Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Red, White, Blue & Orange

Episode Date: May 14, 2013

A torture expert records an imaginary criterion commentary track for the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty. We learn about Umarov Muhibullah, one of the first innocent men to be released from Guantanamo. And your host ponders why Guantanamo is still open. **********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. The following installment is called Red, White, Blue, and Orange. All right, so, I mean, the first thing that strikes me is that this is utterly cartoonish. I own you, Amor. You belong to me. I own you? I mean, how is that gonna elicit good, strong, actionable intelligence? It's absurd.

If you don't look at me when I talk to you, I hurt you. You step off this mat, I hurt you. If you lie to me, I'm gonna hurt you. Now! Now, look at me! Look at me, Amar. I'm watching the torture scenes from Zero Dark Thirty, the Hollywood movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,

with this guy, Joshua Phillips. I'm the author of the book, None of Us Were Like This Before, American Soldiers in Torture. Joshua Phillips spent years interviewing interrogators and soldiers. He knows all about what happened to the detainees who were tortured and what happened to the Americans who did the torturing. I went to his apartment and we recorded a torture commentary track for our imaginary Criterion edition of the film. So the Latin music is not only there to disorient,

but in many cases in all three war theaters afghanistan iraq and guantanamo was used really for the purpose of sleep deprivation so in this scene this is the the um the prep for the the waterboarding when you lie to me i hurt you so everything is is framed in that in those terms. You lie to me, I hurt you. I mean, again, made for TV stuff, man. At this point, Maya is just an observer. Maya's the film's protagonist,

the female CIA agent who's relentless in her search for Osama bin Laden. Put some water in it. And while she's not doing any torturing in this scene, she's definitely paying attention to what Dan, the guy doing the torturing, is doing. She's definitely soaking it all up for later. Dan is such a tough guy and a cool guy

that we kind of sympathize with, you know, his approach. You think that it's effective. Seems rational. that we kind of sympathize with, you know, his approach. You think that it's effective. Seems rational. Where was the last time you saw bin Laden? Where was the last time you saw bin Laden, huh? Seems like, you know, we're dealing with implacable terrorists and this is the only way of extracting information for them.

This is what defeat looks like bro your jihad is over right okay there's so many things are so messed up about that that scene okay so first of all um we saw dan waterboard amar you know strangle him with water once, twice, three times maybe? How many times was KSM Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, how many times were those guys waterboarded? 183 times or something absurd like that? In the end, everybody breaks, bro. It's biology. Okay, so that's really twisted, absurd, deeply troubling logic,

but certainly ubiquitous in terms of the overall perceptions of how people regard torture interrogation. You know, this line really captures the essence. It's biology. Everybody breaks. And I would hear this sort of reasoning echoed throughout all of our war theaters. That sort of reasoning is echoed everywhere. I mean, there's expectation that it's just, it's a biological function that you can A, calibrate pain and duress, and B, under enough pain and duress, a detainee will crack, and in cracking, they will provide actionable intelligence.

So there's so many problems with each one of those strands of thought. I mean, my God, even the CIA's own researchers found in the course of doing research on interrogation and torture that part of the problem with using torture for interrogation is its deleterious effects on memory and reading. So, I mean, the thing is that it's biology, bro, that exactly the opposite happened. This is a dog collar. Okay, so he's naked wearing a dog collar. And this, what is this supposed to do for us? I mean, really, I mean, the thing that strikes me about all these techniques that they're doing here, the sexual stuff, the, you know, the walling, the dog collar, you know, it's amateur hour.

I got you. Huh? This box here, this box sucks. I'm going to put you in it. All right, I box here, this box sucks. I'm going to put you in it. All right, I'm turning this off. I'm not watching another second of this. So, Joshua, you've written that these scenes are fake, inaccurate, and cliched. But more importantly, you seem to believe that they are lethal to the very soul of America.

So let's just cut to the chase and spell this out. For me, what is troubling about it is you may not necessarily see torture producing the perfect results in each scene in which torture is used during an interrogation. But cumulatively, cumulatively, we see no torture, no bin Laden. I doubt we'll ever learn the truth about how we really found Osama bin Laden. But there is one thing I know for certain, and that is we did not get any information from Umarov Mohibullo. What's Umarov Mohibullo? His name is Umarov Mohibullo. Umarov?

