard force in the discipline camps,
two and three.
They'd all been called over to camp four to help.
Because we got to kick their asses and get away with it.
After all that BS we had to take from them.
That's the guy that I was truth.
And they don't, we never would have sent it like that.
They probably even to this day don't like, wouldn't like us to put it like that.
But if you ask any guard that was involved in that, that's what they'll tell you.
And we finally had our day, you know.
Pickman and his team pushed the detainees out of Zulu block to where Navy guards were
waiting in the courtyard.
Well they start, while they're giving up and we're throwing them out the door, then those
Navy guys outside are literally just beating the shit out of them.
As they're going out.
They were getting cuffed and then placed all face down in the dirt outside.
They're putting wristbands on them and then they're just beating them up.
Risk bands meaning like flex cuffs or what?
Yeah.
Okay.
And beat it like hitting them.
Hitting them, yeah.
And nobody is.
Post-facephas, nobody's doing a thing.
Some of them when they were throwing them back to us, they were swinging the kickers
so we had to take them down.
Traculously, nobody was gravely injured that day.
A couple of the guards were banged up, but not as badly as some of the prisoners, especially
the ones who'd been shot with plastic pellets.
I know my uniform was covered in blood.
After we were done, I went to the clinic, you know, they take it off, throw it in one
of their bio bags and then hose off and go get it fresh, you know, form, go back to work.
Some of the detainees told us, they like to fight too.
That was a good day.
So when I asked about my friends, they were so happy after that.
So it's feel like they had kind of like their freedom.
Also the fight was righteous.
They were protecting the Quran.
It's the Khukshan.
Yeah, prisoners were, I would happy to depend the Quran.
Bumgarner couldn't understand it. They had it so good over there in Camp 4.
Why they throw it away?
Why they tear the place apart?
He dealt with the May 18th debacle not as an existential problem, but as a disciplinary
one.
That night, Camp 4 was emptied out completely.
All those supposedly compliant detainees sent to punishment blocks.
From now on, fewer people would be allowed to congregate at any one time.
And as for suicide prevention, Bumgarner focused on overdosing, medical staff only to distribute
medications, not guards.
But honestly, Bumgarner said he felt like he had things back under control.
I feel pretty comfortable saying, at that point, after just a few days, you can tell
about the activity you see in the camps on the morning briefs and just about radio traffic
that you hear.
The camps are pretty quiet.
They're sort of back to normal.
Yeah, I didn't keep my hand in my failure.
My tentacles weren't up like there was something out there was about to happen.
Maybe Bumgarner's tentacles weren't activated, but the tentacles of prisoner unrest, those
tentacles were activated and probing quietly for escape.
That's after the break.
I use the New York Times Games app every single day.
I love playing connections.
I need to twist my brain to see the different categories.
I absolutely love spelling B.
Sudoku is kind of my version of lifting heavy weights at the gym.
When I can finish a hard puzzle without pins, I feel like the smartest person in the world.
It gives me joy every single day.
Start playing in the New York Times Games app.
You can download it at nytimes.com slash games app.
Three weeks after the violence in May is when the worst thing about the worst year would
happen.
June 9th, 2006.
That night, the joint task force commander, Admiral Harry Harris, hosted the camps top
officers at a dinner party, a rare break for Bumgarner.
It was sort of like it has been a tough last few weeks.
It was the O6s and above sort of rest smoke cigarettes with the balls.
He loved to smoke cigarettes.
So sitting out on his little deck looking out over Guantanamo, the actual bay itself.
Beautiful, relaxed evening.
That sticks with me so bad that while all this is building up in the camps, I am sitting
probably for the first time and only time that happened in my time there.
I am actually sitting relaxed at the Admiral's house.
After the party broke up and people wandered home to their quarters, phones and pagers started
buzzing.
Several detainees had been found unresponsive in their cells, in alpha block of camp 1,
about 15 yards from Bumgarner's office.
The men had been discovered one by one, starting a little after 12.30 a.m.
First the guy in cell 8, then in cell 12, another, then a third, in cell 5.
According to government records, their names were Yasser Azaharani from Saudi Arabia.
