- Three, four, three. 

Interviewer: Yeah, we're done, wait a minute, rolling. Okay, good afternoon. Good afternoon. 

Interviewer: We are very grateful to you for participating in the witness to Guantanamo project. We invite you to speak of your experiences and involvement with detainees who were held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We are hoping to provide you with an opportunity to tell your story in your own words. We're creating an archive of stories that people in America and around the world will have a better understanding of what you and others have experienced and observed. Future generations must know what happened at Guantanamo, and by telling a story you're contributing to history. We appreciate your courage and your willingness to speak with us. If at any time during the interview, you wanna take a break, just let us know. And anything you say that you'd like to retract or just review, just let us know and we can go back over that. And I'd like to begin with some general background information such as your name and your hometown and birth date and age. Maybe you could tell us that. 

- Name, Christopher Brandon Arendt, A-R-E-N-D-T, hometown, Lansing, Michigan and well, born in Sparrow Hospital, Lansing, Michigan, raised in Charlotte, Michigan. And then birth date, 02/18/1984, the February 18th, 1984. I feel like this is a pretty military breakdown. Like social security should come next. Zero, two, five, eight. 

Interviewer: And what's your age? 

- 27. 

Interviewer: And where do you currently live? 

- I live in Trumansburg, New York. 

Interviewer: And a little bit, are you, your marital status? 

- Single. 

Interviewer: And your education? 

- Like some college didn't, have not finished a degree. 

Interviewer: Okay, and your current occupation? 

- The art director of the veterans sanctuary combat paper project. (laughs) It sounds pretty professional, right? 

- Good, okay. So I'd like to begin just how you first joined the military and why you did and which branch? Just a little background on that. 

- Was gonna join the military pretty much my whole life. I have memories dating back to childhood. I'd say like eight, nine, 10 years old, having conversations with my mom about joining the military, military family, so, and also very poor. And my mom had kind of built into my brain that it was like college money, military equals college. Military equals you going to college, is like how it broke down. So I had accepted that the military was something I was gonna do for a long time. And then in November of 2007, no, 2001, I'm sorry, I was a senior in high school and I was gonna join the Marine Corp, but then my family started to kind of fall apart. And I ended up staying with friends and realized that I needed, like I needed money of my own, like I no longer had kind of any financial support. So I'd been working and I had my own job and everything, but I realized I needed a future. So I decided to join The National Guard instead of the Marine Corps, 'cause by then the war had started, the 911 had happened and I decided that I did not wanna shoot people. I was really disgusted by the anti Muslim sentiment, the whole turn it into a glass parking lot and I wanna kill rag heads and the whole favor against the Islamic nation that came around. I was really disturbed by it, so I did not wanna participate in the war. So, but I did want the college benefits in the military. So I joined The National Guard under the false assumption that we would guard the nation. 

Interviewer: And what kind of training did you give The National Guard? 

- I joined the field artillery and I was trained for 16 weeks. And eight of them was for basic combat training for shooting targets and stabbing targets and running around and doing pushups and learning how to yes sir, no sir and who to say yes sir or no sir to and all the rules of the game. And then another eight weeks training on how to fire M109 howitzer cannons, the whole firing operations and maintenance of self-propelled howitzers and then that was. 

Interviewer: It was purposeful then. 

- For shooting cannons for combat. I mean, it's a National Guard unit so it's pretty hard to explain why there are things like artillery units in The National Guard but mine is not to question why. All I know is that I kind of failed the ASVAB which is the initial test for the military and I got a 55, so I could not join. I could only join the infantry or the artillery and artillery comes with vehicles and you don't have to walk around so much. So as a naturally lazy person, I decided that the artillery would be better. 

Interviewer: And after those 18 weeks, what happened then? 

- I reported back to Michigan and started drilling with my unit which is drilling is like three days a month. We go in and sweep the floors, complain about things, most of the times, we're not even around our canons until the summertime comes and then we start drilling up North where we kept our cannons and we would fire them for a couple of days and then in the summer, we would have what's called an annual training and we'd fire our canons for two weeks at a time, and then spent, well actually most of that time was spent in the motor pool, kicking sand around and smoking cigarettes and pitching violence. 

Interviewer: How did it happen that you ended up in Guantanamo, how did that happen? 

- In October of 2001, I was called by my section chief. Oh, sorry. 

Interviewer: You joined in 2000? 

- Oh, I'm sorry, 2004, I'm sorry. Timeline mixed up, October of 2003. So I was trying to go to school. I was living in a place called Kalamazoo, Michigan and going to community college and my phone rings and my chief it's my chief. And he gives us the call sign for, that we've been deployed basically. They'd let us know when the war started that if we ever get deployed, this is what we'll say, when we call you on the phone to let you know that we're gonna go somewhere. So my chief calls and he's the jerk. So all he says is these words that you know it's raging bull. He just goes raging bull and then hangs up the phone. And that's it. So like for probably three weeks I had no idea what was going on. Nobody would answer my calls or telling me what was going on. I just knew when the next time I had to go for drill was so I was so for three weeks, I was just like I'm deployed, but I don't know where to, I don't know how to get out, I don't know what to do about this. So I basically just went into like a big drug coma. Like it just did everything. I put everything in my mouth I could for that entire period of time. And then we get to drill for the next month. We sit around all weekend long everybody's talking about where we're gonna go. We're gonna be in Afghanistan, we're gonna be in Iraq, we're gonna be in England. I heard probably six different countries we're gonna go to. None of them were going on Guantanamo Bay. No one saw that coming. And then they line us all up and they start showing us these clips of jet skis and beautiful beaches. And they were like Charlie battery been we've been deployed to Guantanamo Bay. And then that was really all that was said about it. I mean, I went home and looked it up online. I'd heard about it but I never really thought about the place much. I just knew that's where they said that they were gonna put detainees, and. 

Interviewer: And did they give you any specific training before you went to Guantanamo? 

- We had one month of what's called mobilization because technically, they had to train, they had to do something to trade our jobs. You can't make a person, you can't switch a person in the military from operating a canon to operating a detainee or a detention facility without any training whatsoever. So, but they didn't put a whole lot of effort into their training program. We got like a day of culture training which was geared towards people deploying to Iraq. Like, it's basically there was a bunch of generic Iraq deployment stuff 'cause they were, it's 2004, they had people going everywhere. This base was full of people deploying to every National Guard units. I mean, it was Fort Dix, New Jersey. So it's a retired base that they don't use anymore full of National Guard people who have just been activated. So you have like a hive of confused, under-trained, poorly militarized people that are ill adapted to lifestyle, all swarmed onto this base, all prepared, trying to prepare for this ridiculous excursion into some other cultures world. And so they didn't really, the only thing that they had that was specifically for training us for Guantanamo was this rinky dink little camp that they made out in the middle of nowhere. They put it as far away as they could. It was like a 20 mile bus ride out there. And it was just a bunch of chicken wire shacks that they put out there and they taught us how to like walk around. Basically, they just released us to play around on the camps. They gave us a bunch of locks and keys and shackles and said shackle yourselves up, lock yourselves in cages, walk around, and that happened for like two days and then. 

Interviewer: Did they teach you how to shackle or you just practiced on each other? 

Interviewer: They gave us a few instructions on how to shackle. It's pretty simple. You get it pretty quick. 

Interviewer: And did they try to frighten you as to what you would see when you went to Guantanamo? 

- Oh yeah. I mean, we did the largest chunk of our training was combat training, fighting training, stabbing knife training. And a lot of, one of the most terrifying experiences that I had was there with the knife training 'cause I was not everybody, everybody are already want an excuse to beat my ass. So then they had this formalized experience of like we all got together on these mats and they gave us rubber knives and then just stabbed the fuck out of each other with rubber knives for like two days, we were stabbing each other and chanting, like screaming, this mantra that they've made us yell, which was, I will get stabbed but I will not die, over and over and over again. That's all we said for like the whole day is we're like stabbing at each other, and that was all to prepare us for what they said was the likelihood that the detainees would craft knives out of anything, including toilet paper. They told us that they would make knives out of toilet paper and that they would stab us with them. So we had to be prepared for that so that they did, they work mostly like the biggest training that we got was fear-mongering about the capabilities of these super powered detainees that could craft knives out of toilet paper. And basically like they just had this mystique of like, we'll kill you with a whim. These are hardened terrorists. They've been trained in hand-to-hand combat. It's like a clash between this like ultra respective, they're fighting prowess and then totally belittling them 'cause you know, and I mean, to be quite frank, the language that we were using to talk about these people was at this time, understand that whenever we referred to these people, the nicest thing we called them was tainers, which is a shortening of detainees 'cause they wouldn't let us call them prisoners. But I mean, the rest of the terms ran along the lines of like the really racist stuff like a little bit of haji that we didn't use it, but a lot of like I don't even wanna say it, but for the purposes of documentation sand nigger was like, everyday I heard that term refer to them, camel jockeys, ridiculous stuff like dune coons. It was all just a bunch of different racial slurs to refer to them which was exclusively how we referred to them. 

Interviewer: Why couldn't you call them prisoners? 

- Because it violates the Geneva conventions that, yes, that was something that they were very, the only things about the rules that they were very specific on were the nomenclature of what we can call things to keep it in this detentions kind of atmosphere. It's like, I don't think people understand how much of the detentions policy really runs on the rhetoric of changing the name of somebody from a prisoner to a detainee because just calling someone a detainee puts them in a whole different kind of legal situation where, so it's, That was a really key focus that they definitely drove into our head of these people when you refer to them, they're detainees, they're not prisoners. And so that's one thing that they were really specific on us taking away from our little educational experience. 

Interviewer: What were you thinking you would see in Guantanamo before you came there given what you (indistinct) 

- Oh man I didn't have fucking clue. I didn't have a clue. There was no way I could have predicted that, I mean. 

Interviewer: What did you think you would see now when you did see, what did you think you would be seeing? 

- There was a lot of speculation on everybody's part. I don't remember really doing much pre-planning. I mean, I'm like thinking about what was gonna happen. I do remember assuming that there would be gross amounts of torture, that it would be that the things that people think about when they think about torture would be occurring there. 

Interviewer: Why (indistinct) 

- Because I thought that due to the nature of like how we were talking about them as terrorists and due to the nature of what they were like, it was proposed as an intelligence gathering place and intelligence gathering to me and to everybody else just kind of read as we're gonna torture these people until they tell us things. And then, so that's basically what I was assuming was gonna happen, I guess, but I didn't really like imagine it 'cause I don't, that's kind of like playing the game of like imagining what a psychopath thinks about? And I was very, I remember being very clear with myself to avoid that whole deranged game of like I was really desired to not play the psychological games that all of the people in my unit were playing 'cause they were very fancy free with imagining the different kinds of torture that they wanted to enact. It was like, I mean, it was like living in all of a sudden the 150 people that I knew beforehand turned into violent psychopaths that were totally free to talk, to run their miles. No women, no normal people around and they just turned into the whole hog racist killing machines that were just like all talk about how they wanted to torture these people. So not that when we got down there, actuality in actuality it was totally different story. Like people that talk shit, some went through with it, some were turned out to be tree huggers. Some turned out to be much more sympathetic than they thought they would. Some turned out to not really give back, some, people want a million different ways but when we were preparing, everybody was really anxious to seem as gung-ho as possible because not being into the mission, the mission being torturing and beating these people to a polyp then you're not a real man. And at the time too, we were all kind of like, well this is pretty cake deployment to pull during, everybody else we know is getting into humvees and going cross the seed of the ocean to the Middle East. So we were also kind of like all pretty relieved that while I was relieved that it was such an like an easy duty assignment, but. 

Interviewer: So where did you see when you first arrived in Guantanamo? 

- When we first arrived, the Camp Delta is a separate, is in Guantanamo Bay. Like there is a distinction there that Guantanamo Bay is just a Naval base in Cuba. And then on Guantanamo is Camp Delta where all of these things happen inside of a certain encampment. So when I first got there, I really didn't see anything except Camp Delta from the outside. And I could hear Camp Delta, but mostly I just saw Guantanamo Bay proper, like they took a lot of time to show us the external things and a lot of paperwork in lines and stuff, for like three weeks, we didn't even go into the camps. We just did processing and processing and processing. And yeah, we signed way more papers than we did, than we took in tutorials on how to do our jobs, but. 

Interviewer: What do those papers say? 

- Oh, just, there are a lot of like the military she's got like a million different papers you have to sign for anything. So if they move you somewhere, your equipment's got papers, your pills have papers, your food has papers, your wife has papers, your kids have papers, your shots had papers, my psychologist had papers upon papers. My papers had papers. There's papers everywhere in the military. I mean, there's files for everybody. They're so thick. And especially when you deploy, I mean, there's just, it's a really crazy system of bureaucracy and you gotta go one by one through these lines where they've got one person doing this one paper and you're sitting in a line with your little packet for hours just drinking coffee and just being like, ah, to hold my spot, I need to go smoke 50 cigarettes. 

