Serial S04 - Ep. 6: Part 2, Asymmetry

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A heads up before we start that this episode deals with suicide, including descriptions of suicide, which I know can be a hard thing for some people to hear about in any context.

So if you're not ready for that right now, this might be one you want to come back to later.

You're not leaving.

Previously, on cereal.

You're going to be here, and I can try to help make your life a little better while you're here, or you continue to be miserable.

They were like, hey, I thought we were friends.

Yeah, in a way.

Why are you complaining?

Just beating,

dragging me on the floor, beating me everywhere.

I thought maybe I'm giving the wrong message that these guys, they just wanted better food and better treatment.

You're going to think that we are okay.

You can keep us here for the rest of our lives.

It was peaceful as could be.

From Cereal Productions and the New York Times, it's Serial Season 4, Guantanamo, one prison camp told week by week.

I'm Sarah Koenig.

This is part two of Colonel Mike Bumgartner and the worst year.

Early on May 18th, 2006, Bumgartner was in his morning meeting when someone came in with urgent news.

So the meeting was interrupted with, hey, we got a suicide attempt here.

A few minutes later, another one came in.

We got another suicide attempt here.

And they were being found unconscious, frothing at the mouth, I think, in both instances.

A suicide attempt on its own shocked no one.

Suicide attempts happen constantly, Bumgartner said.

So routine that somebody's trying to cut their wrists or somebody's trying to hang themselves.

I mean, that was an everyday battle.

There was always somebody trying to kill himself.

Which Bumgartner worried about, but not over much.

He didn't think most of the people attempting really wanted to die.

Besides, suicide isn't allowed in Islam.

Most of the detainees wouldn't abide it.

Anyone trying to hang himself, for instance, would be discovered immediately, usually because other detainees would stop him.

They wouldn't let him do it.

I mean, they had proven it time and time again.

They always told on.

They always told us so-and-so is trying to hang him.

She felt like there's a backstop.

Yes.

Okay.

Absolutely.

But May 18th was different.

First off, these guys weren't found hanging.

They were reportedly frothing at the mouth, which meant poisoned.

And not just one, but two people.

Bum Gardner said his mind flew straight to a Guantanamo prophecy.

Okay, if there's two, there's got to be a third one out there somewhere.

That influential Saudi prisoner, Shaker Amer, had told him about it a while back.

Shakar was in hospital at the time, on a hunger strike, and he said, you know about this, don't you?

About the dream?

And he told Bumgardner that another detainee had had a a dream that if three detainees died, they'd all get to go home.

The dream had made its way through the camp.

Lots of people heard about it.

Several former detainees told us they didn't put much stock in it.

It just seemed, whatever, unlikely.

But Bumgardner believed it.

He believed that the detainees believed it, but he also believed the substance of the dream, that what it laid out was probably true.

I honestly did believe that if they got their way and the three guys died from the vision, that there would be such, I don't know why I talked myself into believing, but I did believe there's going to be such tremendous pressure now, that that's such a hellhole down there that people are killing themselves.

It's got to be shut.

And that it would force them, the facility would be closed.

And if we had to close it, the guy that is really responsible for letting it happen was me.

That's the way I feel.

That's such a huge responsibility that you're putting on yourself.

Well, it is.

And it may be arrogant to think that you ever thought of that.

You know, that the world's dependent upon me.

Maybe I'm crazy.

It's like the captain of the ship, though, you know.

Everything that happens on my ship, I'm responsible for.

If we succeed,

you know, it's me and the crew.

If we fail, it's me.

And under this skipper, the USS Guantanamo was currently enjoying Bumgardner's signature achievement, the period of peace.

He wanted to keep it that way.

He could not be, would not be, the guy who screwed this up for the country.

The men found unconscious had taken overdoses of anti-anxiety medication, not their own medication.

In all, four detainees had become sick, though prison personnel said only two seemed to be genuine suicide attempts.

They were hospitalized and recovered.

And the prophecy Bumgardner dreaded about three detainees dying was averted.

Still, he failed to recognize this May 18th crisis for what it was, a prelude.

Instead, the headline that day for Bumgardner was that detainees had somehow managed to hoard medication, which freaked him out.

What with the medical protocols and the regular cell searches, they should not have been able to do that.

So right away on May 18th, Bumgardner ordered a facility-wide search.

Cell searches happened all the time at Guantanamo, but not like this.

Every single cell, every single person, some 460 detainees at that point, now, all hands on deck.

Reports vary about what they found, but Bumgardner remembers they discovered a bunch of people, he thinks it was in the low teens, had secreted pills.

In mattresses,

that's probably the prime place.

In the folds of, you know, the very edges of a sheet, you know, where the little little thing goes around.

Oh, like the hem?

Yeah, up inside the hem.

I mean, you take out a few stitches, stick out in there, and actually they would sew them back up.

One guy had a stash of pills hidden in his prosthetic leg.

So yeah, we found quite a bit.

Again, detainees were used to having their cells tossed, but this time, Bumgardner made a risky call.

He directed his personnel to search all Qurans, too, in case contraband was hiding inside the pages or the spine.

He knew it would cause tension.

Complaints about personnel disrespecting or desecrating the Quran were legion.

The previous Guantanamo commander had ordered an investigation into various allegations in an effort to separate rumor from justified fury.

It was such a sensitive issue, the camp had instituted a rule that only Muslim staff, interpreters, or the camp's new cultural advisor were allowed to touch it.