He was 22, Mani El-Utaybi also Saudi, age 30, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed from Yemen, he
was 27.
All three had been found by guards hanging at the back of their cells near their sinks,
which they'd evidently stepped off of in such a way as to suspend themselves.
They concealed themselves by attaching sheets or blankets to the ceiling in front of the
sink.
Their hands were tied.
And each had a piece of paper in a pocket, a couple of short, furious sentences written
in Arabic.
By the time Bumgarner arrived, the camp was in a state.
The guards were frantic.
One said he comforted a colleague and then puked in a trash can.
Medical personnel were working on the three men, though they all appeared to be past saving.
Within an hour of Bumgarner's arrival, they were pronounced dead.
This was very bad for the prison.
That's where Bumgarner's head went.
No detainees had died since the camp opened, and now three in one night.
This is bad for us, for me.
How are we going to basically explain when we let this happen?
For me, that's what I was about to happen.
The immediate answer seemed to be run-of-the-millian competence.
The guards were supposed to be walking the tear every three minutes, making sure to see
skin and movement from each detainee in each cell.
But as one guard later admitted to investigators, it gets old and boring.
When it turned out two guards had gone to Chow at the same time, which was against the
rules.
Eventually, Admiral Harris would conclude that prison personnel violated six procedures
that night, some of which might have contributed to the detainees' ability to kill themselves.
I can't tell you which six, because it's redacted.
In any case, by dawn, Washington was waiting.
Within four hours of that happening, we're on the telephone at a conference table with
the White House.
Wanting to know what the hell happened.
Bungardner knew full well that question had an uncomfortable cousin.
Whose fault was this?
He also knew.
They all knew.
They were listing toward a PR nightmare.
The one Bungardner most feared.
The narrative that people were killing themselves at Guantanamo because it was such a hellhole.
Just a month earlier, the UN committee against torture had issued a report saying the prison
violated human rights law and should be shut down.
The EU parliament had also called for its closing, in part because of the inhumane conditions
of confinement.
Now the Germans, the Danes, the British were reiterating, close it down.
The US government, though, in an abundance of confidence, spun its weakness into a strength.
These deaths didn't reflect badly on Guantanamo.
Just the opposite.
These deaths justified Guantanamo.
Hours after the conference called with the big Wiggison DC, Admiral Harris went big.
He told CNN the suicides were proof that these men were still in the fight, a continual
threat to the United States.
They are smart, they are creative, they are committed, they have no regard for human
life, neither ours nor their own.
I believe this was not an active desperation, but rather an active asymmetrical warfare
waged against us.
Asymmetrical warfare, meaning the widely adaptive strategies, guerrilla fighters, or terrorists
use to attack a bigger, stronger enemy.
That was the government's story about the suicides.
They were an active war.
For his part, Bumgarner told me he didn't cotton to the asymmetrical warfare language,
but he was certain the deaths were coordinated and that they were calculated to harm not
necessarily the United States, but to harm Guantanamo.
For one thing, he knew all the men on that particular block, Alpha Block of Camp One.
He said they were all instigators, manipulators, as he called them, hand in the back of the
room types.
I'm confident that whole tier, that whole cell block, knew this was going to happen, and
they had to, they participated to make it happen.
It was all about fulfilling the prophecy.
The prophecy that if three men died, they'd all be freed.
They killed themselves for the good of the group to keep Guantanamo in the nightly news
on the front page.
I am 100% convinced that those three people committed themselves to dying for their
calls to get all, in quotation mark, the brothers released from Guantanamo to get sent back
home.
There's no doubt in my mind that was the purpose for those suicides.
They were dying for the calls in Jihad.
They certainly didn't die out of any, I'm depressed, I can't make it anymore, and I mean,
it makes no sense at all for the three of them to do a simultaneous, I mean, you don't
plan suicides that way.
It's not the way you do.
Bumgarner believed other more powerful detainees, Al Qaeda guys, had either planned the suicides
or at the very least approved them.
And he thought it was possible that lawyers for the detainees might be encouraging the
detainees to protest or passing information to their clients.
