NEW YORK – In the mesh cages of Guantanamo Bay, with the sun bearing down and detainees shacked by the ankles, hundreds of Muslim men and boys would use an expression to one another: “I resist, therefore I live.”
As the eyes of millions remain on the United States during this World Cup, 400 miles to the southeast lies the naval base at the centre of countless allegations of human rights abuses. For its opponents, it is an unresolved symbol of injustice; or in Arabic, Zulm, which translates literally into putting something outside of its rightful place.
I spoke with former detainees who spent years inside Guantanamo. They told the stories of their capture, torture and illegal detention, and of the extraordinary moments of human spirit on the makeshift football pitches of the camps by the Cuban coast.
In the peak of the “War on Terror” after the 9/11 attacks, 779 men were held there; more than 98 per cent have never been convicted. Fifteen of them remain there today. Over the past four weeks, the US has sought to use the World Cup to bolster its international reputation; amidst the noise, the last voices of “Gitmo” have gone unheard.
‘I never dreamed I would end up here’
Mansoor Adayfi was born into a traditional tribal community in the Yemeni mountains. Some of his earliest memories are of going to fetch water from a well and a life without electricity. He moved to the city for a new life, studying computer science, when he was selected for an academic project to travel to Afghanistan. At the time, Afghan war lords were being rewarded with bounties for young men handed over to the Americans. He was 18-years-old.
“I was taken by the American marines – they told me I’m al-Qaeda,” Adayfi tells The i Paper. In the CIA interrogation blocks before he was transported to Guantanamo, he says he “almost died”.
“You can’t sleep, hung upside down. Under torture you will admit to anything – but the big problem was giving them details [because I didn’t know any]. That means they intensify the torture – persecution, sexual assault, electrocution, waterboarding, drowning, you name it.”
Around the same time, Moazzam Begg was at his home in Pakistan when he was taken away by CIA and local agents. Begg, born in Birmingham, England, would be held for three years between 2002-2005 without charge.
“I never thought in my wildest dreams that would be somewhere that I would end up,” he says. “But I had a sense, because I’d spoken with some of my friends in the UK and they told me that MI5 had approached them and asked about where I could be.” It was 1998 when an MI5 agent first paid a visit to his house.
Begg was accused of al-Qaeda membership and of funding the organisation’s training camps, which he denied, insisting he had only provided support to Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s. He has denied any involvement in terrorist activity.
Begg was taken to Guantanamo on a 36-hour journey via Turkey, with his head in a hood, his hands tied behind his back and his legs shacked “with guns pointing at me”. On four or five occasions, a British voice would ask him questions. Beside the CIA, he realised it was the same British agent from all those years ago.
Life inside Guantanamo
In cells of around eight feet by six, Begg, Adayfi and the other detainees slept on metal bunk beds. Cockroaches crawled along the walls. Fluorescent lights would sometimes beam for 24 hours a day. A metal toilet and basin made up the room. Some would use the floor to pray five times a day – except that was likely to single them out to the guards. There were moments of escape, with a football – but that was not day-to-day life.
One particular guard in Camp Delta had a handkerchief of a US flag, which he would use to cover his face. The detainees believed he would perform the gesture when he knew he was committing what the US considered “enhanced interrogation techniques” – widely recognised by human rights organisations as torture. Official government policy has since banned these practices and denies using torture, despite ongoing allegations of their continued use.
Prisoners could be kept for days at a time in a coffin-sized box, or slammed against a concrete wall. According to eye-witness accounts from multiple former detainees and former staff members, as well as human rights groups including Amnesty and the Centre for the Victims of Torture, they were deprived of sleep for days at a time, hung naked by a chain from the roof.
“The guards, they could do whatever to you. Even if they killed you it doesn’t matter,” says Adayfi. By the time he arrived at Guantanamo, he already had “a lot of broken stuff in my head, broken skull, broken ribs, lost some of my memory and my vision” from the interrogation sessions. He was no longer Mansoor Adayfi – he had become Prisoner 441.