Obviously, detainees weren't happy about having to hand over their Qurans that day, but Bumgardner said nobody made too big a stink until they got to Camp Four.

We told them it was going to happen.

They didn't like that.

And so it started getting rowdy then.

Rowdy in Camp Four was not supposed to happen ever.

Camp 4 was the communal camp, their showcase.

It's where Bumgardner could bring distinguished visitors and boast, see, even though the Geneva Conventions don't apply here, we still treat these men humanely.

The detainees lived together in open dorms, 10 beds to a block.

They got to wear white clothing.

They could play soccer and basketball.

They could pray together and eat together.

One former detainee told us you could save leftovers for a couple days and then invite friends over for brunch.

Admission to Camp 4 depended on good behavior.

It was a reward for compliance.

But just because you followed the Americans' rules, it did not follow that you necessarily trusted the Americans.

We talked to half a dozen detainees who were in Camp 4 that day in May, and they told us they had the distinct impression the Americans were up to something.

This didn't feel like a normal search.

It felt more like a deliberate provocation, possibly for some dark purpose they couldn't decipher.

One day, the guards came to us in a weird way.

They started talking loud.

They started hitting doors.

They wanted to take the holy book.

That's Mustafa Ayatadir, originally Algerian, later from Sarajevo, where he lives now.

They would grab it by the covers and they would shake it in a disrespectful way, the way you wouldn't do it to any regular book.

Again, only Muslim personnel were supposed to touch the Qurans.

That was the rule.

And Bumgarner had suspended it.

Mustafa said he tried to broker an agreement with the guards whereby he would search the Qurans himself, but it didn't hold.

And then, as Bumgarner would say, it started getting rowdy.

Even the Afghan prisoners, who had a reputation for lying low, even they got rowdy at the prospect of the Quran under attack.

So they told them,

we will fight or you can kill us.

We can sacrifice when it comes to the Quran.

That's Samuel Hajj from Sudan, a journalist.

And they used also the tiyagas.

Abundantly, they used the tier gas.

You could tell there's this hyperactivity going on with yelling at us, screaming back at us, and the guards.

The guards had already evacuated out of the areas that they normally patrol.

Camp 4 was not only the most permissive camp.

For the guards, it was also potentially the most dangerous camp because detainees could congregate in their dorms and outside.

The uproar was getting out of hand.

Baumgartner tried to shut it down lamely.

And then I began to personally issue an orders to them.

I would not want to see footage of it.

I was ticked off.

You know,

get back in your bay, calm down,

just all kinds of trying to bring order to it, which that really, I don't know why I thought that was ever going to help, but I did.

I thought they would listen to the colonel.

They could care less.

Actually, that got to matter, I think.

What happened next has been described in reports as a disturbance, a fight, a riot.

Details differ, but most of the documentation I've read settled more or less on the same story.

That afternoon, Bumgardner decided it was time to call in the QRF, the Quick Reaction Force, a team of 10 soldiers equipped with riot control gear.

Sergeant Joe Hickman was in charge of the QRF that day.

He said they'd been called up before, but always the mere sight of them had quelled whatever was stirring.

They'd never had to actually engage with detainees.

Most of the time, they sat around, bored, in their hut, watching movies on DVD or whole seasons of the office.

The force feeding chairs were stored in there, too.

Hickman said he'd sometimes take a nap in one of them.

But May 18th, when they hustled over to Camp 4, Hickman said they could hear people yelling and banging and breaking stuff in all the different buildings, which ringed a large central yard.

About 200 Navy guards were staged there, waiting.

The QRF team lined up outside the door of one particularly agitated block, Zulu Block.

There's a whole wind-up protocol they're supposed to go through before they physically enter an enclosed space, but that got short-circuited when a guard started yelling about yet another suicide.

A Navy guard yelled, who was standing by the door, he said, detainee is in here hanging himself.

He's hanging himself.

And he opened the door real fast and we ran in.

The Navy guard was mistaken.

No one was hanging himself inside.

Instead, Hickman says what he and his QRF team encountered when they rushed in was an expertly slicked up floor, an ambush.

And we slid all over the place and we were getting bombarded with feces and urine.

Like it had been stockpiled.

Yes.

They were waiting for us.

The actual truth was that they would give detainees sulf soap,

the powder soap for laundry.

That's Mullah Mohamed Nabi Omri, who'd been a Taliban official.

He told us he was in the dorm when the QRF came bursting in.

And he said the detainees were throwing these containers of surf soap at the guards, and the soap was spilling out onto the floor, mixing with the liquid from the tear gas.

Yeah, well at the ground.

So when they wanted to enter the room and march forward,

they would slip on this ground and fall.

This is the truth about this issue.

Again, there's some disagreement, especially between the Americans and the detainees, about some of the fine points here.

Omri Omri said there was no ruse to lure them in, no ambush, no advance excretion gathering.

He said they were reacting in the moment to being attacked.

But everyone involved agrees.

They got pretty vicious.

So the prisoners started to break stuff, like the light fixtures and stuff.

The light fixtures and the water bottles, the prisoners started throwing it at the guards.

Friend used everything that would come in their hands.

Whatever that was.

Fans, bottles, bidding sticks.

We took a botanist from him and we had some American with that.

They had the upper hand first.

That's Joe Hickman again.

They were beating us.

And you know, when you got people caged up for years,

They fight like animals.

They fight at a different level than my 18-year-old kids that just graduated high school and worked at McDonald's part-time before they went in the military.

These guys are fighting.

