A wrinkle in sending men to such places was that it was illegal under American law, the law being the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which Clinton had signed in 1994 after years of stalling by Presidents Reagan and Bush the elder. The law read, in pertinent part, “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” After September 11, as Bush the younger rendered men by the hundred, rendition’s apologists argued that the extraordinary enemy justified extraordinary measures. But this was a canard the Convention Against Torture had foreseen. “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,” the law read, “whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The United States, however, was in a cruel, inhuman, and degrading mood.
THE STOREHOUSES of men—the keeps, the camps, the slammers, the gulags—have in common spareness, which is economical for the storers and a further punishment for the stored. In Egypt a typical cell reserved for political prisoners is a concrete box furnished with a reed mat or a grain sack or a piece of cardboard to lie on and a vile blanket that has been soiled with the blood and sputum of prior inmates. The latrine, if there is one, will be little more than a reeking hole in the floor, and if there is a window, it is likely to be miniscule, set too high to see out, and admissive more of pests than of light. The door will be of steel or thick wood and will have a sliding slot through which food can be inserted and commands barked. A ventilation duct, if it exists, will not do its job, and the air will be fetid and mildewy. There is sometimes water on the floor, in which case the dankness in the air may approach that of a recently used shower. In some cells, puddles survive for years from the drip of a pipe ten feet overhead. Its plip—plip—plip—plip—plip can derange. Sometimes moisture covers the entire surface of the floor in a thin film, and then the walls will crawl with mold and other spores, the prisoner’s bedding will be damp, and there will be no place he can touch, including his own person, that is not clammy. Prisoners have been punished by being held temporarily—days or weeks—in cool water up to their shins. In the South Pacific, where the water is 85 degrees, sailors cast overboard have become hypothermic and died in a few days. Just so, a man may die in the Egyptian desert from standing in what amounts to a wading pool. Other prisoners have been put in sealed cells into which water is poured through a pipe. When the water reaches a man’s chest, he will be likely to sign whatever confession is put before him.
Torture through excesses of plumbing is cruelly ironic, because plumbing in its normal form is deficient in Egyptian prisons. If the cell has a sink, it may yield no water or may yield it for only a few minutes a day. The water is apt to be filthy, although it can be improved by filtering through a rag, even though the rag, like everything else in the prison, will be dirty. When prisoners drink, the water may cramp and convulse them, and sometimes it will bring diarrhea that can last months. Cell toilets are apt to clog, and shit and piss can back up into the cell. Warders know the power of shit in annihilating their wards. They may put a man in a cell with no toilet and keep him there a month, so that he is forced to defecate and urinate on the floor. Or they may put him in a cell with shit piled so high in a corner that when he has to add to it, he will barely be able to squat over the pile and breathing will be revolting at any time. Or they may strip him naked and throw him sprawling into a cell whose floor is covered inches deep in excrement and urine.
That a cell is indoors does not imply protection from weather. In the Egyptian summer, the temperature inside a cell may rise to 125 degrees, and in winter it can drop below freezing. If a prisoner has no mat, he must choose in the winter between putting his blanket under him to lessen the cold of the frozen concrete or putting it over him to guard against the frozen air. Either way, one half of him will freeze, and he will pass the night shifting his blanket from one side to the other. He may keep his face warm by wrapping his underwear about his head.
In any weather a penitentiary night is long. It often begins in late afternoon or early evening, when the lights are shut off, and lasts until well past dawn—sixteen hours of darkness or near darkness passed in a silence enforced by cudgel.
In Egypt a man who is walled off from other men is not walled off from life. The lower orders of fauna find their way into cells. Flies, gnats, and mosquitoes mock the swats of confined men and attack with a sandstorm’s persistence. Their victim may find partial sanctuary under a blanket, but the blanket is usually so thin that the insects can bite through, and in the Nilotic summer, to be under a blanket may be so stifling that the cure is worse than the cancer. Cockroaches are not put off by blankets and will crawl over a prisoner almost as boldly by light as by dark. After Sadat became president, he took a pickax to a prison where he had once been held, and at each blow of his ax, hundreds of cockroaches poured out of the sodden bricks. He built new prisons that he said would be humane, but the cockroaches overran them too—a metaphor for the Egyptian polity.
Smaller visitors come to the inmate too. One is the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, which favors crevices—the valleys between fingers and toes, the crooks of elbows, the cracks of buttocks, the flaps of genitals. With his large family, he burrows under the skin and pushes up little ridges, which turn to pustules that ooze, burst, and release bacteria. His victims develop a savage urge to scratch, but if they do, they will spread the bacteria, which will cause their skin to redden and swell and may bring fever. If they are otherwise weakened, as Egyptian prisoners tend to be, the fever might kill them. Lice scourge similarly, dropping their miniscule eggs across hirsute hills and dales and sometimes bringing typhus, another killer. Such pests are hard to eliminate without medicine and cleanliness, both of which are in short supply in an Egyptian cell. Everything humane is in short supply in an Egyptian cell. Only inhumanity is excessive.