Umarov, yes. Umarov? Umaro? Umaro? Mohibullo. Mohibullo. H. Mohibullo. Muhibullo. H. Muhibullo. And how old is he?

24. 24. 24. I met Muhibullo Umarov in the Obihingu Valley, which is in Tajikistan's Pamir Mountains. And he lived there with his family, including a younger brother who was missing a leg.

The brother lost it when they were boys during the civil war in Tajikistan when a bomb dropped on their grandparents' potato field. And Mohibolo himself suffers ailments from his time in prison. And how did you end up in the valley? Well, that's a longer story. Mackenzie Funk has traveled the globe writing magazine articles about faraway places like Siberia and Greenland. In 2006, he wrote a story about his encounter with Umarov Mojibolo

for Mother Jones magazine. But the story begins with a mountaineering trip he took in 2003. I had a long interest in Central Asia, with a mountaineering trip he took in 2003. I had a long interest in Central Asia, and that's the former Soviet Union, all the different stands, as they're called, so Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, if I didn't say that one already.

And even in college, I'd always wanted to visit them because they seemed so off the map, and eventually I did. The first time I went into this region, Vakhio, was on a mountaineering trip, and part of the appeal of this, of the Pamir in Tajikistan in particular, is there's these beautiful mountains that no one ever has really explored in the last decade. It's just sort of, it was always off the map, but it dropped more off the map as soon as the Russians left. And how it happened that I went into that valley was on a mountaineering trip with my friend Lars. And people told us, don't go into that valley was on a mountaineering trip with my friend Lars. And people told us, don't go into that valley.

That is where the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan walks back and forth when they're doing their attacks. And so it's dangerous for you to go there. But as we were doing this high mountain traverse, we ended up walking down this valley, which is the Surhab River in the Vahia region. And we go down there and all these villagers were hailing us saying, hello, hello. And all the signs of these militants that we'd been worried about, people said, avoid that valley. And they weren't there. And eventually we asked and broken Russian, my Russian isn't great, but it's good enough to talk to people a little bit. Said, well, what about the militants? They haven't been here for three or four years. It was one of those things where I realized how lacking our

intelligence is in this part of the world. I realized probably for the first time in my life that we don't know what's going on and that America doesn't know what's going on in these parts of the world and that any intelligence we have on where the militants are or aren't isn't any good. And they told us we were the first Westerners in about a dozen years to be there. And we walked from village to village down that valley. So I just knew America according to the map, the world map, and then the second time I knew America when America was bombing Afghanistan. And so the next year I decided to come back.

I wanted to do a big mountaineering, maybe a ski mountaineering traverse and do a magazine article about that. And I got the help of a mountain guide who we, who's, for the purposes of this story, we'll call him Kubad. And he and I went up there and we began trekking, basically, to see if this pass would work out for a later ski expedition. And we stopped to visit and we visited a farmer named Heirat who I'd met the summer before and I'd known was a really good guy.

And we're sitting around in his house one night. He's got this little whitewashed tiny house. He himself is missing some fingers from a mine back in the Civil War, Tajikistan. And he's sitting around feeding us potato soup because that's all there ever is in that valley. And he says, you know, there's a kid in the valley who's been to America. And I said, well, I don't think that's true. No one here has really been out too much out of Tajikistan. He said, no, no, seriously.

He's been to America. He was in prison there. They made a big mistake. And I said, well, okay. And he said, yeah, he was in Cuba. And I said, Cuba? And he said, yeah, he was in Coba. And I said, Cuba? And he said, yeah, Cuba. I put it together.

I knew that they'd been releasing the first prisoners from Guantanamo. And I was like, wow, this is one of them. And at the time, there really hadn't been any interviews with these people who'd been released. There hadn't been any news from what's it like inside Guantanamo. It had all been sort of smoke and mirrors with the media trying to visit. So I was very excited to go track this guy down. So it took a couple days, but we got our jeep and went down the valley and met him. So he went in October 2001 to Pakistan and he was imprisoned in May 2002, in six months.

So what was he doing in those six months? Everybody I'm Shashmoo. Shashmoo is a poor guy, he's a hound, he's a... Partly walking, partly studying. Actually he doesn't like Pakistan because of climate, everything. Actually he says it's not a good place, but he had to finish his school. He had to have his diploma, and this is the most important thing, to have diploma. Was he a good student? I don't know. Did you have a good student? Yes.

