500 Days

by Kurt Eichenwald

  • • •

  By five o’clock, the agents and investigators with the Joint Terrorism Task Force had finished with Arar. The interviews and searches turned up nothing. The information in the government computers was vague and unpersuasive. This was a waste of their time.

  The message was passed to immigration officials: The counterterrorism agents had no interest in Arar as an investigative subject. As far as they were concerned, they were free to remove him from the country.

  • • •

  An order came down that same afternoon from J. Scott Blackman, the INS eastern regional director.

  Following instructions from Washington, Blackman declared that Arar was not to be sent to Zurich that day, as had been planned, and his original “withdrawal of application” was canceled. Instead, he said, Arar should be told that he could withdraw his application only if he agreed to be sent to Syria.

  • • •

  Two INS agents met with Arar to present him with the new conditions. “We want you to voluntarily go back to Syria,” one of the men said.

  Back to Syria? He hadn’t lived there for eighteen years, since he was a teenager.

  “No way,” Arar replied. “Send me to Canada, where I was going.”

  The agent looked angry. “You are a special interest, okay?” he snapped.

  Arar didn’t understand. A special interest to whom? A boss? Another country? It didn’t matter—he would not willingly go to Syria.

  “Send me back to Switzerland or Tunisia,” he said.

  That wasn’t an option. “If you don’t agree to return to Syria,” one agent said, “you will be charged as a terrorist.”

  The agents left the room. At about eight that night, Arar was chained up again, placed in a van, and driven to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He was strip-searched and dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Maher Arar, Canadian entrepreneur, was now inmate number 61339053.

  • • •

  Still no word from her husband. After more fitful sleep, Monia Mazigh decided to stop waiting and take some action.

  She telephoned the Canadian embassy in Tunis and reached a woman named Thérèse Laatar. After answering a few initial questions about where she lived in Canada and where she was staying in Tunisia, Mazigh told her story.

  “My husband, a Canadian citizen, has not contacted me since leaving Tunisia two days ago,” she said. “He was scheduled to arrive in Montreal, but didn’t.”

  There was a long silence. Mazigh assumed that Laatar either was taking notes or didn’t understand the situation. When she spoke, her tone was almost dismissive. She would contact the Consular Section in Ottawa, she promised.

  “I’ll call you back on Monday,” Laatar said. Three days later.

  Not good enough. Mazigh placed another call, this time to the office of Michael Edelson, the lawyer Arar had consulted when Mounties had sought to interview him months before. She explained the situation again. Edelson promised to call the Crown Prosecutor’s Office to find out if they knew what had happened to her husband.

  Mazigh hung up. Nothing she had tried was working.

  • • •

  In Damascus on the evening of September 30, Abdullah Almalki was brought upstairs from his cell at Far’ Falastin prison. His tormentors were waiting.

  The head of interrogation, George Salloum, handled the questioning. “I want you to list everyone you know by the name of Maher,” he said.

  Almalki tossed out a few names, then mentioned Maher Arar. Salloum’s eyes lit up.

  “That is the one!” he said.

  They needed to hear what Almalki knew about Arar, Salloum said. Almalki was handed some paper and a pencil, and ordered to write it all down.

  Salloum glared at him, the wisp of a smile on his face.

  “Arar is detained now somewhere, and we are going to question him,” he said. “If his story is different than your story, I will torture you myself.”

  • • •

  Joseph Witsch was troubled.

  An instructor in the military’s SERE program, Witsch had been part of a team dispatched to Fort Bragg to conduct training sessions on aggressive tactics for questioning detainees—a task they weren’t qualified to carry out and that, in any case, was worse than pointless.

  SERE training was about learning to resist harsh tactics, not about effective interrogation. Sure, harsh tactics might force detainees to talk—but they couldn’t make them tell the truth. Using these methods in Guantanamo was going to produce information that was unreliable and misleading, Witsch thought. He wrote a report to Chris Wirts, senior civilian in the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, urging caution.

  On October 1, he sent a more strongly worded follow-up memo to Wirts. The handling of the detainees, he wrote, “is a screwed up mess and everyone is scrambling to unscrew the mess.”

  The only way they could make a contribution, Witsch wrote, would be to consult with high-level officials in the government, and not spend time with lower-level personnel who would then have to teach their own bosses how to properly use the information about SERE.

  The bottom line—everyone involved in SERE needed to get away from training Guantanamo interrogators. Eventually, the whole effort was going to blow up.

  “We don’t have an established track record in this type of activity and we would present an easy target for someone to point at as the problem,” Witsch wrote. “The stakes are much higher for this than what you and I have done in any activity before.”

  • • •

  Prison guards at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Brooklyn accompanied Maher Arar to a telephone that same afternoon. He had been held for five days and had not been allowed to contact anyone; he was certain that his family was in near hysterics. He needed to calm them—and get their help.

  A guard unchained Arar.

  “You have two minutes,” the guard said.

  Two minutes. Not enough time to reach his wife in Tunis. Or a lawyer. Or anyone in the Canadian government. The best choice was his mother-in-law in Canada.