Now these same attorneys, along with human rights activists, were pushing a different
narrative about the suicides.
The prisoners had died from despair, they said, from hopelessness, after years of abuse
and no clear legal or administrative path towards release.
A UN spokesman said the suicides were, quote, not completely unexpected, unquote.
Amnesty International straight up blamed the Bush administration for the deaths.
Eventually, inevitably, yet another story emerged about what had happened to the three
men.
Some people began wondering aloud whether they'd in fact been killed.
Maybe these weren't suicides at all.
Maybe they were homicides.
My name is Talaal Zahrani.
Talaal Zahrani, a former general in the Saudi police and the father of the youngest
man who died, Yasser Zahrani.
He openly challenged the US government's account of what happened to his son.
In a remarkably polite video statement, he implored the president and the courts and the American
people to investigate.
I never believe this story.
There are many signs and pieces of evidence that show the story as false and that these
individuals were killed at Guantanamo.
There was some weirdness about their deaths.
Even if the guards were phoning it in that night, for instance, how could these hangings
have gone unnoticed for so long?
A couple of the men's bodies were showing the beginnings of rigor mortis when guards cut
them down, which takes about two hours to start to set in.
The logs the guards made of their rounds that night were a little off.
Someone seems to have falsified a headcount about an hour before the first detainee was
found hanging.
But when investigators asked the guards about it, they all claimed impulsively not to know
who wrote the entry.
In 2010, Harper's Magazine published an award-winning investigation into the Guantanamo
suicides with the word suicides in scare quotes.
And it was intriguing.
The reporter's main source was introduced as a whistleblower, Joe Hickman, the former
sergeant in charge of the QRF team that fought the detainees in Camp 4.
Hickman said some personnel were acting oddly that night, and that while he was on duty
in a guard tower, he saw an unmarked white van coming and going from Camp 1, which appeared
to him to be secretly moving individual prisoners to and fro.
Hickman's hypothesis, maybe another agency, perhaps the CIA, had taken the men for secret
meetings and things got out of hand and they died, and then they were strung up to look
like suicides.
Hickman wrote a book about it.
To this day, he thinks there's a wide conspiracy to hide the truth of that night.
And some of the detainees, including some of the former Guantanamo prisoners we spoke
to, they also refused to believe the men hang themselves.
They just don't see how or why they could have done it.
The Americans must have killed them somehow.
These three competing explanations for the suicides, warfare or misery or homicide never
seemed to fade.
People still talk about the deaths with some mystery.
But there is information, a lot of it, that to me offers the most persuasive answer to
the question of what happened.
Information that lives inside the paper trail these men left, while they were still alive.
That's after the break.
Okay.
So, of the three stories about what killed the men in camp one, desperation, asymmetrical
warfare or homicide, I'm going to set aside the homicide idea.
Because no evidence has surfaced to support it after all these years.
And many good reporters we've spoken to told us they did take the idea seriously, tried
to substantiate it, but they weren't able to.
And then just the size of the cover-up we'd be talking about, all those people, all those
falsified witness statements and investigative documents, and now one person has cracked
in 20 years.
This seems unlikely.
So to me, that leaves two options, desperation or warfare.
And if we're weighing the truth of those stories, we do have convincing evidence.
Beurocratically speaking, I know the most about the Yemeni man, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, because
I have his medical and behavioral records.
Left over from an unsuccessful lawsuit filed on behalf of his and Yasser El Zaharani's
fathers.
Ahmed arrived in Guantanamo in June of 2002.
He was 22 years old, or possibly 33 years old.
The US never seems to have pinned down his birth date or his real name for that matter.
Most of his Guantanamo records say he was 22.
He'd worked selling clothes at the sook in Thai's Yemen near his hometown.
He had a thick black beard and was married to a young woman named Hayat.
The story he told the US was that he was studying in a university in Pakistan when he got
arrested during a raid at the guest house where he was living.
The US thought he was lying.
That the studying was a cover story.
And that Ahmed was maybe a mid-to-high level al-Qaeda operative and had possibly traveled
with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
People said they saw him in Afghanistan in Kandahar.