After about five or 10 minutes, Hickman says he gave the order to fire.

And they did.

Non-lethal hard pellets, though Hickman says they used them at a potentially lethal range.

It was the first time weapons had been fired at detainees at Guantanamo.

Hickman says he hit a detainee in the chest with a rubber grenade.

He remembers laughing.

It was comical to see a body go flying like that, he said, which he feels kind of bad about now.

But in the moment, it was payback.

Violence was always in the air at Guantanamo, but this was something else.

A straight-up fight, right out in the open, 10 against 10, soldiers versus detainees.

This is something that they would never have made public, but

the day of the riot, morale was never higher.

That's Steve Timmis, the Navy officer in charge of the guard force in the discipline camps, two and three.

They'd all been called over to camp four to help.

Because we got to kick their asses and get away with it after all that BS we had to take from them.

And that's the God-honest truth.

And

they don't, we never would have said it like that.

And they probably, even to this day, don't like, wouldn't like us to put it like that.

But if you ask any guard that was involved in that, that's what they'll tell you.

And we finally had our day, you know?

Hickman and his team pushed the detainees out of zulu block to where navy guards were waiting in the courtyard well they start while they're giving up and we're throwing them out the door then those navy guys outside are literally just beating the shit out of them um as they're going out they were getting cuffed and then placed all face down in the dirt outside they're putting wristbands on them

And then they're just beating them up.

Wristbands meaning like flex cuffs or what?

Yeah.

Okay.

and beating like hitting them hitting them yeah

and nobody

nobody's doing a thing

some of them when they were throwing them back to us they were swinging and kicking so we had to take them down

miraculously nobody was gravely injured that day a couple of the guards were banged up but not as badly as some of the prisoners especially the ones who'd been shot with plastic pellets i know my uniform was covered in blood after we were done i went to the clinic you know they take it off throw it in one of their bio bags, and then hose off and go get a fresh uniform and go back to work.

Some of the detainees told us they liked the fight too.

That was a good day.

So, when I asked about my friends, they were so happy after that.

So, it feels like they had kind of like

their freedom.

Also, the fight was righteous.

They were protecting the Quran.

Bumgarner couldn't understand it.

They had it so good over there in Camp 4.

Why'd they throw it away?

Why'd they tear the place apart?

He dealt with the May 18th debacle not as an existential problem, but as a disciplinary one.

That night, Camp 4 was emptied out completely.

All those supposedly compliant detainees sent to punishment blocks.

From now on, fewer people would be allowed to congregate at any one time.

And as for suicide prevention, Bumgardner focused on overdosing, medical staff only to distribute medications, not guards.

But honestly, Bumgardner said he felt like he had things back under control.

I

feel pretty comfortable saying at that point, after just a few days, and you can tell by the activity you see in the camps on the morning briefs and just by the radio traffic that you hear.

The camps are pretty quiet.

They're sort of back to normal.

Yeah, I didn't keep my,

at the end of my failure.

My tentacles weren't up like there was something out there was about to happen.

Maybe Bumgardner's tentacles weren't activated, but the tentacles of prisoner unrest, those tentacles were activated and probing quietly for escape.

That's after the break.

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Three weeks after the violence in May is when the worst thing about the worst year would happen, June 9th, 2006.

That night, the Joint Task Force Commander, Admiral Harry Harris, hosted the camp's top officers at a dinner party, a rare break for Bumgartner.

And it was sort of like it has been a tough last few weeks.

And so it was

the 06s and above sort of

rest, smoke cigars with the boss.

He loved to smoke cigars.

So

sitting out on his like his little deck looking out over Guantanamo, the actual bay itself, beautiful, relaxed evening.

That sticks with me so bad.

That

while all this is building up in the camps, I am sitting probably for the first time and only time it happened in my time there.

I am actually sitting relaxed at the Admiral's house.

After the party broke up and people wandered home to their quarters, phones and pagers started buzzing.

Several detainees had been found unresponsive in their cells in Alpha Block of Camp 1, about 15 yards from Baumgartner's office.

The men had been discovered one by one, starting a little after 12.30 a.m.

First the guy in cell 8, then in cell 12, another, then a third in cell 5.

According to government records, their names names were Yasser Azaharani from Saudi Arabia.

He was 22.

Mani al-Utaybi, also Saudi, age 30, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed from Yemen.

He was 27.

All three had been found by guards hanging at the back of their cells near their sinks, which they'd evidently stepped off of in such a way as to suspend themselves.

They'd concealed themselves by attaching sheets or blankets to the ceiling in front of the sink.

Their hands were tied, and each had a piece of paper in a pocket, pocket, a couple of short, furious sentences written in Arabic.

By the time Bumgardner arrived, the camp was in a state.

The guards were frantic.

One said he comforted a colleague and then puked in a trash can.

Medical personnel were working on the three men, though they all appeared to be past saving.

Within an hour of Bumgardner's arrival, they were pronounced dead.

This was very bad for the prison.

That's where Bumgardner's head went.

No detainees had died since the camp opened, and now three in one night.

This is bad for us, for me.

How are we going to basically explain we let this happen?

For me, that's what I was.

How did this happen?

The immediate answer seemed to be run-of-the-million competence.

The guards were supposed to be walking the tier every three minutes, making sure to see skin and movement from each detainee in each cell.

But as one guard later admitted to investigators, it gets old and boring.

And it turned out two guards had gone to Chow at the same time, which was against the rules.