I had a good student. I see. I'm a teacher. Boys that don't like to study. They like to make a business. One day, five, six in the morning, the secret service of Pakistan came. So there was a library where they had a small office.

So it was in a little room in a library? Yes, it was a small library. It was a kind of library. This is the library. They came and slept. So they came, we were sleeping that time. They woke us up. They opened the door.

So they took their eyes, how to say? They covered their eyes? Yeah, they covered their eyes, how to say? They covered their eyes? Yeah, they covered their eyes. They took the t-shirts. His own t-shirt? Yeah. He made the eye thing out of the t-shirt? And then the handcuff out of the t-shirt. And you made the eye thing out of the t-shirt? My question was like that.

And then the handcuff out of the t-shirt. And then what was he wearing on top? I wish you'd tell me. So that they had something. This happened to be about ten days after the first suicide bombing that Pakistan had ever had. There was a bus that had been blown up by a car bomber outside the Sheraton in Karachi. So this was Pakistan's first suicide bombing, which, you know, now they've had so many. And it was after that happened that there were ads in the paper saying,

report any suspicious foreigners. Well, here are these two Tajik guys staying in a library. And so the best guess is that someone reported them. And the agents came at night, and then they were taken to prison. So then he brought him to one room. He said, concrete room, which was 50 centimeters wide and one meter long. And then he stayed there for 10 days it has, I have to say. It's tight.

They put him in a tiny cell. This is one of a number of times he was put in a cell that seems to have been the size of a refrigerator. And he was there for quite some time. He got taken to some Americans who interrogated him at what sounded sort of like a luggage factory. At least there were a lot of suitcases and briefcases around. That's how he described it. So, the two Americans, what did they look star? It's a rainbow. Rainbow? I saw a rainbow.

What is the name of that? Kinosh. seen in the movie. Yeah, so he had the cut off arms, but he did some things. He had the headband. And... Inja bandagos? Oh. And... So he was in... not in uniform. What questions did they ask? So first again about your personal information.

And then he said, do you know any tourists? Have you seen them? Have you heard about them? So he's been asked, do you know Al-Qaeda? Have you seen Osama Bin Laden? He said, yes I've heard but I've seen him on TV. Was he afraid? No, sir. I didn't because I knew that I didn't do anything bad. He told me, I knew I was going to be freed because I'm not a thief.

I didn't do anything. They'll realize it's a mistake. But pretty soon he was flown off to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. And if you think about it, the barriers to entry are pretty low in this kind of thing. There were stories of the CIA, in fact, paying Pakistanis to bring in militants at the time. And the barriers to exit are extremely high.

I mean, we've got people just... He was sort of in limbo. Nobody knew why he was there, but nobody wanted to take the chance to release him. One day, one woman, say investigator, had talking with them. So this woman also said, according to you, to the conversation we had,

you are not guilty. You don't know why they brought you here. What he told me was that interrogator after interrogator, including this one at Bagram, said, I don't know why you're here. They said that to his face. And yet he kept on getting moved in the system. And eventually they were all rounded up one day and put on a plane and flown to Guantanamo. We were all surrounded by people. Once, having lunch,

some said, stand up, stand up, everybody stand up. They were just, one day just eating lunch? Yeah, and they put their gloves, and they put them gloves in their hands, and then they fix them with the scotch, the gloves. Tape them? Yeah, tape them, yeah. Also, the special eyeglasses,

which not allow you to see anything. The face mask. Those photos that we all saw from Guantanamo, with the men in orange prison suits, with the hoods and the chains, getting frog-marched into camp, that's how they brought Umar out to Cuba. They couldn't breathe well with him. So do you have any questions to say yes?

I said, you are in Cuba. They said, you are in Cuba. Finally, you are in Cuba. They said, you are in Cuba. Finally, he had an answer. And the second question was, why you brought me here? What was my crime? What was the answer? And they say, according to your speech, according to your information, you are not guilty. They said, we don't know why you're here.

He was a very positive person going into this, obviously. He kept thinking, I'm going to be free, this is a mistake. He didn't seem to have any particular beef with America. He didn't know much about America until, as he said, the bombs began falling in Afghanistan. And so he kept thinking he was going to be freed, but after a time he thought, maybe this isn't about me. For example, terrorists are the people who are fighting for their rights. For example, I am a Muslim.

