Guantanamo Bay Quotes

“Guantánamo Bay's motto: 'Safe, humane, legal, transparent detention.' Four adjectives describing one sick joke.”
― Rodney Ulyate

“It was William Penn who said, “Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.” Brent knew that there was nothing right about this place and the way the prisoners were treated, and he was determined to do whatever he could to change that.”
― Kenneth G. Eade, A Patriot's Act

“I helped negotiate the end to the hunger strike. I asked for better meals and time for rec. We got five extra minutes each week. I wasn't the general they thought I was--I wasn't even a leader--but I had found my role in this place: To feel the pain of others. To stick up for those who were beaten. And to try to make our lives better.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“No one wanted to be a block leader because as soon as interrogators found out about them, they disappeared to interrogations and then to solitary confinement. The professor was smart and told brothers to make someone else block leader and he would advise them.

So they asked me. I wasn't a leader. I wasn't an instigator. I was young and, like most men my age, I was still learning; I was clever, but not wise yet. I was just a simple tribal man who couldn't sit by and watch other men and boys get abused and mistreated.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I thought about all the moments we had experienced in this place that no one knew about. But I didn't want the world to just know about all the bad things that had happened to us. I wanted them to see who we were and how we had survived through friendship and brotherhood.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I was shipped out of Guantánamo in the same way I was shipped in: against my will, gagged, blindfolded, hooded, earmuffed, and shackled.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Guano-mo, huh? The neo-Nazi concentration camp”
― Kenneth G. Eade, A Patriot's Act

“The military prison at Guantanamo was the equivalent of any concentration camp in Nazi Germany, the most shameful example of the cruel and complete abolition of all human rights by the Government, all in the name of the war on terrorism.”
― Kenneth G. Eade

“No no, please please

Please stop it
Is this ‘cause my last name bears the name of the prophet?

I don’t know no Akbar
I don’t know no Ahmad
So why the hell are you tying my hands and tilting my head back?

Me no sign up for this
Cloth warm, over my face

You cut to the chase
Cruciform, torturous ways

I’m biting my lips
Spine chills, trying to be brave

So this is the place
Sign my will, death is my fate”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Letter 19

“Passei a ter alucinações e a ouvir vozes claras como cristal. Ouvi minha família numa conversa informal da qual eu não conseguia participar. Ouvi a leitura do Corão numa voz celestial. Ouvi música de meu país. Mais tarde, os carcereiros usaram essas alucinações e começaram a falar com vozes de chacota através do encanamento, incentivando-me a agredir os carcereiros e armar um plano de fuga. Mas não me enganaram, mesmo quando eu fazia o jogo deles. “Ouvimos alguém — talvez um gênio!”, diziam eles.
“Sim, mas eu não estou ouvindo”, eu respondia. Só sabia que estava à beira de perder o juízo. Comecei a falar sozinho. Por mais que tentasse me convencer de que não estava na Mauritânia, de
que não estava próximo de minha família e portanto não poderia ouvi-la conversando, eu continuava ouvindo vozes permanentemente, dia e noite. Assistência psicológica estava fora de questão, como também assistência médica de verdade, além do imbecil que eu não queria nem ver.”
― Mohamedou Ould Slahi

“He came forward. “Mr. Trask,” he said. “My name is Martin Carroll. I expect shortly to receive orders to obtain from you, by any means, a full account of your activities.”
Marin studied the man’s face. He was remembering Carroll. He had seen him once or twice with Slater, he recalled. Carroll was a type. Strongly dedicated to duty, he was a dangerous adversary because he had no doubt about the rightness of the work he did.
Marin had only a passing interest in the man. He knew his own needs in what was developing here. Only hate in all its violence could maintain the muscles and nerves of any living creature against torture. He had no time for kind thoughts or for reason—except at the far edge of his mind.”
― A.E. van Vogt, The Mind Cage

“The song of our daily lives changed that day so that the wind could sing to us. Without the green tarps, we looked out our window and saw the sea, the vast and beautiful sea, dark and angry, and the sea saw us, too, and raged at what it saw: hundreds of men in metal cages.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I understood that there was a right and a wrong way to treat human beings, even those you thought of as your enemies. My American captors held no such values.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“In the beginning, some brothers could sea the sea if they stood on their sink and looked through their window. In the rec yard, I found that if I lay down on my stomach in the corner, I could tear away a tiny piece of green tarp covering the fence and steal glimpses of a turquoise sea. I told my brothers and soon many of us would lie down and spend our recreation time looking at the sea through that small secret window. Eventually the guards noticed the hole.