Eventually, Admiral Harris would conclude that prison personnel violated six procedures that night, some of which might have contributed to the detainees' ability to kill themselves.

I can't tell you which six because redacted.

In any case, by dawn, Washington was waiting.

Within four hours of that happening, we're on the telephone at a conference table with the White House.

Wanting to know what the hell happened.

Bumgardner knew full well that question had an uncomfortable cousin.

Whose fault was this?

He also knew, they all knew, they were listening toward a PR nightmare, the one Bumgardner most feared.

The narrative that people were killing themselves at Guantanamo because it was such a hellhole.

Just a month earlier, the UN Committee Against Torture had issued a report saying the prison violated human rights law and should be shut down.

The EU Parliament had also called for its closing, in part because of the inhumane conditions of confinement.

Now the Germans, the Danes, the British were reiterating, close it down.

The U.S.

government, though, in an abundance of confidence, spun its weakness into a strength.

These deaths didn't reflect badly on Guantanamo.

Just the opposite.

These deaths justified Guantanamo.

Hours after the conference call with the bigwigs in D.C., Admiral Harris went big.

He told CNN the suicides were proof that these men were still in the fight, a continual threat to the United States.

They are smart, they are creative, they are committed, they have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own.

I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

Asymmetrical warfare, meaning the wily adaptive strategies guerrilla fighters or terrorists use to attack a bigger, stronger enemy.

That was the government's story about the suicides.

They were an act of war.

For his part, Bumgardner told me he didn't cotton to the asymmetrical warfare language, but he was certain the deaths were coordinated and that they were calculated to harm not necessarily the United States, but to harm Guantanamo.

For one thing, he knew all the men on that particular block, Alpha Block of Camp One.

He said they were all instigators, manipulators, as he called them, hand-in-the-back of the room types.

I'm confident that whole tier, that whole cell block, knew this was going to happen.

And they had to.

They participated to make it happen.

It was all about fulfilling the prophecy.

The prophecy that if three men died, they'd all be freed.

They'd killed themselves for the good of the group to keep Guantanamo in the nightly news on the front page.

I am 100% convinced that

those three people committed themselves to dying for their cause to get all,

in quotation mark, the brothers

released from Guantanamo to get sent back home.

There's no doubt in my mind that was the purpose for those suicides.

They were dying for the cause in jihad.

They certainly didn't die out of any,

I'm depressed, I can't make it anymore.

And

that makes no sense at all for the three of them to do it simultaneously.

I mean, you don't plan suicides that way.

That's not the way you do.

Bumgartner believed other more powerful detainees, al-Qaeda guys, had either planned the suicides or at the very least approved them.

And he thought it was possible that lawyers for the detainees might be encouraging the detainees to protest or passing information to their clients.

Now these same attorneys, along with human rights activists, were pushing a different narrative about the suicides.

The prisoners had died from despair, they said, from hopelessness, after years of abuse and no clear legal or administrative path towards release.

A UN spokesman said the suicides were, quote, not completely unexpected, unquote.

Amnesty International straight up blamed the Bush administration for the deaths.

Eventually, inevitably, yet another story emerged about what had happened to the three men.

Some people began wondering aloud whether they'd in fact been killed.

Maybe these weren't suicides at all.

Maybe they were homicides.

My name is Talal Azahrani.

Talal Azaharani, a former general in the Saudi police and the father of the youngest man who died, Yasser Azaharani.

He openly challenged the U.S.

government's account of what happened to his son.

In a remarkably polite video statement, he implored the president and the courts and the American people to investigate.

I never believed this story.

There are many signs and pieces of evidence that show this story is false and that these individuals were killed at Guantanamo.

There was some weirdness about their deaths.

Even if the guards were phoning it in that night, for instance, how could these hangings have gone unnoticed for so long?

A couple of the men's bodies were showing the beginnings of rigor mortise when guards cut them down, which takes about two hours to start to set in.

The logs the guards made of their rounds that night were a little off.

Someone seems to have falsified a headcount about an hour before the first detainee was found hanging.

But when investigators asked the guards about it, they all claimed, implausibly, not to know who wrote the entry.

In 2010, Harper's Magazine published an award-winning investigation into the Guantanamo suicides with the word suicides in scare quotes, and it was intriguing.

The reporter's main source was introduced as a whistleblower, Joe Hickman, the former sergeant in charge of the QRF team that fought the detainees in Camp 4.

Hickman said some personnel were acting oddly that night, and that while he was on duty in a guard tower, he saw an unmarked white van coming and going from Camp 1, which appeared to him to be secretly moving individual prisoners to and fro.

Hickman's hypothesis, maybe another agency, perhaps the CIA, had taken the men for secret meetings and things got out of hand and they died, and then they were strung up to look like suicides.

Hickman wrote a book about it.

To this day, he thinks there's a wide conspiracy to hide the truth of that night.

And some of the detainees, including some of the former Guantanamo prisoners we spoke to, they also refused to believe the men hanged themselves.

They just don't see how or why they could have done it.

The Americans must have killed them somehow.

These three competing explanations for the suicides, warfare or misery or homicide, never seem to fade.

People still talk about the deaths with some mystery.

But there is information, a lot of it, that to me offers the most persuasive answer to the question of what happened.

Information that lives inside the paper trail these men left while they were still alive.

That's after the break.

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Okay.

So of the three stories about what killed the men in camp one, desperation, asymmetrical warfare, or homicide, I'm going to set aside the homicide idea because no evidence has surfaced to support it after all these years.

