Adventures in Correspondentland (18 page)

Again, this explains the success of that other surprise bestseller,
The Report of the 9/11 Commission
. Try as they might, novelists and film-makers have not yet managed to turn 9/11 into a major cultural event. Rather like the Second World War, which has never been commemorated with appropriately epic works of fiction, simple, real-life narratives have had more than enough drama, pathos and sentimentality.

The fact that
The Report of the 9/11 Commission
made it so effortlessly to the top of the national bestseller lists was all part of what came to be described as the new normalcy. An anxious America of colour-coded security warnings, the rote removal of shoes at airports, National Guardsmen in musty combat fatigues at railway stations, worries about owning property in Washington or Manhattan because of the possible detonation of dirty bombs and runs on hardware shops to buy up plastic sheeting and duct tape.

I remember telling London that the duct-tape panic was a complete media beat-up, a confected alert from our friends at cable news. Americans simply were not that paranoid. Then I
went to an old-fashioned hardware store near the bureau, in an area populated by urban professionals – lawyers, college lecturers, accountants, journalists – and discovered that Americans were that paranoid now. The shelves were completely empty.

More so than the run on duct tape, the low point for me came when I watched a wheelchair-bound woman in her 80s being told to remove her white slippers, presumably to ensure they were not packed with explosives. Paranoiac madness or what the writer George Packer called a ‘mental state of emergency'.

However much one wanted to return to 10 September, there
was
reason to be afraid. Ominous warnings about chemical and biological weapons were borne out in early October 2001 when anthrax-laced letters turned up in the post of news organisations and the offices of two senators, including the Democratic senate majority leader Tom Daschle.

Cordoned off with yellow tape, and patrolled now by police officers wearing chemical-warfare HAZMAT suits, Capitol Hill resembled the set of a big-budget science-fiction movie with extremely high production values. With ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and the
New York Post
all coming under anthrax attack, it was not long before all of the mail sent to our bureau in M Street was also being screened for deadly spores. Danger normally comes in combat zones and war-torn countries, but now it came through the mail. I distinctly remember the moment I heard that NBC News had been targeted, for I felt physically sick.

Strangest of all was the sight of policemen dressed in HAZMAT suits at the headquarters of the
National Enquirer
in Boca Raton, Florida, the first media organisation to be targeted. ‘The
Enquirer
Hit By Anthrax Attack'. Not even the tabloid's inventive sub-editors could have produced a headline as outlandish as that.

Usually so optimistic, America had become a place of fear, anxiety and paranoia. Crucially, however, there was curiosity too. Part of the public response to 9/11 was a quest for understanding, with many Americans now considering it part of their civic duty to find out ‘why they hate us'. Search engines spewed out information on al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Northern Alliance and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Ahmed Rashid's
Taliban
, a once-obscure history of a once-obscure band of Islamic zealots, became an unexpected bestseller. So, too, did
Islam: A Short History
by the religious scholar Karen Armstrong, and
Holy War, Inc.
by a British journalist, Peter Bergen, who had once interviewed bin Laden.

With more weighty matters to discuss, the green rooms of the cable news channels now played host to more serious-minded pundits. Retired colonels edged out political hacks. Former intelligence officers, especially those with expertise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, took precedence over Hollywood divorce attorneys. The BBC also benefited from this thirst for knowledge, not least because so many of the US networks and newspapers had defenestrated their networks of foreign bureaux. Our ratings in America soared.

Naturally, the fun went out of American reporting, for gone in an instant was the frivolity of the Clinton era and the relatively relaxed pace of the start of the Bush years. With the aftermath of 9/11 now the single preoccupation, trips beyond the Beltway to cover a lighter menu of stories also came to an immediate halt. Keen to explore as much of America as I could – my running tally of ‘states visited' was closing in fast on that magic number 50 – my editors had been surprisingly indulgent when it came to recreational reportage. They had let me file from ‘The Big Easy'
on how the jazz clubs of Bourbon Street were being elbowed out by strip joints; from Las Vegas on the Y2K fear, hilarious in retrospect, that on the stroke of midnight at the start of the new millennium electronic gambling machines would turn into silver waterfalls; and even from Tinseltown, where I had donned a black tuxedo for red-carpet duties at the Oscars. Instead, the American 9/11 beat was limited pretty much to Washington, New York and the occasional nearby military base.

