Excerpt from: "Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice in Guantanamo Bay"

By Joshua Colangelo-Bryan

October 2004

 

“We’ll be watching,” the sergeant said, pointing at a video monitor inside Camp Echo’s guard booth. “For your protection.” The monitor showed a grainy image of a table and chairs in a small room. To the side of the room was a tiny cell, partially hidden behind a metal mesh wall. I was about to have my first meeting with a Guantanamo Bay detainee in a room just like that.

“You have any questions before you go in?” the sergeant asked.

I certainly did. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, had said that the detainees were “among the most dangerous, best-trained vicious killers on the face of the earth.” President George W. Bush had said that they had been “trying to kill Americans.” General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said they would chew through hydraulic cables to bring down airplanes. I didn’t buy that kind of rhetoric wholesale, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that there were some nasty characters at Guantanamo. It was impossible not to wonder if I was about to meet one.

These questions had been on my mind for several months, ever since I had convinced management at my corporate law firm to represent six Bahraini detainees. According to a document the government provided us under court order, the thirty-one-year-old client I was about to see had received military training in Afghanistan, gone to Bosnia to fight, and been arrested in connection with a bombing in Saudi Arabia. A day earlier, on the small prop plane that ferried us to Guantanamo from Fort Lauderdale, I had read stories from the internet describing this man as an Al Qaeda recruiter. For a moment, I pictured myself sitting alone with a big, bearded, menacing Arab who would try to reach across the table for my throat. Figuring the sergeant was asking if I had questions about protocol or logistics, I said no.

A military guard escorted my interpreter, Karim, and me away from the centrally located guard booth and toward one of a series of small wooden buildings that were spread out around Camp Echo’s gravel compound. The buildings were on short stilts, and despite resembling low-rent beach cabanas, each housed an interview room and cell like the one on the monitor. Beyond the buildings, and surrounding the camp, were several fifteen-foot-tall chain-link fences, each topped by razor wire and covered with a green tarp, evidently to keep people from looking in or out. We walked up to one of the buildings where a guard held the door slightly ajar. I nodded to him and, more tentatively than I might have liked, went inside.

Jaber Mohammed sat at a table, flanked by guards. When he saw me, his face broke into a warm smile. As I walked toward him, I sized him up, a habit I had developed as a kid on New York subways and school playgrounds. I guessed he was about five foot six and 140 pounds—not exactly a gladiator’s build. I started to feel a little embarrassed for worrying about meeting a vicious trained killer.

Jaber had a beard but the rest of him didn’t match my overwrought mental image. One of Jaber’s ankles was shackled to a bolt that was attached to the floor. He struggled to get halfway to his feet. We shook hands.

“Assalamu alaikum,” I said. Having exhausted my Arabic, I looked to Karim for help, “I’m Josh Colangelo. I’m your lawyer. It’s very good to meet you.”

“Hello, I am Jaber,” he said in heavily accented English before shaking hands with Karim and switching to Arabic.

“Thank you for coming. I have been waiting for your visit. Please sit,” he said, gesturing to the table. It seemed Jaber was doing his best to be a gracious host despite his shackles and our inhospitable surroundings.

Once we sat down, the guards left.

“Do I understand correctly, then, that you received my letter?” I asked, referring to correspondence I had sent two months earlier. Jaber nodded.

“As I said in my letter, I’m a lawyer with a firm in New York. Your brother Amir asked my law firm to represent you. Or to be more precise, he asked an American human rights lawyer who was in Bahrain to represent you. That lawyer asked me if my firm would take the case.”

“When did you find out that you would be seeing me today?” I inquired.

“This morning they told me I was moving, but they did not say why.”

“I’m sorry about that. Do you normally stay somewhere else?”

“Yes, I am in Camp 5. This is worse than Camp 5.” Jaber gestured to the cell two feet away from us, sealed off from the rest of the room by the same sort of metal mesh wall I’d seen on the monitor.