"Why can I look at the sea?" I asked the watch commander when he caught me.

"It's for your own safety and security," he said through an interpreter. I suspected he thought Osama bin Laden might land on the beach one day with an al Qaeda army and break us all out. America was supposed to be a smart country, but the things we believed made us question this.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I remember explaining explaining what I saw to one brother who couldn't see the sea.

"I see an endless body of blue," I said, "with a soul that courses through the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal, all the way to the Red Sea and the western coast of Yemen, where in the seaside town of Hudaydah, my father is at the market buying fish for a special meal. And when the tide comes in and the air is heavy with salt, my mind takes me straight to the port city of Aden and weekends I spent there with friends after high school. We'd lie on the beach and imagine our lives and the wives and families we would one day have.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Bahr sang in Arabic, Pashto, Persian, and English, but even if our brothers or the guards didn't understand the words, his voice was enough to free us all from our caged lives, even if only for a moment. Music and poetry are the soul's languages, and when Bahr sang, all the blocks quieted down so they could listen. His voice and his songs carried with me into solitary confinement, where I listened to Bahr and the sea in my head.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I could still hear Bahr sing, much to the disappointment of the interrogators. I sang back to him that the Afghani brothers treated me like one of their own. The guards and interrogators heard every song we sang, but they never listened.

Everything they did made that clear. Or maybe they listened but couldn't understand what they didn't want to hear--that their choices had consequences and not the ones they expected.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Diane Beaver, who served as State Judge Advocate on Guantanamo’s Joint Task Force in 2002–04, when it adopted harsh methods, told an interviewer that the show 24 had inspired many of the eighteen controversial interrogation techniques used on detainees, including waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and the terrorizing of prisoners with dogs. Jack Bauer, she said, “gave people lots of ideas,” adding: “We saw [24] on cable [and] it was hugely popular.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“Islam is a practical religion that's woven into the fabric of our daily life. General Miller, this head of interrogations, the interrogators and psychologists all failed to understand the depth and strength of our faith. Yes, we were physically weak, we were beaten, and they would beat us more, but our strength was in our hearts, and our hearts were driven by our faith and trust in Allah. We couldn't be bought with promises of riches.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“According to our faith, we're all created for a single reason, which is to worship Allah. One way to worship is how you handle hardship and dilemmas in your life. Life on this earth is a test for us, and we should expect anything, even the worst hardships, in our test. At the same time, nothing happens without Allah's permission; nothing moves without Allah's will. If we were at Guantánamo, He had willed it and we would leave when He willed it. But we had free will to choose our path while here.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“How do you do it?'' one of the nicer guards asked me one day through the interpreter. ''How do you not lose your mind with loneliness? How do you starve yourself? How do you survive without wanting to die?''

''Allah,'' I said and then tried to explain to him about my faith and the belief that all of this was Allah's wish.

For years, the interrogators, Miller, the revolving door of colonels had desensitized us to the violence of our daily lives. They hit us so much that we no longer felt the pain of the punch. There was something bigger at work protecting us, something beyond our capabilities, and that kept us alive without losing our minds. This was Allah's Mercy, and we all felt it there. We couldn't survive without Allah's help.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Where do we go in these moments of pain, when the world turns black? We always turned to Allah. I prayed to Allah to guide me, to protect me, to help me stop this madness and hasten my release.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“After so many years of interrogations, I had learned that praying and reciting the Qur'an completely shut off all my senses so that I didn't hear, I didn't see, I didn't feel anymore. I just existed in the moment but outside the moment. Interrogators could talk for hours. They could do all kinds of horrible humiliating things to me and they did. But it didn't matter anymore.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo