To the Death

“They have both been sensible and told us everything we need to know, including details of your own part in the attempted atrocities against the United States on January 15. However, I would like to clarify your personal details. I believe you are Syrian, like Mohammed?”

That last remark was a wild swing in the dark, based upon Mohammed’s admitted job in the Syrian embassy in Caracas and the almost certain destination of that phone call from Commonwealth Avenue.

Salman made no reply. Was he related to Osama bin Laden, whose Saudi-based cousin still owned the Boston apartment? Nothing. Had he worked for Osama? Nothing. Was he an active jihadist? And, if not, why had he delivered the critical phone message back to Syria? Zero. No response. No reply to anything.

They kept it up for four hours, never threatening. Just probing. Then they took him back to his holding cell, still manacled, still hooded, still in the dark. Every half hour, someone came in and shook him awake. He ate his meals in the dark, he drank his water in the dark. Four times a day, and every night, he was questioned. Ramon Salman was never allowed to sleep.

At midnight on Friday, January 21, they turned on the pressure. Salman was by now completely disoriented. He did not know whether it was night or day. He did not know what day of the week it was; he had lost count of the number of days he had been in captivity.

He had not spoken, but he was clearly becoming distressed and was beginning to hallucinate, mumbling incoherently, the guards assumed in Arabic. As Friday turned into Saturday, they suddenly piped deafening music into his cell, cheap rock ’n’ roll, blasting in the confined space. He was not manacled at the time, and the guards watched him clamp his hands over his ears.

At which point, they walked in and grabbed him, replacing the manacles and the handcuffs and the hood, and then left him for one hour with the music still blaring. When they returned, the tone was very different. “SALMAN! GET UP! SIDDOWN! And listen carefully, because our patience just ran out, and if we don’t get some answers we’re going to beat the living shit out of you.”

Right then they pulled off his hood, and Salman’s eyes, accustomed only to the dark, almost exploded as they were hit by viciously bright interrogation lights, aimed right at him.

Simultaneously, from out in the corridor came penetrating screams of pure terror, the sounds of hell, the unmistakable sounds of the torture chamber. There were sounds of men being beaten, of slashing whips, cries and whimpers of appallingly injured people. As fake tapes go, this one often did the trick down there in Guantánamo. The wretched Salman gritted his teeth, clenched his fists, and said nothing.

“SALMAN!” roared the interrogator. “Right here I’m holding a U.S. Army officer’s baton, and two minutes from now I’m going to smash it right across your mouth. You got just one way out. Answer this question: are you Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, or al Qaeda?”

Ramon Salman spoke not one word. He just sat there, hunched up, listening to the screams echoing in the corridor. He was shivering now, but something seemed to tell him the Americans were not going to smash his face. Everyone knew the West was soft.

He kept up this defiance for one hour. And the guards began to think he never would give in. They were wrong. The following night, Salman cracked.

1930 Sunday 23 January Guantánamo Bay

Reza Aghani had been kept outside under the hot Caribbean sun all day. He’d been kept in one highly uncomfortable position for more than ten hours. They gave him food and water, but he was not allowed to move, and there he had remained, isolated, disoriented, hallucinating, probably wishing to hell he had never asked Elliott Gardner to look after that briefcase in Logan’s Terminal C.

They took him back to his cell and fed him his evening meal at 1900, just bread, beans, rice, and an apple. Then they turned up the music, and left him under rock ’n’ roll assault for an hour. When the guards returned, they turned off the music, manacled and handcuffed him, and asked him the questions he had refused to answer maybe a hundred times.

Who is your immediate superior? Who gives your orders? What is his name?

Aghani had had enough. The wound in his upper arm, where he had been shot by Officer Pete Mackay, was throbbing. His resistance had ebbed away. There was nothing he would not do to end this interrogation. And he was very afraid the Americans might just kill him, and no one, including his wife and family in Tehran, would ever know what had become of him.