Descriptions of Fear and Despair in Guantánamo Camp

By CARLOTTA GALL with NEIL A. LEWIS

KABUL, Afghanistan, June 15 — Afghans and Pakistanis who were detained for many months by the American military at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba before being released without charges are describing the conditions as so desperate that some captives tried to kill themselves.
     According to accounts from some of the 32 Afghans and three Pakistanis in the weeks since their release, it was above all the uncertainty of their fate, combined with confinement in very small cells, sometimes only with Arabic speakers, that caused inmates to try suicide. One Pakistani interviewed said he tried to kill himself four times in 18 months.
      An Afghan prisoner who spent 14 months at the camp, at the American naval base at Guantánamo, described what he called the uncertainty and fear. "Some were saying this is a prison for 150 years," said Suleiman Shah, 30, a former Taliban fighter from Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan.
      None of those interviewed complained of physical mistreatment. But the men said that for the first few months, they were kept in small wire-mesh cells, about 2 meters by 2.5 meters in size, in blocks of 10 or 20. The cells were covered by a wooden roof, but otherwise were open at the sides to the elements.
     "We slept, ate, prayed and went to the toilet in that small space," Mr. Shah said. Each man had two blankets and a prayer mat and slept and ate on the ground, he said.
    The prisoners were only taken out once a week for a one-minute shower. "After four and a half months we complained and people stopped eating, so they said we could shower for five minutes and exercise once a week," Mr. Shah said. After that, he said, prisoners got to exercise for 10 minutes a week, walking around the inside of a cage 10 meters long. 
     In interviews at their homes, weeks after being released, he and the freed Pakistani detainee talked of what they said was the overwhelming feeling of injustice among the approximately 680 men detained indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay.
     "I was trying to kill myself," said Shah Muhammad, 20, a Pakistani who was captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, handed over to American soldiers and flown to Guantánamo in January 2002. "I tried four times. Because I was disgusted with my life. 
    "It is against Islam to commit suicide," he continued, "but it was very difficult to live there. A lot of people did it. They treated me as guilty, but I was innocent." 
     In the 18 months since the detention camp opened, there have been 28 suicide attempts by 18 individuals, with most of those attempts made this year, Capt. Warren Neary, a spokesman at the detention camp, said today. None of the prisoners have succeeded in killing themselves, but one man has suffered severe brain damage, according to his lawyer.
     The prisoners come from more than 40 countries, and include more than 50 Pakistanis, about 150 Saudis and three teenagers under 16, the majority of them captured in Afghanistan, said Dr. Najeef bin Mohamad Ahmed al-Nauimi, a former justice minister in Qatar, who is representing nearly 100 of the detainees.
     Dr. Nauimi represents many of the Saudis, and American lawyers represent about 14 prisoners from Kuwait. There are also 83 Yemenis, he said, and a sprinkling of others, including some Canadians, Britons, Algerians, Australians and one Swede. 
    Since January 2002, only 32 Afghan prisoners and three Pakistanis have been released from Guantánamo Bay. Five Saudis were recently handed over to the Saudi authorities. Captain Neary said 41 people had been released in all, but could not give a more exact description.
    At the same time, the military is preparing to place a handful of the prisoners, about 10, before a military tribunal soon, officials said recently.
     Human rights organizations have raised concerns about the conditions at Guantánamo Bay and the unclear legal status of the detainees. The American military has refused to consider them prisoners of war, even though the majority of them were captured on the battlefield, and does not allow them access to lawyers. No charges have yet been brought against any of the detainees, some of whom have been there for 18 months.
     Concerned about their prolonged detention without trial or clear legal status, the head of the International Red Cross, which visits the detainees, urged the Bush administration last month to start legal proceedings for the hundreds of detainees and to institute a number of changes in conditions at the camp.
    Cmdr. Brian Grady, the staff psychiatrist at the camp's medical facility, said in a recent interview that most of the prisoners suffering from depression brought their symptoms with them when they arrived in Cuba.
      "I don't know what the effects of this particular confinement are," he said. "I'd be hesitant to comment." Officials at Guantánamo have generally dismissed the notion that the confinement and uncertainty about the future are specifically to blame.
      "I would not particularly say these circumstances are a factor," Commander Grady said. 