Interviewer: What were your impressions during those first three weeks they had really, had it change you? 

- Oh, a lot. I had a lot of impressions starting that first three weeks. There was a lot of things to get used to down there. One is that the camp, the whole place is run by third country nationals. So I was really shocked by the fact that no soldiers anywhere were doing any of the jobs that I had assumed were done by soldiers, cooks, people working in different areas. All of these people were little short Filipino dudes and a few Jamaicans that drove our buses but at first I was just overwhelmed by the all of our services, everything, everything was done by third country nationals. And it's, I started to like think, why are they paying other people to do these jobs when you've got perfectly disposable soldiers that are trained to do things like sweep floors and take the trash out and do our own paperwork and do our own laundry and stuff like that. You've hired a whole slave force of these poor people down here. And very quickly, I was like, I bet you this dudes making a dollar an hour and then some fat white dudes probably making $50 an hour to have that one dude down there, you know? And it's like, that stuff's starting to me off. I didn't even really think about the camp a whole lot until we started to go down there and then I started to realize like, oh my God this shit's gonna get really crazy. I was on like a lot of personal issues at that point in time like really having an adjustment disorder just to being in the military full-time, so, I don't know. 

Interviewer: So as the three weeks went by, when you finally went into the camp, can you describe what you first saw and what your first duties were? 

- My first, I remember my first day very clearly. Now, before I explain that though, I'm gonna explain how they work you in the camp to keep a sense of disorder about your mental state as you go through things, you never do the same job two days in a row. You never work the same block with the same detainees, you never even do the same type of task. You might not work the blocks two days in a row, You might work the blocks two days in a row but then the next day you'll be on escorts or you'll be in a sally guard or a sally gate which is like opening a gate for people or you'll be doing some other weird mission. And then you'll be back on the blocks for a day and then you'll be somewhere else. And so that it's a constant psychological game of shuffling you around to different locations and keeping you and also working different shifts 'cause you'll work morning shifts and then night shifts and then afternoon shifts. They'll have you on a week of mornings and then a week of nights and then a week of afternoons. And then they'll say you have a week off but you'll end up in the camp replacing some other unit. And then, so to deal with like the first impressions of the camp is really difficult because my first impressions of the camp that was very successfully for them very disheveled and like all over the place, where the fuck am I, who is this person? I don't remember any faces 'cause I was on the camp in like in working the blocks for such a short period of time that I didn't really get to cycle through more than maybe a couple of times through the different jobs before they realized that I was not a good block guard and they took me off to do clerical work. But I can't explain my first like first memory of the place is very vivid of my first day in the blocks. We lined up to meet the unit that we were gonna be working with in the blocks and this was outside of the camp. And then on one side was all black dudes and women and with one Latino Lieutenant who was their platoon leader and then on our side was all white dudes with a couple of black, maybe two black guys in our unit. And then, and that's it. And so, and all of the dudes I was with really racist and I knew it and I've heard him say the most awful thing. So it was like, okay, 365 days was like assigned to working with this unit. This is gonna be, so at first I thought it was gonna be funny. I was like, these guys are gonna knock. I wanted this other unit to like, just beat the jet out of my unit for like I could see it happening. So we meet and greet and they do the whole thing where they came right out and they said like clearly you're not the same. (laughs) And we're just gonna have to get along here with like green is the only color they did this whole like speech and I'm like dying, laughing on the inside not the stone face on the outside but inside, I'm just like, I can't believe that I'm in this whole thing of adults and they have to pull us together and make this like speech about how the white people and the black people were just gonna have to get along for now while we torture the brown people. So it's like, I don't know, it was weird. So then we just, they marched us. We marched down, we walked through the camp, went through the sally ports, they checked everybody's stuff, and then we went to our separate blocks and we walked into the blocks and mine was Oscar block. I was on there, I was like one of the only new people working on that block. And it's an isolation block. I don't know, I guess I should, I don't know if I, it's so hard to explain this stuff like, as it comes along but the isolation blocks were, there were fewer cells probably like 24 all told and they were solid steel instead of the, like latticed cages you see, they were just solid metal frames with like basically like port windows on the doors of them and in a bean hole and a little tiny exhaust fan up in the back. And they were phenomenally hot, really hot inside there. Just to walk down, I could feel the cells radiating from the doors 'cause it just like, everything's like a metal it's like a metal chicken coop, and every property that you think that like that would have under the blazing hot Guantanamo sun, it does, those rooms are cooking. Like they are so ungodly hot. All I can really remember is just feeling so, like the kind of hot that just took my breath away. And on top of that, the whole place smelled like, this whole block smelled like OSI spray. I'm sure this has been explained to you before by somebody had to say something about OSI spray. It's oil based like mace that they use to spray the detainees with. And it's got, it smells like Frank's hot sauce basically but really pungently, and it's not so much a smell as something that you just feel everywhere and it burns your eyes. And you could just, I mean I was like crying, like burning eyes, like, so basically I'm like walking around with like bloodshot red eyes crying on the blocks and like the detainees were, some of them, it was really weird. I was like, it was like being in some kind of weird zoo, like I'd look in and one guy's pacing around in this tiny little circle talking to himself and another guy is reading from the Quran and just looking totally kicked back and relaxed. And another guy's just staring at me in the window just like sitting in there and just like staring at me, like he's and I don't remember saying anything to any of them until I got down to the end of the block. And then this guy wanted toilet paper and I didn't wanna give him the toilet paper because there was like rules about how much toilet paper you could give them. And when you gave them toilet paper and we were already like, had given them their allotment of stuff for the day, so what you do all at one time you just go through and you're like here's your food and your toothpaste and everything. And then you collect back what they can't have. It's a big ordeal, it's like you give them items. Some of the stuff you get back you have to know what they can get back. Some detainees can't have this. Somebody detainees can't have a cup or a little one inch toothbrush or something like that. So they can use them, but you have to give them back. So everything's is complicated process of like you put something in the bean hole and if they don't wanna give it back, then you have to get into their cell and get it back from them which is I learned very violent process. And it's like how the detainees choose to fight the guards and how the guards choose to fight the detainees, is where all the aggression comes together is when detainees decide to keep things inside their cells. and then we have to come in and get it. It was just so childish, you know. 

Interviewer: Well, I'll get to that, but let's just talk about when you said you saw the president wanted more toilet paper and what did you do? 

- Well, eventually after a long argument, he spoke English. Perfect English, British English. 

Interviewer: Do you know who he was? 

- Yes, his name's Terrick. I've met him since then, which is, but do you know Terrick? Yes, yeah. It's him with the one arm and so he got the toilet paper, I gave it to him, but, well, actually when I put it in the cell, I was kind of like frustrated and he'd kind of want. And I was just like, really just super embarrassed like burning face, like the anxiety prickles just like, I just felt like a super sheer head, that this is what I'm doing with my life right now. I was having this conversation about toilet paper. And so I finally like gave him the toilet paper just one of the situation to be done. And with his one good arm, he just grabbed my whole wrist and then just drop right down to the floor. And so like pulled me all the way into the cell up to my shoulder and I'm like smashed against the window, like looking down at him and he's screaming obscenities at me. And nobody from the rest of the block has come. They're all upfront bullshitting. They've left me to watch this whole block of, I mean, presumably an Oscar block. If these are the worst of the worst which Guantanamo was supposed to be, Oscar block is more or less the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst. So it's like, this is the final stop for the behaviorally challenged in Guantanamo Bay where it's the ultimate form of like, but so you don't wanna get along in the camps. Okay, sit in this hot little box by yourself all day long, see how you like that. And they'll put people in there for months and it is hell. I mean, it is hell inside that place, so. 

Interviewer: What happened to you of you being pulled down? 

- He finally just let me go. And I stood there for a couple of seconds and I was like what do I do now? Because I knew that if I went and told the guards that it would be, he'd probably be earthed, I knew that the next step would be to earth them. And there was a sick little moment that happened where I really wanted to get some vengeance, 'cause I felt like such like this guy had made such a fool out of me that I wanted to like, I kind of wanted to buy in on that violence. And everybody was so excited for it. Everybody wanted it. We knew what an earth was. We knew that that's how to beat up detainees. And everybody was like, chomping at the bit to get that first one. And I was like, am I gonna be the first person to like have to instigate these things, and just had this kind of gross little moment. Before I could even figure it out myself, he kind of settled it for me, and he's like, yeah, why don't you go tell all your friends that you just got beat up by the one-arm dude. And that back that's sitting in a cell, like what, I felt probably love that, and they called me a bitch a couple of times. And I was just like, wow that's a good point that you bring up. I can't really go tell people. It's not gonna improve my reputation at all if I go and tell them that the one-armed detainee inside of the isolation cell just beat my ass through a hole that I compromised myself and did exactly what I shouldn't have done which was put my hand inside the cell. And then I just realized that there was like a dozen different ways that I'd handled the situation that would lead back to me being at fault. And so I just kind of realized like, no, not gonna let this one, not gonna take this to the next step. And then throughout the course of that day, and that night like when I went home, felt disgusting, totally fucking sick. Like I would say, like rape victim sick, probably like how people feel after experiencing really super intense trauma. I sat in the bottom of the shower for like an hour that night and with a cold water on just crying and realizing that this is gonna be my life. This is where I was gonna live. And I was gonna have, that I was gonna have to deal with, basically the thing that gross me out most was that I had wanted to like hurt that guy. I wanted to call in all of these guards and watch him get his ass kicked. I'd wanted to see that kind of violence. And, but I didn't want that. It's like, it's hard to explain. When you have, when you're given that kind of authority and that kind of power, it is a really disturbing and sick thing. And there was two parts of me going two totally different ways, then the one part of me that I consider to be my conscious self really hated the part of me that it was just like this, yeah. 

Interviewer: And what did your buddies, the other people who were in your troop or fake when they saw you sitting in the shower in tears. 

- No, this is we had, we lived in houses. We had, I had a bathroom and a house and a bedroom completely all like any kind of cheap house, military housing that they provide anywhere on base. I shared a room with a guy, but we had a full shower sink, the mirror, toilet, the tile floor, we're not in tents, we're not in, bizarrely, we're living in some kind of weird like on base situation. So it's like, another thing that alienates our situation in the war to other people's situation is that we just had this cushy bougie job where we got to go home. And it's really bizarre to go from what to me seemed like working in a concentration camp into a cozy little bed and taking showers at night. But yeah, so, I mean, I was locked in the bathroom by myself when that was happening. And when otherwise was in my room by myself, my roommate drank a lot and was out all the time. So I was renowned for locking myself in my room and just kind of people wouldn't see me for two or three weeks, at a time I'd sleep for the time that I wasn't. I mean, just like, come back from work. If I showered that I'd shower and then I'd get in bed and read like five pages and sleep throughout the day and just wake up when I had to go to work again. And that's when people would see me and then I just wouldn't, you know. 

Interviewer: Do you ever express what you were going through to other colleagues? 

- I don't remember to what extent I did or did not. I can't be honest about that question. I've been asked a lot about it and I don't remember if I did. I know that I was really frank about being, basically I had told everyone that I was psychologically ill-equipped for the job from the very beginning and I tried to get out of the deployment. So what I had said was that I was losing my mind and that it was me that was broken, not the job. I'd never said that it was the camp. It was I always said that I couldn't take it but I did frequently say like that I was losing my shit and I couldn't keep it together. And I had a very small group of friends who knew me and made fun of me and just kind of like kept things in perspective and they kind of made me realize that, like, you've what are you gonna do? You know? Well, I mean, there was one thing that we knew I could do and I eventually tried it just like all the detainees try it and failed just like all the detainees fail. And then that was kind of the end of that story. 

Interviewer: What is the way out? 

- Suicide man. That's the one way out of the camp. That's your one one ticket away from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is to hang yourself. No, I think seven people have died there. I know, right after we left there was a rash of hangings that succeeded. Most of them do not 'cause other detainees don't accept that. Even though a lot of people try, when you try, it takes the complicity of everybody else in the block to not say anything 'cause there's supposed to be somebody walking up and down. It takes takes about five to seven minutes for a person to choke themselves and to die from 'cause you can't hang yourself from the top, you've got to hang yourself from the side. So you're still kind of restrained. So it takes a long time for you to fully fixate from that. So normally a soldier will walk by and see that and they'll, it's kind of a long process because if there's a detainee in the cell next to that detainee, then you have to get that person out and move them but usually the whole block just lights up wherever everybody's like, MP, MP, MP, this guy's trying to kill himself quick. Get in here, get in here. Like, I mean, so you'll know right off the bat, it's not, it's highly unlikely that somebody's gonna try to, I have heard of it, but I've never seen it where somebody has tried to hang themselves and like all the other detainees on the block are just like sitting there letting it happen? And those that did happen a few times at night too. 

