Transcript for S04 - Ep. 6: Part 2, Asymmetry

I heads up before we start that this episode deals with suicide, which I know can be a hard thing for some people to hear about in any context. So if you're not ready for that right now, this might be when you want to come back to later.

Today we're like, hey, it's our friends.

From serial productions in the New York Times, it's serial season four, Guantanamo, one prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Canick. This is part two of Colonel Mike Baumgartner and the worst year. Early on May 18th, 2006, Bumgarner was in his morning meeting when someone came in with urgent news.

A suicide attempt on its own shocked no one. Suicide attempts happened constantly. Bumgarner said,

Which Bumgarner worried about, but not over much. He didn't think most of the people attempting really wanted to die. Besides, suicide isn't allowed in Islam. Most of the detainees wouldn't abide it. Anyone trying to hang himself, for instance, would be discovered immediately, usually because other detainees would stop him.

You felt like there's a backstop. Yeah, absolutely. But May 18th was different. First off, these guys weren't found hanging. They were reportedly frothing at the mouth, which meant poison and not just one, but two people. But I'm garners it as mine flew straight to a Guantanamo prophecy.

That influential Saudi prisoner, Shacker Amher, had told him about it a while back. Shacker was in hospital at the time on a hunger strike, and he said, you know about this, don't you? About the dream? And he told Bungarner that another detainee had had a dream that if three detainees died, they'd all get to go home. The dream had made its way through the camp, lots of people heard about it. Several former detainees told us they didn't put much stock in it, it just seemed, whatever, unlikely. But Bumgarner believed it. He believed that the detainees believed it, but he also believed the substance of the dream, that what it laid out was probably true.

That's such a huge responsibility that you're putting on yourself.

And under this skipper, the USS Guantanamo was currently enjoying bum garners signature achievement, the period of peace. He wanted to keep it that way. He could not be, would not be, the guy who screwed this up for the country. The men found unconscious had taken overdoses of anti-anxiety medication, not their own medication. In all four detainees had become sick, but only two seemed to be genuine suicide attempts. They were hospitalized and recovered, and the prophecy bum garnered dreaded about three detainees dying was averted. Still, he failed to recognize this may-18th crisis for what it was. A prelude. Instead, the headline that day for bumgarner was that detainees had somehow managed to hoard medication, which freaked him out. What with the medical protocols and the regular cell searches, they should not have been able to do that. So right away on May 18th, bumgarner ordered a facility-wide search. Cell searches happened all the time at Guantanamo, but not like this. Every single cell, every single person, some 460 detainees at that point, now all hands on deck. Reports vary about what they found, but bumgarner remembers they discovered a bunch of people. He thinks it was in the low teens, had secreted pills.

Oh, like the hem? The hem?

One guy had a stash of pills hidden in his prosthetic leg.

Again, detainees were used to having their cells tossed, but this time, Bumgarner made a risky call. He directed his personnel to search all carons, too. In case contraband was hiding inside the pages or the spine. He knew it would cause tension. Complaints about personnel disrespecting or desecrating the Quran were Legion. The previous Guantanamo Commander had ordered an investigation into various allegations in an effort to separate rumor from justified fury. It was such a sensitive issue, the camp had instituted a rule that only Muslim staff, interpreters or the camp's new cultural advisor were allowed to touch it. Obviously, detainees weren't happy about having to hand over their carons that day. But Bumgarner said nobody made too big a stink until they got to camp four.

Roudy in camp 4 was not supposed to happen ever. Camp 4 was the communal camp, their showcase. It's where a bum gardener could bring distinguished visitors and boasts. See, even though the Geneva conventions don't apply here, we still treat these men humanely. The detainees live together in open dorms, 10 beds to a block. They got to wear white clothing, they could play soccer and basketball, they could pray together and eat together. One former detainee told us you could save leftovers for a couple days and then invite friends over for brunch. admission to camp forward depended on good behavior. It was a reward for compliance. But just because you followed the Americans' rules, it did not follow that you necessarily trusted the Americans. We talked to Hafa doesn't detainees who were in camp for that day in May, and they told us they had the distinct impression the Americans were up to something. This didn't feel like a normal search. It felt more like a deliberate provocation, possibly for some dark purpose they couldn't decipher.

That's Mustafa Iad Adir, originally Algerian, later from Sarajevo where he lives now.