      But Jamie Fellner, director of the United States program for Human Rights Watch , said in an interview that that was highly implausible.
      "These conditions of confinement by themselves over a prolonged period are enormously psychologically stressful," she said. "Added to that is the uncertainty as to the future."
     Ms. Fellner added that her group had not found any credible reports of physical abuse and that it had investigated several accounts of beatings and such that turned out to be unfounded.
      Hospital officials said that about 5 percent of the inmates were suffering from depression and that they were being treated with antidepressants, typically Zoloft.
     Mr. Muhammad, who spent 18 months in Cuba before his release, said that "when they first took us there they would not let us talk, or stand or walk around the cell. At the beginning it was very hard to bear, there was no call to prayer, and there was no shade, in the afternoon the sun came in from the side." 
     Under the current routine, the majority of the prisoners remain in their cells but for two 15-minute periods a week, in which they walk around the cage and take a shower. In addition, the call to prayer is played over the prison's loudspeakers five times a day, according to Capt. Youseff Yee, the Muslim chaplain who oversees the religious needs of the Guantánamo prisoners.
      Conditions improved after the first few months, and prisoners were moved to newly built cells with running water, a bed, Mr. Shah said. Interrogation was sporadic and varied in length and intensity. Sometimes they were questioned after 10 days, or 20 days, and then not for several months, prisoners said.
     But it was the uncertainty and fear that they would be there forever that drove many of them to despair, prisoners said. "Some were saying this is a prison for 150 years," Mr. Shah said.
     "All of the people were worried about how long we would be there for," he said. "People were becoming mad because they were saying: `When will they release us? They should take us to the high court.' Many stopped eating."
      One Taliban fighter from the southern province of Helmand, who only uses one name, Rustam, said he was driven to trying to hang himself because he was in a block of Arabs and Uzbeks he described as "crazy."
     "There were some very strange people, they were hitting their heads on the wall, insulting the soldiers, and that is why I hated it," said Rustam, who is 22. "I think they were really crazy people, and that's why I kept asking to be taken out for questioning."
      When he tried to hang himself, Rustam said, the guards found him quickly. "They untied me and said `Don't do this,' " he said. "They gave me medicine, but it was no good. They put me under supervision and moved me to another place."
      Mr. Muhammad, one of three Pakistani prisoners to be released at the end of April, said he first tried to hang himself because for months on end he was surrounded by Arabs and could not speak their language.
      "It was difficult not talking to anyone for so long," he said. "It was because of the jail. They put me in a block full of Arabs, they were only letting us out for a very short time, and it was very difficult. I could feel myself going down."
      After 11 months in the prison camp, he tied his bedsheet to a ceiling wire and hanged himself from it at 4 o'clock one afternoon. "I don't know what happened," he said. "They took me to the hospital. I was unconscious for two days."
      Only after that suicide attempt, Mr. Muhammad said, did his American keepers tell him that he was only being held for questioning, and that one day he would go home. The doctors prescribed tranquilizers, he said, but he stopped taking the tablets after a while and tried suicide again.
      Then the doctors gave Mr. Muhammad a powerful injection that he said left him unable to control his head or his mouth or eat properly for weeks. Although he refused to have the injection, the military medical personnel gave it to him by force, he said. He made two further attempts to kill himself which he said were more protest actions at the conditions.
     "We needed more blankets but they would not listen," he said. "And I kept asking them to take me to the Afghan and Pakistani side. All the time I was with Arabs. I did not speak my own language for months." Mr. Muhammad also threatened to kill himself again if they gave him another injection. He remained on tablets right up until his release, he said.
     American officials have confirmed that one prisoner who tried to commit suicide remains in the prison hospital with severe brain damage. Dr. Nauimi said the prisoner was Mish al-Hahrbi, a Saudi schoolteacher. He said that the teacher became desperate over not knowing what his future held and that he tried to hang himself. The teacher was resuscitated but is unlikely to recover from a severe hemorrhage, the lawyer said. 
     Back home with time to ponder their ordeal, the former prisoners now want to demand compensation.
      "The Americans said if anyone is innocent, they will get compensation," Mr. Muhammad said. "They held me for 18 months, and so they should give me compensation. They told me I was innocent, but they did not apologize."