An exception was to fly, via Puerto Rico, to America's Caribbean redoubt: the most controversial new landmark in the Bush administration's war on terror.

Much of Guantanamo Bay felt more like a resort than an encampment, a heavily militarised holiday camp on the craggy shores of the Caribbean. On every night of the week, the Downtown Lyceum, an open-air cinema with terraced bleachers, offered the latest in Hollywood escapism. Tuesday and Sunday were bingo nights at the Windjammer Cafe. The Cuban Club promised ‘the genuine taste of the Caribbean'. If that did not suit, there was Rick's Lounge for the officer ranks, the Tiki Bar, a late-night hotspot with views across the moonlit-dappled water, a Reef Raiders dive club, an 18-hole golf course, 11 beaches and, inexorably, an O'Reilly's Irish pub.

Were it not for its battleship-grey paint job, the roll-on-roll-off ferry connecting the two halves of the base, on the windward and leeward sides of the bay, would not have looked out of place steaming into Martha's Vineyard. The bayside clapboard homes of the naval commanders again recalled New England and could have provided the backdrop for a Ralph Lauren fashion shoot.

The weather was perfect. Unblemished blue skies, with a soothing breeze blowing off the sea. Needless to say, there was a Pizza Hut, a Subway and a McDonald's, the only branch on the island of Cuba. It came complete with golden arches and the
normal architectural blandishments of dull-brown brick walls, plate-glass facades and mansard roofs. The only thing missing was a Toyota dealership next door.

Other parts of Gitmo looked like a museum of the Cold War – albeit a working museum, since this was one of the few corners of the world where it had not yet ended. A 17-mile fence-line hyphenated with tall watchtowers separated Cuban Cuba from America's century-old outpost, the first beyond its shores. US Marines looked out over a no-man's-land known still as the Cactus Curtain. Cuba's Frontier Brigade stood guard on the other side.

Even though many of the 55,000 landmines had been cleared on the orders of Bill Clinton, it was still thought to be the biggest minefield anywhere in the western hemisphere and the second most dangerous in the world. US forces patrolling the fence-line even kept up the Soviet-era precaution of covering their mouths whenever they spoke, lest Cuban lip-readers picked up what they were saying by peering at them through binoculars.

Just two years on from 9/11, Gitmo already housed a relic of the Bush administration's war on terror: Camp X-Ray, the temporary detention centre where ‘enemy combatants' had been brought from Afghanistan wearing orange boiler suits, goggles, restraints, earmuffs and face masks. Its makeshift wooden watchtowers had not yet been dismantled, nor its open-sided wire cells with mesh walls and corrugated tin roofs that made them look more like dog kennels.

We had been invited to Guantanamo by the Pentagon to look at its replacement, a purpose-built prison constructed in a remote corner of scrubland once populated by iguanas and banana rats. On arrival at Gitmo's airstrip, we were loaded onto a white-painted
school bus, ferried across the bay and introduced to our Pentagon guide. She was an attractive African-American lieutenant colonel with a winsome smile, a velvet voice and more than a passing resemblance to Halle Berry. In their battle for journalistic hearts and minds, the US military had unleashed a devastating new weapon: a smart bombshell.

She had put together a busy itinerary. There were interviews with camp cooks, who showed us, with the aplomb of television chefs, their new Muslim-friendly dishes – though ‘culturally appropriate' was the phrase
de jour
. The menu included halal meat, baklava pastries and even special dough that they proudly called Taliban bread. During the fasting month of Ramadan, especially large breakfasts were prepared to help the inmates last until sundown.

After a tour of the kitchens, we were shown the state-of-the-art medical facilities, which offered detainees at least as high a standard of healthcare as American veterans returning from Afghanistan. A library for the detainees included Arabic editions of Harry Potter. Newly built cells had arrows stencilled into the floor facing towards Mecca and were all equipped with a copy of the Koran. Surgical masks had also been handed out, which the detainees hung from the ceiling to protect their holy books from ever coming into contact with the ground. In a further demonstration of tolerance towards Islam, loudspeakers were dotted around the detention centre from which the call to prayer was broadcast five times a day.

