An American Witness

For 6 1/2 months starting in December 2002, Army Sergeant Erik Saar served as an Arabic translator and a military intelligence specialist at the detention facility for suspected terrorists that the U.S. operates at its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He recounts his experiences in a new book, Inside the Wire, co-written by TIME correspondent Viveca Novak. In the following excerpt, Saar, now retired from the Army, deals with the issue of suicide attempts among the detainees and the military's use of the Initial Reaction Force (IRF). An IRF team, Saar explains, is a five-person unit responsible for subduing an obstreperous detainee. Four soldiers each take a limb; the fifth takes the head. The soldiers are supposed to apply pressure to sensitive points on the body if necessary to restrain the inmate, but, Saar reports, it is not unusual for detainees to be beaten. The names of detainees and personnel who worked with Saar were changed to protect their privacy.

My fellow translators Adam and Vanessa and I were lounging around the office one quiet afternoon when an MP's urgent-sounding voice came over the radio: "Translator needed pronto on cellblock Charlie." Adam and I both bolted. As we cleared into Charlie block, we saw medics rushing there as well. Out in the yard I saw a detainee, blood all over his right arm and covering his feet, halfway on a stretcher with the left side of his body dangling.

A doctor was kneeling next to the detainee, and Adam went and knelt next to him. I heard them telling the captive, a Bahraini named Halim, that he was going to be all right. On the ground outside the shower I noticed a pool of dark red blood; the detainee had apparently cut his wrists with a razor. Sitting on the cellblock steps was a trembling National Guardsman, a kid of no more than 19, trying to calm his nerves with a cigarette.

An MP summoned me over to the shower. There was another puddle of blood, with more smeared on the wall. I realized that the blood on the wall was writing. The senior officer asked me to translate. "Sir, it reads: 'I committed suicide because of the brutality of my oppressors,'" I said. The young soldier cowering on the steps had been tasked with monitoring the detainee. When he heard me, he looked horrified. I could see he was blaming himself for the carnage, and I walked over to him. "This wasn't your fault," I said.

"But I heard what you just said," he replied in a pained voice. I tried to convince him that the detainee meant "oppressors" writ large--the American infidels, not the guy standing outside his stallbut the kid looked dubious.

Halim survived, remarkably, and I learned more of his troubled story. He had been in detention for almost a year. He'd attended college in Indiana and he spoke English, but he'd barely talked when he first arrived in Gitmo. He always had a dazed look, as if he didn't know where he was. Eventually the camp psychologist put the Bahraini on some heavy meds. Halim would fake taking his medication each day and hide the pills in his cell, planning to store up enough so he could take them all at once and end his life. But one of his cellmates ratted him out, and the MPs introduced him to the IRF. The IRF process was a little more ad hoc then: it meant receiving a good old-fashioned a__ whipping, after which the lucky detainee would be hog-tied--made to kneel with his hands behind his back and the shackles on his hands and feet locked together--for four hours.

Halim didn't speak in the weeks after the treatment. He just stared straight ahead. But the day the MPs were transferring detainees from Camp X-Ray to the newly built Camp Delta, Halim received another beating. Vanessa saw him two days after the move and noticed that his face was black and blue. She tried to investigate why Halim was IRFed the day of the move, but her questions went unanswered.

Soon after Halim got to Camp Delta, he tried to end his life again. He thought he could scrape enough paint chips off the cells to eat all at once and do himself in, but it only gave him an upset stomach. Then for a while it appeared that he was starting to improve--until the day he requested a razor in the shower, supposedly to shave his body hair. It seemed insane to me that a detainee who had twice tried to kill himself would be allowed to take a razor into the shower. But at this point, things not making sense at the camp was starting to become the norm.

The International Committee of the Red Cross broke its customary public silence in October 2003, pushed to do so, it said, by a spate of suicide attempts. "One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely," a senior official said. By then, the official number of suicide attempts was 32, though I knew it was actually far higher. The military kept the number low by labeling most attempted suicides as "manipulative self-injurious behavior" or "self-harm" incidents, a practice that became more frequent as time went on. In January 2005, the Pentagon disclosed that 350 "self-harm" incidents had occurred in 2003, including 120 "hanging gestures." o