ABU OMAR was awakened by a guard turning a key in the lock of his cell door. He guessed he had slept a few hours. The guard blindfolded him, warned him not to speak, and led him down a hallway to a bathroom, where, standing behind him, he took off Abu Omar’s blindfold and said he was not to turn around until the door was closed behind him. After he had used the toilet, he was to knock on the door and turn his back to it, and the guard would come in and blindfold him again. Abu Omar did as told and was returned to his cell and his blindfold was removed. Later he was given food, which he ate without interest.
He had paid little attention to the character of his cell when he had been brought to it that morning. He saw now that it was four and a half feet by six. The floor was mercifully dry. A dim bulb hung from the ceiling, and near it were a very small window that let in almost no light and a very small hole for ventilation, obviously inadequate. The air was rank. There was a thin mat and a blanket, nothing more. It was a box for a man.
Remembering his torture of fifteen years ago and knowing the stories of other victims, he was terrified. He tried to pray and recite the Quran, but he had trouble keeping his thoughts from what might happen to him. His jailers let him sauté in this imaginative broth for some hours, then at last the door opened and guards came in and blindfolded him and bound his hands. They marched him in silence down several corridors until coming to a very low doorway that had to be entered on hands and knees. The guards kicked him through, and on the other side someone removed his handcuffs and ordered him to take off his clothes. When he was naked, they re-shackled his hands behind his back and made him bend one leg so that his foot was pointed back and up toward his hands. Then they shackled the ankle of the leg to his wrists. It is hard to stand on one leg for a long time even when not wearing a blindfold, which removes the visual cues that help a person balance. Eventually Abu Omar f
ell to the hard floor, with no hands to break his fall. The guards stood him back up, he fell again, and they stood him up again. Each time he fell, he tried to land on a part of his body that would not hurt, but there was no such part. This went on some time, the guards laughing at each fall. In the future this torment would last what seemed like hours, but today it was shorter.
At length, he was held in place, or maybe his foot was unshackled and he was sat down on a chair, and a man asked him questions: Who were his family? Where had he grown up? With what friends? Where did he go to college? Why did he join al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya? Who recruited him? Who were his colleagues? What had he done with them? Why did he preach against the Egyptian government? Why did he conspire to commit terrorism? Wasn’t he plotting to kill officials? To overthrow Mubarak? If he was innocent, why did he leave Egypt? Where did he go? What did he do there? Who did he live with? Who else did he know there? What else did he do there? What else? Where did he go next? What did he do there and who did he know? And after that? And that? Which Egyptians did he know in Italy? Which other North Africans? Did he know Abu So-and-so? Did he know the deputy imam at this mosque? How long had he known him? With whom did this deputy imam associate? Abu Imad, the imam of Viale Jenner, was a terrorist—he knew this, of course? Come now, what did he know about Abu Imad’s plots? Nothing? Of course he must know something. Who was Abu Imad planning to bomb? Who was Abu Omar planning to bomb? Where? When? What were they planning with their brothers in Egypt? Who recruited the men? Who got the weapons? How were they moved? How were the papers worked out? Come, come, he must know all of this. No? No? Well. They would see about that—and a fist smashed into his head.
It is bad to be struck but worse to be struck when you cannot see the blow coming, because you cannot flinch to soften it. Before Abu Omar could recover, another fist smashed into him. Then another. Then another. The questions continued. It seemed to Abu Omar as if there were hundreds. When his interrogator exhausted one subject, he moved to another, then doubled back and revisited the first—whether to check Abu Omar’s answers or wear him out, Abu Omar did not know. When his answers did not satisfy, there were more blows. Hours seemed to pass this way. At some point that day, or perhaps during a later session, the blindfold was removed and someone put a photograph of an Arab before him. Did Abu Omar know this man? What was his name? Where did he live? What did he do for the jihad? Another photo would follow, then another. There were scores of photos, mostly of men who had emigrated to Italy. Abu Omar knew some of them, but whatever he said about them, he would later not tell.
Eventually his questioners pressed to his skin a metal stick that must have been a kind of cattle prod, for electricity shot out of it and into him with horrible effect. Other victims have said such jolts contorted their muscles into grotesque positions, made their jaws clamp shut, and set their teeth grinding together. Some victims felt as if something were exploding inside them or the flesh were being ripped from their bones or their bodies were trying to tear themselves apart only to be held in place by the thin check of their skin. Some felt their eyeballs pushing up from inside, straining to burst from their sockets. Some thought their brains or hearts would rupture. Abu Omar screamed madly. His tormentor paused, gave him a few seconds to recover, then electrocuted him again. Then again. And again. And again. Each time he stopped, Abu Omar cried and pled. He promised to tell them anything, absolutely anything—they had only to name it. But the stick was put back to him. This may have gone on for minutes or hours. He lost all sense of time.