Interviewer: Are you saying you were present when people did try to commit suicide? 

- Everybody was, I mean, it was a fairly regular occurrence. 

Interviewer: Did you see, actually see somebody being pulled down 'cause they're drank. 

- Yeah, yeah, and never parked, like actually cut them down but I was part of the, usually I was the person that opened up the gates for people, 'cause people didn't really want me around for things, I was known as kind of an emotionally wrecked person. So I would always get the off jobs. So my job was to let people in and out of the block because as soon as something like that happens, you put a radio call out and then a medical team runs to the situation. And a video camera comes, eventually later, that was my job when I got switched off of the blocks which is a whole other world was to videotape things. But there's a whole bunch of people report to the block to respond to the situations. So most of the time, if it happened, then I never saw one and said, hey, this guy is trying to kill himself. I was always kind of like off doing other things. So never really directly participated like with that. And actually, I don't think I've ever really seen any like up-close I know I've looked down the block and been like, that guy is definitely hanging in there, cutting him down like that, 

Interviewer: I've seen that. 

- That I've seen and known that it was happening either on my block or on another block close to me but never like cutting them down. 

Interviewer: So when the people did commit suicide at Guantanamo, you weren't present at that time? 

- No none of my unit was. 

Interviewer: So what else did you see before you got taken off blocks. What else did you see day to day as you walked (indistinct) your job as you walked through, were you always in isolation, are you? 

- No, so like I said, switched blocks, switched jobs. So like I also worked in the sally port, so just opened up gates or, they did a lot of after my first couple of days on the blocks, I got a lot of those jobs, like non block jobs because every day that I worked I made it more and more evident that I couldn't, I really was not good at this job. Just like my psychological review had said that I would not be good at this job, so. 

Interviewer: Did you ever walk detainees to interrogations? 

- Yes, that's called escorts and I did that job frequently. 

Interviewer: Can you describe what that's like. 

- You have a radio and you're calling on the radio and they you come into the office and you're handed a slip and it has the detainees number, location and where they're gonna move to, you get a pair of three piece shackles, handcuffs, waist belt and feat shackles that are all chained together and one lock and a set of keys and then you walk to the location where the detainee is. You ask them to put, you tell them that they're going to interrogation. You open up the bean holes. They put their hands through, you shackle their hands. It's like left first and then right. And it's finger, you put one finger in and tightened down but most people just cranked them on. And then you drop the rest of the shackle set down to the floor and you open up the foot being holes and you reach in and you do their feet in the same fashion that you did their hands and then you ask them to hold one end of the chain for the waist belt and then they grab that and then they spin around and you hold the other end and then when they come back around you grab both and you shackle their waists to use the lock to shackle the waist belt to the chain that goes from the handcuffs from here down to their feet. And then the block guards will open up the door and the detainee will be shuffled out. And then from that point until they get from there until they're locked in the interrogation booth, there's both guards are to have a two points of contact on the detainee at all times. So you walk with your hands, one on a pressure position on their shoulder, which is what they tell us. So you're constantly ready to apply pressure to try to subdue them from behind and then the other is to hold their arm while, while yeah, it's like that. And then you just kind of push them forward and they shuffle and it's a very slow process. And you shuffle all the way to the interrogation booth which is usually through several different sally ports that you shuffle with these. And they've got sandals on there. They always get rocks in their sandals. Like oftentimes people drag them. I never dragged. I was always very polite about the whole thing for bashful and embarrassed about the process. After my first encounter, I had a totally different tact with the detainee. So it was all yeses bear pleases and thank you's and trying to be as polite as possible. 

Interviewer: Some people drag them. 

- Yep. 

Interviewer: Because detainees resisted being. 

- Walking, yeah. Usually after being earthed, they would resist 'cause sometimes they could resist going to reservation and that's what they called the interrogations reservations. So they would resist going to those. So then they would be earthed and taken out anyway and then take into their interrogation anyway. And if that was the case, then they'd just be dragged along the stones. I've seen, I've dragged people along the stones before. 

Interviewer: Where dragging mean that they're on all floors (indistinct) 

- No you hold them by their arm and you drag them and their legs dangle and ride along the rocks. 

Lady: Is there a translator there? 

- Yes. I've heard that they're bad. I heard that they're not very good at what they do but there's translators for every language in the camp. 

Interviewer: And when you got to the interrogation room, did you take the detainee inside the room? Is that part of your job? 

- You take them in and you do what we call short shackling where you shackle their feet cuffs and their handcuffs to an eyeball lifting plug that they screwed into the door. So it'll be on the floor. And then they, sometimes there'll be a chair there, there's different procedure for what's in the room when you get there. And usually you're told in advance, like when I was, I'll get to this later, but you're told how to leave them in advance. And then so oftentimes you would sit them down on the chair and then shackle them to the point where their arms will be down like this and they'll just kind of hang or there'll be no chair and you just shackle them and they just kind of continuously do this weird repositioning, trying to find a comfortable spot but there is no comfortable spot 'cause if you fall back any which way, you're pulling against the shackles, which cut into your hands. So I've seen a lot of people with like really you get a lot of cut risks, a lot of risks like wounds, scabs and shit on people's wrists. And especially people that they interrogate in this fashion for a long period of time often 'cause they do, it's like some people never get interrogated down there, some people get interrogated every day and some interrogation are like good interrogations where they can smoke a hookah. There was a lot of talk about porn, about like they would get McDonald's and then there's interrogations where they'll sit in a freezing cold box with like music blasting at them for 12 hours in a row. They'd just sit in there with music. And then at the end of it, the interrogator would, well we would never actually see what would go on inside the booth 'cause once you're done shackling the detainee floor, that's it, you're done. You're job over, you go, you turn in the keys to those shackles to the escort control and then you wait for another call. That's it. They shut the door and there's rooms where the cameras work, there's rooms where the cameras doesn't, there's people that monitor those cameras. That's a whole nother assignment is to monitor the interrogation buildings but the intero. 

Interviewer: How do you know what when an interrogation if (indistinct) 

- No, we don't know. We didn't have no idea what goes on interrogations. 

Interviewer: And did you monitor the cameras in the internet? 

- Nope, but this, I know several people that did and no one ever reported anything extreme, like I mean more extreme than just the general idea of like that this room is freezing cold and that you're short shackled to the floor for 12 hours which is pretty fucking extreme but I never heard of anybody saying like there were dogs in there, that this person was being whipped, but those were the rooms where their cameras didn't work. So I mean, when they're there, when you could monitor the interrogations, then there was nothing to monitor. The interrogators knew that that would be a video friendly interrogation and then there's not video friendly interrogation, so. 

Interviewer: Did you pick up the detainee after the interrogation take him back to his cell? 

- It's not necessarily the same team that picks them up. It's basically like any team that's available at the time 'cause interrogations are that's big business in Guantanamo, constantly rotating, constantly doing something. You're not, there are times where you're sitting around sometimes, but most of the time it's like, eventually that my job was to be the dispatcher of the escort teams, so. 

Interviewer: Did you ever pick up someone after an interrogation? 

- Yes, yeah. 

Interviewer: Could you describe what you saw after you picked him up? 

- Well, I mean, there is, again something is like very normalized behavior. It's happened in a bunch of different ways. It's like, I remember talking to one guy about how they said, I mean, every week they would tell this guy, his name is Triple Nickel. That's not his science name. It's Isiah 7555 and every week he would, he was a Christian Muslim and he was a Christian dude. So it's kind of weird. He spoke good English. He used to be a drug mule and basically they'd take him in. I assumed that he would just ride a bunch of people out and then they'd tell him, he'd go home next week. And every week when you go back, it's just like so sad because he's like, they telling me I'm going home, I'm gonna go home. And he never lost that hope. It was like the joke of the whole year. We were there is like, is Triple Nickel's still going home, you know? So sometimes there's that weird sense of like what the are these guys doing playing around with these people like this, you know they're not going anywhere. Triple Nickel's probably still down there. Like, well, actually it probably got rid of him because it was, we all had kind of a general opinion consensus that he wasn't worth a diamond as far as intelligence was worth 'cause he told us everything that he would have told them. I mean, he's very forward about just being like, oh yeah I know I told him that this guy's brother was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, man I don't understand what you're saying, but that's. 

Interviewer: What, did you see anything else when you picked up 

- Pretty people that were pretty broken? I mean, I remember picking up a lot of people that looked like they were fucking dead afterwards. Like that, especially the long ones. That's another time when people get dragged back to their cells is when they're just like done, exhausted, burned out, got bigger problems than you. And they're in a whole nother world. It's weird. You can just, it's like dragging a ghost around. It's not, they're just broken people. 

Interviewer: Did you ever see any juveniles while you were in? 

- I did see the young man, the person who was brought in when he was 14, Omar Katar is his name, Katar. I saw him on several occasions, I never escorted him. I know that he had a lot of emotional issues and I know that he was in the camp that my friend worked in, which was camp four which is supposed to be like a softer camp until he was exposed that he was being brutally raped, regular basis by other detainees and then I never saw him after that again. 

Interviewer: How did you get that? 

- What? 

Interviewer: How'd you get that? 

- Well, at first it came about from a joke from my friends who worked in the camp. He said that he'd seen two men 'cause they're open bays in camp four, there were 10 people sleeping in the same bay. I think it's 10 or 12. He said he saw two dudes having sex. And he's a very conservative dude. So he, I apologize for the frankness of the story, but he opened up the mic on the radio 'cause he's got a radio that goes to every, like into the gay and he just yelled faggots, faggots, faggots, and they stopped. And as he's explaining this story, he's already in like point of disgust. So then he said when the situation, like the dudes separated and he kind of realized that the person that was the recipient of the sexual act was this kid who was like 15 at the time and was exhibiting like really intensely like negative behavior. So he like this guy that hit at first, like thought that it was just two dudes having sex with each other in the base kind of started to realize that this kid was probably being molested like frequently. And that he was like showing every sign of being like a total, like it's really fucking as psychology as well as the fact that he'd like lives in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and has since he was a young adolescent. Has been detained since he was like 12 and then. 

Interviewer: Did you report them? 

- No. 

Interviewer: Why not, do you think. 

- That's gotta be scratched his name, please but can't use his name. He's a really good friend of mine and I would never drag him into anything that I've chosen to do. This gig is a little on the dangerous side how the paperwork floats. And none of my friends are anxious to be out where I am with it, so cool. But that, no, it was never reported. It was later realized and dealt with I think it was probably a psychologist that or it came out in an interrogation or something of the sort and he was moved. I think he was moved into the psych block or something like that but he was moved into a place where he was a nice isolated solitary confinement for the rest of my deployment there and since then I have no idea. 

Interviewer: Did you see any other, did you see your a mistreatment, any kind of mistreatment while you were walking through? 

- The blocks through the camp? Yes, lots of it. Like I said, the IRFs are where the bulk of it happens. I mean, there's like all kinds of verbal abuses, things like that. I mean, all day, every day, like you can just assume that there's, I mean massive quantities of verbal abuse happening. They're always physical abuse, saw it regularly. I'm not gonna say it was the rules. I'm not gonna say that everyone did it. I've learned a lesson about that. I don't know how to exactly quantify exactly how much it happened. All I will say is that there is a high capacity for excessive amounts of violence during the extraction, cell extractions. And that that's where most of the soldier on detainee violence occurs. That's, and, but then there's a lot of other casual kind of violence taking away items from them like comfort items and a lot of psychological games that are played in that camp as well. So but everything, it all reduces down to a dialogue about what people constitute as like torture or excessive amounts of violence. And like in the one camp you've got, these are terrorists taking away their corps is such a big deal. And then in the camp that I like to be considered a part of is that these are human beings that have never been proven guilty of anything. So the idea of limiting them to just to corp is insane. 

Interviewer: Can you give us an example of an earth that you either videotaped or did you participate in any. Did you ever wear. 

- I never went into a cell ever. I do not really want to discuss this in great detail. A lot of, I have memory issues about the things that I've seen in earths or a lot of them a lot of images coming to my mind and I don't really want them in my head, and I don't, man, I don't really like thinking about them a whole lot. I've seen people be kicked in the face repeatedly. And I mean, I'll only speak to the things that I've specifically seen. I know that a lot of things happened outside of my view but I'm not going to use that as testimony in a real way. What I have seen is people being kicked in the face, excessive amounts of punching, way excessive usage of OSI spray would be the number one thing I would say instead of like OSI spray is to be used as a one second verse across the bridge of the nose. And I've seen whole cans of it sprayed in the whole block. The lieutenants that would just walk down the block just spraying the whole can as if it was like an aerosol freshener into the cells. There's a few more, I don't really wanna go into it though. I think that should do, that those have occurred. 

