Excerpt – Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay

The following excerpt is taken from Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, published by Humanitas Media, and captures the author’s first visit to Guantanamo Bay as he begins confronting the realities of the detention system firsthand.

The audiobook edition of Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan and narrated by Mike Lenz is now available on Audible, Apple Books, Spotify, and other major audiobook platforms.

The print edition is available wherever books are sold.

Jaber and I sat down and for the next several hours had an easy, even companionable, conversation, almost like we were two people hitting it off under some normal circumstance. Of course, we talked about weighty stuff, like the habeas corpus petition we had brought for him and our other clients and his terrible living conditions. But we also talked about Jumanji, his favorite movie—he thought it was scandalous I hadn’t seen it. We talked about our shared love of molokhia, a traditional Egyptian broth made from greens, eaten over rice and chicken. We talked about our families.

At one point, Jaber paused. “Joshua is a Jewish name. Are you Jewish?”

I couldn’t imagine that question leading to a positive place.

“No, Joshua was just a popular name in the neighborhood where I grew up,” I told him.

“Oh,” he said, sounding slightly disappointed. “I heard the best lawyers were Jewish.”

Quickly, and obviously for my benefit, he added, “But I’m sure you’re good too.”

Nearing noon, I told Jaber we had to see other clients but would be back the next day. As I stepped outside, I looked back to wave goodbye.

Jaber flashed his smile again and said, “See you later, alligator.”

I knew there was a stock response, but hearing a “vicious killer” at Guantanamo say, “See you later, alligator,” proved too much. I couldn’t think of what I was supposed to say.

After waiting and likely wondering if I was sharp enough to be a good lawyer, Jaber almost nailed the punch line, “After a while, crocodile.”

Whatever I had expected that day, it certainly wasn’t the start of a deep friendship. Yet, that’s what developed over eleven more visits I made to Guantanamo. To be clear, Jaber and I spent hours talking about abuses he had suffered. We spent hours talking about the abject hopelessness he often suffered due to being held in indefinite detention, cut off from the world—except for me—and typically in a solid-wall cell 23 to 24 hours a day.

But, at least when Jaber was able to find little rays of hope in the darkness, we also talked just like friends—friends who enjoyed a certain ironic gallows humor.

Jaber once told me about an interrogator who called himself “Jeremiah” and had threatened Jaber, “You can’t punk me, motherfucker, I’m from Brooklyn.”

“Wait, I live in Brooklyn,” I said. “What does this guy look like? Maybe I know him.”

Jaber laughed out loud.

The “You can’t punk me, motherfucker” line became a running inside joke (not that we ever sat with an outsider), with each of us lobbing it at the other in random moments.

Jaber often gave me a hard time, mostly in good humor, for not being married. I was in my mid-30s, an age at which a man in Saudi Arabia, where he grew up, would normally be betrothed. On one visit, he asked if I was still unspoken for.

“What, you think I got married since my last visit and didn’t tell you?” I asked.

“It’s time for you to get married,” he said with a little solemnity this time.

“I know . . . but . . . it can be hard to find the right person.” I winced at saying anything on the outside was “hard.”

Jaber wasn’t interested in my equivocation. “I know you. You don’t buy the cow because you get free milk,” he said, grinning.

“I don’t buy what…Where did you hear that?”

Jaber had learned it from a guard who had said he would never get married.

“Did I use it correctly?” Jaber asked, concerned if he had gotten the idiom just right.

“Yeah,” I laughed, “but no, it’s not about free milk. I just want to make the right decision.”

Jaber waved his hand with playful dismissiveness. “Maybe you’ll be married in the next life.”

Eating was always a staple of our visits. Jaber was obviously underweight and in a surprisingly humane gesture, the military let us bring food to client meetings. Before that first trip, I had gone to Sahadi’s, a Middle Eastern specialty shop in Brooklyn, for top-shelf baklava, dried fruit, date cookies, pistachios, and more. Jaber was grateful, but it quickly became clear he had a hunger for different fare.

As our second day of meetings during that first trip ended, Jaber said, “Tomorrow, can you bring me a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish with extra mayonnaise? And a Sprite, please.”

I had noticed a McDonald’s in Guantanamo’s commercial strip, which also featured a Navy Exchange supermarket, Subway, and gift shop. Jaber knew about the Mickey D’s from interrogators. But it had never occurred to me he might want, let alone prefer, American fast food. The next day, I bought a Filet-O-Fish for the first time in my life and went on to buy more than I could ever have predicted over the next few years.

Another favorite turned out to be Junior’s cheesecake, a Brooklyn standard. I brought it on a hunch once, managing to keep a medium-sized cake fairly cold on the day-long trip from New York to Cuba via Fort Lauderdale, where we caught the Air Sunshine charter flight for the base. I’m fairly sure that, following his first taste, Jaber looked forward to my subsequent visits more for the cheesecake than the conversation. And even though I felt a moral obligation to keep bringing fruit, nuts, or anything without sugar as its main ingredient, Jaber always went straight for the sweets. Given the lack of proverbial sweetness in his life, I couldn’t blame him.

Through the Gates of Hell is set in Guantanamo, so, inevitably, it covers the legal, political, and national security issues that arose in the context of America’s most notorious detention operation. But at the core, it’s a story about the entirely unlikely friendship that Jaber and I developed.

I hope the book is an interesting read and that it is also useful in this era of hyper-demagoguery. Jaber was the “worst of the worst,” a description no reasonable person who got to know him or reviewed the “evidence” against him could justify. But that manner of description—applied post-9/11 to huge swaths of Muslim men—is what allowed a U.S. president to detain hundreds of people at Guantanamo, most of whom were never even accused of taking action against the United States. Now, that very same phrase is being used by the current administration to demonize various groups of people, including—literally, unbelievably—people it is sending to Guantanamo. If there is one thing to be learned from Through the Gates of Hell, it’s that the vilification of a group never survives encounters with many members of the group. It’s a lesson we seem never to learn.

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