I didn’t know much about Camp 5, but Jaber’s observation was well taken. The cell next to us couldn’t have been any smaller. The main section was as long as the concrete slab that served as a bed and no wider than five or six feet. The cell had another small area for a shower, but it was locked behind a heavy steel door. There was nothing in the room except the cell and our meeting area. Anyone spending a night there would be completely alone, except for the remarkably loud drone of an air conditioner that sounded like it was on its last legs.

“I’m sorry you have to stay in a place worse than usual just to see your lawyer.”

Jaber smiled and waved his hand as if to say that I shouldn’t worry about such inconveniences. Again, the gracious host.

One thing I had been worrying about was whether Jaber would be able to trust a thirty-something, white, short-haired American who showed up at Guantanamo claiming to be his lawyer. It seemed likely that the only people fitting my description he had seen over the prior few years were guards, interrogators, and the like. Maybe he would think that this was just some CIA agent’s ruse.

I attacked that issue first. “I thought it might be hard for you to believe that it was really Amir who sent me here. So I asked him to tell me a few personal details about you that only people close to you would know. Do you mind if I share those details?”

“No, please tell me.”

“Amir said that when you were a child, your favorite beach was Half Moon Beach.”

Jaber smiled as if savoring a memory. “Yes, Half Moon Beach,” he said in English.

“Amir said that he can’t wait to go there with you when you get home.”

“Please tell him that I look forward to doing the same.”

“Amir also told me that you loved the movie Jumanji.” Jaber smiled again.

“I am a little embarrassed to say that I asked him if it was a Middle Eastern movie, and Amir had to tell me it’s American.”

Jaber laughed. “You don’t know this movie?”

“No, I’ve never seen it.”

I had googled the film and learned that it starred Robin Williams and was about kids playing a board game. It wasn’t my kind of cinema, and it had struck me as an odd favorite for a supposed jihadist.

“You should see it. It’s very good,” Jaber said earnestly.

“I’ll have to watch it when I get home.”

As we spoke, I wondered what personal details I would tell a lawyer if my younger brother were detained thousands of miles from home by a foreign country’s army.

Maybe it would be about where we had played Little League baseball. Or maybe that whenever we played the card game spit as kids, the loser accused the winner of cheating.

I also was trying to remember if there was anything more from Amir to share. Several weeks earlier, the military had demanded that we agree to a set of access procedures as a precondition for our visit. One of the procedures allowed the military to review any materials we brought into our client meetings; it was a matter of national security, they said. The idea of giving an attorney-client-privileged meeting outline to our clients’ jailer was unacceptable. So, rather than bringing notes, we decided to memorize the subjects we wanted to discuss. I had spent several hours on the plane ride down studying for that purpose and resisting fifth-grade impulses to write key phrases on my hand.

“Jaber, unless you have questions about what Amir told me, I would like to explain why we agreed to represent you.”

“Yes, that would be good,” he said.

I told him my firm had over six hundred lawyers with offices around the world. Jaber seemed impressed; I decided not to say that by New York standards, it wasn’t that big. I told him we would represent all six Bahrainis at Guantanamo, and that a colleague of mine, senior to me, was with another client right then.

“I don’t need to tell you that the government has classified you as an ‘enemy combatant.’ The government claims it can hold anyone it calls an enemy combatant in jail forever without a trial. The government claims that enemy combatants do not have any rights at all, but I guess you know that also.”

Jaber smiled knowingly.

“Now, you might disagree, Jaber, but personally I don’t think that’s right.”

He chuckled and nodded.

“If someone is facing life in jail, I believe the person deserves a fair hearing to determine if he has done something wrong. My law firm feels the same way, and that’s why we agreed to represent you. It’s as simple as that.”

 

 

Excerpted from Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice in Guantanamo Bay

By Joshua Colangelo-Bryan

©2025. Reprinted with permission of Humanitas Media.