Gitmo ‘Lifetime,’ Interrupted

Nasser Nijer Naser Al-Mutairi says he survived three years at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a prison of hunger strikes, beatings, harsh interrogations and suicide attempts. But nothing frightened him as much as the constant message from the guards: “You are never going to go home.”

Wednesday, he went home.

Al-Mutairi was picked up on an Afghan battlefield in 2001, his lungs and right leg severely injured. He was shipped to the military prison in Cuba. There he underwent several chest operations and one interrogation session, an ordeal that he said left him near death.

Last August, the Kuwaiti was officially declared an enemy combatant. A military tribunal rejected his pleas that he was on a religious mission when taken into custody. Instead, U.S. officials determined he was a “member of, or affiliated with, Taliban forces.” They pronounced him unfit for release.

Then in January, without explanation, they released him to Kuwaiti authorities. On Wednesday, the government of Kuwait released him on bail, and he joined his family at home.

“I cried when they told me,” he said from Kuwait on Wednesday in a series of telephone interviews through an English translator. “None of us had any hope. Especially when the interrogators and guards there were always telling us, ‘You will stay here for a lifetime.’ ”

Al-Mutairi is the latest among a handful of prisoners released from Guantanamo to speak out on their experience. Though others have been repatriated, how many remains uncertain. The Pentagon does not always provide precise numbers, and never gives the names and countries of those turned loose.

Among those whose fate is known, there have been elderly men too confused to provide details about the prison. Some have demanded cash for interviews, calling into question their credibility. The U.S. military says some have again taken up arms against the United States and its allies, and some have been recaptured or killed.

Al-Mutairi seemed calm and coherent as he told his story, but worn out physically.

He described a world that for the most part remains shrouded in secrecy. Those accused in the war on terrorism are held outside the U.S. in a specially constructed prison at Guantanamo known as Camp Delta.

He said that because he was unable to provide much to his captors in the way of intelligence, he was basically left alone by guards and the prison administration.

He said he saw fellow detainees struck and dragged into interrogation sessions. Other inmates launched three hunger strikes to protest the harsh conditions, and he knew of two prisoners who tried to take their own lives, he said.

“It was so bad,” Al-Mutairi said, “that I cannot explain to you exactly what I felt when I heard I was being handed back to my government.”

His account is consistent with statements by lawyers for other detainees who claim their clients have been mistreated. In the latest such case, lawyers for six men still at the prison camp filed suit Wednesday in Boston alleging new instances of prison abuse.

The Pentagon, as it has in the past, said reports of prisoner abuse were routinely investigated. “With regard to allegations of detainee abuse,” said Department of Defense spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers, “U.S. policy requires that all detainees be treated humanely.”

Al-Mutairi, now 28, said he left home in October 2000 to work as a teacher and minister in small mosques and schools in Afghanistan. In November 2001, two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he was captured during an uprising in Afghanistan. He said he was shot by Northern Alliance troops and then exposed to smoke and fire as he and others hid in the basement of an old house.

“I was dragged to the basement, and they put smoke and fire down there on us,” Al-Mutairi said. “I inhaled a lot of smoke.”

The battle was the same one in which “American Talib” John Walker Lindh was captured and CIA agent Johnny “Mike” Spann became the first U.S. casualty in the new war.

Almost a year later, the Kuwaiti government told Al-Mutairi’s family it had learned that at some point he had taken ill and was in a hospital in Kandahar. The family next learned from television that he had been turned over to the United States.

In truth, he was already nearly a year into his captivity at Guantanamo Bay. That first year, he said, guards were especially ill-tempered and quick to strike and drag detainees from their cells for interrogation sessions. Some interrogations lasted up to 36 hours, he said.

He said his interrogation was relatively mild because his injured lungs made him unable to withstand a long encounter. He recalled two operations on his chest at Guantanamo Bay, and one for his right knee.

At his interrogation, soldiers showed him a video of scenes taken before the uprising where he was captured. He said they asked him to identify Lindh and Spann, but he could not recall them.

In contrast to his interrogation, Al-Mutairi said other inmates told him they were struck and kicked in lengthy grillings. He said he sometimes heard their cries. Other times, he said, female guards taunted detainees and sexually humiliated them. He said their Korans were taken and handled disrespectfully.

“Five or seven guards would come to your cell and tie you down and drag you out,” he said. “Some of them sat on you. It happened to me once, when they dragged me out. Another time they pushed me very hard, even when I was limping and couldn’t walk straight.”

Al-Mutairi recalled three prisoner hunger strikes, efforts he said he could not join because of his frail condition. One was called because detainees grew frustrated over their uncertain fate. Another was held because of the harsh interrogations. A third came after the Korans were mishandled.

He remembered two prisoners who tried ending their lives. One from Tajikistan tried to hang himself with a torn sheet in his cell, but guards reached him in time. The second inmate, from Saudi Arabia, was being treated in the prison hospital alongside Al-Mutairi.

He said it was not until the long-delayed tribunals got underway last year that much of the harsh treatment eased up. At his tribunal, according to a military transcript of the proceedings, Al-Mutairi admitted carrying a Kalashnikov rifle and two grenades while on the Taliban front line.

But he maintained he was there “for the purpose of Rabat,” a religious mission, and that he promptly turned over his weapons once the Northern Alliance drew near.

“I did have a Kalashnikov and I was on that line, but all I did with the weapon was clean, disassemble and reassemble it,” he told the panel of three U.S. military officers. “I was there not to fight but to do Rabat.” He compared it to guard duty.

“Rabat means waiting,” he said. “It’s a form of worship.... There is a great reward in my religion for doing Rabat. If someone dies while on the line while doing Rabat, they are considered martyrs and go to heaven.

“Rabat is the opposite of jihad, because Rabat is defending the line and jihad is attacking the line.”

At the close of the tribunal, Al-Mutairi worried that he had not been taken seriously. “Are my words clear?” he asked them. “Is everything that I said understood?” The tribunal president answered, “I believe it is clear.”

With that, Al-Mutairi felt doomed to spend his life at Guantanamo Bay. Then, without explanation, he was released on Jan. 16 and flown home on a Kuwaiti military aircraft. He was held there on charges that included committing an act of aggression against a foreign nation.

He was released Wednesday on bail of 200 dinars, about $680, with his case scheduled to be heard June 1. Until then, he is a free man.