Interviewer: And sometimes you videotape some of those you said. 

- Yes, later when I got into the DOC, part of my responsibilities were videotaping these. Every everything like this is videotaped for transparency purposes. What happens to those films? I don't know who they're transparent to, I do not know. Whether or not they could be used as, if I were to file a complaint, still, could I do that? And could I, is that what those films are there for, is like egregious usages of violence. I assume that's what they're there to stop but they're never referenced. I've never heard them referenced. I've never heard anybody speak of them. I've never heard them brought into the legal side of things. 

Interviewer: Where do they go after you've filmed them, where do that go? 

- They're taped onto little cassettes and then I would file the cassettes into a filing cabinet and then they would just sit in a filing cabinet. 

Interviewer: And did people ever pull them out and watch them? 

- No, I don't think so. 

Interviewer: And were they labeled (indistinct) 

- I don't even know who is responsible for the, no, they're not really labeled all that well, either they just have a date on them, as far as I know, as far as I can remember is like we'd use the same footage, the same tape for a lot of different earths and then like, we would just collect the tapes until they filled up and then we would use another tape and that it would just have the start date on it and then at the beginning of each earth on the film, it would be everybody, we would go through and everybody that's in partaking in it would say I'm the number one man, my name and my social security today's date. And then the next person would say, I'm number two, my name social security today's date. So that was their means of accountability. But then the thing that happens with these videotapes is that when there's an earth, there's like 15 people that come to the spot. And whenever I would go with the camera, I remember the first time I went out and like, my NCO was like, all right, make sure that you just kind of be, like kind of forgiving about this. I don't know how to say it exactly how he told me to go into the situation but basically you were saying, if it gets crazy, don't videotape what they're doing. Like so, and then I got to the situation, never been trained on what to do and I realized that they had shouldered all of these people, the medics and the officers and the platoon sergeants had shouldered me to the back and this was, and it was looking like, it's this is like crazy block riot situation that's going on 'cause it's like, it's during the period. I think that this was during, when we were trying to take, we were taking pants away from people on Romeo block and that was crazy, crazy, people share everywhere. They had to build plastic. They put plastic things on the sides of the cells in Romeo block 'cause it was a literal shit storm. Like, I mean, just like people that were working the blocks said that it was like feces and pee just spraying across the blocks all day long just like a constant bombardment of it. And I remember trying to get into that space and everybody I realized I was being like really shouldered out like that. It was, they were making it impossible for me to get in there. So I finally was just got like really assertive for once and I was just like, get out of my way. Like I've got a responsibility. So I pushed the Lieutenant to the side which I was later reprimanded for pushing an officer. And then, but then somebody stood up for me. So, but I kind of got up and I had to like reach the camera up and I twisted the thing down and I had to get this like top-down view over the people's heads plus with an earth you're talking about five grown soldiers in riot gear and a detainee inside of a five foot by eight foot space. That's six people, it's a six person party inside of a cell. It's already occupied by a toilet and a bed and you know all their other stuff. So when all their other stuff, not like they had that much stuff to occupy it with, but. So it's a lot of commotion that goes on in those situations. And it's really like, you can't see much during the camera except you see five dudes doing that and then you know that that's like, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've videotaped that where it's just like pummeling, people being fucking pummeled after during these things that long past and then there's always the little kicks and jabs and stuff too. 

Interviewer: And then what happens after they get pummeled? 

- Either they go to wherever they were supposed to go or whatever was supposed to be taken from them is taken from them and then they go back into the cell. Their hair is shaved. That's one thing that they do, is they take them out into the rec yard and they shave their hair off and then bring them back in. It's kind of like a mark of the hoofed is the shaved head, but poorly shaved head 'cause they'll leave patches of hair all over the place long, strands of beard. They'll shave at their beards, which is obviously that like way against the rules. Later they cracked down on shit like that and they started saying like, no, that's really unprofessional, you know? Like they picked and choose what they would say was too, that's too crazy for this place but. 

Interviewer: Did you ever see anybody water hosed? 

- We had hoses on the blocks and I know that we used to like kind of playfully spray the detainees every once in a while. I'm really hoping that that's still a playful memory and I've never thought about it as like, holy shit why are hosing these people. But I mean, it's just like a garden hose. And I mean, it's really hot there too. So I don't know a lot of times when they were playing and 'cause not everything is super intense, crazy violent there all also, everything like basically I'm just pointing out the egregious errors in this, a lot of times like just totally peaceful, whatever you're doing your thing, I'm doing my thing. Especially after we got into the the vibe of the place. At first people got out a lot of aggression and then for the other eight months of the year, you're just kind of doing a job. So there were playful times too. And I remember people talking about spraying the detainees with hoses in the rec yards, 'cause they like asked for it or like joking and like spraying inside the cells. And I really hope that those stories were as positive and friendly and jovial as they struck me because I would hate to think that that situation was yet another guard story of somebody like walking through the cell's spraying. And I could see that being an issue because if you spray the Catan or Quran Catan, sorry we've been playing a sport camp, settlers of Catan anyway. But if you spray the Quran with water you'd probably start a shit show also, but. 

Interviewer: Why was everyone's pants being removed? 

- 'Cause we were giving them shorts instead of pants, pants were too much of a responsibility for them. I don't know. 

Interviewer: That's what you think? 

- These are just those crazy, you know just like crazy rules that come from on high. Like the kernel makes some half fast wild decision in the middle of the day. And then all of a sudden a new paperwork is out and we have to route through a whole block or a whole camp to get some item back from people 'cause he is or giving them something 'cause he's feeling either generous or like a tyrant. So it's like once or twice a week, there'd be a new thing introduced or taken back. It's a constant ebb and flow of things. If they didn't provide us with reasons to go in and have them, then we'd provide our own by making situations that we knew they would react to, so. 

Interviewer: You were saying that you wanted long pants to replace them with shorts. 

- Yeah. 

Interviewer: That's understood. Did you ever see any force feeding or an hunger strike? 

- No, I heard of hunger strikes, yes. People, like people very frequently would not eat and hand back their food a lot. But like I said, we never had like a one-on-one relationship with any detainees 'cause of how we traveled through the camps. So, and camps, there's multiple camps and they would rotate you through the camps as well. So you never really got a feeling for like, oh this guy is hunger striking all the time or not. They'll be in their notes. if you're supposed to say, you're supposed to type it into the computer whenever a detainee does anything of note. And if they're not eating or if they've handed back a full meal then that's something that you would put into the computer. A lot of people don't do that shit though. I mean, a lot of people were just like, whatever just throw it in the garbage, fine. They don't wanna write something in the computer. 

Interviewer: And you saw, I never saw a force feeding. You were never in the medical clinic? 

- No, nope. But I know it happened. I mean, I've talked to enough detainees from them, they've been forced fed. 

Interviewer: They would tell you that? 

- Yeah, but that's all gathered from like Gerald Omari and Marvin begging Omar to guys who all said that they were forced fed at some point in time or the other, so. 

Interviewer: Did you ever observe doctors in the cells at all? You said there was a medic. 

- Yeah, there's medics and there's psychs and then there's, the doctors make the rounds every day and ask about complaints and set up schedules for people to go to the hospital or to the clinic. There's two different things in the camp, the clinic in the hospital, clinics for like a little day to day shit. And the hospital is where they had like, I think there's two people. What'd they call, they called one the guy from oh shit. Timmy, they call him Timmy. I don't know. He was beaten so severely in one of the camps that he was rendered completely physically and mentally retarded. And he was like hooked up to life support in the hospital all the time. I don't know when this happened. It was before we came, he was like a camp legend. He was just some detainee that was just totally broken. And we were just keeping him alive in the camp. 

Interviewer: You never saw him. 

- I did see him once. 

Interviewer: You saw him when hooked up on life support? 

- Yeah, I was in the hospital one time. I mean, it's not like crazy life support. Like, I mean, it's just like, I think they just feed him with tubes and stuff. It's not like respiratory. I think he's still conscious, just super, super fucked up. 

Interviewer: And people told you that it was the result of being beaten. 

- Yeah, that was word on the street. But total rumor, we couldn't, we had no way of checking these things, and the detainee hospital has a top secret file clearance too. So you can't get information about detainees that are in the hospital as well even when I worked in the DOC, the detention operations center, where I had access to basically all the detainees information that they would allow, there was a whole other tier to that system that I could not access in the hospital, anybody in the hospital was one of them. So I couldn't get any information about that. I remember being really bummed out 'cause I liked researching the detainees and seeing what was going on but that was really limited to the guard notes. We didn't get any of the interrogation notes or like these files that the were just released. That's all stuff that was out of our hands. 

Interviewer: Could you tell us what the detainee operations center is? 

- It's the DOC, detention operations center. It is where, it's basically the hub of information for everything that happens in the camp 'cause you've got an alphabet of blocks A through I think there's a Zulu block. There might just be a Yankee block. I think there's a Zulu block, I can't remember. And camp five and camp six and camp Guana and all of these different things gather information. Like that's the purpose of the campus to gather information and to monitor the detainees. So all of that information routes back into the detention operations center which takes that information, organizes it, edits it and also has the job of keeping up communications with the auxiliary operations of the unit like the tower guards, the infantry that would patrol around the camp, the infantry reaction forces that would like, that if the camp was like really crazy, they would call in like a big assault force to kind of just like take the camp over again. Never happened but it's like a theoretical, could happen. And you know there's a quartermaster where that has guns and everything. So basically, and all of the food that goes to the camp. It's basically like every operation, it's paperwork folk, it like comes through the DOC and is rerouted to whatever particular office that needed to be rerouted from. And that is largely a computerized system. And due to the charms of the modern war that everything's run by computers and the NCO the non commissioned officers and the officers are all older people that in 2004 didn't even know how to use fucking computers. So they realized that they had a whole bank of things that they didn't know how to operate and they basically made a call out to the units and said, send us your nerds. We want all of your computer nerds, your geeks, like if they know how to use the computer, send us your 19 year old freaks, we want, we need them. So I was gathered up in a minute. My Charlie battery was like, we got you guy. And they sent me there. I interviewed with the NCO in charge there. And then that was my new job. 

Interviewer: And what was your job then? 

- I learned from a guy who ran the thing before. And it was basically to just do everything. I mean, you're on every hour, you're making radio checks, you're playing over the loudspeakers. You're playing the call to prayer on time. You're making phone checks with the blocks, your radio checks to the block, making sure that radio communication is operating throughout the camp. You are fielding questions and you're the standard operating procedure guru of the camp. Like basically, like I had to know that thing inside and out about it. So like when they called me, I could say, well the rule book says this and the rule book says that, but then there was a dozen different varieties of the standard operating procedure at the same time. The detention operation center had an updated version and the blocks had all the old paper versions. So it's like, so there was all these misconceptions that went on and it changed. Like I said, like the commander of the camp loved to release memorandums of new rules, amendments to rules and stuff like that. So, I mean, there was a standard opera operating procedure and then there was like 2.5, which is like a whole other book of amendments to the whole thing and like things that work, things that don't work. And then, oh, sorry. 

Interviewer: Do you wanna ask the question? 

Lady: Next time. 

Interviewer: (indistinct) 

Lady: (indistinct) 

Interviewer: Okay. 

- Yeah, I think, well, so I'll finish breaking down the operations of the DOC and then there's another section which is escort control, separate office, and that's what I just explained earlier. The escort teams, they all sign up at the beginning of a shift. They receive a radio, the escort control person signs for everything in that room, all the keys, all the radios, all the shackles, everything. This is the military man. You lose it and you're online. And the yeah, then. 

Interviewer: You were the central person for a lot of this? 

- Yeah, either in the DOC. When I worked in the DOC, I was a central person there, but there are still NCOs, NCOs there that do that job. I was only the central person for like operating the computers. All the decision-making, all that went to the up and ups. I was just the person that they said, log this in the computer. If this is the USS enterprise, I'm like, I don't know what the checkoff, like I'm just with my little computer, like putting things in, not decision-maker just making the radios work, and doing stuff and filing the papers, not decision-making. And then in the escort control side, it's all basically just fulfilling the expectations of that job. I don't know how to explain it so, so much, but. So those are the two major functions of that. And then that office, we shared that office with all the command and the whole camp, command, Sergeant Major Mendez and Colonel, oh God, we went through two generals 'cause I came when Miller was there and then Miller left and then there was some other guys that were a cowboy hat for a while. Thought he was real awesome weirdo, fucking weirdo. And he was only there for a little while. I think he was hood. No, it's not hood. I don't know. And then there was Colonel something who was just this frumpy old dude from Ohio who just looked like, he just sat at his desk. He was at the, always at the end of the hall. Every day I walked in and I will see him and he was just sitting down there and was just like, like, so it's like just bummed out. Like he was just like I don't know. I felt like we had a real special connection with him. And even if he didn't know that we had it, like I felt like somewhere we were on the same page because he just looked really resentful. He was a National Guard guy that like, I feel like he was like, kind of had the feeling like he had gotten pinned into this and had become like the fall guy. Like they knew that this shit was too super whack and they just needed some random replaceable officer to stick in there. And he got rank. I mean, he got up to general in that office but he didn't do shit and he never left the office. He just sat back there and moped all day. I think, I mean, I saw him pick up a pen like a half dozen times. I don't know what his job was. Command Sergeant Major Mendez ran everything 'cause he loved his job. Loved it, loved everything about it. Loved yelling at us Loved, he loved causing pain for detainees and soldiers alike. It was like if they hadn't built Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I don't know what that man would have done with his life. Oh, it probably would have just continued working at the prison that you worked at beforehand with the military. So, but he was made for it man. That guy, he's my nemesis. I hate him. I hate him more than anything. Spawn of Satan on the planet. 