Again, only Muslim personnel were supposed to touch the Quran's. That was the rule. And Bungarner had suspended it. Was Diffus said he tried to broker an agreement with the guards, whereby he would search the Quran himself. But it didn't hold. And then, as Bungarner would say, it started getting rowdy. Even the Afghan prisoners who had a reputation for lying low, even they got rowdy at the prospect of the Quran under attack.

That's Samuel Hajj from Sudan, a journalist.

Camp 4 was not only the most permissive camp. For the guards, it was also potentially the most dangerous camp, because detainees could congregate in their dorms and outside. The upper was getting out of hand. Bumgarner tried to shut it down, lamely.

What happened next has been described in reports as a disturbance, a fight, a riot. Details differ, but most of the documentation I've read settled more or less on the same story. That afternoon, Bumgarner decided it was time to call in the QRF, the quick reaction force. A team of 10 soldiers equipped with riot control gear. Sergeant Joe Hickman was in charge of the QRF that day. He said they'd been called up before, but always the mere sight of them had quelled whatever was stirring. They'd never had to actually engage with detainees. Most of the time they sat around board in their hut, watching movies on DVD, or whole seasons of the office. The force feeding chairs were stored in there too. Hickman said he'd sometimes take a nap in one of them. But May 18th, when they hustled over to Camp 4, Hickman said they could hear people yelling and banging and breaking stuff in all the different buildings, which ring the large central yard. About 200 Navy guards were staged there, waiting. The QRF team lined up outside the door of one particularly agitated block, Zulu block. There's a whole wind up protocol they're supposed to go through before they physically enter and enclose space. But that got short circuited when a guard started yelling about yet another suicide.

The Navy guard was mistaken. No one was hanging himself inside. Instead, Hickman says what he and his QRF team encountered when they rushed in was an expertly slicked up floor and ambush.

Like it had been stockpiled.

That's Mola Mahamed Nabi Omri, who'd been a Taliban official. He told us he was in the dorm when the QRF came bursting in. And he said the detainees were throwing these containers of surf soap at the guards, and the soap was spilling out onto the floor, mixing with the liquid from the tear gas.

Again, there's some disagreement, especially between the Americans and the detainees, about some of the fine points here. Omery said there was no ruse to lure them in, no ambush, no advance excretion gathering. He said they were reacting in the moment to being attacked, but everyone involved agrees. They got pretty vicious.

That's Joe Hickman again.

After about five or ten minutes, Hickman says he gave the order to fire and they did. Non-lethal hard pellets, though Hickman says they use them at a potentially lethal range. It was the first time weapons had been fired at detainees at Guantanamo. Hickman says he hit a detainee in the chest with a rubber grenade. Here, members laughing, was comical to see a body go flying like that, he said, which he feels kind of bad about now.

Violence was always in the air at Guantanamo, but this was something else, a straight-up fight, right out in the open, 10 against 10, soldiers versus detainees.

That's Steve Timis, the Navy officer in charge of the guard force in the discipline camps, two and three. They'd all been called over to camp forward to help.

Pikmin and his team pushed the detainees out of Zulu Block to where Navy guards were waiting in the courtyard.

Rispans meaning like flex cuffs or what? Yeah. Okay. And beat it like hitting them.

We're accurately nobody was gravely injured that day. A couple of the guards were banged up, but not as badly as some of the prisoners, especially the ones who'd been shot with plastic pellets.

Some of the detainees told us, they like the fight, too. That was a good day.

Also, the fight was righteous.

Bumgarner couldn't understand it. They had it so good over there in camp 4. Why they throw it away? Why did they tear the place apart? He dealt with the May 18th debacle not as an existential problem, but as a disciplinary one. That night, Camp 4 was emptied out completely. All those supposedly compliant detainees sent to punishment blocks. From now on, fewer people would be allowed to congregate at any one time. And as for suicide prevention, Bumgarner focused on overdosing, medical staff only to distribute medications, not guards. But honestly, Bumgarner said he felt like he had things back under control.

Maybe bum gardeners tentacles weren't activated, but the tentacles of prisoner unrest, those tentacles were activated and probing quietly for escape. That's after the break.

Three weeks after the violence in May is when the worst thing about the worst year would happen, June 9th, 2006. That night the Joint Task Force commander Admiral Harry Harris hosted the camps top officers at a dinner party, a rare break for bumgarner.

