HITT: We tried out many of our new interrogation techniques on Jumah Al Dossari. Colangelo-Bryan met with him many times and catalogued what was done to him. Al Dossari said that Americans forced him to the ground and urinated on him. We put out our cigarettes on him. We shocked him with an electric device. We spat on him. We poured a hot cup of tea on his head. We told him "We brought you here to kill you." We beat him until he vomited blood. We threatened to have him raped. We dressed him in shorts and left him in a frigid, air conditioned room. We abandoned him in another room with no water. We invited him to drink from his toilet bowl, which he did. We wrapped him in an Israeli flag. We told him that we would hold him forever, and that we would send him to Egypt to be tortured. On a different day, we chained him to the floor and cut off his clothes while a female MP entered the room. We dripped what we said was menstrual blood on his body.
When he spat at us, we smeared this blood on his face. We kissed the cross around our neck and said "This is a gift from Christ for you Muslims." We videotaped the entire episode.
There's no way to confirm that all this happened to Al Dossari. But other prisoners and officials at Guantanamo have described variations of every technique on the list, including the menstrual blood, the Israeli flag, the references to Christianity, the beatings, the sexual humiliation. Al Dossari is interrogated still, about once a month. During one visit last winter, he asked Colangelo-Bryan, "What can I do to keep myself from going crazy?" A few months later, during a meeting, Al Dossari asked to go to the bathroom. Colangelo-Bryan and the MP stepped outside the hut and waited. After five minutes, Colangelo-Bryan got concerned. He cracked the door open. COLANGELO-BRYAN: When I opened the door, the first thing I saw was a pool of blood on the floor in front of me. I then looked up and saw a figure – hanging. I yelled to the MPs for help. They then began to cut down the noose around Jumah's neck. HITT: It wasn't Al Dossari's first suicide attempt. COLANGELO-BRYAN: About three weeks later, I was back in Guantanamo. Jumah said to me that he didn't want to kill himself without an outside witness. His fear was that if he died, and only the military knew, nobody would've known what happened. HITT: Of course, as we're so often told, this war is different. Who wants to be the one who lets somebody go who then turns out to be the next 9/11 hijacker? So for the military, there's also this other new thing. A terrifying calculation that there can be no margin of error. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees, and has been trying to make sense out of what has been happening at Guantanamo. 7 MARGULIES: If we give them the benefit of the doubt, it is possible – and there is a lot of evidence to support this – they had no idea who they were going to be capturing. And they thought they might get more, uh, serious people, people who were more seriously involved. The reality is, those people never came to Guantanamo. The most serious folks are those in CIA custody, of which there are approximately 30; 27 to 30, something like that. Those are the people in black sites that we don't even know where they are. The people who are of any significance never arrived at Guantanamo, but they didn't know that when the base opened. And they said, at the time, that these were the worst of the worst, they were trained killers, they would gnaw through hydraulic lines to bring down the plane that was flying them to Guantanamo… I mean, they used the most inflammatory rhetoric, and it very quickly became apparent that they were just mistaken. And then they were stuck with this PR nightmare. And at the same time, there was this sense, this nagging sense,that maybe they are really bad and we just can't find out. Maybe they're not Afghan dirt farmers as all appearances seem to be. How do we really know? Maybe we need to use more aggressive techniques to find out. So they kept turning up the heat and using more and more coercive techniques on people who were less and less significant. HITT: In this new war, the plan was to build a prison so bleak that the detainees would give up hope and talk. The military was given a mission, and they did a good job. But many prisoners are now moving into year five. If they're Al Qaeda, detainment is perfectly justified. No one argues that. But think about what these incarcerations are for men wrongfully and indefinitely detained. It's like being buried alive in a coffin. Nobody knows how many of the prisoners are, in fact, the "worst of the worst" and how many are innocent. But there is a way to find out. It's called habeas corpus. * * * * *