After they stopped, he continued to shake with spasms, and flashes of light darted before his eyes. In his ears the sound of a dentist’s drill buzzed. Where the stick had touched him for a prolonged time, his skin was singed. In later sessions he would be electrocuted on his nipples, penis, scrotum, ears, nose, spine, soles—whatever part of his body his torturers fancied. Sometimes he passed out.
On this day or one like it, his tormentors removed his blindfold, gave him pen and paper, and told him to write a statement of his crimes. He could not easily work the pen after the electrocution, but he tried to please them. When he was done, he was given a declaration that said he had not been mistreated, which he signed. Then he was given his clothes and dressed himself in pain, and his guards returned him to his cell. Rather than leave him in relative peace, they chained his hands to an eyelet on the wall that he had not seen before. He was in so much pain that the chaining was at first unworthy of notice, but his hands soon ached miserably, and after several hours they began to swell.
Not knowing when he would be tortured again was its own torture. Each time a door opened in the passageway or footsteps came his way, he became frantic. When the steps continued past his cell, he praised God, but the terror returned almost immediately. Sometimes the steps stopped outside his door, the food slot was slid open, and a pair of eyes looked in at him. Then the slot slid shut, the owner of the eyes walked away, and the unnatural hush that was the jail’s usual state returned. Two dozen prisoners may have been within shouting distance, but Abu Omar did not hear them, and they did not hear him. Forbidden to speak, each was alone among many.
THEY CAME for him again after two or three days. He was blindfolded, walked to the torture chamber, and made to strip naked. The questions began, and the photographs were put before him. He was tortured. Sometimes they beat him with fists, sometimes with thick cables. Very often he was electrocuted. At some point they put headphones on him and blared music so loud that he lost most of the hearing in one ear. He was given a document renouncing his asylum in Italy, and he did not hesitate to put his name to it—he would have renounced his children if they had asked. Sometimes his interrogators said they were certain he was a terrorist mastermind, but other times they said they knew he was just a small fish. One interrogator asked him for the passcode to his mobile phone account, which made him think his kidnappers had brought his cell phone to Egypt. Another interrogator claimed to have visited Milan shortly before the kidnapping, and he described the streets between the flat on Via Conte Verde and the mosque on Viale Jenner. Abu Omar thought, without foundation, that this proved Egypt had taken part in the kidnapping. One interrogator said Abu Imad, the imam of Viale Jenner, would be the next person kidnapped. Egypt, the interrogator claimed, had a deal with Italy whereby the latter would export any Egyptian Islamist at the request of the Egyptian government. Abu Omar believed this claim too, also without foundation. During another session, he was told that Egypt had no complaint against him but had to hold him because “the Americans imposed you on us.”
“Why, then, do you abuse me so?” Abu Omar said.
“It is our family tradition,” the man answered.
During a pause in one session, Abu Omar heard a cassette tape being ejected from a recorder, turned over, and put back in. He wondered who would listen to the recording.
At the end of nearly every session, he was made to sign more statements. Back in his cell, when he was not chained to the wall, he was often made to lie on his rude bed, on pain of beating if he stood up. Sometimes his guards kept him awake for long stretches—he did not know how long. When it was cold, he froze, when it was hot, he burned, and he became rheumatic and arthritic and had pain when he breathed. The insects worked on him, and his skin grew abhorrent. Now and then he fainted. When he slept, it was without rest. His nightmares were peopled by assailants he could not see, and he woke screaming, his body twitching uncontrollably. One morning he found his beard had turned white.
In time his isolation made him desperate enough to risk opening the slot of his door a crack when other prisoners walked by. He wanted only to glimpse someone who was not a demon. He thought he recognized a few Islamist leaders, one of whom, he believed, was Abu Yasser, formally Refai Ahmed Taha Musa, a high leader of Gamaa who had last been seen in Syria in October of 2001 and who was believed to have been rendered to Egypt. It was generally assumed that he had been executed. Seeing Abu Yasser alive gave Abu Omar a brief joy.
But a day came when an officer told Abu Omar he would soon be leaving. He wept. He had often said to himself that the Italian government would not abandon him, and he had even thought the Italian ambassador himself might visit him and offer his protection. He inferred now that his hope had not been misplaced. He envisioned his return to Milan and his reunion with his wife and the brothers in the mosques. Over and over, he played the scenes in his mind.
The day of his departure arrived, and he was blindfolded and taken to an office, where the blindfold was briefly removed and he was told to sign two documents before him. One said that he had not been abused, the other that he had arrived in prison with no possessions. The papers were dated September 14, 2003, which was how he learned he had been in prison seven months. He signed the papers and was ordered to take off his prison uniform and was given the cut-off pajamas the Americans had dressed him in. He was mildly surprised they had been kept all these months. After he had put them on and was again blindfolded, his hands and feet were shackled and he was led outside the building at a shuffle. It was the first time in seven months he had been out of doors, and the fresh air, notwithstanding that Cairene air tastes of lead and soot, was a miracle to him. He was put aboard a microbus, the preferred transit of the Egyptian torturer, and told to lie on the floor, where he was covered with blankets so he would not be seen.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 15