After the party broke up and people wandered home to their quarters, phones and pagers started buzzing. Several detainees had been found unresponsive in their cells in alpha block of camp 1, about 15 yards from Bungerner's office. The men had been discovered one by one, starting a little after 1230 a.m. First, the guy in cell eight, then in cell 12, another, then a third in cell five. According to government records, their names were Yasser Azaharani from Saudi Arabia. He was 22. Mani Al-Uttaibi, also Saudi, age 30. And Ali Abdullah Ahmed from Yemen, he was 27. All three had been found by guards hanging at the back of their cells near their sinks, which they'd evidently stepped off of in such a way as to suspend themselves. They concealed themselves by attaching sheets or blankets to the ceiling in front of the sink. Their hands were tied. And each had a piece of paper and a pocket, a couple of short, furious sentences written in Arabic. By the time Bum Garner arrived, the camp was in a state. The guards were frantic. One said he comforted a colleague and then puked in a trash can. Medical personnel were working on the three men, though they all appeared to be past saving. Within an hour of bone gardeners arrival, they were pronounced dead. This was very bad for the prison. That's where bone gardeners head went. No detainees had died since the camp opened, and now three in one night. This is bad for us, for me.

The immediate answer seemed to be one of the million competence. The guards were supposed to be walking the tier every three minutes, making sure to see skin and movement from each detainee in each cell. But as one guard later admitted to investigators, it gets old and boring. And it turned out two guards had gone to chat at the same time, which was against the rules. Eventually, Admiral Harris would conclude that prison personnel violated six procedures that night, some of which might have contributed to the detainees' ability to kill themselves. I can't tell you which six, because redacted, in any case, by Don Washington was waiting.

Wanting to know what the hell happened. Bungarner knew full well that question had an uncomfortable cousin. Whose fault was this? He also knew, they all knew. They were listing toward a PR nightmare. The one bumgarner most feared. The narrative that people were killing themselves at Guantanamo because it was a jahalhole. Just a month earlier, the UN Committee against torture had issued a report saying the prison violated human rights law and should be shut down. The EU Parliament had also called for its closing, in part because of the inhumane conditions of confinement. Now the Germans, the Danes, the British were reiterating, closed it down. The U.S. government, though, in an abundance of confidence, spun its weakness into a strength. These deaths didn't reflect badly on Guantanamo, just the opposite. These deaths justified Guantanamo. Hours after the conference call with the Big Wigs and D.C., Admiral Harris went big. He told CNN the suicides were proof that these men were still in the fight, a continual threat to the United States. They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us. asymmetrical warfare, meaning the widely adaptive strategy is guerrilla fighters or terrorists use to attack a bigger stronger enemy. That was the government's story about the suicides. They were an act of war. For his part, Bungarner told me he didn't cotton to the asymmetrical warfare language, but he was certain the deaths were coordinated and that they were calculated to harm not necessarily the United States, but to harm Guantanamo. For one thing, he knew all the men on that particular block, Alpha Block of Camp One. He said they were all instigators, manipulators, as he called them, hand in the back of the room types.

The prophecy that if three men died, they'd all be freed. They'd killed themselves for the good of the group to keep Guantanamo in the nightly news on the front page.

Bunger and her believed other more powerful detainees, Al Qaeda guys, had either planned the suicides or at the very least approved them. And he thought it was possible that lawyers for the detainees might be encouraging the detainees to protest or passing information to their clients. Now these same attorneys, along with human rights activists, were pushing a different narrative about the suicides. The prisoners had died from despair, they said, from hopelessness, after years of abuse and no clear legal or administrative path towards release. A UN spokesman said the suicides were, quote, not completely unexpected, unquote. Amnesty International straight-up blamed the Bush administration for the deaths. Eventually, inevitably, yet another story emerged about what had happened to the three men. Some people began wondering aloud whether they'd in fact been killed. Maybe these weren't suicides at all. Maybe they were homicides. Tallahul Azaharani, a former general in the Saudi police and the father of the youngest man who died, Yasser Azaharani. He openly challenged the U.S. government's account of what happened to his son. In a remarkably polite video statement, he implored the president and the courts and the American people to investigate.