Interviewer: Did you meet with Miller? 

- I mean, meet like as much as me, there's as an officer, as a general of Miller's caliber is gonna have in like a specialist that's just working in the office. We pass by a couple of times and I'm kind of a weird person. I have a weird bill, didn't fit in, in the military. I also have trouble controlling my mouth. So because of the close operations and because he was in the same office, a lot of like our weird personal stuff would spill out and I'd get a lot of, kind of like there'd be a lot of weird memorandums that would come in about stuff that I would do or that was kind of seemed specifically directed towards my personality disorder from him. So he would address the issue of me, but we never like met. So I think the only time we talked to each other is in the chow hall when I begged and pleaded him once a month to put vegetarian food in there, which he never did. So I picked up a habit of starving myself while I was down there. Well that, and the responsibility of being signed for 40 radios and 40 sets of shackle keys which are the same colors, the dirt. And if you lose them, then everything stops. Everything, whole camp shuts down. No sally ports open, nobody goes anywhere. Everybody gets fully inspected and it's all my fault. So if I left for half an hour to go to lunch and somebody misplaced his keys, that's it, that's like it. I mean that level of responsibility caused such a huge, I don't know, man, I still like can't touch a pair of keys to save my life. Like if you put keys in my hands, like all I can think about is them is keys. And I haven't, it's just, oh man, that's really wild. 

Interviewer: Change all the locks, if you lost the keys. 

- No, 'cause it's a generic lock key thing for the handcuffs and for the, they would have to get new handcuffs, new shackle things like, but I mean, it got down to the point one time where they were checking in toilets and they'd shut down the camp for like a couple hours. I know we were extended there and people were hating me, hating me. And I was like total line with a command Sergeant, Major Mendez and he's screaming at me, he's like, I'm gonna lose everything over losing these keys. And the detainees are gonna get out of their shackles and killed guards. And it's all gonna be my fault and it all the way on my head. And it's all my responsibility and I'm such a shit bag. And then I go into my office and take all that anger out on all of the people that I have the authority to take my anger out on, which I shouldn't have 'cause most of them aren't ranked me, but call them in one by one and be like, you find me these keys you shit bag. Well, I mean like that's how the military works. One person yells at you. You immediately take it to the next person that you have the authority to yell at and yell at them. And it's that's you pass it on? 

Interviewer: Do you wanna (indistinct) Do you wanna take (indistinct) 

- No, I'm good, I'm kinda good on everything. If you guys want a break. 

Interviewer: No bro. 

- [Man With Low Voice] We've got about nine minutes. 

Interviewer: Okay, well let's, if you wanna ask your question. 

Lady: When you do respond, could you look at the camera? 

- Mhm. 

Interviewer: Or look up here. 

- Okay. 

Lady: I had a question when you said early on when you were grabbed by the one around prisoner and you've mentioned that you've spoken to him subsequently, could you describe a little bit about that, how that went and how it came up and kind of relationship (indistinct) 

- That kind of unfolds into a super large question 'cause that gets into like, oh yeah, that kind of unfolds into a super large question 'cause that gets into how I got involved in anti-war activism after I got out of the military and then how that, how I was contacted and you know it took years to set that situation up in which I met those people. So I think it will probably work more organically to work towards that later if that's okay. Like to work on a timeline 'cause I feel like while we're talking about the get more stuff I'd kinda like to get that over in this chunk and not have to continuously reference back to it. 

Lady: Another question is you mentioned that when you saw the interrogator, she never went into the room. Were those interrogators non-military and did you ever interact with those interrogators outside the interrogation rooms? 

- Yeah, they're, all of the military, all of the interrogators are non-military. If they are military, then they wear civilian clothes, Hawaiian shirts, almost gaudy nonmilitary types. And I do, I worked with, when I was an escort control, I worked very closely with them. They would come into office, they knew me. They called me Chris, they'd come in and they'd be like, hey man, here's my reservations for the day. They give me their list and then I'd have to write that out into my big list. Each interrogator would come in, they all work with different organizations, different countries, different, like there was a German guy there. Like there were people that I didn't even understand what political affiliations they had to anything and they wouldn't explain it. And that so, I had top secret clearance so I thought that I was free to ask questions from people but it's very not free to ask questions from people but, yeah, so there are a lot of non-military, a lot of CIA types, a lot of, I think probably FBI but I don't remember too much FBI. What did they say? The No Such Agency, NSA, then there's the, I think there's even contractors down there who do like psychologists, like people that are kind of like unaffiliated, like really weird loose relationships with the interrogation process. Yeah, and they were all, there was one guy that was like a brick share house big white dude with like 80 style handlebar, mustache all poofy, real jovial like come in and he'd kind of like, hey, what's up man. And he'd shoot the shit if you will. But then when on the camp was that he was a monster in the interrogation room. Like people really had built up for that guy a big reputation of being like a little bit of a bone breaker and like a real intense interrogator. So that kind of scared me. And then there was a lady who was like this really sexy blonde, like 40-ish woman. And then supposedly she was the one that like kind of sexually harassed the detainees. I've heard a lot of like people being touched in their genital areas by women. And I think that was the lady that did that style of interrogation more likely 'cause women make Muslim men uncomfortable not, oh, wow, that was a really shitty thing to say, not accurate but women and Muslim men have their own relationship and a non Muslim woman being really forward and sexually aggressive with them makes them really uncomfortable. And you know, they definitely played with those borders there, so. 

Interviewer: How do you know that? 

- Well, like detainees telling us, detainees complaining about things, that her general makeup and demeanor and presence would suggest that because she dressed very erotically seductively which is I'm gonna say dangerous for lack of a better term around the soldiers as well because there was also a lot of rape that happened in Guantanamo soldier on soldier rape. And so to have like a very scantily clad woman walking around a place with all uniformed, aggressive men and a few women, there's very few women there but a lot of combat arms type men is a dangerous situation. So I knew that. And also she was a professional so I knew that like she had to be dressed up like that for a reason, that's part of. And that's how everything is there. Everything's for a reason, nothing happens haphazardly, even the Hawaiian shirt is there for a reason that you know everything about their demeanor is there for some kind of psychological game. That's probably the end for that tape, right? 

Interviewer: Yeah let's take a break and then come back, any questions? Then we can. 

Lady: (indistinct) 

Interviewer: Okay. You're ready? 

- Mhm. 

Interviewer: Okay, you were saying some things about the interrogators and about the woman who was as you described seductive and could you tell us a little bit more about what your impressions were about the interrogators if there's anything that (indistinct) 

- I mean, they were just, it's hard to explain, in a place like that, they're the superheroes of the camp, they're the people that are getting, they're people that have the picture that we were all missing. So we were all kind of, we kind of mythologized their position amongst the camp 'cause it's like these people know what's really going on, what we're only guessing at. So a part of me definitely wanted that information and their authority was attractive that they were completely outside of any rules or regulations or guidelines or answering to anyone they talked to Sergeant Major Mendez as if that he was their personal assistant, like run off and get me this now, kind of behavior. So they kind of asserted a very like cool in charge. Like they were like clearly the people that really ran the camp if they wanted something, they got it. We were all there to do what they wanted. If they wanted anything to happen to a detainee, we made it happen, so. 

Interviewer: And you said some of them were foreign, like you said you saw a German. Was he interviewing only people who spoke German or was he? 

- I don't have that kind of, I didn't keep that close. I mean, when I was organizing the interrogations, there's 50 of them in a day and on top of that I've got to rotate everybody out through chow. So the Sergeant major wants the trash cleaned out of, wants soldiers to walk along and pick the garbage out of the concertina wire along the camp. I got other fish to fry. I can't sit around and be like, so this guy wants this guy from this country. It must be for this reason. Like all of my political, like piecing things together, like, who's this, why do they want this guy all got swamped out by just being overly exhausted on their responsibility front. 

Interviewer: So I just wanna go back to the woman who you said was seductive. Detainees kind of told you that there was some inappropriate behavior from her? 

- They told my friends and my friends told me. So it's uncertain weather and ow much came from them? How much came from my guard buddies out. It was definitely amongst us. We said terrible things about her. We assumed that she had sex with them. Like people regarded her as if she was hooker, and then people would back that up with things that the detainees would say about that. And then from, and then upon further hearing more about detainee stories as my research has gone onwards into what they have said about what happened there, I know that they, that a lot of them talk about being sexually assaulted by a woman interrogator and she's the only woman that I know there, so. 

Interviewer: And was she there the whole time you were there? 

- She was there the whole time I was there. All the interrogators that I knew that were there were there before we came and they were there when we went and they were probably still down there. 

Interviewer: And when you talked about rape at Guantanamo, what were you talking about exactly when you said. 

- The women soldiers were raped. Women in our units were raped. 

Interviewer: Five soldiers? 

- Yes, five people in my unit, people in other unit, men in my unit and other units. 

Interviewer: Did they report it? 

- I think occasionally it wasn't, it was probably squash. I only knew one woman that had specifically told me that she had been raped by people in my unit and that I never reported that, and she never reported that, and. 

Interviewer: Why do you think? 

- About not reporting it? She knew she wouldn't be taken seriously and I agreed with her. Not, they all operated under, we were the least of their concerns and our problems were not to not, I mean it's all a matter of chain of command because we were there as JTF-GTMO So we would have to report to JTF-GTMO. So if you're gonna report something like that to that camp, it's all very small and these women work in these units, everybody would know immediately, I mean it would be if you dropped that thing, if it got outside of the chain of command, it's gonna be a huge issue all in, so that it never became a huge issue means that those women that did bring those charges up were not taken seriously. And from further communication with that woman that I know that was there, that was raped, I know that she knows of other women that were raped while they were there. And I do not, I am not surprised by the general behavior and the general mentality of the people that I saw there that that is the case. I oftentimes felt very sexually threatened in that I might be raped. I was very, because I am, I don't fit the normal manly build of the soldier, I was oftentimes kind of treated like a woman or more realistically, just a gay soldier. My name was basically faggot while I was in the military and I had a lot of rape threats. I had a lot of really creepy things said on top of just, I mean, pounds and pounds and pounds of daily verbal abuse that I learned to just accept. And there were several situations. One time I was duct taped to my bed by people in my unit and I thought that I was going to be raped. I thought that I was being raped the whole time. And I was left in my bed duct-taped naked to my bed. And I was late for work the next day until my roommate came home and unduct taped me. 

Interviewer: Why did that happen? 

- They got drunk. They didn't even remember that they did it the next day or they'd never admitted to it. I took it immediately to my command 'cause I was punished upon getting to work about why I had showed up late. And then, so I immediately said, well my guys in my unit did this and my superiors in the DOC said, well then we're gonna have to talk to your command and then it just all disappeared. And apparently they'd done it to like three other people on our unit. 

Interviewer: How did you manage to survive during your time in Guantanamo where you personally lived? 

- I stayed in my room and slept and dreamed. I created two, there was two different worlds. There's the world outside and then there was the world inside and I'd learned to take the world inside of myself as a totally separate and pristine environment that I worked very hard to keep separate and I became really detached from reality and lived inside of a dream of what I wanted to do when I got back and what I basically art thinking about writing and writers and goals of my life. I became very self-centered and very focused on the beautiful things that I wanted to do with my life after GTMO and that's how I survived. 

Interviewer: Can we go back to the translators? 

- Yeah. 

- Everybody thoughts about the translator that you saw. 