He said he'd never been there.
I have no idea whether he was mid-to-high level al-Qaeda, but from the records, it seems
like he was a mid-to-high level pain in the guard forces ass.
He spits on someone, throws a cup of pee on someone, sexually harasses female guards
now, and then early in 2004, he gets urfed a couple of times, once for refusal for reservation,
meaning an interrogation session, none of which made him exceptional at Guantanamo.
But it's pretty clear from the guard logs, Ahmed was never okay at Guantanamo.
He wasn't inclined to settle down or wait it out, whatever it was.
He was a tenacious resistor.
In January 2004, a guard sees him climbing the fence at the back of the wreck area, trying
to see what's on the other side.
The guard tells him to come down before the tower guard spot him.
Ahmed tells the guard, I want the infantry to shoot me so I can be with Allah.
Please MP, please.
If he had a reputation at Guantanamo, it was for hunger striking.
During the camps, very first hunger strike in 2002, Ahmed joins in.
They have to revive him with oxygen when he passes out.
He joins the hunger strike again in July of 2005, not long after Bumgarners arrival.
He's one of the guys who stops for a couple of days when Bumgarner and Shackar Amur work
out a deal.
And he's one of the guys who gets angry when that deal falls apart.
He's the Americans who've tricked them, lied to them, breaks his toilet and his light
fixture, goes back on hunger strike.
And this time, he never really stops.
That fall of 2005, as Bumgarner is struggling to contain the hunger strike, Ahmed ends
up in the detainee clinic a few times.
He's so weak he can barely talk.
He'd arrived at Guantanamo weighing about 177 pounds.
By December 20th, he's down to 124.5 pounds.
By Christmas, he's hospitalized with pneumonia and a sepsis scare.
At the very end of December 2005, a few weeks after the first force-feeding chairs were
shipped to the island, medical personnel write this note in his file.
Quote, patient states that he wanted to commit suicide because he does not want to be a
prisoner anymore and he lost hope.
Ahmed will not stop hunger striking.
They prescribe him zooloft.
By January 10th, he weighs only 122 pounds.
They strap him into the feeding chair.
This is how Bumgarner's period of peace looks for Ahmed.
Dozens and dozens of pages of meticulous force-feeding documentation.
Exact times, exact amounts of liquid nutrition, the width of the tube, the lidocaine percentage,
which nostril they snake it down, whether he resists or not, whether he gets sick after.
Twice a day, they're strapping him in the chair.
The process is so harrowing, most of the hunger strikeers quit within a few weeks, but
Ahmed doesn't.
By mid-February, he's one of only three men still on hunger strike, and the inside of his
nose is infected and so inflame the nurse can't get a tube down.
They put it down his throat instead.
He's got other medical complaints as well.
Itchiness, his ear hurts, to stickular pain.
His knees were bashed during an earthing he tells them, and now his knee pain is constant.
But he is gaining weight, 138 pounds, 150 pounds.
On his cell, he's allowed to keep a couple dozen pictures of his hometown, Ibb Yemen,
a crazy beautiful city surrounded by green hills and waterfalls.
All the while, the behavioral health team is checking in on him, and all the while he's
waving them off.
A typical encounter.
I'm good.
Everything is good.
Are you from psych?
Oh no, I have nothing to say.
I know your questions, and you know my answers.
Have a good day.
Ahmed keeps getting the feeding tube for another month after that.
Five months total of force feeding.
Until lunchtime on June 2nd, 2006, a guard walks by Ahmed's cell, and instead of writing
the usual one word description in Ahmed's activity log, sitting, standing, sleeping,
praying, the guard writes, eating, in all caps, with three exclamation points.
Ahmed had voluntarily eaten a meal.
His hunger strike was over.
By this time, he weighs 163 pounds.
It's not clear if he's been sneaking food on the side somehow, or if the force feeding
caused him to gain back the weight, but he's physically healthy.
After a couple days, they determine he's ready to get off Oscar block in the discipline
camp and move over to Alpha Block in camp one.
On June 7th, two days before he kills himself, a behavioral health staffer comes by.
Ahmed is in good spirits, the report says.