I said it myself. My impression was that the first five months I was thinking that they are really looking for terrorists who belong to terrorist groups. They want to fight against the terrorism, against Al-Qaeda and stuff like that. But after that, I had a new impression that they're not against terrorists, but they're against Islam. The other people with him in the cell, did he think to himself, with me they made a mistake, but with these guys they did not make a mistake? Those who I didn't know, Iал, что они виноваты. Но когда я пошел в Кубу, я узнал, что они виноваты. Но потом, когда он встретил других людей в Кубе,

он понял, что их много, как и его. met some other people and they understood there were many of them like him. That was interesting. He had met человека, который был 100 лет. С большой губой. Он даже не мог слышать. Он был 100 лет? Откуда он был? Я не знаю, где он был. Он был из Афганистана. И еще один парень. У него было маленькое ребенок. Десять месяцев. В тюрьме?

Да. Он был в тюрьме. a 10 month child in the prison In prison? Where did he go? He went to the hospital and in one week he was released in one week? So in one month this guy was allowed to

visit his child on the one side So his child on the one stone So his child was brought from Afghanistan or? Afghanistan This guy took his baby and went to visit a doctor and then he was arrested. Oh, he was arrested at the doctor. Amazing. Even the people, investigators say, not only you are not guilty, there are a lot of people who are not guilty. One thing we did get news about in the States was suicides. That there were many suicides

in Guantanamo. Did he ever see them or experience this? Yes, there are some people there, hanging themselves, using their sheets. How many times did he see this? So for instance, 15-20 people suicide themselves once. Did he ever think about suicide? I was thinking about it, but according to Islam, it's not good. Did he lose all hope that he would ever be free? So in those two years I've been in Guantanamo, no one was afraid, so he didn't think about freedom. We focus so much on, is torture okay? Did we torture these people? And was it worth it?

And the reality is, maybe there's this small class of hardened Al-Qaeda prisoners who are being tortured or were tortured, and there is a legitimate debate there. But there's this other class of people like Umarov, who were swept up in the war on terror, put in this prison for years, and maybe we didn't waterboard them, but they did lock them up for two years. They did bind their hands and cover their eyes and put them in sensory deprivation goggles and fly them to Cuba and back. And that's the story that no one's really focused on on and I think that's maybe the more important story. Was there a time that was worst of all? Every day was the same. Each week he's been called to have this investigation.

Interrogations, yeah. The questions were the same The only investigators were different So different investigators Come to you Who are you? How are you here? Do you know Al-Qaeda? Do you know what bin Laden is I had the understanding maybe an hour or two into our eight hour conversation

that I'm asking him exactly what interrogator after interrogator after interrogator has asked him, how did you get here, what are all the steps he seemed to tire of them and he became more agitated at the end and I was very aware that I had just this one moment with him He seemed to tire of them, and he became more agitated at the end. And I was very aware that I had just this one moment with him. I had to get back to the States. I was certain that the Defense Department would not want to do any fact-checking with me.

So this was it. This is one of those stories that you can't fact-check too well, and you can only know if it's real or not by, one, your gut, and then whatever else you can pick up along the way. So I just wanted to make sure the story was airtight. Wendy had his final conversation with one of the interrogators at Guantanamo. They took him to this room, the same interrogation rooms they always took him to, but this time they took him without shackles. And then they sat him down in front of this middle-aged American man,

maybe 50-year-old white man. Whenever the war happened, a lot of people were involved in wars, وقد حدث هذا. هناك الكثير من الناس مخاطرين في هذه المساعدة. وعندما يكون الناس ليسوا مخاطرين، فهم أيضا مخاطرين في هذه المساعدة. هذا ما قال الرجل. هل تعتقد أنه كانت هذه المساعدة تجعله يتعذب؟ We are not against Islam, we are against these people who are making bad things, terrorists and the like. We are sorry, we have burned two years of your life and we want very much you to not contact with bad people. And if someone would say that, let's fight against America, then contact them, then be with them. Just set up your life. They took him like this.