And many good reporters we've spoken to told us they did take the idea seriously, tried to substantiate it, but they weren't able to.

And then just the size of the cover-up we'd be talking about.

All those people, all those falsified witness statements and investigative documents, and not one person has cracked in 20 years.

It seems unlikely.

So to me, that leaves two options, desperation or warfare.

And if we're weighing the truth of those stories, we do have convincing evidence.

Bureaucratically speaking, I know the most about the Yemeni man, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, because I have his medical and behavioral records left over from an unsuccessful lawsuit filed on behalf of his and Yasser al-Zaharani's fathers.

Ahmed arrived in Guantanamo in June of 2002.

He was 22 years old, or possibly 33 years old.

The U.S.

never seems to have pinned down his birth date, or his real name for that matter.

But most of his Guantanamo records say he was 22.

He'd worked selling clothes at the souk in Taiz, Yemen, near his hometown.

He had a thick black beard and was married to a young woman named Hayat.

The story he told the U.S.

was that he was studying at a university in Pakistan when he got arrested during a raid at the guesthouse where he was living.

The U.S.

thought he was lying.

that the studying was a cover story, and that Ahmed was maybe a mid-to-high-level al-Qaeda operative and had possibly traveled with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

People said they saw him in Afghanistan in Kandahar.

He said he'd never been there.

I have no idea whether he was mid-to-high-level al-Qaeda, but from the records, it seems like he was a mid-to-high-level pain in the guard forces ass.

He spits on someone, throws a cup of tea on someone, sexually harasses female guards now and then.

Early in 2004, he gets IRFed a couple of times, once for refusal for reservation, meaning an interrogation session.

None of which made him exceptional at Guantanamo.

But it's pretty clear from the guard logs, Ahmed was never okay at Guantanamo.

He wasn't inclined to settle down or wait it out, whatever it was.

He was a tenacious resistor.

In January 2004, a guard sees him climbing the fence at the back of the wreck area, trying to see what's on the other side.

The guard tells him to come down before the tower guards spot him.

Ahmed tells the guard, I want the infantry to shoot me, so I can be with Allah.

Please, MP, please.

If he had a reputation at Guantanamo, it was for hunger striking.

During the camp's very first hunger strike in 2002, Ahmed joins in.

They have to revive him with oxygen when he passes out.

He joins the hunger strike again in July of 2005, not long after Bumgardner's arrival.

He's one of the guys who stops for a couple of days when Bumgardner and Shaker Amer work out a deal.

And he's one of the guys who gets angry when that deal falls apart, believes the Americans have tricked them, lied to them, breaks his toilet and his light fixture, goes back on hunger strike.

And this time, he never really stops.

That fall of 2005, as Bumgarner is struggling to contain the hunger strike, Ahmed ends up in the detainee clinic a few times.

He's so weak he can barely talk.

He'd arrived at Guantanamo weighing about 177 pounds.

By December 20th, he's down to 124.5 pounds.

By Christmas, he's hospitalized with pneumonia and a sepsis scare.

At the very end of December 2005, a few weeks after the first force feeding chairs were shipped to the island, medical personnel write this note in his file.

Quote, patient states that he wanted to commit suicide because he does not want to be a prisoner anymore and he lost hope, end quote.

Ahmed will not stop hunger striking.

They prescribe him Zoloft.

By January 10th, he weighs only 122 pounds.

They strap him into the feeding chair.

This is how Bumgardner's period of peace looks for Ahmed.

Dozens and dozens of pages of meticulous force-feeding documentation.

Exact times, exact amounts of liquid nutrition, the width of the tube, the lidocaine percentage, which nostril they snake it down, whether he resists or not, whether he gets sick after.

Twice a day they're strapping him in the chair.

The process is so harrowing, most of the hunger strikers quit within a few weeks, but Ahmed doesn't.

By mid-February, he's one of only three men still on hunger strike, and the inside of his nose is infected and so inflamed the nurse can't get a tube down.

They put it down his throat instead.

He's got other medical complaints as well.

Itchiness, his ear hurts, testicular pain.

His knees were bashed during an irfing, he tells them, and now his knee pain is constant.

But he is gaining weight.

138 pounds, 150 pounds.

In his cell, he's allowed to keep a couple dozen pictures of his hometown, Ib, Yemen, a crazy beautiful city surrounded by green hills and waterfalls.

All the while, the behavioral health team is checking in on him, and all the while he's waving them off.

A typical encounter.

I'm good, everything is good.

Are you from psych?

Oh no, I have nothing to say.

I know your questions, and you know my answers.

Have a good day.

Ahmed keeps getting the feeding tube for another month after that.

Five months total of force feeding.

Until lunchtime on June 2nd, 2006, a guard walks by Ahmed's cell.

And instead of writing the usual one-word description in Ahmed's activity log, sitting, standing, sleeping, praying, the guard writes, eating in all caps, with three exclamation points.

Ahmed had voluntarily eaten a meal.

His hunger strike was over.

By this time, he weighs 163 pounds.

It's not clear if he's been sneaking food on the side somehow or if the force feeding caused him to gain back the weight, but he's physically healthy.

After a couple days, they determined he's ready to get off Oscar Block in the discipline camp and move over to Alpha Block in Camp 1.

On June 7th, two days before he kills himself, a behavioral health staffer comes by.

Ahmed is in good spirits, the report says.

States that he has no mean thoughts of hurting others or himself.

He's not seeing ghosts or genies in his cell, not hearing voices.