- Not more than that. They're just kind of run of the mill translators that some of them didn't seem super adequate. It seemed like a lot of times they caused trouble more than helped it that they were not necessarily on one side or the other but that they could occasionally be on either side. I've seen it on both ways where it seemed like the translator was hindering the guard's process by favoring the detainee or otherwise but it was, they were oftentimes a third point in communications. They would filter kind of statements. They would save detainees from things that they'd said that are particularly like inflammatory. You could tell like a detainee would be screaming and yelling for five minutes and then the interrogator would go, he says that he wants this in his meals. You know, so it's like, well, it sounds like he said some other things in there. What's all that? And then you'd hear occasional swear words in English come out and none of that would come through it. It's basically like watching a translated film that's been translated really poorly and you're not really getting, 'cause the super emotion on a detainee's face and then the translator is looking at you and just kind of like reducing these three or four or five minute dialogues down to little snippets of what they're saying. So it's a lot of synthesis that happens there too. 

Interviewer: Another question I had for you was about the plane rights that we use. Did you ever scored any detainees and plan or do you know any people in your unit who did? 

- Our unit was tasked to assign people to that special mission? I was not chosen. I was by that time already working in the detention operations center. So no longer fell under my former command. So they couldn't assign me to do anything nor would they, the people that they chose to send were all fairly rough around the edges types, like people that they could expect to keep their mouth shut. They were good soldiers. They were hand selected by our chain command, people that were definitely insider people with our unit, people that our commander trusted. And one of my friends was selected to go. And they were all very quiet about it. All I heard when they came back from the mission was that they'd gone to Turkey. A couple of them had sex with hookers. They did a lot of drugs, they drank, but none of them talked about anything that happened except for my friend who told me a few uncomfortable things about the experience, but all he always fought with kind of like, he really believed in what we were doing and that these people were terrorists. And that's kind of just one of those things that we accepted in the lack of communication in our dialogue but he seemed noticeably weirded out by how that whole thing had gone. And more than that, that was kind of the first time that I started thinking, well where did these people go? 'Cause we were also at that same time starting all of these like mock trials too. So it was really confusing 'cause you've got these bullshit courts happening the military tribunals, which are a huge to do. I mean, 'cause they had to take the detainees outside of the camp and I would have to arrange the pistols. They'd have to pick up pistols ammunition and a vehicle to transport the detainee and the detainee would have to be hooded and shackled in a different way and taken in a different uniform. And it was just like, why are we taking one group of people that have gone through no process whatsoever back to their countries and putting other people through this silly trial system that seems broken right off the bat. I mean like the lawyers from these things were all military. I talked to a few of them and it did not seem like they were like, I mean everybody's attitude seemed like these were phony trials made to like kind of what I mean. And once again with interrogators it's like. 

Interviewer: Could we just go back to the plains again? Can you tell me exactly what was uncomfortable about those things. 

- I just heard how they were transported, shackled to the floor. And that I believe that though, that they were beaten while I think that that during that flight those detainees were probably harassed pretty intensely. It was kind of, it sounds like they were given the green light to basically, I mean really do whatever they wanted to, which is really unfortunate 'cause if those people did go back, they were the most innocent of the bunch. They were the people that the government first said was like, okay, we really screwed up with these people. They don't belong here at all, send them back. And there was also a lot of rumors that some of these people had been killed as soon as they went back to their countries, that they would be killed going back to their countries and upon further analysis now in the future, I believe that probably a lot of them probably were killed by their governments because now that I find out about how they were detained, a lot of them were just on lists from like Omar, the guy is a detainee who was only ever on any of these lists because his father and his whole family are basically the precursors to today's Libyan rebels who were anti Gaddafi people. And Gaddafi had said, I don't want these people in my, I don't want them around here. And so that's why they live in England 'cause they were trying to get asylum from Libya and then he'd made some random trip to Afghanistan and got detained there because Gaddafi had said, here's the list of people that I want in cages. And China did the same thing with the Weigers. And so when you take those people back to those countries on planes, they don't want them still. And if they're just sitting there on a tarmac, all shackled up, these places are not the United States of America and they won't hesitate. Look at how they operate. They won't hesitate to put a bullet in the back of somebody's brain on the tarmac, throw you off the side of the ditch and then their problem is fucking over it. 

Interviewer: Did your friends see that happen or you just. 

- They never said anything about it. 

Interviewer: Do you know if the planes had guards on where. 

- They were the guards. 

Interviewer: They were the guards? 

- They were the guards. 

Interviewer: Were they on the same level or were they in a second level, do you know that from? 

- No, it was all gutted. It was a gutted C140, is of C140. C140 rolling down the street. I don't know, it was some old. 

Interviewer: And they just stand there as guards? 

- Yes, and then all the detainees were short shackled to the ground, hooded with goggles on, full transportation mode, which is really horrible. That is a super long flight and the traveling accommodation, they just pissed themselves. I know that, that I know that my friend that went on that was said that they just peed themselves where they sat and that it was really uncomfortable to see and that they were sedating them with drugs that they were just, the doctors would just stick them and put them out with whatever on labeled drugs. 

Interviewer: And when they were brought to Guantanamo, do you know anybody who was on any of those planes (indistinct) 

- No, no. 

Lady: How would you know that those people were sent back to their country to be freed? Could any of them been rendered? 

- Anything could have happened? We didn't know anything. The detainees could have been freed or killed or put in another prison or put in another American prison. They could have been sent back to the same camps, maybe they're back in Kandahar biogram or any of these black campsites. They could have, anything could have happened to them. And that's kind of the mystery of being a soldier in Guantanamo Bay is that anything could have happened with these people and anything can happen with them after you come and go. Your job is not to worry about that. Your job is to feed them and to make sure that they don't die while you're watching them. 

Lady: Did you have any encounters where people were put on plane and then the plane never took off? 

- No, that sounds entirely unfamiliar. 

Interviewer: Did you ever hear of Camp Nou? 

- No. 

Interviewer: No, okay. (laughs) 

- Sounds like it was adequately named. 

Interviewer: You've heard. We asked you in the break and you know your initial impressions of the detainees, did you resent them when you first arrived? 

- [Man With Low Voice] First let's (indistinct) 

Interviewer: Okay. (siren whistles) 

- He's driving around the block? (laughs) Sounds like it's all on the same spot. It doesn't sound like it's moving at all. There it goes now, it's getting a little bit more distant. 

Interviewer: Okay, so your initial impression with detainees, I'm gonna ask you, during the break if you had some initial resentment before your attitude changed. 

- I would like to qualify this with the resentment is a natural part of that job. Yes, I was resentful that my life was interrupted because at first I thought that there was a high likelihood that these people probably were terrorists. I wanted to believe very much that we were not being asked to do something totally wrong and that there had to be some reason and that I was just being too liberal and idealistic to think that these people were all innocent. And I did hate the ones that were terrorists. I do still, like, I think that if they're causing violence, I hate them as much as I hate American soldiers that cause violence. I hate them as much as the American politicians and businessmen that cause violence. I resent anybody who is killing for whatever reason. And I do resent the idea of terrorism. It was, the only thing that stopped me from letting that go whole hog and fully resenting them is that they were never proven to be guilty of anything. And I never had any evidence to hold my hand and I'm just principled in that way. I won't hate anybody without being given. So it's very confusing and resentment comes and it goes, some days he resent more than others. Some days you're a tree hugger and some days, I won't lie. There were days where I said and did some pretty awful shit and allowed a lot of awful shit to happen that I didn't challenge because I maybe was getting out my little kicks against them in my own little way. Yes, there was resentment, but more against the soldiers. I resented the soldiers much more and much more clearly and much more violently than I resented the detainees. So if there was resentment against the detainees, I felt much more kindred or kinship with them as well too. 

Interviewer: Why did you resent the soldiers? 

- Because they were rapists. And I had seen enough of their racism and I had been called a faggot by most of them for the last three at that time, three to four years of my life. And I thought that they were dumb and I thought that they were violent and that they had been given the opportunity to be violent and that a lot of them had taken it. And I pretty much say that everything about them. Just about everybody, I hated them all. I hated them for being in the military. I hated me for being in the military for that matter. I wasn't sparing myself from any of this hatred. During this, the person I resented the most was this guy. I mean, I really, really loathed myself during that period of time, so. 

Interviewer: But there was no way out really. 

- No, just the initial way that we discussed already. I mean, other than doing your time and spending your whole year there, but for the detainees, there's literally no way out, instead of waiting for this infuriating legal process to manifest around you when it chooses to. 

Interviewer: Were there other friends of yours who felt the same way as you did who wanted out too? 

- No. 

Interviewer: You were pretty alone? 

- Pretty, I would, yeah. I never made contact with anybody on the terms that we collaboratively thought that what we were doing was wrong. No, I would never expose that. I felt like exposing that would be like walking out into 1940 to Germany and saying I'm a Jewish or I'm a Jew, it's like, I felt very strongly that to express an opinion of distasteful for what was going on with label me as I would either get beaten up or, who knows they're murdered. I could easily, I could name 20 people who would love to kill me, who would love to kill me before I even started doing this stuff, who probably just wanted to kill me from the day they met me 'cause they thought that I was a fag or whatever, there were a lot of people that I was really afraid of. And also really afraid to expose myself is not military, is not masculine 'cause I had to be very sharp and very quick to defend that so that I could keep my buy-in with these people so that I didn't, wasn't always a freak. It took me a lot of, I had to create an entire other persona to be around them. You know this like sharp witted kind of alpha male of an intellect kind of, like I made it very quick that if you came to make fun of me or to deride me that you were probably going to leave, looking and feeling like a fucking asshole for having ever endeavored to do so and I got really good at it. And it was almost impossible to change the behavior when I came back 'cause all I knew how to do was defend myself against people and make them feel like shit. And I was in Guantanamo. Perfect behavioral trait that had application all day, every day at home, really difficult to adjust to my friendships again, and to find lasting relationships. And to this day still, I still find myself very defensive against other people. I can be open for a period of time and then once anything gets towards the real like relationship, I find that that personality is now not so much under my control so much as just a dark part of myself that I'll probably always have, so. 

Interviewer: And you think being in Guantanamo where the military is what helps this develop this kind of personality character? 

- It's the only reason I made it. I would have never been like this otherwise I would. Well, that's not true. I mean, I grew up in the country around a lot of rural, the behavior had developed to a certain degree amongst country boys who had also been calling me a fag since that and a lot of the problem with my unit is that these people were from my local area, I'd known some of them before we even joined the military. I had known some of them since we were five, you know? So it's like, no, I'd already learned how to deal with that kind of repressive behavior, which I wanted very much to leave. I wanted to move to the city. I wanted to be able to be whoever I wanted to be without being criticized about that and the military was just, and that's why for me being activated was such a brutal reality for me. It was that I was gonna be around only these people for a long time. And then they provided me with every, I mean, it was the full validation of everything that I had. Before I thought just had been like selfish weakness on my part of like, I can't play with all these rough edge to boys to now fully hating them for what I saw inside of them and will ultimately see inside of myself as well. It's something that I fight against every day and work against being like, and have always worked against being like is a violent rapist really. 

Interviewer: Did you see rape of any males? Did you hear rape of any? 

- Long connected stories. Like stories with far-flung connections but I know of a gay boy who was in the Navy, who was a medic there and people talked that he'd been raped by infantry soldiers, but not, I mean nothing that was too substantial. 

Interviewer: Do you have any real quick (indistinct) before we move on to. 

Lady: Not just one, most of the soldiers that you were with, were they also National Guard or where do they come from? 

