Guantanamo I - Tulkarm (part 2)

Like I said in my previous post, Tulkarm's prison was divided into two areas: the larger prison for men who were already convicted and were serving their time, and the more secretive prison where I was positioned. I should start by describing the main prison, though I really did not see much of it.

What I remember is a large courtyard, roofed with a barbed wire net. The courtyard was surrounded by cells, each housing a twenty or so prisoners. The prisoners spent most of the day in the courtyard, wandering around, exercising, and praying. The cells were all open, and they could go back and forth between them pretty freely. Some prisoners played volleyball, exercised, or practices martial arts. Others walked around in circles in pairs, talking about one thing or another. Still others attended classes or read. They basically had the whole day to themselves, with very little interference from the guards.

What marked the day for them was the five daily prayers from sunrise to dusk in which everyone participated, the three meals, and the two head counts, morning and evening. Other than that, they were more or less free to spend the day as they pleased, always under the watchful eye of the guards. They patrolled the perimeter of the roof and looked down on the prisoners from two towers at opposite corners of the compound. There was almost no interaction.

In fact, the prisoners lived fairly autonomously within the prison confines. They were allowed to wear their own clothes, and they even cooked all their own food in an open-air kitchen at the far end of the courtyard. The prison provided them with staples and they had a team that prepared all the meals for the prisoners including the prisoners in our compound. The kitchen was the only place where knives were allowed, but then again, you have to cut up the meat and vegetables somehow.

Where we were situated was very different. There were no walls, and the entire compound, including where we slept, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Rather than cells, there were prefab cement block houses with no windows whatsoever, and just an iron door with a small window grate that was kept shut from the outside. Part of our job was to patrol the dirt footpaths between these dank holding cells 24/7.

It is impossible to tell how many people were in each cell, because it changed every day, and often several times a day. Often we were shuffling people around to disorient them, and without the chart that we had in our common space there was no way of knowing which prisoner was where at any given time.

The prisoners did not have names either. Instead each one was assigned a number, so if we needed particular prisoner we would go to the cell and call out the number. We were ordered not to talk to the prisoners or even ask their names too, and the idea was that none of the prisoners was supposed to know who was detained there at any given time. In fact, even the little windows on the doors were carefully positioned so that no window ever faced another.

But there were other precautions too. Whenever a prisoner was taken out of the cell, for interrogation or to be moved, we would handcuff them with their hands behind their backs and put a hood over their heads. The hood was an olive drab tube with a flat top (like in the picture), and we would move the prisoners by grabbing the bottom front of the hood and pulling them forward. It was very slow going, especially if it had rained and the path was muddy. The handcuffs were not standard handcuffs, which are round. Instead they were much narrower and made to fit the wrists, with about 5 cm of chain between them. I have never been able to find a picture of these handcuffs, but we were told that they were much less comfortable and violated international law. Though we had several pairs ready for use, we were told that if the Red Cross ever visited, we were to remove them and replace them with the more humane handcuffs that everyone knows. In fact, we did this once while I was there.

Some of the cells were rather crowded, with 8-10 people in them. Others were empty or almost empty with just a single prisoner in "solitary." Of course, the prisoners all knew who was in each cell, because they would call out to each other. Though this was not allowed, there was little we could do except bang on the iron doors with our wooden truncheons and tell them to shut up.

What the prisoners did not always know is which of their fellow cellmates were mashtapim, or as we called them, shtinkerim (from the English word stinker), used to describe collaborators or informants. Some of these were being paid to sit in prison and inform. Others broke down during interrogation and agreed to inform for a reduction of their sentences. We did not know who they were either, but usually after some cell-shuffling, a few people ended up in the interrogation room.

There was one other reason we assumed that we shuffled people around. The Intifada was largely a youth uprising, and while most of the prisoners were in their twenties and thirties, there were a few older and a few younger--as young as fifteen, in fact. Often, the older prisoners were in solitary, and on several occasions we were ordered to move one of the younger boys into those cells for the night.

The cells themselves were rather dark and dreary. They each had a single light bulb housed in a metal grid. Since there was no running water, they had black plastic jerrycans of water for drinking, washing, and ablutions before prayers. They also had no toilets. Instead, there was a kardal, a large black plastic trash can with a toilet seat cut out of its lid. This was kept in a corner of the room, and usually partitioned off with a black woolen military blanket that the prisoners rigged up for privacy. It did not partition off the stench, particularly of a kardal used by half a dozen men or more.

Every few days, two or three senior prisoners were given kardal duty. First the guard would go cell by cell and have them carry their kardal outside and leave it by the door. Then the senior prisoners would collect them, one by one, and take them to the dumping area, a pit some fifty meters from the compound. While we guards watched from a distance, doing what we could not to get splashed on, they would spill the foetid combination of urine and shit, vomit and rancid food scraps, into the pit, then rinse off the kardal with a hose. As disgusting as it was for us--and believe me, it was one of the grossest things I have ever seen--the men seemed to enjoy doing it. It was a chance to get out of their cells and into the sun without the hoods and handcuffs. When you have so little, even this could be a gift. They would laugh and joke, and occasionally even interact with us a bit. I felt a bit like a slave master doing that, and to ease my conscience I would usually reward the prisoners with chocolate or cigarettes. I guess it was my way of letting them know that I didn't want to be there either.

I apologize if this is coming out as stream of conscience. Each memory evokes some other memory, and there is no real order to this. In my next posting I'll write about the daily routine and interrogation. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments.