I met a prisoner from Guantanamo. Eight years he had spent there, eight years. He was in the contingent of early arrivals, “worst of worst” as US defense secretary Rumsfeld insulted them. January 11, 2002 was the beginning, he too chained in the hold of a plane that took off from Afghanistan just cleared of Al Qaeda and Taliban, sixteen hours of flight from Kandahar, before his eyes a fuser mask and a muzzle like that of dogs. “Now you are owned by the United States Marines,” the guards told him: then the orange overalls, the cage, the “X Ray” field, which no longer exists, is just an abandoned expanse of tall grass and rusted sheets that fry in the tropical heat.
I met Adel Ben Mabrouk in his hometown of Tunis as a free man. Obama had brought him out of Guantanamo; frustrating, pathetic, failed attempt to close the Bush camp of that unrealistic president, always unfinished. He had to be transferred to his country of origin: he gladly offered the indigenous prisons to continue Guantanamo Ben Ali, modernist autocrat and relentless enemy of the jihadists. But fate hadn’t stopped scrambling with his blind gestures. When he landed in Tunis there was nothing left: Ben Ali, the gendarmerie, the judges, the prisons. All evaporated. Instead, there was the revolution. From the airport he had reached his home, as quiet as a worker who has finished his shift and is preparing to start another one. Nothing was left behind that was not accomplished. He had dissolved his past.
He waited for the hours of prayer sitting in front of the door, looking at the vendors of vegetables and immobile junk in the corners of that neighborhood of subdued poverty, without shouts, without gestures, clumsily clinging to the sidewalks. His face was sharp, only lines, breath and eyes. The women passed in front of him and with an automatic gesture of respect tightened the veil and lowered their eyes, the men and boys bowed, a sign of admiration for the hero, the Guantanamo invictor.
I wanted to talk about Bin Laden, the Geronimo operation, the Al Qaeda leader killed by American soldiers, the body thrown into the sea as a vulgar refusal not to create a place of pilgrimage. Because he had been part of Sheikh Osama’s personal guard, had talked to him, had fought alongside him, had sworn to die with him in the fiery and ferocious days of Tora Bora. Before the Pakistanis betrayed him “by selling him to the Americans for money,” and he set sail for that long shipwreck of Guantanamo.
His eyes sparkled at that word. You could look through those eyes as if they never ended. After all, as far as the essential is concerned, man is what he hides.
Guantanamo … what a word! The most mysterious word in the world: the sunset of Western civilization, the shameful, shapeless twilight of the American gods, the Patriot Act exception courts with abusive arrests, lack of evidence, confessions torn under torture, legal inventions to circumvent the Geneva Convention and the guarantees of the American constitution, the faded flags of human rights, the rising tide of mud. All this is still today, after twenty years, Guantanamo, “the daily defeat” as Biden well defined it when he was vice president. But that as president not even he has ordered to close. Too dangerous for the Kabul defeat. The instrument of vengeance has wrapped itself around the victors and binds them forever.
He agreed to talk about everything, “waterboarding” ‘, the repetitive torture of water you have seen in a thousand films, the use of noise to prevent prisoners from sleeping, force-feeding to cancel hunger strikes with pipes inserted in the anus and mouth sealed to prevent vomiting, harsh interrogations.
“But I won’t tell you anything about Sheikh Obama …” he immediately warned. Then I understood why: there was no need. Guantanamo was already, in itself, the perfect, relentless description of the victory of the terror billionaire. With five box cutters, the cost of two seats in the cinema, he had pushed Bush to want what he wanted, to rush into the lawlessness.
In those 117 square kilometers of the island of Cuba, left over from 1898 from one of the first manifestations of American imperialism, the war against Spain, there was the chain from which the greatest power in the world could no longer break free. Bin Laden had made his enemy fall into the mistake of creating a monster. Yes. Guantanamo is an American monster. Not because he put innocent people in prison. The eight hundred who were imprisoned there were jihadists, murderers, many creators and perpetrators of bloody attacks, who wanted to purify the world by killing men. The monstrosity, the original sin of Guantanamo and the war on terrorism, is in the fact that a democracy has not been able to find a form of justice to punish them without in turn committing injustices. Without becoming like them. Unfortunately, Guantanamo is not an anniversary. It is the photograph of our defeat as the West, in its still being there, intangible, perhaps eternal, with its 400 million dollars a year cost for forty remaining inmates, its surreal signs inviting not to feed to the iguanas, the tables of rare fish, the nature trails that no one can use because everything is forbidden, with a new school for the children of the staff just inaugurated and plants to reduce the costs of electricity and drinking water costing tens of millions of dollars.
The trial of three attackers of the Bali and Jakarta massacres in 2003 which caused 215 deaths goes on wearily, almost embarrassed, the ritual of lawyers who meet clients chained to chairs, faces hidden, the obligation not to describe the places. There are still some “high-value” prisoners, they call them like this: like the Pakistani Khaled Mohammed known as “KSM”, one of the brains of 9/11; or the Saudi Rahim al Nashiri, one of the attackers of the “Uss Cole” in 2000. And then the “unlimited detainees”, too dangerous to be released but whose trials hang on confessions obtained through torture. How do you, like cats, erase the traces, cover the dirt produced with sand?
Guantanamo is proof of the failure of the crusade against terrorism. Shortly after our meeting Adel left for Syria, Al Qaeda was calling his people again. He was electrocuted by a sniper near Idlib. He too made war an existential hygiene, he was certain that the proximity to death on the battlefield gave meaning to life. Risking one’s life for a totalitarian god meant acquiring a soul. when he came out of Guantanamo he was a living dead ready to turn everything he touched into death. Death had contaminated him and he in turn defiled death.
Twenty years after the first prisoners arrived at the naval base in Cuba, the Americans ate the dust in Afghanistan. One of the Afghan detainees, Abdul Zakir, is a minister in the government of the Islamic Emirate, while six others are among the Taliban leaders back in power. The liberated are not counted among those who fight in the fake “wars on terrorism” launched by Western politicians in league with arms dealers or to support old and new accomplices. There are no regrets. Alas, Guantanamo’s unanswered question revolves around what must be the foundation of every human enterprise: where is justice in all of this?
So that war continues. It has just begun. For us everything is ending, for them everything begins. Bush was right when a few days after 9/11 he announced to the Americans: “This crusade will take some time.”
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