- A lot of soldiers from The National Guard, a lot of soldiers from the regular army, the ones that were from the regular army were from actual MPU units. The ones from The National Guard units were from combat arms units that were quote unquote reclassified as block guards. A lot like us, like tankers or as a unit of tankers. I assume that we were brought in mostly because we were useless as what we did. Our equipment would not let us be artillery men or tankers in Iraq or Afghanistan because the rigors of keeping, you need new tanks and those things, even brand new tanks will break down in the desert all the time. A 1980s tank will not work in the desert at all. So we had no jobs in the global war on terror except to burn trash and to be block guards. And that's what they did with The National Guard is like, devious up, give us all new jobs and fill is cocked throughout the whole global war on terror. Just fill in all these little jobs that they couldn't give to third country nationals. And so there was a lot of national guard there. The Navy deployed a whole like 100 chiefs, all E7s. I don't know what their game plan with that was, like one day there was all of a sudden just a whole bunch of E7 standing around who all were supposed to operate as like normal block guards to do the jobs of what E3s and E4s and E5s. And so here's these people that are used to being all rank and file, and now they're signing up and coming to me every day to be escort teams. And they're, I'm telling them what to do and was typically really to not military about it. The Marines sent people to, and I was not military enough for them 'cause I'd gotten used to people and they'd gotten used to me. So I could kind of just be like, hey, here's this thing, go do this. I've got 150 things to do at any one minute. So I don't have time to stand at parade rest and do the yes Sergeant no Sergeant thing. I'd just gotten rid of it immediately. And people hated it for a while. And then I kind of just charmed my way into the position of just being, it was accepted. I was good at what I did, everybody knew that when I was on, it worked, everything worked, it moved and they just accepted like, all right, he's a share head but whatever, he makes this one place work. It's really crappy job, whatever. So, but these chiefs just never adapted to it, They'd just come in and they'd be like. "You can't talk to me like that." And that's, I'd be like, oh, well, I mean how do you guys handle it in the Navy? You feel free to inform me. I'll stand however you want me to stand and tell you whatever I need to tell you but I still need this person moved from here to here. Like, that's all I'm saying is like this. I didn't come up with this. I didn't make this job, I didn't make this assignment. I just, I'm here, you're here, we're all here, we're all doing what we're supposed to do and now what I'm asking you to do is take this person from here to here. And if you need to be patted on the shoulder, treated like your rank and time is worth fucking anything to me, then I'll do it. I'll do the song and dance. I don't want to but I'll do it for you while you're here. But it just caused endless amounts of drama 'cause I'd forget and then we'd have that conversation over and over and over again. And they'd always dressed me down and do the whole, like they try to put me in front leaning respite, which is pushups. People would be like drop down and give me 20. And then my, I had like a superior NCO who was an E7 who was there to basically handle situations like that to be my flag guard against situations exactly like that. And he'd always just open up the window and he'd be like, that's my art. You don't tell him what to do. So then I'd be like, oh, okay. So he's yours and he's like, yeah, nobody makes him do pushups. The leadership that was directly in charge of me was really fantastic during the whole thing. Basically, they were like my, they were my defenders so that I could be weird Chris, and just get my job done. And they knew that from the get-go that they didn't understand me, didn't wanna deal with me, but they knew that I could do what they needed done and I could do it well and better than anybody else that they could have in there. And I was really smart. They all acknowledged that that's where I should be in this camp. And they just did a really good job of covering up for me during that. So I never really had to deal with the reality that I was otherwise just a totally shitty soldier, not good at what we were supposed to do. 

Interviewer: So could you just describe how it was when you left Guantanamo, a year was up or was there some other reason why you left? 

- Yeah, the year was up, our deployment was over. It kind of just came, it was like we'd all, the date changed a million times. They kept it very loose. It was anywhere from October to December. We ended up leaving in the end of October we found out like two weeks in advance. So from the moment that we found out we were coming home, that every minute was just like that clock just like (groans) ground down to a hall. I remember sitting in that office and just being like, oh God, 12 hours in here. 12 hours is just so long. Psychologically that last two weeks I felt all of that time. I mean, it's not like 12 hours was easy to get through before but there is this kind of like, where else am I gonna be? But then all of a sudden there was like we're going home. So then I knew everywhere else where I could be. And I was, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was like, I'm gonna ride a bike, I'm gonna see women. And I'm like just like be in a place where there was women that are not in uniform was like so exciting to me. And I had a girlfriend online. I was really excited to like go home. She lived in Tennessee. I was pretty sure that we were gonna be in love forever. We were not. 

Interviewer: So did you get, were you then released from the military when you went back home? 

- No, we got three months off after we got home. I got on unemployment, which lasted for six months and then after that three months, we were right back and I'll be in Michigan drilling one weekend a month. And that's how I lived out. The rest of my military experience is, I know I was never promoted, but I was, what do they call it? They call it, like a win year promotion. They changed my job title to ammo team chief. And so all of a sudden I was acting like a Sergeant on an E4s pay, which I hated 'cause I just didn't want, all I wanted to not do was act like a Sergeant. I would've taken the pay, but I didn't wanna act like a Sergeant. So they gave me the worst of both worlds is to pay me like E4 and then give me the responsibility. So, and that was just for like control of the ammunition that we would fire on the howitzers, which is bullshit And I just ended up doing everything myself 'cause I couldn't trust the people around me. One guy was a chronic smoker and there's cordite explosives everywhere, bags, giant bags of stuff that launches 100 pound rounds, 18 miles down the road. So it's like this guy couldn't stop smoking cigarettes around him. I slapped him in the face like a handful of times just being like wake up now, like we are, you could blow us up. I mean, and that was it for just weekends. Lots of anxiety about waiting for my phone calls, like waiting for that next raging bull 'cause it's like, I knew it. I knew it was coming, but we got really lucky in that they detached the rest of our unit. They sent, they only sent half of us to Guantanamo 'cause the other half of us were new enlistees that were in basic while we were gone. And people who had gotten out of this deployment, there's a lot of like, they had a pretty minimal cap. So there was like a whole, everybody that could flee fled. And then while we were gone, we were all like, oh, those shit bags couldn't even come on this deployment. And we just talk endless amounts of shit. And then right when it was coming up for time for us to go, the government was like, hey, other half of the 119 that we left behind, you guys are gonna to Iraq and they split them up and send them everywhere all over to a bunch of different prisons and those guys. So basically our unit was technically deployed until like 2006. We are on some kind of deployment roster. So we got really lucky in that 'cause they sent enough people to Iraq, that was finally like, they wouldn't send our detachment 'cause we were too small. The Guantanamo detachment was too small to fill anything for them but they were doing some wild and wacky shit back then like taking weird little groups of five or six people from different units all over the nation and jamming them into one giant national guard unit, sending them into Iraq and then rebreaking them up into God knows which ways. And sending them all over the place again too. They've been doing some really crazy mobilization cycles with national guards, so. 

- So then you got out in what? 

- 2007. So I had one year of like possible deployment time basically. And as soon as that year came up, I was I was also up for review, for medical review for like where I was at the military does a pre, you get out kind of medical tests. And I went back in and I was like, they started asking me questions, do you use drugs? And I was like, every day I do, I can't stop. Like, I was just honest with them. I was like, I've told you, I told you before that and they were like, when did you tell us this? Like, how has this been on record this whole time? So they go back and they pull out all of my file and they go through it and I can, I'm just watching this guy go through. And he's like, oh my God, oh my God, they deployed you, they deployed you? Like and I was like, yeah, they deployed me man. Like, of course they deployed me. They deployed everybody. And he's like what? They said that they shouldn't. And I was like maybe that's a conversation we should have had back in 2004. Don't you think? Like I was pissed, I was so irate. I blew up on the sky. He sent me back home with a paperwork, a paper that said basically like, we have totally fucked the situation up, this person is undeployable, cannot touch a rifle, cannot touch a weapon, can not touch anything, do not ever like, this, like basically they were just like trying to prepare me to get kicked out of the military on psychological grounds 'cause I had admitted to doing acid and Mescalin and cocaine and mushrooms and weed smoking every day before I'd gone to Guantanamo Bay and then continuously put in other psychological things that totally confirmed that I was on a heavy drug diet throughout the entire time I was in the military, that I was suffering from huge issues that I'd had suicide attempts. All of this stuff is in my pile of papers. And nobody had ever realistically looked at it and said this person is undeployable. They just always said, we need the bodies. You're fucking going. You're they'd call me a bitch 'cause I was trying to get out of it. Sorry to use the terms that, but to stick to the reality, I'd prefer to use exactly what they said, you know? So there was a lot of hate about me trying to get out of the deployment. And it was just, it was just. 

Interviewer: Did you see a psychologist in Guantanamo? 

- No, they had. Before I left because of all the paperwork and psychological complaints I've made prior to my deployment, they had said that to be there, I would have to be on medication and seeing a psychologist but that that was my commands responsibility to make sure that that happened and then we got down there. I never followed it up, they never followed it up, I didn't want the pills. So nobody ever did anything with it. Basically. It just got, it was a non, it was a forgotten issue. The only person that checked in on me that cared about this was, it was one NCO who I respect more than anything who is like a golden light of rationality who I think probably was on my page but was really proud of being a soldier. He came from a really kind of trashy family and it meant a lot to him to be a soldier. And he's a really good NCO. And he made me write a list of all the things that I wanted to live for and all of the things that I wanted to do and really took me under his wing and kind of became the one person that was like really, I don't know that really actually cared about that and push me to get into the psychologist's office but then never pushed too hard, but checked in on me. He was really the only NCO or person from our unit that really gave a fuck about it. Everybody else. The only thing that they said when they were presented with the paperwork that came from the psychologist that said that I should not send them was my commander took the paper and the guy next to him, our platoon Sergeant said, what'd you tell him you're gay. And then that's it, that's all that was ever said about it and then my commander basically said, well this isn't gonna fly, I'm gonna deploy you anyway and that's what happened? 

Interviewer: Did people take drugs in Guantanamo? 

- No. I found out later that they did. I was looking like a fiend while I was down there. There was Jamaicans and every Jamaican bus driver, every hair cutter, every person, I was like, yo you got any weed? And then everybody was like, man, you can't, I can't, like there's no way I'm gonna, no, I can't even say anything to an American soldier. Like if I lose this job, I'm fucked man. Like there's no, nobody here is gonna give you drugs. And, but later I heard stories that people had been getting meth and weed shipped in. Meth was a big problem in our unit. And that people were taking like hardcore drugs the whole time that we were there and I'd never known. And everybody knew that I was like a drug fin. So I got, I remember getting really off when I found out that this one guy in our unit had been, he said that he'd been smoking weed the whole time. And I froze the conversation. I was like, what are you talking? Wait, all the time, you had it the whole time. You know that I wanted some, like why didn't you ever say anything to me? And he's like, I thought she'd go crazy, man. I didn't want you to smoke my weed. And it's hard to get it down there. So I didn't wanna like share. I got really pissed off at him. 

Interviewer: So maybe we (indistinct) 

- But sorry, one thing about that, but drinking all the time, booze is cheaper than milk down there. So we drank on the blocks. We drank in the camp. All a lot of people would make cocktails in their camelbacks the backpacks with liquids in them that you can drink from a host. They would come to work with straight whiskey in those things, they would come to work wasted, drunk, that they would get drunk and then do things like duct tape me to the bed, huge drinking problems, huge, a lot of booze in that camp, huge involvement of booze in the violence, booze violence combination thing going on as well. There is a lot of whiskey breath during a lot of those earths. So there is a relationship there. We had way too ready access to booze. 

Interviewer: And nobody seemed to care? 

- Nobody had any, we had no leadership. There was nobody, everything. They broke everything down and split everything up so that nobody, the most you're ever reporting to is like your section chief was probably also a drunk in E5 like one rank above you and the problems were so endemic that it's like you had good NCOs and bad NCOs. And you knew when you were working well that works both ways. Good NCOs being like NCOs that would also be drinking and that you knew you could drink with. And the rosters would be put out in advance. You know who you're working with, you know who is acceptable to do certain things around. So they would plan things that, and the goody two-shoes NCOs were always pinpointed. Nobody wanted to work around them. And they were put with like the units would select them and put them in there, like goody two-shoes little sections and, or try to get rid of them entirely send them to other missions because everybody was weary about having another Abu Ghraib situation where somebody would say like, whoa, flag on the play here. Like we didn't want that. That was always on people's tongues is like 'cause we knew we were doing stuff like it. I mean, I've seen things that look a little bit like those pictures, maybe not as drastic. And we definitely would never take pictures. You'd never get a camera into that place. They'd searched you like, one kid from our unit tried to bring a computer chip in one of the little zip drives, they weren't super popular back then. He tried to bring one of those into the camp and they kicked him out of the camp for a week while they tried to figure out what to do with them and eventually sent him off to work at a different job like, 'cause they made such a big deal about operational security stuff, so. 

Interviewer: You sort of said things similar to have a grade talking about. 

- Just violence is the way we treated the detainees 

Interviewer: Minis that asked you about when you met the detainees outside subsequently and the one man with the one arm. 

- Terrick. 

Interviewer: Terrick, can you tell us a bit about that or how that happened and your experiences then? 