States that he has no mean thoughts of hurting others or himself.
He's not seeing ghosts or genies in his cell, not hearing voices.
So that's how prison personnel saw Ahmed.
But the clearest picture of what Ahmed himself was thinking and feeling comes from his own
writing, which is part of the military's investigative record.
He and the other men left letters, brief manifestos, explanations.
My name is Ali Abdullah Ahmed Nasr al-Salam.
I'm 27 years old, married, my country is Yemen, and I memorized the Quran, praise and
gratitude goes to Allah, Ahmed begins.
I don't know how I start my story, however, I know how I could end it.
He writes of U.S. greed and support for repressive regimes in the Middle East, including Iraq
and Israel.
Of his treatment and custody, the earthings, and the tear gas and the humiliation, they
desecrated our religion, our bodies and private parts.
He says he gave up his hunger strike just a few days back in order to quote safeguard
myself against the American suppression, and I mean final ruling-quishment without return
God willing.
I have remained repressed inside a very cold metal box.
They call it a solitary cell.
I have come out of this box, and my intention was to put an end to these ordeals.
I'm not desperate and I swear to Allah not afraid.
The date on the letter is June 7, 2006.
The same day he tells his behavioral health staffer he's feeling just fine, and two days
before his suicide.
In another letter addressed to Muhammad's nation to the entire Muslim world, he says it again,
don't ever think I have been afflicted with desperation.
He hopes that perhaps by doing what he's going to do, it revives the hearts and awakens
the endeavoring and victorious.
He signs off with a telephone number in Yemen.
But in other more personal letters, also dated June 7th, he sounds terribly sad.
My dearest brother, he reminisces, asks that he let people know what happened at home
at the shop, asks that he take good care of my parents and forgive me, ask my parents
too for forgiveness.
To my family and the beloved ones, he writes about piety and obedience, and also his agony
over being separated from them.
To my dear wife, he hasn't seen her for five years.
He writes of longing and devotion and a gleaming moon and silk and the smell of roses and
sweet and fresh water.
The other men left writing too.
Yasser as a Hirony's letters are thematically and stylistically similar to Ahmed's, but
they have a little more fire, more of a raised fist, more talk of a US-led conspiracy to keep
them indefinitely detained, more ghastly detail.
His letters too were all dated within days of his death.
In the third man, Mane Al-Utaybi, there's only one letter in the records, dated June 8th.
As you all know, the situation in this prison is worsening.
He asks Allah to release the other prisoners from captivity to diminish the infidels.
His letter concludes, forgive me.
He asked the former prisoners we spoke to, what they remembered about the three men who died.
Ahmed Erashidi, the Moroccan chef who spent five years in Guantanamo, told a story about
Yasser as a Hirony.
Erashidi was often on the discipline blocks, he said, and that's the last place he saw
Yasser.
He was just opposite myself and he was very young.
He used to call me Uncle Armin.
They were on the harshest, most restrictive block, November block.
He was opposite, I was in number 18 and he was in number 19.
Or maybe it was the other way around, he can't quite remember, but they were both afflicted
by the punishing cold of the air conditioning.
Erashidi said he couldn't stand it, freezing all night, and decided to block the AC
event in the ceiling of his cell.
But in November block, there's nothing in your cell, no material to work with.
So he resolved to use his food, scarce as it was, hungry as he was.
Or in the end, I would chew, chew, chew, and then suck it and then remove it and then
we stick it to the vent, block the vent.
Which worked.
He didn't know it at the time, but it turned out Yasser in the opposite cell, also blocking
his ceiling vent with food.
We were doing this time thing, but we didn't tell what another about it.
So one night I could hear the soldiers bringing a house, water house.
He got him out of his cell and I was watching all this through a crack and he removed him.
They liberated his AC event by blasting it with water.
Erashidi said he remembered the guards were so young, early 20s, like Yasser.
And they seemed to be having such a good time, which I can picture, young soldiers with
a water hose and a project.
And he said was flooded.
And then, and he was chuckled in the middle of the corridor and then he put him back in
his cell, like a swimming pool.