  The call connected and she answered. Arar quickly told her that he was being held in a Brooklyn prison and gave her a short summary of what had happened.

  “I’m not being treated well,” he said. “And I’m scared, because they’re talking about sending me to Syria. I need a lawyer. Somebody needs to help me.”

  The guard interrupted. “Time’s up.”

  • • •

  Arar’s mother-in-law immediately telephoned her daughter in Tunis. “Maher just called,” she said. “He’s being held in the United States.”

  The words echoed with malevolent force through Mazigh’s head. “What did he say?” she asked.

  “He wants a lawyer. He’s afraid he’ll be sent back to Syria. That’s all he told me.”

  “Didn’t he tell you why he’s in prison, what he’s charged with?” Mazigh asked.

  A sigh. “No. No, he hung up right after that.”

  • • •

  The next morning in London, an official with Britain’s diplomatic service finished editing a travel advisory warning of a heightened danger in Indonesia. The information had been received days before from M15, but the e-mail hadn’t been ready to send until now.

  Much of the advisory was filled with routine language that had appeared in official warnings for months. No key points were highlighted; the text was paragraph after paragraph of mind-numbing bureaucratese. The new information was slipped in almost haphazardly, worded in the same cumbersome language.

  In the run up to the fasting month which starts around 5 November, activists are more likely to show their disapproval of many of the bars and nightclubs which are popular with Indonesians and foreigners, especially on Friday nights. British citizens should avoid these establishments.

  Terrorists had become activists. Attack had become the more delicate show their disapproval. Ramadan had become the fasting month. And neither Islamic nor Muslim—words that would have leaped
out at any reader who waded through the familiar verbiage—appeared at all. Someone had couched the alert in terms so benign that they seemed almost designed not to sound an alarm.

  • • •

  The next afternoon at 1:40, military and intelligence officials met at Guantanamo to again discuss how to break detainees during interrogations. They began with a review of tactics used on soldiers in the SERE program.

  “Harsh techniques used on our service members have worked and will work on some detainees,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jerald Phifer, the director of intelligence at Guantanamo. “What about those?”

  “Force is risky,” replied Major John Leso, an army psychologist.

  Just being in this room, having this conversation, filled Leso with anguish. Young, slender, and earnest, he had been delighted when he was deployed to Guantanamo, assuming that he would be providing counseling to soldiers. But after he arrived, Leso was ordered to teach interrogators psychological tactics that might force detainees to talk. The assignment threw him—Leso knew nothing about interrogations. Since then, he had witnessed harsh questioning—involving sexual humiliation, stress positions, and the use of dogs—and the experience had left him distressed. Now he was sitting at a table, listening as plans were hatched for even more abusive methods. His dedication to helping people had been twisted into an ugly quest to hurt them.

  Leso stayed mostly silent as the group reveled over the success of aggressive interrogation in breaking the resistance of al-Qahtani, the suspected twentieth hijacker. Their self-congratulations were misplaced—al-Qahtani had said nothing that he hadn’t already told the FBI before the military took over the questioning. None of the intelligence interrogators had so much as glanced at the FBI agents’ notes of their interviews with al-Qahtani and so never knew that he was simply repeating himself. And there was no one at the meeting to stress that point—the criminal interrogators had not been invited to attend.

  The camp needed to be shaken up, one of the participants said, by creating an environment of controlled chaos. But they would have to be careful—the International Committee of the Red Cross was occasionally checking to see if detainees were being treated in accordance with international standards.

  Dave Becker from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that there were already plenty of reports being issued by the ICRC about the use of sleep deprivation against detainees held at Bagram Air Base.

  “True,” said Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the top legal advisor to the military’s interrogation unit at Guantanamo. “But officially, it’s not happening. It is not being reported.”

  Beaver then repeated that ICRC inspections at Guantanamo were a serious concern. “They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave,” she said. “That would draw a lot of negative attention.”

  A CIA lawyer, John Fredman, mentioned that the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department had offered a lot of guidance on the issue of rough tactics. As for the ICRC, the Department of Defense had already found ways to work around any problems.

  “In the past when the ICRC made a big deal about certain detainees, DOD just moved them away,” he said. “Then when the ICRC asked about their whereabouts, the DOD’s response has been that the detainees merit no status under the Geneva Conventions.”

  There were other laws protecting detainees, of course, but based on the Justice Department analysis, those weren’t matters of much concern.

  “Under the Torture Convention, torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” Fredman said. “Severe mental and physical pain is prohibited. But the mental part is explained as poorly as the physical part.”

  Fredman then recited the definitions for “severe pain” that had been cobbled together by the Office of Legal Counsel based on interpretations of health care laws. For an action to count as physical torture, he said, it had to cause permanent damage to major organs or body parts. Mental torture had to meet similarly high standards—the tactics were illegal only if they led to permanent and profound damage to the senses and the personality.