So that's how prison personnel saw Ahmed.

But the clearest picture of what Ahmed himself was thinking and feeling comes from his own writing, which is part of the military's investigative record.

He and the other men left letters, brief manifestos, explanations.

My name is Ali Abdullah Ahmed Nasser al-Salami.

I'm 27 years old, married.

My country is Yemen, and I memorize the Quran.

Praise and gratitude goes to Allah, Ahmed begins.

I don't know how I start my story.

However, I know how I could end it.

He writes of U.S.

greed and support for repressive regimes in the Middle East, including Iraq and Israel.

Of his treatment in custody.

the Irfings and the tear gas and the humiliation.

They desecrated our religion, our bodies, and private parts.

He says he gave up his hunger strike just a few days back in order to, quote, safeguard myself against the Americans' oppression.

And I mean final relinquishment without return, God willing.

I have remained repressed inside a very cold metal box.

They call it a solitary cell.

I have come out of this box, and my intention was to put an end to these ordeals.

I am not desperate, and I swear to Allah, not afraid.

The date on the letter is June 7th, 2006, the same day he tells his behavioral health staffer he's feeling just just fine, and two days before his suicide.

In another letter addressed to Muhammad's nation, to the entire Muslim world, he says it again, don't ever think I have been afflicted with desperation.

He hopes that perhaps by doing what he's going to do, it revives the hearts and awakens the endeavoring and victorious.

He signs off with a telephone number in Yemen.

But in other, more personal letters, also dated June 7th, he sounds terribly sad.

To my dearest brother, he reminisces, asks that he let people know what happened, at home, at the shop.

Asks that he take good care of my parents and forgive me.

Ask my parents too for forgiveness.

To my family and the beloved ones, he writes about piety and obedience and also his agony over being separated from them.

To my dear wife, he hasn't seen her for five years.

He writes of longing and devotion and a gleaming moon and silk and the smell of roses and sweet and fresh water.

The other men left writing too.

Yasser Azaharani's letters are thematically and stylistically similar to Ahmed's, but they have a little more fire, more of a raised fist.

More talk of a U.S.-led conspiracy to keep them indefinitely detained.

More ghastly detail.

His letters too were all dated within days of his death.

From the third man, Mani al-Utaibi, there's only one letter in the records, dated June 8th.

Quote, as you all know, the situation situation in this prison is worsening.

He asks Allah to release the other prisoners from captivity to diminish the infidels.

His letter concludes, forgive me.

We asked the former prisoners we spoke to what they remembered about the three men who died.

Ahmed Erashidi, the Moroccan chef who spent five years in Guantanamo, told a story about Yasser as a Harani.

Ereshidi was often on the discipline blocks, he said, and that's the last place he saw Yasser.

He was just opposite myself, and he was very young.

He used to call me Uncle Ahmed.

They were on the harshest, most restrictive block, November block.

He was opposite me.

I was in number 18 and he was in number 19.

Or maybe it was the other way around, he can't quite remember.

But they were both afflicted by the punishing cold of the air conditioning.

Ereshidi said he couldn't stand it, freezing all night, and decided to block the AC vent in the ceiling of his cell.

But in November block, there's nothing in your cell, no material to work with.

So he resolved to use his food, scarce as it was, hungry as he was.

So in the end, I will chew it, chew it, chew, and then suck it and then remove it and then we stick it over to the vent, block the vent.

Which worked.

He didn't know it at the time, but it turned out Yasser in the opposite cell, also blocking his ceiling vent with food.

We were doing the same thing, but

we didn't tell one another about it.

So one night, I could hear the soldiers bringing a hose, water hose.

They got him out of his cell, and I was watching all this through a crack.

And they removed him.

They liberated his AC vent by blasting it with water.

Arashidi said he remembered the guards were so young, early 20s, like Yasser, and they seemed to be having such a good time, which I can picture.

Young soldiers with a water hose and a project.

And his cell

was flooded.

And then, and he was shuttled in the middle of the corridor.

And then they put him back in his cell, like a swimming pool.

And they said to him, have a good night.

Soon after that, Arashidi said, Yasser was moved.

Probably to Camp 1 alpha block, if I had to hazard a guess.

And Arashidi was moved into yasser's cell and that cell he said had an especially big ac vent just huge he couldn't bear to walk under it only then i realized what he was facing only then i realized that what he was going through erashidi said he spent about three weeks in that frigid cell on november block before he too was moved out within a week

We got the news that three detainees were killed.

Ahmed Erashidi doesn't have any first-hand knowledge of what happened in Camp 1 that night.

It's not impossible the men were killed, he says.

But he also believes it's possible they were driven to suicide because of the harshness.

The feeding chairs, November block, Bumgardner's innovations, Bumgardner's Guantanamo.

So were the men martyrs?

Was this a coordinated political tactic?

Or were they hopeless prisoners?

Sounds to me as if they were both.

Judging from Ahmed's letters especially, Ahmed had thought this through.

He was done suffering, done with the endless force feedings.

But also, he hoped his death would mean something.

Maybe even inspire something.

Guantanamo commanders never figured out exactly how the suicides had been planned or carried out, so there was no intelligence fix they could grab onto.

All they could try to do in response to this loss of control, Bumgardner said, was to try to reassert it.

It was not, let's be nice.

It was control.

Shut it down.

The experiment with kindness is not working.

Before the suicides, the camp administration had planned for about three-quarters of the detainees to move into more permissive living arrangements.