There was some weirdness about their deaths. Even if the guards were phoning it in that night, for instance, how could these hangings have gone unnoticed for so long? A couple of the men's bodies were showing the beginnings of rigor mortists when guards cut them down, which takes about two hours to start to set in. The logs the guards made of their rounds that night were a little off. Someone seems to have falsified a head count, about an hour before the first detainee was found hanging. But when investigators asked the guards about it, they all claimed implausibly not to know who wrote the entry. In 2010, Harper's Magazine published an award-winning investigation into the Guantanamo Suicides with the word Suicides in scare quotes, and it was intriguing. The reporter's main source was introduced as a whistleblower, Joe Hickman, the former sergeant in charge of the QRF team that fought the detainees in camp 4. Hickman said some personnel were acting oddly that night, and that while he was on duty in a guard tower, he saw an unmarked white van coming and going from camp 1, which appeared to him to be secretly moving individual prisoners too in front. Hickman's hypothesis, maybe another agency, perhaps the CIA, had taken them in for secret meetings and things got out of hand and they died, and then they were strung up to look like suicides. Hickman wrote a book about it. To this day, he thinks there's a wide conspiracy to hide the truth of that night. And some of the detainees, including some of the former Guantanamo prisoners we spoke to, they also refused to believe them and hang themselves. They just don't see how or why they could have done it. The Americans must have killed them somehow. These three competing explanations for the suicides, warfare or misery or homicide never seem to fade. People still talk about the deaths with some mystery. But there is information, a lot of it, that to me offers the most persuasive answer to the question of what happened. Information that lives inside the paper trail these men left while they were still alive. That's after the break.