And he said to him, have a good night.
Soon after that Erashidi said Yasser was moved, probably to camp one alpha block if I had
to hazard a guess.
And Erashidi was moved into Yasser's cell.
And that cell, he said, had an especially big AC vent, just huge.
He couldn't bear to walk under it.
He only then realized what he was facing, only then realized what he was going through.
Erashidi said he spent about three weeks in that frigid cell on November block, before he
too was moved out.
We didn't week.
We got the news that three detainees were killed.
Ahmed Erashidi doesn't have any firsthand knowledge of what happened in camp one that night.
It's not impossible to men were killed, he says.
But he also believes it's possible they were driven to suicide because of the harshness.
The feeding chairs, November block, bum garners innovations, bum garners Guantanamo.
So were the men martyrs, was this a coordinated political tactic, or were they hopeless
prisoners?
Sounds to me as if they were both.
Judging from Ahmed's letters especially, Ahmed had thought this through.
He was done suffering, done with the endless force feedings.
And also he hoped his death would mean something, maybe even inspire something.
Guantanamo commanders never figured out exactly how the suicides had been planned or carried
out, so there was no intelligence fix they could grab onto.
All they could try to do in response to this loss of control, bum garners said, was to
try to reassert it.
It was not, let's be nice, it was control.
Shut it down, the experiment with kindness is not working.
Before the suicides, the camp administration had planned for about three quarters of the
detainees to move into more permissive living arrangements.
Now they flipped that percentage.
The big new camp six designed to be communal like the now emptied camp four would be all
single cells maximum security.
They'd put steel mesh enclosures along the second floor walkways so no one could jump.
The new recreation yard was carved into individual enclosed pens.
Admiral Harris began using a new phrase and interviews with the press.
I don't think there's such a thing as a medium security terrorist.
Mike Bumgarner came to believe he was personally responsible for the three suicides, not because
his policies were too harsh because they were too soft.
He'd relaxed the SOPs in camp one so that when Yasser Azza Harani was seen washing his own
blanket in his cell and then hanging it up to dry, that was allowed.
And the extra stuff they were permitted to keep in their cells, the clothing, the water
bottles, the sewing area on alpha block, a cell where you could use a needle in thread.
The dim lights so you couldn't easily see the back of the cell plus the no flashlights
and detainees faces rule for guards so as not to disturb detainees sleep.
All of that helped the detainees pull off their suicides and all of that carrots planted
by Bumgarner.
What he learned from the suicides was that you can't negotiate with terrorists.
And trying to comply with certain aspects of the Geneva conventions, Bumgarner thought
he'd bent too far toward accommodating the detainees and the detainees had manipulated
his leniency.
That's what some of his superiors had warned about and some of his subordinates had grouched
about early on and now he saw they were right.
November block, that most miserable discipline block he instituted, where your hair and
beard would get shorn where you couldn't talk, couldn't wear clothes, nothing in your
cell except a merciless vent blasting cold air, that's what really worked, he said.
That's what created compliance at Guantanamo.
The only way that you deal with the general, not general, the people in Guantanamo was from
a position of strength, from position of power, from I am in charge to be successful.
I am in charge, it's going to be my way.
I'm in charge.
Starting with the prisoners endorsing their reasonable requests, allowing reasonable
concessions, he said the detainees must have pegged him as weak.
You show any weakness whatsoever and where I'm going to give to you one inch and you give
this type of freedom to them, that's totally forgotten.
I mean, that freedom, I don't, that totally forgotten that you ever did that made that
concession.
Now the bar has moved way down the road again, they were always reaching for the next thing.
Anything you did for them, they didn't really recognize.
That wasn't, there was no doubt that you would expect appreciation.
People always say, well, what do you expect from the guys?
I mean, there's not trustworthy son of a bitch in there.
Well, what do you expect?
I mean, they're terrorists.
Just, you know, as we thought, what do you expect?
But I didn't really, some of my treating people's humans, I just, I thought there was
a degree.
A degree of mutual respect or at least a degree of fair play.
Bungarner had a stunning faith that if he gave the prisoners some privileges, they'd
be grateful.