Now they flipped that percentage.

The big new camp six, designed to be communal like the now-emptied camp four, would be all single cells, maximum security.

They'd put steel mesh enclosures along the second floor walkways so no one could jump.

The new recreation yard was carved into individual individual enclosed pens.

Admiral Harris began using a new phrase in interviews with the press.

I don't think there's such a thing as a medium security terrorist.

Mike Bumgardner came to believe he was personally responsible for the three suicides, not because his policies were too harsh, because they were too soft.

He'd relaxed the SOPs in Camp 1.

so that when Yasser al-Zahirani was seen washing his own blanket in his cell and then hanging it up to dry, that was allowed.

And the extra stuff they were permitted to keep in their cells, the clothing, the water bottles, the sewing area on Alpha Block, a cell where you could use a needle and thread, the dim lights so you couldn't easily see the back of the cell, plus the no flashlights in detainees' faces rule for guards so as not to disturb detainees' sleep.

All of that helped the detainees pull off their suicides.

And all of that, carrots planted by Bumgartner.

What he learned from the suicides was that you can't negotiate with terrorists.

In trying to comply with certain aspects of the Geneva Conventions, Bumgarner thought he'd bent too far toward accommodating the detainees, and the detainees had manipulated his leniency.

That's what some of his superiors had warned about, and some of his subordinates had groused about early on, and now he saw they were right.

November Block, that most miserable discipline block he instituted, where your hair and beard would get shorn, where you couldn't talk, nothing in your cell except a merciless vent blasting cold air.

That's what really worked, he said.

That's what created compliance at Guantanamo.

The only way that you deal with the gentle, not gentle, the people in Guantanamo was from a position of strength, from a position of power, from, I am in charge to be successful.

I am in charge.

It's going to be my way.

I'm in charge.

Conferring with the prisoners, endorsing their reasonable requests, allowing reasonable concessions, he said the detainees must have pegged him as weak.

You show any weakness whatsoever, and where I'm going to give to you one inch

and you give this type of freedom to them, that's totally forgotten.

I mean,

that freedom, I don't, that totally forgotten that you ever did that, made that concession.

And now the bar has moved way down the road again.

They were always reaching for the next thing.

And anything you did for them, they didn't really recognize.

That wasn't, there was no, not that you would expect appreciation.

People always said, well, what do you expect from the guys?

You know, I mean, there's not a trustworthy son of a bitch in there.

Well, what do you expect?

I mean, they're terrorists.

Just, you know, as we thought.

What do you expect?

But I didn't really, some of them I treated as people, humans.

I just, I thought there was a degree.

A degree of mutual respect, or at least a degree of fair play.

Bumgarner had a stunning faith that if he gave the prisoners some privileges, privileges, they'd be grateful.

They'd hold up their end of a one-sided bargain.

Instead, in Bumgarner's eyes, they did the worst thing.

They killed themselves and tried to destroy Guantanamo.

And that's why he said, at Guantanamo, you can't fully employ the Geneva Conventions, which spell out not only the obligations of the captors, but of the captives, how they should behave.

That's the element of why Geneva Conventions can't hold in a camp, is because because there's no obligation on those being held.

No recognition of all the Geneva Conventions.

If they don't play by the rules, then we can't either.

The precise thinking that created the mess of Guantanamo in the first place.

Because there had been rules, maybe not perfect rules, but still perfectly good rules, that the United States spurned at Guantanamo.

Guardrails designed to curtail humanity's worst impulses toward violence and revenge and domination.

That's what the Geneva Conventions were and the Convention Against Torture.

International agreements the United States not only endorsed and adopted, but helped write.

For some of the prisoners, the worst thing about Guantanamo wasn't so much that the U.S.

wasn't playing by the rules.

That's what Ahmed Erashidi explained to us.

He said, the worst thing was that the U.S.

seemed to think it was playing by the rules.

You know, the worst thing that you can imagine is when your rights are being violated and when you are tortured and abused and brutalized by someone who is regarded as someone who respects human rights, as someone who doesn't believe in torture.

So when you are tortured by someone who doesn't believe in torture, it's really, really scary because you don't know what comes next and how bad it's going to get.

Because you're shocked.

How can this guy who believes in human rights doing this to me?

You know, that makes you think that it's going to get worse and worse and worse.

Immediately after the suicides, Bumgardner was in trouble.

Not for the suicides.

He was investigated for what's called a spill.

A reporter from the Charlotte Observer happened to be visiting Guantanamo doing a story on Bumgardner when the suicides occurred, and Bumgardner's bosses were concerned he'd possibly disclosed classified information to the reporter.

The accusation was weak.

It quickly fell away.

And in any case, Bumgardner considered it a pretext.

He's certain what really pissed off his command were some intemperate comments he made in the days following the suicides, captured by that reporter.

The most damning thing?

He quoted Bumgardner saying, in honor of our three dead brothers, and then biting into a pork chop sandwich.

Bumgardner was suspended from his duties and sent to his quarters pending an inquiry.

I was based under house arrest.

I don't know if they called it that, but that's basically what I was: just

go sit by yourself in the house.

Bumgardner was floored.

The three deaths from the premonition had happened, and he thought for sure they're going to close it.

The publicity, the politics would overwhelm Guantanamo and shut it down, and it would be his fault.

He couldn't comprehend how quickly his star had fallen.

I mean, I was

bad.

I mean, it was as if I had committed a capital crime.

And here I was, you know, just hours before, you know,

respected, I thought, by people and doing the right thing, doing right for God and country, you know.