AL Kennedy
Tuesday June 10, 2003
The Guardian

Remember those films in which alien pods would appear for no good reason in cellars and massage parlours and the like and one unsuspecting night almost everyone goes to sleep and disappears, because the pod people have killed them, reproduced their bodies and then woken up bright and early the following morning and taken control of the world? Those films used to worry me a lot. I would imagine I'd be one of the few nocturnal types that managed to escape being podded and then ended up in an environment run by militant aliens, with everything familiar turned inhospitable and scary.
      Well, it's happened. The pods came, the day shift nodded off and the rest of us survivors are stuffed. (By the way, read this very carefully - there may be a pod person watching you for signs of incipient dissent.) Massive podding in high places is the only thing that can really explain most of this century, with particular reference to the last few weeks.
      For example, only a pod person would stand up in public and claim that, because something can't be found, it must be there. And don't think that hasn't tempted me over to the pod side more than somewhat. After all, according to pod logic, that means that I must be enjoying a mature, varied and satisfying sex life. I must be swinging from my light fitments in a sweating haze of glory before somersaulting into the fur-lined gondola that is my bed, swiping a few of the hot, buttered dwarfs out of my way and getting down to something utterly unnatural. There's not a shred of evidence that anything like this has happened, is happening, will, or ever could - so it must be real. All hail to the pods.
       Goodness, I'm glad to be having so much fun - and that so many Iraqi children are also having fun, scampering about between the cluster bombs and playing catch with all their extremities indubitably in place. Because clearly, if even fully qualified reconstructive surgeons can no longer locate the kiddies' hands and feet, this must mean that they're absolutely there. All hail to the pods.
       These are the same pods who can prove the Axis of Good is just dripping with freedom, because there's hardly a shred of it remaining. Westminster is surrounded with breeze blocks and razor wire, trainspotters are being pre-emptively boiled in acid and over in George W's kingdom, human rights are fairly blossoming. Take the entirely innocent Mr Oliverio Martinez, shot five times by police due to a night-time confusion provoked by Mr Martinez's suspiciously squeaky bicycle. Wounded in the eyes, legs and spine, lucky Mr Martinez had the democratic privilege of being questioned repeatedly in the ambulance and during his hospital treatment. For 45 minutes he screamed, begged and denied that his injuries were his own fault, until his medication finally rendered him unconscious. But, in these times of terrorist menace, the supreme court has wisely ruled that Mr Martinez's treatment in no way violated his fifth amendment rights. He is now paralysed and blind. Coincidentally, independent observers are still being barred from several US holding and interrogation facilities in Iraq. All hail to the pods.
      Of course, pod reasoning works equally well in reverse. If something is right there in front of you and undeniably exists, then it cannot be so. Therefore veterans of the first Gulf war who exhibit innumerable signs of serious illness and disability have nothing whatever wrong with them - even those among them who are dead now. And there is nothing remotely approaching a present casualty rate of 30%, due to chemical mishap and depleted uranium poisoning. This is the same depleted uranium that hasn't been dumped in hundreds of tons all over Afghanistan and Iraq and doesn't continue to poison civilians and troops of various nations, even as I type. The evidence is overwhelming, so it can't possibly be true. And - hey - while we're ignoring our armed forces, why not slash every kind of support for the disabled, vulnerable and poor, because they plainly don't exist, either. Far better to spend our money on stoking and suppressing the endless terrors we create. All hail to the pods.
      The pods are the reason the world's most powerful bankrupt nation is ruled by an unelected Texan, rather than Bill Hicks. (I'd pick a dead comedian over a live fundamentalist flake any day.) They're why the bend in Clinton's dick provoked more outrage and investigation than Georgie's bloodlust ever will. They're why we make money arming countries - so we can bomb them to hell and back. They're why we haven't simply drowned Tony Blair in a bucket of his own, conniving sweat. All hail to the pods - they're here to stay.

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

The tiki family tradition 
Here's to Dad. Mike Buhen honors his father every Wednesday in his Polynesian-style bar.

