Detainee 063 is republishing the interrogation log of Mohammed Al-Qahtani in real time. Beginning on 23 November 2002, the log covers a fifty-day stretch of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation at Guantanamo Bay (where he was, and still is, being held on suspicion of terrorism). Each entry will appear on the website exactly seven years after it was first recorded.
Over the course of the fifty days, Al-Qahtani, Detainee 063, is questioned by teams of interrogators working in shifts, typically for twenty hours a day. While individual entries of the log are sometimes brutal and unpleasant to read, what is particularly disturbing about the treatment Al-Qahtani receives is its relentlessness. By publishing the log in real time, this site is intended as a kind of re-enactment – to show how mistreatment which might not appear immediately as terrible as, for example, waterboarding, can nonetheless come to amount to nothing short of torture, how by being prolonged and unceasing it can become unbearable.
As well as at the site itself, the entries are being made available through an RSS feed and a Twitter account.
By the date the log begins, Al-Qahtani has already been in US custody for almost a year, having been captured in Afghanistan in December 2001, and has been marked for intense interrogation for several months, his fingerprints having linked him to an August 2001 attempt to enter America.
As the days and weeks go on, sometimes an IV drip will be forcibly administered to ensure that Detainee 063 remains well enough to continue the interrogation. On one occasion, when he has been handcuffed to his seat to prevent him interfering with the IV, he will bite through the tube running into his body. He will be put in a booth covered with images of 9/11 victims. Images of victims will be taped to his clothes. His head and beard will be shaved and female interrogators will be used to cause him discomfort. He will be made to act as a dog, being taught to stay, come and bark. His hands and feet will swell. His heart rate will slow to 35 bpm.
On January 22, 2009, two days after assuming office, Barack Obama issued an executive order that the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay be shut down within a year. By the time the last entry of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation log is published at Detainee 063, that deadline will almost have arrived.
Last week, Obama admitted that the deadline would not be met. “I’m not disappointed,” he said in an interview: he always knew it was going to be tricky, he just underestimated how long it takes to get things done in Washington. Discussing the centre’s closure he said, “There is a set of detainees though that are dangerous to the United States, but unfortunately evidence against them may be tainted. Figuring out how to deal with them always was going to be difficult.”
Some of the reinterpretations of international and US law made under the Bush administration – reinterpretations that made possible the interrogation of Detainee 063 – have since been rescinded. However, abuses like those committed and then logged by Al-Qahtani’s interrogators have tainted a great deal – more even than just the evidence against detainees.
Dealing with these issues will be difficult. To ignore them would be abhorrent.
photo from The Big Picture. Randall Mikkelsen/AFP/Getty Images.