They'd hold up their end of a one-sided bargain.
Instead, in Bungarner's eyes, they did the worst thing.
They killed themselves and tried to destroy Guantanamo.
And that's why he said, at Guantanamo, you can't fully employ the Geneva conventions,
you're spell out not only the obligations of the captors, but of the captives, how they
should behave.
That's the element of why Geneva conventions can't hold on to camp, because there's no
obligation on those being held, no recognition of all the Geneva conventions.
If they don't play by the rules, then we can either.
The precise thinking that created the mess of Guantanamo in the first place.
Because there had been rules, maybe not perfect rules, but still perfectly good rules,
but the United States spurned at Guantanamo.
Guardrails designed to curtail humanity's worst impulses toward violence and revenge and
domination.
That's what the Geneva conventions were, and the convention against torture.
International agreements, the United States not only endorsed and adopted, but helped
write.
For some of the prisoners, the worst thing about Guantanamo wasn't so much that the US
wasn't playing by the rules.
That's what Ahmed Aeronashidi explained to us.
He said the worst thing was that the US seemed to think it was playing by the rules.
You know, the worst thing that you can imagine is when your rights are being violated and
when you are tortured and abused and brutalized by someone who's regarded as someone who respects
human rights, as someone who doesn't believe in torture.
But when you are tortured by someone who doesn't believe in torture, it's really scary.
Because you don't know what comes next and how bad is going to get.
Because you are shocked.
How can this guy who believes in human rights doing this to me?
You know, that makes you think that he's going to get worse and worse and worse.
Immediately after the suicides, Bumgarner was in trouble.
Not for the suicides.
He was investigated for what's called a spill.
A reporter from the Charlotte Observer happened to be visiting Guantanamo doing a story on
Bumgarner when the suicides occurred and Bumgarner's bosses were concerned he'd possibly
disclosed classified information to the reporter.
The accusation was weak and quickly fell away.
And in any case, Bumgarner considered it a pretext.
He's certain what really pissed off his command were some intemperate comments he made in the
days following the suicides captured by that reporter.
The most damning thing, he quoted Bumgarner saying, in honor of our three dead brothers
and then biting into a pork chop sandwich.
Bumgarner was suspended from his duties and sent to his quarters pending an inquiry.
I was based under house arrest.
I don't know if they called it that, but that's basically what I was.
Just go sit by yourself in the house.
Bumgarner was floored.
The three deaths from the premonition had happened and he thought for sure they're going
to close it.
The publicity, the politics would overwhelm Guantanamo and shut it down and it would be his
fault.
He couldn't comprehend how quickly his star had fallen.
I was bad.
I mean, it was as if I'd committed a capital crime.
And here I was just hours before respected.
I thought by people and doing the right thing, doing right for God and country and Owing
the next second, I'm like on the FBI's most wanted list, at least that's the way I felt.
And when you see I'm also at age eight, I'm winning a citizenship award.
I mean, I was always the good citizen always.
I was the guy, I don't say I do good, but I never got in trouble.
I was always the right guy.
I was a stickler on rule following and to know that I'm being accused of breaking the
law that I've been involved in something that is wrong, that I failed, that we've let
the nation, because it was a good we'll talk about it.
You know, we're not going to let anybody die.
I mean, that was our mission, that was part of the mission.
Nobody's going to escape, nobody's going to die.
Those are the things that you just don't allow to happen.
And that was the first time in my life, that was the absolute rock bottom of my whole life,
that period, with nothing coming anywhere near close.
You weren't suicidal or something, were you?
Were you there?
Oh, I'm so sorry.
I didn't make any act, but I was close.
I was very close, very, very, very, very close.
I was as close as you could be without doing it.
Life was over for me.
I mean, it was horrible.
I can't tell you how low I was.
Can you begin to tell you how low I was?
After about a week, Bum Gardner was cleared.
The military found he hadn't spilled anything to the reporter.
And shortly after that, his command at Guantanamo was over and he rotated out, a lot of Tory
citation in hand.
His career continued, but his rank didn't rise.
He retired from the Army in 2010.