And the next second, I'm like on the FBI's most wanted list.

At least that's the way I felt.

And

when you see, I'm also

at age eight, I'm winning a citizenships award.

I mean, I was always the good citizen, always.

I was the guy,

I won't say I do-gooder, but I never got in trouble.

I was always the right guy, you know, stickler on rule following.

And to know that I'm being accused of breaking the law, that I've been involved in something that is

wrong, that I failed, that we've let the nation, because it was.

I think Hood would talk about it.

You know, we're not going to let anybody die.

I mean, it's, that was our mission.

That was part of the mission nobody's gonna escape nobody's gonna die

those are the things that you just don't allow to happen

and um

that was the worst time of my life to be honest that was the absolute rock bottom of my whole life that period wow

with nothing come anywhere near close um

You weren't suicidal or something, were you?

Oh, you were?

Yeah.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

I didn't make any act, but I was close.

I was very close.

Very, very, very, very close.

I was as close as you could be without doing it.

Life was over for me.

I mean,

it was horrible.

I can't tell you how low I was.

I can't even begin to tell you how low I was.

After about a week, Bumgardner was cleared.

The military found he hadn't spilled anything to the reporter.

And shortly after that, his command at Guantanamo was over and he rotated out, laudatory citation in hand.

His career continued, but his rank didn't rise.

He retired from the Army in 2010.

A coda to this story of the worst year.

Guantanamo's favorite reporter, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, had toured the camp on June 9th, 2006, the same day, just coincidentally, as the suicides.

Tonight, the media drumbeat continues about Guantanamo Bay.

So far, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the New York Star Ledger, USA Today, and other newspapers have either criticized Gitmo or call for it to be shut down.

Of course, some of the things that we're talking about.

This segment ran a few days afterwards.

O'Reilly had left the island before the suicides took place.

He'd gotten a special tour, exposed to as much as possible, Bumgardner at his elbow.

In a sit-down interview, O'Reilly had had asked Bumgardner about the fight that had erupted a month earlier in Camp 4.

Were you surprised these guys try to kill your guys?

Oh, absolutely not.

Well, you're nice to them.

Why are they not?

Why do they want to kill you?

Why are they?

Well, these folks, they hate us.

It's a strange thing.

It takes me hours to try to explain this to you.

They hate us.

They hate Americans.

I mean, I see it every day.

I see a look in their eyes.

that I cannot explain to you.

It is a crazy look when you're dealing with them.

They do kill you in a heartbeat.

Sir, I characterize it to everybody that comes through here.

Make no mistake about it.

They will cut your throat in a heartbeat.

Make no mistake about it.

Bumgardner told me he knew O'Reilly wanted a sound bite, and so he exaggerated a little, gave the people what they wanted.

What about all these poor bakers and barbers who they rounded up and threw in here for no reason?

I'm looking for them, sir.

I'm looking for them.

They're out there somewhere, I reckon.

Because that's what the Human Rights Watch tells me.

Oh, I know.

I know they tell you that.

I wish, you know, sir, again, those that come here, see it, walk it,

leave with a different opinion.

These folks are not what folks paint in the media out there.

Not at all.

These are not good guys.

I stake my reputation and my

life as a career military policeman on this.

No, we've answered butts.

We appreciate the hospitality of the Joint Task Force in Guantanamo.

Coming right back with some religious leaders also upset about alleged torture.

Bumgarner had been worried that pressure from liberals and bad press would close Guantanamo, but in hindsight, it's obvious he had nothing to worry about.

Because this asymmetrical drumbeat was always stronger.

The one pounding out the message to any and all wavering Americans.

Don't believe the human rights lawyers, the naysayers.

Guantanamo is vital to our national security.

When O'Reilly's tour was over, Bumgardner told me he escorted him off the island.

I mean, I remember

driving him back.

We're taking him over to put him on a boat to take him across.

he said to me he said colonel don't worry about it this place is not going to close i said i i was very deferential to him yes sir well how do you know that he goes i'm not going to let it happen

In the end, Bumgardner took this terrible year of hunger striking and fighting and suicides harder than Guantanamo itself.

The prison had survived the worst.

Maybe it could survive anything.

It's almost quaint now to think the government was courting the press back in Bumgardner's day, telling them to come on down and see for themselves.

Because skip ahead 15 years, and the PR goal was to make Guantanamo disappear.

That's next time.

Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas, and me.

Our editor is Julie Snyder.

Additional reporting by Cora Currier.

Fact-checking by Ben Phelan.

Music supervision, sound design and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

Original score by Sophia Dele Alessandri.

Editing help from Jen Guerra and Ira Glass.

Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali.

Additional research by Emma Grillo, Amir Khafaji, and Sami Yousafzai.

Translation by Mohamed Raza Sahibzada, Nael Hedjo, Atik Rahin, Dana Alisa, Bashar Al-Halabi, Mohamed Wali Ferdaus, and Omama Uthman.

Additional production from Daniel Guimet and Katie Mingle.

Our standards editor is Susan Wesling.

Legal review from Alamein Sumar and Maya Gandhi.

The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter.

Supervising producer for Serial Productions is Nde Chubu.

Our executive assistant is Mac Miller.

Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of the New York Times.

Special thanks to Manny Supervielle, Mansoora Daifi, Mohamed El-Faki, Farishta Tayyeb, Mark Denbo, Pardees Cabriai, Corey Schreppel, and Libra Fiter.