I expect you to call him a liar.

The following is a short article from the “Readings” section of Harper’s (June 2005, pp. 16 - 18).

As a side note to those who think that we don’t need to worry about what other people think: It’s well-known to anyone who has worked in retail and who pays attention that a satisfied customer will tell three other people about their experience at an establishment, whereas a dissatisfied customer will tell six to ten other people. Think of this man as an involuntary “customer”, and an innocent one at that, and you may see the result.

For those who suggest that to be at Guantánamo is a de facto indication of guilt, think about this man’s case and how you would feel if he were your friend, your cousin, or your neighbor. The first condition for this exercise is to think of an Arab as a member of the human race.

From a sworn affidavit by Hussain Abdulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a fifty-one-year-old Palestinian man who plans to sue the U.S. government for cruel and unusual punishment. More than 500 “illegal combatants” are currently being held at Guantánamo Bay.

On May 25, 2002, the Pakistani police took me to a detention center. After seven days they began the interrogation. The interrogator spoke very good Arabic, but the Pakistanis told me he was American. He asked me only about my life for about half an hour. He never asked me about any criminal offense and never suggested that I might have done anything wrong.

Three days later they said we were being taken to Islamabad. I was blindfolded. The Pakistanis gave us over to the Americans, and they forced me into a plane. After it landed, we were taken out and put in a line with sacks on our heads and our hands shackled. Some Afghans and Pakistanis said we were in Bagram. The bag was taken off my head, and I was undressed until I was naked. It was very humiliating. If there was anything at all I could have done to avoid it I would have done it -- this was the first time as an adult I have been naked in public.

We were tortured, abused, and put in very embarrassing positions. They would threaten me, saying that they knew I was guilty and that they would make me talk. They would deprive me of sleep. You were never allowed to speak to each other, or even to yourself. They would hang us on the door by our wrists for an hour or more. If someone was praying, the American soldiers would make them stop. The soldiers did not like us praying and made fun of us. They would threaten the prisoners with ghastly and immoral acts like rape.

In fact, the worst thing that has ever happened to me took place in Bagram. An American soldier took me blindfolded, with my hands tightly cuffed, with my ears plugged so I could not hear properly and my mouth covered so I could only make a muffled scream. Two soldiers forced me to bend down, and a third pressed my face down on a table. A fourth soldier then pulled down my trousers. They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum. It was excruciatingly painful. I have always believed that I am not a person who would scream unless I was really hurt, but I could not stop screaming when this happened. This torture went on for several minutes, but it felt like hours, and the pain afterward was almost as bad as anything I experienced at the time. I have pain to this day from what they did to me. I will never feel comfortable having a bowel movement both because it is painful and because it always reminds me of what happened. I simply cannot understand why it happened to me. It will always cloud my life. It is something I am ashamed to think about, but it is something I cannot press out of my mind. Naturally, I do not want it known, yet my fear for my own privacy is overridden by my desire to make sure that the truth is known, so that others are not made to suffer in this way. The Americans never said anything about why they were doing it to me, so I had to try to work out what was going through their minds. I think maybe they wanted to make me so embarrassed that it would dehumanize me and reduce my ability to resist.

One of the threats I would often hear was that if I didn’t confess they would send me to Cuba. They would say that once I was taken to Guantánamo, the interrogation would be far worse, and I would probably stay there until I died.

I arrived in Cuba around the fifth or sixth of August, 2002. In the beginning, they would constantly yell, “Do you know where you are? You’re with the American Army now!” I still had no idea what my fate would be, but the way they used to shout, I always expected the worst.

Some of the people I was with would be taken out in the morning for interrogation, and they would not come back until the evening. The interrogator would say they had to confess to a particular thing. But because the people would not admit to it, because they insisted they were innocent, the pressure put on them would gradually rise. For example, the Americans would use females who would sexually abuse the prisoners. In one case a woman was brought into the interrogation room in a swimsuit or underwear. She paraded in front of the man being interrogated and tried to make him sexually excited. She went up to try to kiss him, getting very physical and close to him. The man tried to move his face away, but that did not work, so in the end he had to spit in her face to get her to go away, which is all he could do since he was tightly chained. For doing this, of course, he was beaten. This kind of abuse was consciously aimed at a devout Muslim -- for someone else it might not have had such an impact, but in Islam you are not allowed even to touch a woman to whom you are not married. The issue of women soldiers in general is a very sensitive one. Prisoners would have their beards shaved off as punishment for refusing to be handled by women. This was just heaping one religious insult on top of another.

Once a Saudi was taken for interrogation and was told he had to confess to one particular thing. The prisoner was told that if he did not confess, the interrogator would tread on the Koran. The prisoner could not confess, so the interrogator went ahead and stomped on the Koran. The Americans had clearly been trained in how to abuse Muslims and did things that were calculated to inflame. It was so outrageous to us that there was a hunger strike in the prison. One time, after stomping on the Koran, the Americans brought in an Israeli flag and wrapped it around a prisoner’s body, in another attempt to insult and abuse him.

I was interrogated only twelve or thirteen times. Some other prisoners were questioned far more often -- almost daily. I assume from the limited number of times they bothered to question me that they knew all along that I had nothing I could say.

Some would try to take their own lives in their cells. Nobody died that I know of, because when we could see someone trying to kill himself, we would create a loud noise to make sure a guard came. If a prisoner was badly hurt after trying to kill himself, the Americans would send him to the infirmary. If not, he would simply be punished, as if that was any kind of way to deal with his problems. It was a deep shock to me that the prisoners had been made so desperate that they would try to take their own lives. In Islam, suicide is a profound sin. You die a non-Muslim and your cannot have prayers read for you.

They came one day and said I would be taken to Camp November, a prison used for punishment. I asked why I was being taken there and they did not say. When I got there, they measured me for jeans, gave me the shoes I am wearing today, and told me I was leaving. I thought I was going to Jordan, but actually I was taken to Bagram again. I stayed there for another four and a half months. There were no interrogations there. I was told I was innocent and that I was a guest. It was just a matter of waiting to see where they were going to send me. I was released in Amman on August 11, 2004.

Nobody from the American government has ever apologized for what happened to me. A sergeant read out a paper saying that there was a war on and many people had been killed, and so on, and in that sort of situation the United States had rounded people up. I was given a paper by the U.S. military that said I had been found to be no threat to the United States.

I will never be the same person. Now I spend a lot of my time alone, sitting in the mosque, as I have become an introvert. I go out only when it is really necessary. My father came to visit me and warned my wife and children that I should not be left to brood on my own for long periods, left with my own thoughts. I have intrusive thoughts while I am alone about what I have gone through. These are the thoughts that I sit with, and while I know I should not sit brooding over them, I just cannot help it. I worry that I am depressed, and I fear that I might be going through a nervous breakdown.

I sometimes think what I would say to the United States after all this, and I think it might be something along these lines: In New York, they have the Statue of Liberty. Surely, it is not only in America that there should be liberty? Surely, the United States should stand for liberty for all. The Americans should not have treated me as they did. They should not continue to treat others as they do.

This man, as are many Arabs of the Levant, is apparently educated and aware of the world. He has every reason to hate America because of what Americans have done to him. Yet, what he wants is an apology, his health returned, and some closure. He seeks that through a lawsuit. We can’t count on all the enemies we have made in this way to be so civilized. But rather than face these events, we blame the victims for being in the wrong place, or we blame “the war”. We ignore the fact that our image of ourselves is not the image that the victims have, nor their families, nor their neighbors. We ignore the fact that we are defined by our actions, not by our image of ourselves, and that these actions unchallenged become ours, the essence of what we will become.