Acoda to this story of the worst year.
Guantanamo's favorite reporter, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, had toured the camp on June
9, 2006.
The same day, just coincidentally, as the suicides.
Tonight the media drumbeat continues about Guantanamo Bay so far the New York Times, Boston
Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the New York Star Ledger, USA Today, and other newspapers
have either criticized Gitmo or call for it to be shut down.
This segment ran a few days afterwards.
O'Reilly had left the island before the suicides took place.
He'd gotten a special tour, exposed to as much as possible, Bum Gardner at his elbow.
When a sit down interview, O'Reilly had asked Bum Gardner about the fight that had erupted
a month earlier in Camp 4.
Were you surprised you guys tried to kill your guys?
Oh, absolutely not.
Wow, you're nice to them.
Absolutely not.
Why did they want to kill you?
Why did they?
Well, these folks, they hate us.
It's a strange thing.
It take me hours to try to explain this to you.
They hate us.
They hate Americans.
I mean, I see it every day.
I see a look in their eyes that I cannot explain to you.
It is a crazy look when you're dealing with them.
They would say, it is a kill you and a heartbeat.
Sir, I characterize it to everybody that comes through here.
Make no mistake about it.
They will cut your throat and a heartbeat.
Make no mistake about it.
Bum Gardner told me he knew O'Reilly wanted a sound bite and so exaggerated a little,
gave the people what they wanted.
What about all these poor bakers and barbarers who they rounded up and threw in here for
no reason?
I'm looking for them, sir.
I'm looking for them.
They're out there somewhere, I reckon.
Because that's what the human rights voice tells me.
I know, I know they tell you that.
I wish, you know, sir, again, those that come here, see it, walk it.
Yeah.
Leave with the different opinions.
These folks are not what folks paint in the media out there, not at all.
These are not good guys.
I stake my reputation and my life as a career military policeman on this.
They'll be fans of butts.
When we appreciate the hospitality of the Joint Task Force in Guantanamo.
I'm coming right back with some religious leaders also upset about alleged voices.
Bum Gardner had been worried that pressure from liberals and bad press would close Guantanamo.
But in hindsight, it's obviously had nothing to worry about.
Because this asymmetrical drug beet was always stronger.
The one pounding out the message to any and all wavering Americans.
Don't believe the human rights lawyers, the naysayers.
Guantanamo is vital to our national security.
When Arilis Tor was over, Bum Gardner told me he escorted him off the island.
I remember driving him back, we're taking him over to put him on a boat, taking a cross.
He said to me, he said, Colonel, don't worry about it.
This place is not going to close.
I said, I'm very different, you know, sir, how you know that?
Because I'm not going to let it happen.
In the end, Bum Gardner took this terrible year of hunger-straking and fighting at suicides
harder than Guantanamo itself.
The prison had survived the worst.
Maybe it could survive anything.
It's almost quaint now to think the government was courting the press back in Bum Gardner's
day, telling them to come on down and see for themselves.
Because skip ahead 15 years and the PR goal was to make Guantanamo disappear.
See you next time.
Cereals produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas and me, our editor is Julie Snyder,
additional reporting by Kora Courier, fact checking by Ben Falen, music supervision sound
design and mixing by Phoebe Wang, original score by Sophia Daley Ellissandry, editing
help from Jen Guera and Ira Glass, our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali,
additional research by Emma Grillo, America Faggi and Sami Yusuf Zai, translation by
Mohammed Razza Sahibzada, Nile Hedjo, Atik Rahin, Dana Alisa, Bashar Al-Halabi and Omaama
Othman.
Additional production from Daniel Gimet and Katie Mingle, our standards editor is Susan
Wesley, legal review from Alamine Sumar and Maya Gandhi.
The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter.
Supervising producer for Cereal Productions is in Day Chubu.
Our executive assistant is Mac Miller.
Sam Dolenic is deputy managing editor of the New York Times.
Special thanks to many Supervis Al, Mansura Dijfi, Mohammed El Faki, Farishtah Tayyib,
Mark Denbow, Hardiz Cabriai, Corey Shreppel and Lee Rifatair.