At the end of the briefings, we were finally allowed behind the wire, where virtually all the 700 inmates were bearded and wore crocheted prayer caps and flip-flops. White overalls indicated compliant prisoners who did not pose much of a threat to the
guards – the majority – and orange clothing marked out supposed troublemakers. At the time of our visit, in late 2003, none of the inmates had been granted access to a lawyer or even told where they were being held. No one had been charged with any crimes, and some faced the prospect of spending the rest of their lives at Guantanamo without ever getting their day in court.

Ahead of time, we were warned that our visit would come to an immediate end if any of us tried to speak or communicate in any way with the detainees. Today, however, it was a squawking warning siren and the panicked shouts of the prison warden that brought it to a premature conclusion. Rushed from the facility, we were told that there had been some kind of security breach, and it was no longer safe for us to continue our tour. Later, however, we learnt that the siren normally sounded when an inmate attempted to commit suicide – or made a ‘gesture towards suicide', in the terminology favoured by the Pentagon.

In the face of criticism from international human-rights groups, our Pentagon handlers aimed to demonstrate that compassion was being shown towards their captives. But they also left us in no doubt that the enemy combatants were the ‘worst of the worst', as Donald Rumsfeld had described them. A reservist drafted in from the mainland, where he ran a prison in the Midwest, put it succinctly: ‘I have no doubt in my mind that if they had the chance they would kill us all. They'd kill you in a heartbeat. They'd kill women and children. They'd burn down our houses and destroy our way of life. That's their intent.'

More sympathetic was the camp's new Muslim chaplain, a Chinese-American called Captain James Yee, who wore the Stars and Stripes on his sleeve, an Islamic crescent on his military cap and carried around a copy of the Koran wherever he went.
A former Lutheran who converted to Islam during the first Gulf War, Captain Yee now provided pastoral care for the inmates and probably spent more time in conversation with them than any other American on the base.

‘As a Muslim, do you think it is moral that people are being held without charge?' I asked him.

‘I try not to think about the idea of being charged or not charged,' he replied, rather vaguely. ‘Whether they are charged or not, I can't control that. But what I can control is … helping them get through every day.'

Next up was a meeting with the head of the detention facilities, Geoffrey D. Miller, a two-star general who spoke fluent war on terrorism and had a penchant for quoting Thomas Jefferson: ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilance'. Straight out of central casting, he made me think that the first question I should ask was ‘Did you order the Code Red?'. To which he presumably would have replied, ‘You're goddamn right I did!'

But, rather than ventriloquise Jack Nicholson, Miller presented himself as a benevolent reformer, mindful of both the sensibilities of his Muslim inmates and the criticisms of humanrights groups. ‘Did you see those kitchens?' he asked. ‘Has the lieutenant colonel been taking good care of you?'

He was also obliging enough to offer up a global scoop. Guantanamo Bay housed three juvenile enemy combatants, aged between 13 and 15, who were kept in a prison annex called Camp Iguana. It had the feel of a kind of terroristic crèche, with a small play area and a panoramic ocean view – something of an oddity for children who had grown up in landlocked Afghanistan. Miller announced that these legal castaways were about to be set free. Nothing numbs the inquisitive impulses of a journalist quite as
instantly as a spoon-fed exclusive, so we dutifully went off to break the news to our editors at home.

Throughout the trip, we were fed other titbits of information, all of which were designed to show that the conditions at Gitmo were nowhere near as bad as was widely thought at the time. The message throughout this Pentagon PR offensive was that ‘America's Caribbean gulag' was getting an unfair rap. My favourite nugget was delivered by our Halle Berry lookalike. One morning, as we drove in our school bus past the golden arches of McDonald's, she chirpily pointed out that detainees who provided interrogators with actionable intelligence got a fast-food reward: a Happy Meal from Guantanamo. This was presented as a key interrogation tool, although she was unable to say whether the meal came with a small moulded toy.