  “It basically is a matter of perception,” he said. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

  • • •

  That same day in Damascus, Abdullah Almalki was lying in his prison cell, aching and exhausted. He had been interrogated about Arar for two days, but hadn’t given Salloum the answers he wanted. So, they hurt him.

  Almalki wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. The beatings, whippings, and other forms of torture had left him in constant pain. Even on those days when he wasn’t tortured, he endured horrors. When he tried to sleep, large rats came into his cell and crawled over his legs. Cats urinated on him from a grating in the ceiling. Lice covered his body. He had lost fifty pounds, and his ribs stuck out of his chest. The skin on the top of his mouth was almost gone from his screaming.

  Despite everything that had been inflicted on him, Almalki hadn’t been crippled or emotionally incapacitated. His tormentors had been careful not to kill him or leave him in catatonic despair; they wanted him talking, not dead or incapable of speech. And so, they followed only the most time-tested torture techniques, making sure to avoid inflicting long-term damage to Almalki’s major organs and body parts or causing permanent and profound harm to his senses and personality. If they knew about the classified standards being used by the Americans to define torture, the Syrians could reasonably argue that they were in compliance.

  • • •

  Almalki was brought upstairs a few hours later for more interrogation about Arar. Salloum again handled the questioning. For him to be involved day after day signaled that, whatever was going on with Arar, the Syrians considered it important.

  “I want to know if Arar has been to Pakistan or Afghanistan,” Salloum said.

  Almalki feebly shook his head. “No, not that I know of.”

  Salloum kept rephrasing the question, but Almalki’s answer never changed.

  “I want you to say that Arar is with al-Qaeda!” Salloum snapped.

  “I don’t know anyone with al-Qaeda.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I don’t know anyone with al-Qaeda,” Almalki repeated, sounding weak.

  Salloum turned to one of the other interrogators.

  “Send a report about these questions to headquarters, so they can be faxed by noon,” he said.

  Faxed where? Almalki thought. Someone in Damascus? Canada? The United States? Who was involved in this?

  Salloum turned back to Almalki.

  “Arar will be here soon,” he said. “And if I find out you’ve lied, I’m going to put you in a barrel of human excrement, and cut your food rations, and torture you until you’re paralyzed.”

  Almalki’s chest clutched in fear. “I’ve told you everything I know!” he cried. “If you want more, give me a blank paper and I’ll sign it. You can fill it in yourself.”

  Salloum stared at Almalki in silence. He turned to leave the room, glancing at another interrogator on his way out the door.

  “Torture him,” Salloum said. “And be ruthless.”

  • • •

  Maher Arar couldn’t stop sobbing.

  He was in a cell-like room at the Brooklyn prison, sitting at a table across from Maureen Girvan, the Canadian consul in New York. It was October 3, Arar’s eighth day in detention and his first chance to speak with a government official from his home country.

  He described to Girvan what had happened to him since his arrival in New York. He told her of being chained and unfed, of his captors’ refusal to allow him to contact a lawyer. The Americans wouldn’t even let him have a toothbrush. At one point, he said, he was taken to a doctor and given a shot, but no one would tell him what it was.

  They had, however, finally given him papers with the allegations against him—that he was inadmissible to the United States because he was a member of al-Qae
da. He showed Girvan the documents.

  “This is insane!” he cried. “I’m innocent!”

  He was not an enemy of America. He had always admired the United States, he said, and had never experienced trouble in the country before.

  “I’m very scared,” he said. “They’re talking about sending me to Syria.”

  The meeting ended. Girvan returned to her office and prepared a case note for her superiors in Ottawa. It consisted of eleven words.

  “Mr. Arar is alleged to be a member of al Qaeda.”

  • • •

  Girvan spoke with Arar’s wife about an hour later, describing her visit to the prison. “He was disoriented, he cried a lot and wanted to know how you all were,” she said.

  The description of her husband’s anguish tore at Mazigh. “Have the Americans given a reason for his arrest?” she asked.

  “He showed me a sheet of paper saying that they were denying him entry to the United States because he belongs to the terrorist group, al-Qaeda.”

  Al-Qaeda!

  “But he’s innocent!” Mazigh cried. “Maher doesn’t belong to al-Qaeda or any terrorist group.”

  There was a long silence.

  The Americans had made their decision, Girvan finally said. Arar needed to get a lawyer as fast as possible.

  • • •

  Later that day, the CIA sent a fax to Corporal Rick Flewelling, an officer with the Mounties who monitored AO Canada. The intelligence agency was seeking any information the Canadians might have that could be used by the Americans to charge Arar with a crime and keep him locked up. Flewelling assigned some officers to see if they could pull something together.

  • • •

  The call wasn’t memorable, just a two-minute chat that sealed Maher Arar’s fate.

  Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was in his office when a secretary told him Larry Thompson, Ashcroft’s deputy, was on the line.

  “We’ve got a man named Maher Arar detained up in New York,” Thompson said. “He’s a member of al-Qaeda, and he has dual citizenship, Canadian and Syrian. We want to send him to Syria, but wanted to check whether State had any foreign policy objections.”