There was sexual violence, extreme flogging and beatings. Detainees would be pinned down, with headphones and duct tape pinned to their ears, and forced to listen to deafening music. The Quran was torn in front of them. Many were shackled to tables, sprayed with freezing gas, while in the next room guards would threaten detainees with a power drill.
“The way the US got around it,” explains Begg, “is that they got US attorneys to argue that unless it’s organ failure, severe physical impairment or death, it’s not torture. That allowed them to do things like waterboarding, a medieval torture technique used in the Spanish Inquisition.
“They can, as they did to me, subject you to the sound of a woman’s screams that you’re led to believe is your wife and children being tortured in the next room. If anybody had done that to an American citizen, they would be calling for crimes against humanity.”
Guantanamo became a “battle lab” for techniques which would soon be exported to Abu Grahib, the notorious Iraqi prison which faced its own torture scandal in 2004. Around two dozen of the men held in Guantanamo arrived as children – Adayfi maintains he saw a baby in captivity.
It was not possible to know whether it was day or night, with no windows, calendars or access to the outside world. English speakers, who understood what the guards were saying and could pass on messages to other detainees, risked ending up in solitary confinement.
Begg himself spent time in solitary, he believes, because of what he had seen shortly after his capture. At Bagram, in Afghanistan, two men, Mullah Habibullah and Dilawar, were beaten to death by US soldiers – military coroners ruled them to be homicides.
“I was actually a witness to the murder,” says Begg. “And I had made it very clear to the authorities that no matter what I do, I’ll make sure that everyone knows you carried out murder of unarmed, innocent prisoners.”
‘Footballs would burst on the barbed wire’
Resistance in Guantanamo took many forms. Prisoners, including Adayfi, began a series of hunger strikes to “fight back”. The Government would not consider them hunger strikes – “they called it non-religious fasting”. Adayfi says he was then force-fed.
Guards would use the concept of “compliant” and “non-compliant” prisoners to restrict benefits like playing football. A $1m football pitch, supposedly a means of broadcasting humane treatment of the prisoners, prompted controversy across the US. “Why do they need to play soccer?” demanded Donald Trump in his 2015 Presidential campaign.
The reality, the detainees say, was very different.
“They would take 30 to 40 detainees, give them white uniforms and a soccer ball,” says Adayfi. “They would bring a media delegation [to say], ‘look how we treat them’. In the cages, they create a system of levels – if you are level one, you get to go to the small cage and there is a soccer ball. There will be two people to play against each other, they would maybe get a water bottle and people play.
“They say ‘we give them a ball in a cage in Guantanamo’. What’s humanity supposed to do in a cage that’s like two metres and two metres, even smaller?
In Camp Six, a pitch was opened in 2011, with goalposts erected at each end.
“The lawyers used to bring in the balls, but once the ball hit the barbed wire, they’d burst. When they say we have books, we have TVs, [they try to make it sound like] we have some kind of easy life. Those military guys, they believe you should suffer.”
The pitch was largely dust and gravel, the goals the walls of a shipping container. One guard told Adayfi: “It’s my job to keep you alive, but I’m not happy to see you as a human being.”
When the World Cup began in South Africa in 2010, for the first time Adayfi watched the games on TV inside Guantanamo.
“Your brain starts constructing a new you, a new life, a new memories, a new relationship, a new emotion,” he adds. “The more you stay, the more you are distanced from your previous life. So, in the detention people try to survive. People wanted to watch the World Cup to see what’s going on in the world. People could see the flags.”
Before Begg was released in 2005, there was only a “recreation yard”, where detainees were given 15 minutes to walk. “If you’re lucky, you’d get a ball to kick around – and after 15 minutes you’re back in,” he recalls.
“When I came in for the first year, it was literally 15 minutes twice a week.” Once a new commander took charge of Guantanamo, exercise increased to one hour a day.
“There were different camps where there was communal living, people could play football, watch television, play chess, but I experienced none of that.”