Okay, so if the three stories about what killed the men in camp one, desperation, asymmetrical warfare, or homicide, I'm going to set aside the homicide idea because no evidence has surface to support it after all these years. And many good reporters we've spoken to told us they did take the idea seriously, tried to substantiate it, but they weren't able to. And then just the size of the cover-up we'd be talking about, all those people, all those falsified witness statements and investigative documents, and not one person has cracked in 20 years. This seems unlikely. So to me, that leaves two options, desperation or warfare. And if we're weighing the truth of those stories, we do have convincing evidence. bureaucratically speaking, I know the most about the Yemeni man. Ali Abdullah Ahmed, because I have his medical and behavioral records. Left over from an unsuccessful lawsuit filed on behalf of his and Yasser Al-Zaharanis' fathers. Akuma arrived in Guantanamo in June of 2002. He was 22 years old, or possibly 33 years old. The US never seemed to pin down his birthday, or his real name for that matter. But most of his Guantanamo records say he was 22. He'd worked selling clothes at the suit and ties Yemen near his hometown. He had a thick black beard and was married to a young woman named Hayat. The story he told the U.S. was that he was studying in a university in Pakistan when he got arrested. During a raid at the guest house where he was living, the U.S. thought he was lying, that the studying was a cover story, and that Ahmed was maybe a mid to high level al-Qaeda operative, and had possibly traveled with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. People said they saw him in Afghanistan in Kandahar. He said he'd never been there. I have no idea whether he was mid to high level Al Qaeda, but from the records, it seems like he was a mid to high level pain in the guard forces' ass. He spits on someone, throws a cup of pee on someone, sexually harasses female guards now and then. Early in 2004, he gets Earthed a couple of times, once for refusal for reservation, meaning an interrogation session. None of which made him exceptional at Guantanamo. But it's pretty clear from the guard logs, Ockman was never okay at Guantanamo. He wasn't inclined to settle down or wait it out, whatever it was. He was a tenacious resistor. In January 2004, a guard sees him climbing the fence at the back of the wreck area, trying to see what's on the other side. The guard tells him to come down before the tower guards spot him. Ockman tells the guard, I want the infantry to shoot me so I can be with Ala. Please MP, please. If you had a reputation at Guantanamo, it was for hunger striking. During the camps, very first hunger strike in 2002, Ahmed joins in. They have to revive him with oxygen when he passes out. He joins the hunger strike again in July of 2005, not long after Bungardner's arrival. He's one of the guys who stops for a couple of days when Bungardner and Shacker Am are work out a deal. And he's one of the guys who gets angry when that deal falls apart. Believes the Americans have tricked them, lied to them, breaks his toilet and his light fixture goes back on hunger strike. And this time he never really stops. That fall of 2005, as Baumgarner is struggling to contain the hunger strike, Ahmed ends up in the detainee clinic a few times. He's so weak he can barely talk. He'd arrived at Guantanamo weighing about 177 pounds. By December 20, he's down to 124.5 pounds. By Christmas, he's hospitalized with pneumonia and a sepsis scare. At the very end of December, 2005, a few weeks after the first force feeding chairs were shipped to the island, medical personnel write this note in his file. Quote, patient states that he wanted to commit suicide because he does not want to be a prisoner anymore and he lost hope and quote. Ahmed will not stop hunger striking. They prescribe him zooloft. By January 10th, he weighs only 122 pounds. They strap him into the feeding chair. This is how Bungarner's period of peace looks for Ahmed. Dozens and dozens of pages of meticulous force-feeding documentation. Exact times, exact amounts of liquid nutrition, the width of the tube, the light-accane percentage, which nostril they stink it down, whether he resists or not, whether he gets sick after. Twice a day, they're strapping him in the chair. The process is so harrowing most of the hunger strikers quit within a few weeks, but Ahmed doesn't. By mid-February, he's one of only three men still on hunger strike, and the inside of his nose is infected, and so inflamed the nurse can't get a tube down. They put it down his throat instead. He's got other medical complaints as well. Itchiness, his ear hurts, to stickular pain. His knees were bashed during an earfing, he tells them, and now his knee pain is constant. but he is gaining weight, 138 pounds, 150 pounds. In his cell, he's allowed to keep a couple dozen pictures of his hometown, Ib, Yemen, a crazy beautiful city surrounded by green hills and waterfalls. All the while, the behavioral health team is checking in on him, and all the while he's waving them off. A typical encounter, I'm good, everything is good, are you from psych? Oh no, I have nothing to say. I know your questions and you know my answers. Have a good day. Ahmed keeps getting the feeding tube for another month after that. Five months total of force feeding. Until lunchtime on June 2nd, 2006, a guard walks by Ahmed's cell, and instead of writing the usual one word description in Ahmed's activity log, sitting, standing, sleeping, praying, the guard writes eating in all caps with three exclamation points. Ahmed had voluntarily eaten a meal. His hunger strike was over. By this time, he weighs 163 pounds. It's not clear if he's been sneaking food on the side somehow, or if the force feeding caused him to gain back the weight. But he's physically healthy. After a couple days, they determine he's ready to get off Oscar Block in the discipline camp, and move over to Alpha Block in camp 1. On June 7th, two days before he kills himself, a behavioral health staffer comes by. Ahmed is in good spirits, the report says. States that he has no mean thoughts of hurting others or himself. He's not seeing ghosts or genies in his cell, not hearing voices. So that's how prison personnel saw Ahmed. But the clearest picture of what Ahmed himself was thinking and feeling comes from his own writing, which is part of the military's investigative record. He and the other men left letters, brief manifestos, explanations. My name is Ali Abdullah Ahmed Nasser Al-Salami. I'm 27 years old, married by country's Yemen, and I memorized the Quran, praising gratitude goes to Allah, Ahmed begins. I don't know how I start my story, however, I know how I could end it. He writes of U.S. greed and support for repressive regimes in the Middle East, including Iraq and Israel. Of his treatment in custody, the earthings and the tear gas and the humiliation, they desecrated our religion, our bodies, and private parts. He says he gave up his hunger strike just a few days back in order to quote safeguard myself against the American suppression. And I mean final real inquisgment without return, God willing. I have remained repressed inside a very cold metal box. They call it a solitary cell. I have come out of this box. And my intention was to put an end to these ordeals. I'm not desperate and I swear to Allah not afraid. The date on the letter is June 7, 2006. The same day he tells his behavioral health staffer he's feeling just fine, and two days before his suicide. In another letter addressed to Muhammad's nation to the entire Muslim world, he says it again, don't ever think I have been afflicted with desperation. He hopes that perhaps by doing what he's going to do, it revives the hearts and awakens the endeavoring and victorious. He signs off with a telephone number in Yemen. But in other more personal letters, also dated June 7th, he sounds terribly sad. To my dearest brother, he reminisces. Asked that he let people know what happened at home at the shop. Asked that he'd take good care of my parents and forgive me. Asked my parents too for forgiveness. To my family and the beloved ones, he writes about piety and obedience and also his agony over being separated from them. To my dear wife, he hasn't seen her for five years. He writes of longing and devotion and a gleaming moon and silk and the smell of roses and sweet and fresh water. The other men left writing too. Yasser, as a Harani's letters, are thematically and stylistically similar to oxmids, but they have a little more fire, more of a raised fist. More talk of a US-led conspiracy to keep them indefinitely detained, more ghastly detail. His letters, too, were all dated within days of his death. From the third man, Mani Alutaibi, there's only one letter in the records, did a June 8th. Quote, as you all know, the situation in this prison is worsening. He asks all it to release the other prisoners from captivity to diminish the infidels. His letter concludes, forgive me. We asked the former prisoners we spoke to, what they remembered about the three men who died. Ahmed Erashidi, the Moroccan chef who spent five years in Guantanamo, told a story about Yasser as a harani. Erashidi was often on the discipline blocks he said, and that's the last place he saw Yasser.