They hugged him? Yeah. I asked him, of course, how did you feel? Did you come out mad? Did you come out a terrorist, even if you didn't start out as one? And no. His answer over and over again was no. He said, you know, there are many stories in Islam of people being imprisoned unfairly. So if you knew the history of Islam, then you'd get more quiet? Yeah.

He looked to religion for some sort of solace. of Islam, then you get more quiet. Yeah. You look to religion for some sort of solace. Religion teaches us to be quiet, patient. The first thing I did when I got back was I emailed Harper's magazine and I emailed the New York Times magazine and I said, I just found one of the first Guantanamo detainees to be released. He has an incredible story. Are you interested? And both of them for their own reasons said, sorry. And so I made myself a list of a word document that I still have here and have on the list, the NY Times magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper's, New Yorker, GQ, Rolling Stone, Washington Post magazine,

LA Times magazine, Boston Globe magazine. Those were all ones that I pitched, and I'd cross them out after they weren't interested. One of the reasons I think it was so hard for me to get this published was that it was an impossible story to confirm. Like, how can we confirm any of this? Why should we believe his word against that of everyone in the military and everyone in the political establishment? Like, why would we believe some guy who'd been in Guantanamo

when he says, I wasn't a terrorist? It's like, every guy in prison is innocent, right? Finally, after crossing a half dozen other magazines off my list, I went to Mother Jones. It wasn't a story that a lot of people saw. Five years later, in 2011, when Wikileaks released the Guantanamo files, I typed in Umarov's name. Also, Homaro, because they had his name wrong in the official files. It doesn't say much, and yet here in their documents is exactly what he told me. That he was arrested by Pakistani police and held in a month, or held in a Karachi jail for a month, then sent to Afghanistan.

That he'd been arrested in a library, even that little detail. The date matched up. The fact that no one knows why he was there. As an EC, they call it in this document, enemy combatant. No one knows why he was determined to be one, even though it says that he was determined to be an enemy combatant before he was sent to Guantanamo, whatever that means. One detail I didn't find in the WikiLeaks documents,

and this is shocking in and of itself, is that Umarov wasn't compensated in any way for his experience. He was just dumped back in Tajikistan with nothing. And he does now suffer from a host of physical problems. He said that his eyesight was damaged from looking through so many chain-link fences. And he wasn't the only one who said that. Other prisoners have reported the same. He says he has breathing problems now. He says he has back problems. When we started doing the interview, he just returned from getting

injections from a local doctor for the lungs, I think. But the United States didn't offer him anything. And this is something that really bothers me a lot. I think about it all the time. And I asked him about it. And he didn't seem angry about it. He just seemed more amazed. For him, it was almost like a sign that they thought he was still guilty, because otherwise they would offer him something. The one thing that seemed to make him angry, as far as I could tell, was his nickname. The villagers call him Osama. They're joking, but when you are not guilty and you hear this, of course, it's not pleasant. Thank you. ¶¶ I'm sorry. Like there was a moment where we as Americans might just come to our senses and say,

enough is enough. We got Osama. Now we should close Guantanamo. But that moment has passed. Today, in May 2013, Guantanamo is still open. On Facebook, you can like Camp Gitmo and follow it on Twitter. But the men in the prison cells still have not been charged with a crime nor told why they are there. As I put this program together, a hundred of these men are on a hunger strike. Over 30 of these men are being force-fed, and at least five of these men have been hospitalized. But what is perhaps most troubling

is that the majority of Americans remain committed to Guantanamo and what it stands for. The majority of Americans still believe that Guantanamo should remain open. I've spent way too much time trying to understand how this is possible. Sure, there is a lot of bad information out there. Most Americans are unaware that we've imprisoned the majority of these men for over a decade without charging them, and that many of these men, like Umar of Mohibola, don't even know why they are there. Most Americans have no idea that most of these men, like Umar of Mohibolo, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But I don't think Guantanamo is still open because of American ignorance. At times, it seems that this all might be explained by petty politics. In 2007, Obama made it clear that he wanted to close Guantanamo, and there are congressional Republicans who get out of bed every morning determined to make sure that the president does not get to do a single thing he wants to do. But I don't think politics can explain it either. I do, however, believe the hundred men on Hunger Strike have figured it out. These guys with tubes shoved down their throats,

they definitely know why Guantanamo remains open. And they know that it's never going to close. You've been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Red, White, Blue, and Orange. Radiotopia. From PRX.