Forever Prisoners
Today, of the 15 men being held in Guantanamo, some have been cleared for release. Others are considered unfit to stand trial, or the evidence against them has been obtained through torture.
Abu Zubaydah is a 55-year-old Palestinian detained in Camp Seven for 24 years without charge. He has been kept “incommunicado” with the outside world. In 2018, a Parliamentary Report found UK intelligence agencies had sent questions to be put to him knowing they would be used during torture. He was compensated by the British government but as a “forever prisoner”, he is one of a category with no prospect of release.
The “forever prisoners”, Begg explains, are those “they say, too innocent to charge, too dangerous to release. That’s a new category of law the Americans have created”.
Barack Obama first promised to close Guantanamo in 2008. The Trump administration has instead proposed expanding it to “load it up with bad dudes”, including a new camp for migrants. Because of the base’s location, it sits outside the jurisdiction of ordinary US law and the Geneva Convention’s Article Three, prohibiting torture.
In 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that torture methods used at Guantanamo were brutal, ineffective and more widespread than had previously been disclosed. The report was contested by CIA officials.
Before their deployment, guards were often taken to Ground Zero in New York, the site of the 9/11 attacks. In the midst of the 4 July Independence Day celebrations, I visited the site to find numerous military personnel dotted around the waterfall-pools commemorating the victims. They were taken there in the early years of the “War on Terror” to better understand their work.
‘Boycott the World Cup for humanity’
Nobody has ever been found guilty of the alleged human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay. One detainee, Zahir Hamdoun, summed up his detention so: “I have become a body without a soul… I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantanamo.”
Now, as the US takes centre-stage at this World Cup, Adayfi urges fans around the globe to boycott the tournament. It is “the least we can do to stand for our humanity, to bring a voice to the victims.
“Guantanamo is one of the biggest crimes of the 21st century. Unfortunately people don’t look at it because it was done by the United States. This is a big hypocrisy.”
Inside the cages was Guantanamo’s own global community, with 15 nationalities, more than 20 languages spoken. Yet those who left were never given any rehabilitation or integration programmes.
“People think when you leave detention, you’re free,” says Adayfi. “No, you’re not free.
“You have to go through rigorous surveillance. People live with the PTSD, mental, psychological, physical problems, people released in a wheelchair with broken backs. The torture can never stop.
“Now you face the reality. You cannot get a job or a bank account, you can’t get married, you can’t travel… because the US said you are a bad person, you’re a terrorist.”
Some detainees never made it out of the camp. On 10 June 2006, three died by hanging, officially designated as suicides. Human rights groups continue to query the verdicts. Adayfi says that when the bodies of the three men, Mani al-Utaybi (30), Yasser al-Zahrani (21), Ali Abdullah Ahmed (37), were sent to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, “they found there were signs of torture, broken teeth” in the autopsies.
Others were sent to Assad’s regime in Syria. “The prisons there make Guantanamo look like a holiday camp,” Begg says. “I’ve visited them, spoken to multiple prisoners, trying to locate some of them which we believe are buried in mass graves. These are the kinds of people that the US and Britain were working alongside, knowing they would do things the Americans wouldn’t consider.”
There is a Survivors’ Fund for those trying to rebuild their lives after release from Guantanamo – but they will never be given an explanation of why they were captured or held. “There is no legal process that actually exonerates you,” says Begg.
“It’s not uncommon for me to come across guys who can’t travel, can’t get a job, can’t live a normal functional life because they were once held in Guantanamo without charges.
“They did it because they could. And there was no way to stop them.”
After 25 years, the soft power of the US remains undimmed. The World Cup has attracted 1.2 million visitors to the country. The football itself has been spectacular, divisive, and intensely political. In that climate, Guantanamo’s opponents are still fighting for its remaining detainees to be remembered.
“Twenty-five years of illegal detention,” says Adayfi. He will “never forgive” what happened to him in Guantanamo.
“There is no justification. And there is no justice.”
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