None of us swallowed this, of course, and I suspect it actually added to our increasingly mutinous mood. Already, we were aggrieved that the Pentagon trip came with such prohibitive restrictions. We were not allowed to speak to inmates – which was understandable – or to film anything behind the wire. Instead, we were given Pentagon ‘B-roll', as it is called: stock generic shots that showed the stainless-steel operating theatres, and the arrows on the floors of the cells and the copies of the Koran. Everything that the Pentagon wanted us to see and broadcast to the rest of the world.

The only shot of the detention centre we were allowed to take for ourselves was from outside the wire – and one that featured in virtually every television report filed from Guantanamo – showing me entering through the gate. Under the conditions that news organisations signed up to ahead of time, and had long been fighting, the Pentagon could review our footage and delete sections that it
deemed infringed the guidelines. Our prime reason for travelling to Guantanamo Bay had been to see the newly refurbished building on the base where the first military tribunals were about to start, but again we were not even allowed inside. Moreover, the windows had been fitted with mirror glass. The secrecy was all the more disconcerting given that the Pentagon had trumpeted the supposed transparency of the military-tribunal process.

Within days of leaving Guantanamo, our interview with the Muslim chaplain suddenly became part of a larger news story. Captain Yee, the quiet chaplain who had been put forward as a poster boy of the Pentagon's goodwill, was suddenly arrested and imprisoned on charges of mutiny, aiding the enemy and espionage. He had been recorded making regular phone calls to Damascus. He kept a personal journal that included a log of alleged atrocities against inmates, whom he apparently referred to as his brethren. Information was leaked to the press that he kept hand-drawn sketches of prison quarters along with notes of what was said during interrogations.

As further evidence of his disloyalty, Yee was reluctant to eat in the company of his fellow West Point-trained officers. Added together, the evidence was enough to persuade his one-time cheerleaders to manacle him in a so-called ‘three-piece suit' – a primitive set of wrist and ankle shackles, connected to a heavy leather belt. Then he was thrown into the navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was held in solitary confinement for 76 days.

Not for the first time in post-9/11 America, the evidence did not survive close scrutiny. The calls to Damascus were easily explained. His wife was Palestinian-born and had decided to await his return from Cuba with her Syria-based family. Yee did
not eat with his fellow officers because the mess hall did not serve halal meat. As for the journal, Yee simply chronicled what he saw. Rather, the case against Yee seemed to be based on groundless suspicions raised by colleagues who thought he spent too much time with inmates and seemed overly sympathetic towards their plight. Eventually, the case against him collapsed, and he was granted an honourable discharge. To this day, he is awaiting an apology from the Pentagon.

Neither was Major General Geoffrey D. Miller quite the forward-thinking reformer that the Pentagon would have us believe. Hand-picked by Donald Rumsfeld to generate more actionable intelligence from the Guantanamo inmates, he brought in expansive new guidelines granting interrogators much more latitude. Dogs were allowed to frighten detainees. They were stripped naked. The new guidelines also allowed for the use of stress positions.

Miller had also been the driving force behind the prosecution of Captain Yee, one of the few officers to voice concerns about the tough new regime. Then still fairly obscure, Miller achieved much wider fame when he became a central figure in the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. He had first visited the prison in 2003 with the apparent aim of ‘Gitmo-ising' the facility and later went on to oversee it. Whether by coincidence or design, the first of the infamous pictures showing military policemen desecrating Iraqi prisoners were taken shortly after Miller's first visit.

As for the Happy Meals at Guantanamo, it soon emerged that interrogators preferred a very different menu of techniques to extract information. Allegations surfaced of inmates being taunted by female interrogators and prostitutes, who flashed G-strings, wore miniskirts and smeared fake menstrual blood on
the cheeks of prisoners. Waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning by pouring water into the breathing passages, was also used, a technique once favoured by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Back in Washington a few months later, I ended up having dinner with the military spokeswoman who had been our guide. She was the most charming company, and she revealed that after leaving the military she ideally wanted to become a novelist: not quite the radical career change that once it might have seemed.