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Picture this:
It is early October of 2009 and I am in an interview room at Camp Echo, the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay where detainees meet with their lawyers. To get here, I have passed through several guarded checkpoints and locked gates. I am standing at a picnic table under a tent and surrounded by a razor wire fence cloaked in opaque green mesh. After being wand-ed, and having each piece of my blank paper checked, I am ushered into one of the concrete buildings used both for solitary confinement and for detainees' meetings with their attorneys. They are about 8 feet by 10 feet, divided in two by a mesh grate. On one side is a cell, more accurately described as a cage, with a toilet and a cot. On the other is a table with some chairs.
I am sitting at the table, wearing dark clothes and a black headscarf, to signal respect for the detainee's cultural norms-a magnet for the Cuban heat. I am eight months pregnant and cannot stop sweating despite the wheezing air-conditioner. Across from me is a tall, slender Arab man with one foot shackled to the floor. He's wearing an oversized white uniform that hangs loosely on his frame. He has long black curls and a wide smile that does not reach his eyes. He is close to 40, but looks both older and younger.
Introductions have been made, the purpose of the evaluation reviewed, and I have asked my first questions, trying to lay groundwork for an interview in which I am charged with asking this man, suspected of Al Quaeda membership, about being tortured. But there are no neutral topics: Should I ask him about his family, who he has spoken to twice in the last seven years? His work prior to detention? Just as I ask my first careful question about his capture, he is out of his seat, smile erased, arms overhead mimicking his suspension from the ceiling. He shouts in angry Arabic, “What do you want me to tell you? How they hung me up? How they hurt me? Why? Why should I talk about these things? Sure, I'll tell you what