Or maybe it was the other way around. He can't quite remember. But they were both afflicted by the punishing cold of the air conditioning. Erishidi said he couldn't stand it, freezing all night, and decided to block the AC vent in the ceiling of his cell. But in November, block, there's nothing in your cell, no material to work with. So he resolved to use his food. Scareous as it was. Hungry as he was.

Which worked. He didn't know it at the time, but it turned out Yasser and the opposite cell, also blocking his ceiling vent with food.

And you removed him. They liberated his AC vent by blasting it with water. Erishidi said he remembered the guards were so young, early 20s, like usher. And they seemed to be having such a good time, which I can picture, young soldiers with a water hose and a project.

Soon after that, Erishidi said, Yasser was moved. Probably the camp won Alpha Block if I had to hazard a guess. And Erishidi was moved into Yasser's cell. And that cell, he said, had an especially big AC van, just huge. He couldn't bear to walk under it.

Erishidi said he spent about three weeks in that frigid cell on November block, before he too was moved out.

Akmit Erishidi doesn't have any first hand knowledge of what happened in Camp One that night. It's not impossible to men were killed, he says. But he also believes it's possible they were driven to suicide because of the harshness. The feeding chairs, November block, bum garners innovations, bum garners guantanamo. So were the men martyrs? Was this a coordinated political tactic? Or were they hopeless prisoners? Sounds to me as if they were both. Judging from Akma's letters, especially, Akma had thought this through. He was done suffering, done with the endless force feedings. But also, he hoped his death would mean something. Maybe even inspire something. Guantanamo commanders never figured out exactly how the suicides had been planned or carried out. So there was no intelligence fix they could grab onto. All they could try to do in response to this loss of control, bomb gardener said, was to try to reassert it.

Before the suicides, the camp administration had planned for about three quarters of the detainees to move into more permissive living arrangements. Now they flipped that percentage. The big new camp six designed to be communal, like the now emptied camp four, would be all single cells, maximum security. They'd put steel machine closures along the second floor walkways, so no one could jump. The new recreation yard was carved into individual enclosed pens. Admiral Harris began using a new phrase and interviews with the press. I don't think there's such a thing as a medium security terrorist. Mike Bungarner came to believe he was personally responsible for the three suicides. Not because his policies were too harsh, because they were too soft. He'd relaxed the SOPs in Camp One, so that when Yasser Azza Hurani was seen washing his own blanket in his cell and then hanging it up to dry, that was allowed. And the extra stuff they were permitted to keep in their cells, the clothing, the water bottles, the sewing area on alpha block, a cell where you could use a needle and thread. The dim lights, so you couldn't easily see the back of the cell, plus the no flashlights and detainees faces rule for guards. So it was not to disturb detainees sleep. All of that helped the detainees pull off their suicides. And all of that, carrots planted by bum garner. What he learned from the suicides was that you can't negotiate with terrorists. in trying to comply with certain aspects of the Geneva conventions. Bumgarner thought he'd been too far toward accommodating the detainees, and the detainees had manipulated his leniency. That's what some of his superiors had warned about, and some of his subordinates had browsed about early on, and now he saw they were right. November block that most miserable discipline block he instituted where your hair and beard would get shown where you couldn't talk, couldn't wear clothes, nothing in your cell except a merciless vent blasting cold air. That's what really worked he said. That's what created compliance at Guantanamo.

Confirming with the prisoners endorsing their reasonable requests, allowing reasonable concessions. He said the detainees must have pegged him as weak.