By Laura Randall, Special to The Times 

Every Wednesday night at the Tiki Ti in Silver Lake, owner Mike Buhen rings a bell above the bar's fluorescent lava-rock waterfall and leads a toast to his father, Ray. "To my dad, the master ninja," he says, or whatever else comes to mind around the 8 o'clock hour. Then he clinks glasses with any patron in reaching distance. His son and co-bartender, Mike Jr., does the same.
     The toasts started after Ray Buhen, the Tiki Ti's founder, died a few months shy of his 90th birthday in 1999. A regular customer suggested that Mike do something to honor his father, who continued to mix the bar's famously potent tropical drinks until just a few months before his death. The son went a step further and halved the price of his father's signature drink, Ray's Mistake, on Wednesdays. He also hung a framed photo of a smiling, Hawaiian-shirted Ray high on the wall.
      "This bar was his life," said Mike Buhen, 57, who grew up in Silver Lake. "I helped him put the tapa cloth on the wall when I was in high school. He cut the bamboo for the ceiling himself."
     Call it following in dad's footsteps, one Puka-Puka Punch order at a time. Since Ray died, Mike and his eldest son have carried on his legacy behind the tiny L-shaped bar. They not only make the drinks, they also mop the floors, prep the bar, answer the phone and good-naturedly refuse to divulge the ingredients of any of the menu's 80 original libations.
     Ray Buhen, who immigrated to Los Angeles from the Philippines in 1930, opened the 50-by-27-foot shack on Sunset Boulevard in 1961 after three decades of bartending at legendary local watering holes like Don the Beachcomber, the Seven Seas and Luau on Rodeo Drive. The Tiki, as regulars call it, soon became a popular hangout for workers at nearby Allied Artists (now KCET Studios). Actors Marlon Brando and Jack Palance also used to stop by.
      The Tiki Ti arrived on the L.A. bar scene just as Polynesian culture was beginning to sweep Southern California in the form of Saturday night hula shows, rattan furniture and coconut-shell tumblers. Its tropical drink menu comes from recipes Ray dreamed up during his hourly wage bartending days.
     "When my father started bartending, it was just after Prohibition and rum was the cheapest drink you could get. You either had a Cuba Libre [rum and coke] or you drank it neat," Mike said.
     Bored with convention, Ray Buhen and other bartenders began experimenting with fruit juices and grenadine, giving their creations names like Zombie, Fog Cutter and Missionary's Downfall. The patrons loved it, his son recalled.
     When Mike Sr. turned 21 and started helping out behind the bar, his father shared his drink recipes, carefully written in longhand. Two decades later, Mike taught his own son the tricks of the tropical drink trade.
      "It took me about a year to learn the menu. My son picked it up a little faster," he said.
     Despite their longtime association with Polynesian culture, neither Buhen grew up expecting to run a tiki bar full time. Mike Sr. has a bachelor's degree in marketing and worked as a station manager of a car-rental agency before joining his dad behind the bar in the early 1970s. Mike Jr., 29, was a couple of years out of Loyola Marymount when Ray showed signs of slowing down.
      "When my grandfather got sick, I just started getting behind the bar. I knew my dad couldn't do it by himself," he said.
      Both men try to keep a relaxed, anyone-is-welcome spirit to the windowless bar, which is covered in 40 years' worth of blowfish lanterns, tiki carvings and license plates. When Drew Barrymore wanted to rent the place for a birthday party a couple of years ago, she was quickly shot down. "I told her assistant we don't close for private parties," Mike Sr. said.
     On a recent Wednesday, following the toast to his father, Mike Sr. bantered with an off-duty bartender from the Dresden Room and other regulars while his son filled paper bowls with pretzels and popcorn. Someone hauled out a block of aged cheddar cheese, the product of a recent trip to Wisconsin, which was promptly sliced up and passed around the crowded bar.
      As he chatted, Mike Sr. deftly filled two Ray's Mistake orders and garnished the tall glasses with skewers of pineapple. When asked to explain the error behind the drink he'd just made, he laughed as if he were remembering the oft-told story for the first time.
      The concoction was born, he said, after Ray grabbed the wrong mix to make a drink called Anting Anting for a regular customer named Gil.
      "My father was getting ready to throw it out when Gil said, 'Wait. Make me another one just like this.' He started passing it down the bar and people asked what it was. He said, 'I don't know, but it's Ray's mistake.' "

Laura Randall can be contacted at weekend@latimes.com.