A degree of mutual respect, or at least a degree of fair play. Bumgarner had a stunning faith that if he gave the prisoners some privileges, they'd be grateful. They'd hold up their end of a one-sided bargain. Instead, in Bumgarner's eyes, they did the worst thing. They killed themselves and tried to destroy Guantanamo. And that's why he said, at Guantanamo, you can't fully employ the Geneva conventions, which spell out not only the obligations of the captors, but of the captives, how they should behave.

Because there had been rules, maybe not perfect rules, but still perfectly good rules, that the United States spurned at Guantanamo. Guard rails designed to curtail humanity's worst impulses toward violence and revenge and domination. That's what the Geneva conventions were, and the convention against torture. International agreements the United States not only endorsed and adopted, but helped write. For some of the prisoners, the worst thing about Guantanamo wasn't so much that the US wasn't playing by the rules. That's what Ahmed Erashidi explained to us. He said the worst thing was that the US seemed to think it was playing by the rules.

Immediately after the suicides, Bumgarner was in trouble. Not for the suicides. He was investigated for what's called a spill. A reporter from the Charlotte Observer happened to be visiting Guantanamo, doing a story on Bumgarner when the suicides occurred. Bumgarner's bosses were concerned he'd possibly disclosed classified information to the reporter. The accusation was weak and quickly fell away. In any case, Bumgarner considered it a pretext. He's certain what really pissed off his command were some in temperate comments he made in the days following the suicides, captured by that reporter. The most damning thing, he quoted Bumgarner saying, in honor of our three dead brothers, and then biting into a pork chop sandwich. Bumgarner was suspended from his duties and sent to his quarters, pending an inquiry.

Bungarner was floored. The three deaths from the premonition had happened. And he thought for sure they're going to close it. The publicity, the politics would overwhelm Guantanamo and shut it down. And it would be his fault. He couldn't comprehend how quickly his star had fallen.

You weren't suicidal or something were you? Oh, I'm so sorry.

After about a week, Bumgardner was cleared. The military found he hadn't spilled anything to the reporter. And shortly after that, his command at Guantanamo was over and he rotated out. A lot of Tory citation and hand. His career continued, but his rank didn't rise. He retired from the army in 2010. Accorded to this story of the worst year. Guantanamo's favorite reporter, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, had toured the camp on June 9th, 2006. The same day, just coincidentally, as the suicides.

This segment ran a few days afterwards, O'Reilly had left the island before the Suicide's took place. He had gotten a special tour exposed to as much as possible, bum gardener at his elbow. In a sit-down interview, O'Reilly had asked bum gardener about the fight that had erupted a month earlier in camp 4.

I'm going to tell me he knew what Riley wanted to sound bite and so exaggerated a little, gave the people what they wanted.

I'm Garner had been worried that pressure from liberals and bad press would close one tonimo, but in hindsight, it's obvious he had nothing to worry about. Because this asymmetrical drum beat was always stronger. The one pounding out the message to any and all wavering Americans, don't believe the human rights lawyers, the naysayers. One tonimo is vital to our national security. When O'Reilly's tour was over, I'm garnered to him, he escorted him off the island.

In the end, Bumgarner took this terrible year of hunger striking and fighting at suicides, harder than Guantanamo itself. The prison had survived the worst. Maybe it could survive anything. It's almost quaint now to think the government was courting the press back in Bumgarner's day, telling them to come on down and see for themselves. Because skip ahead 15 years, and the PR goal was to make Guantanamo disappear. That's next time. Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas and me, are editor is Julie Snyder, additional reporting by Corea Currier, fact checking by Ben Falen. Music supervision sound design and mixing by Phoebe Wang, original score by Sophia Daley Alessandri. Editing help from Gen Guera and Ira Glass, our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali, additional research by Emma Grillo, America Faji, and Sammy Yusufzai. Translation by Muhammad Raza Sahibzada, Nail Hedjo, Atikrahin, Dana Alisa, Bashar al-Halabi, and Umama Othman. Additional production from Daniel Gimet and Katie Mingle. Our standards editor is Susan Wesley. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Maya Gandhi. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon and Max Guter. Superbizing producer for Zero Productions is Ende Chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller. Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to many supervillains, Mansura Diffie, Muhammad Elfaki, Farjita Tayeb, Mark Denbow, Hardice Cabriai, Corey Shreple and Lee Riffetair.