- Yeah, it's kind of a long chain of events like I said. In the winter of 2007 in December, I joined this group called Iraq Veterans Against the War. I'd heard about it, I had a girlfriend at the time. Her name is Jamie, we were together and our relationship was failing 'cause I cheated on her and lied a whole lot. And it just was really like super acting out and like being super crazy like other persona and being really angry and she was like what in the fuck is going on with you? You've got two sides and I can't tell what's going on. You need help. Like she really wanted to work through it with me. And she was the only thing that would like make me see it as like a problem that I needed help with. She was the only person that would make me like actually even deal with the fact that I was a veteran. Other than that, I was just trying to be a hipster. I was just trying to be out of the military and not have to deal with it and not have to think about it and not have to deal with the reality that I'm different than everybody else I see all the time. I wanted to be like them. So I promised her that I would get help. So I started looking around I found this group called Direct Veterans Against the War and I thought, well, we'll check this out, see what's going on. Maybe this will cover 'cause I don't wanna talk to a therapist. I don't wanna talk to a psychologist. I don't want pills. I know I don't wanna go to the VA. I don't wanna be treated like a demographic. I don't want all of this shit. I just want a place where I can talk with people about this. So I went and I met a bunch of other veterans and I realized that, yeah, this is really where I can kind of get my head straight is around other people that are coming from the same place that I can trust that know if not what Guantanamo is all about, what this war is all about. And it's all connected. It's all the same shit is what I saw, is that everybody everywhere saw the same racism and acted under the same constraints as I did basically. And they asked me if I wanted to testify in winter soldier. I don't think that they really understood what was, like what my constraints were with like the legal thing 'cause up until the day of nobody asked me anything. And then right before I was supposed to walk onto the stage, they were in a little line and somebody goes, all right now, so you guys are talking about prison camps, so did anybody ever sign anything like a Non-disclosure Act? And I was like, oh yeah, we had to, we had to sign one of those. And they were like, oh, oh, well you can't go do this. And I was like, try to stop me. Just went out on stage and was like, basically I remember sitting in front of the mirror just like total, like game time. Like I was ready to walk out of there and handcuffs day. I had no idea what to expect when you, I hadn't heard anything about anybody that had like broken the Non-disclosure Act. I hadn't heard anything about what would happen. I could only guess and imagine. And well, the people that I'm talking to, a lot of the same people that put these people on cages in the first place. So I was really kind of like, well what rules do they apply to? Obviously none. So I can't sit here and try to rationalize the well how this beast is gonna relate to me 'cause they could do anything. They have the possibility to do anything that they want with the situation. So I just went and did it and then got really paranoid about how that, like what would happen. I stayed in my apartment with my girlfriend for a couple of weeks staring out the window, and then nothing ever came of it except that people started calling me and they wanted more and more and more interviews. Everybody wanted to get on the Guantanamo Bay thing. So I was like, at first I was so excited, I was like, yes, people wanna know about it. I'll show, I'll tell, I'll do everything I can, I'll express everything I've got, like what a great window. And I feel like I really kind of lost my head during that period because media is really limited to what they want from us to say, what I realized that there's a whole world of things that people want out of this. They want the torture stories, they want their concept of what Guantanamo is to be validated and they want it to be very simple and they want it to be very cookie cutter and precise and they want it to be exactly like they think it is. And I found that I could never explain to people that it's not anything like, you'll never imagine it. It's like trying to imagine what hell is like, it's totally different. You can't imagine what. I spend my life imagining what nine years inside of a cage feels like and I know that I'll never understand that but to a certain existential degree, I feel like I've got a good understanding of what that does to your fucking head, but people outside of that good luck, you've probably spent the most time that I know of anybody like gathering multiple different stories from different angles. And I'm sure you can understand how complicated this whole thing is now. So it's like these conversations don't happen in 15 minutes. They don't happen in soundbites. They don't happen short and sweet and they don't affirm what you think. They open up a whole new world of despair that people don't, I have found don't want it to challenge. Anyway, so long story short, got into this whole world of public speaking and was pretty disillusioned with the whole thing pretty quickly but then I got contacted from (indistinct) by email. And he basically said, hey, I'm a former detainee, I've been released. I live in England and this whole time that I'd been out, like I basically thought nightmare circumstance, worst case scenario I'm on the street and some buddy sees me, I don't remember any faces. So I would never see any, I'd felt like I would never see anybody and go, holy shit, you were a detainee in Guantanamo Bay. Like that never ever crossed my mind that that could happen. And then I got contacted by mom and I was like, wow this is really a chance to like, confront what has become a nightmare to me. Like I really wanna see how this goes. And we started setting it up. I remember he called me one time. And the first time we'd like talked by voice. He called my phone. I was all like drunk. It was 10 o'clock in the morning. I was like waking up with a hangover. And I was like, hello. And he's like, this is (indistinct) And I was like, oh, wow. I remember feeling like a deadness where I thought that a more profound feeling should be. Like that there should be something really magical about this occurrence but that there for me was a certain amount of just kind of white noise, where my emotions should be which is a fairly familiar feeling to me by now, I've felt more than anything, a lack of feeling around a lot of things that I used to know, a lot of feeling for since I've been deployed. And definitely you really felt that with that initial connection and then also when we first met together, I started doing it, and I also kind of felt like something was not clicking in my head emotionally about the matter but I went to England and started to do this tour. It was 2022, two are dates in 24 towns that we were gonna drive around in with Omar and (indistinct) and Sammy L Hodge was supposed to come as well but he was detained, not detained, oh my God, not detained but his passport was denied or his Visa was denied or something like that. And on one of the first couple of nights, we were at the friends meeting hall. I was kind of like acclimating to (indistinct) who was a little cold and distant at the time. not necessarily like the warmest welcoming party I could have imagined and feeling really like an idiot for being where I was for 'cause I could tell, like after this event, was the first time that I'd sat next to these people. And as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that it was a really privileged and stupid thing to think that my story next to these people's stories really had anything of value you like this is it. I don't know how to explain this but I felt really humbled, I guess, is the word to the point where it was really like, oh God, what am I doing? And this is one of the first speaking events that we had is like how am I gonna sit here in front of thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of people and to see how people reacted to it where they were like fascinated with my position but could seem fucking not to be bothered by the fact that I'm sitting on a panel with people that had been detained there. It's like they have all these questions for me but they don't want, didn't want anything that they didn't have this connection with the guys next to me. And I just felt like such, that whole month just felt like such a freak show environment. But anyway, long buildup to the story of meeting Terrick. After the first event I was outside, chain smoking cigarettes, just what became my habit of like escaping outside of the nearest exit and then finding a corner to smoke in a shadow by myself and just be alone. I had a whole hat and face ensemble that would, I changed my clothes right after everything so that nobody would know who I am. And I just sit outside and smoke and listen to what like the chatter that people would have to say. And I remember I was like smoking and kind of zoning out and staring across. And all of a sudden, like I see this dude on the other end of the stairwell and this big building. And it just was like a flashlight, just a total memory flash. I just knew that that was him, that that was Terrick. And that like, that night he actually drove, I walked over and I introduced myself. I didn't say anything about the first time we'd met. I didn't know if he remembered or not. And he offered to drive me to where we were having a post speech dinner and he was really like, nice and like was super like what I mean, we're really glad that you came and really more so than other people wanted to talk with me about converting to Islam which was a big theme along the whole thing is like me converting to Islam is was like a goal that they all had. And I knew it and they were really seedy about it but we eventually worked it out in that I'm more or less fulfilling in Islamic life. I just really liked some drugs. And also I've got different notions of premarital sex and that's about it really. Other than that, I mean I kind of, I live mostly by their code. A lot of things that they take very seriously like possessions of stuff and like their relationship to the world or to the existential or to the God or whatever, I'm pretty in line with a lot of that stuff. I just don't call it anything. Anyway, we worked it out, but he drove me there that night to that dinner. It was really weird. I felt like I kept it all to myself like this experience of like, I didn't wanna tell him, I didn't wanna talk to him about it. I didn't wanna, 'cause he was the one person that I'd always thought like that's the face that I don't wanna see in the street. Like this is the person that I don't wanna have to deal with, and he's driving one armed and on the cell phone and then shifting, he has a stick shift. So he's like in Europe and I'm just like, this is so fucking weird. This is so weird. Like I'm in the wrong side of a car with a one-armed former detainee who was talking on the phone in Arabic and occasionally trying to tell me to become Islam or a Muslim, and I'm in Europe, like what in the fuck is going on? And we got to dinner and we sat down and him and I sat and we ate and like halfway into the meal. I said, do you remember me? And he said, "Yo, I remember you." And I was like, I remember you. And then that was it. We were just on the same page from then on out. We didn't say anything about it. It's just that just, we both right then just totally made eye contact and realized that that moment was a moment for both of us, and yeah. 

Interviewer: You're still in touch with him? 

- He sends me occasional emails, but I've find that our communication is not, I don't. No, no, no, we're not really. He works on some projects and he keeps in touch with them. They're all very by the book I guess you could say the book being the Quran. One thing that I have a difficult time communicating with a lot of the detainees because of what has now become an overwhelming obligation to the rigorous, moral and ethical codes of the Quran. They have dependent upon it for so long and dependent upon their belief in God for so long that it's like, I mean it's like a card house. If you take that one card out, the whole thing's gonna fall over and you can see it from a mile away. And that's how I always admired how the detainees kept their heads together for the most part, most of them. Some of them lost their shit. Like Terrick lost his shit, There was a guy in the psych ward that lost his shit. A lot of people lost their shit but a lot of people kept themselves really dignified and really hopeful. And really just like Alice. Alice is gonna come and everything's gonna be okay 'cause this is just how the world goes and the world is beautiful. And this is just the play of a Muslim and this is what we have to do. These are the sacrifices that we have to endure for our cause. And I always respected that but at the same time, I am not only, I'm not gonna say I'm an atheist 'cause I believe in God, but I hate God and I don't, I think he's an asshole and that he's never coming and that we've been created to be horrible creatures where we've become horrible creatures all on our own. I don't care to differentiate between them but I don't see God as some benevolent creature who is gonna come and save anyone. And I doubt that if there is a heaven that any of us are getting in and if there is a hell, it's probably here on earth, this is probably it. And on those points and including the drugs and the sex and everything else, we really don't see eye to eye. So it's hard to, it feels like walking on eggshells on a lot of conversations 'cause I wanna be respectful of their space, but on some of the key issues like who is our creator and how is the planet really run, we disagree entirely and those things will, if we, if either of us change, it'll unravel all of our existences, so. So don't know. I find communication with them very difficult, but at the same time, while we were traveling around, the common stuff that we have in common, the camp, you know is stuff that we talked about a lot. And there is a lot of stuff in Islam that we did share. And we talked about that a lot, like especially more them and I, probably had the closest bond and then Omar and I also had a very close bond and Gerald was, I don't know if you've had a chance to meet General Omar. He's a whole other person whom I respect entirely but he's almost impossible to talk to about anything. I remember we went to the art, the Tate Museum in London together, and this just as a general kind of like Gerald versus the world now. He was just looking at art and he was like I don't understand you white people and your problems, like this is, he speaks like he has a really strange accent too. So this is all kind of like an English ization of what he was trying to say, but it's like I don't understand all of this stuff. This is all bullshit. Like, I mean, I don't, there's a war going on and he's the first person to always say like there are still people detained right now. It's like, there's no conversation that you can have with him where he doesn't immediately say my brother is in jail for no reason, my friends are in jail for no reason, we don't have time to bullshit, We don't have time to dick around. We're here for a reason. We're here to talk about this and to, we've got to fix this place, it's like he has got a fire or had a fire. I hope he still has this fire 'cause I don't know what Gerald would look like without that firearm 'cause I don't know. He really suffered a lot while he was there. And, but I definitely admired him a lot for that but it's like every time it got off subject, he was like, Guantanamo detention. what do we do, What do we do, what do we do? You know, it's like, he's really, really thumping the book on that one, so. 

Interviewer: Just a couple more questions. One is, so, are there some things I didn't ask you that you wanna just cover before we close and (indistinct) 

- Well, I mean, not really, there's a lot of things that you've brought up that other people have not that I feel like this is the first time I've ever heard anybody referenced them. I know that's the first time I've talked about a couple of these things. I feel like, I mean, mostly, I guess I would just like to add a little bit of perspective from where I'm at now and how I see things instead of talking about it retrospectively, I'd really kind of like to just. 

Interviewer: Everything I asked you, there's any word? 

- Okay, I mean, now that this wiki leaks thingy drops not that I think that it had to drop for people to really care about it but I don't know if something happened to me that has really formalized my rage about the situation with the coming of this information and to see these documents, to see that everything that I'd always suspected that I didn't really give myself the credit to fully believe but that I felt like was going on was true. As a 19 year old, I figured it all out. It was all bullshit. They were all just brown people that they grabbed up and thrown into cages for no good reason and they kept him there for a long time. And I am so pissed. I rate with this government, with these people, with these moneymaking people that just will hurt anyone. They've ruined my life. They've ruined the lives of all of my friends, and thousands of people. And they've ruined the lives of all of these detainees and given us a disease that will never go away. And they did it all for lies. It was all for lies. It's always been a lie. It's always been a big fucking lie. They lied to us about everything. They lied to me about the terrorists, they lied to me about my college benefits which I stopped getting. They did nothing but lie. I did nothing but offer myself to them, to this country, to this glorious idea of country and they did nothing but lie to us and get us to do despicable work so that they could make benefit, they could bank on it. And then, and you know it's totally ruined my concept of what America is. This is no longer the country that fought the Nazis and was the standard of democracy and goodness, we have become an evil rotten system. The legal structures that we have enacted in our country to provide a democracy, that bullshit term we throw around that we're trying to take everywhere, we've completely bastardized in the process of creating the detention policy. It has been wifed with errors from the beginning and every human rights lawyer, every, just lawyer, a lawyer, like people that know the law or have come out and said, this isn't, I mean there's no way that you can even put this transparently down on paper. It's like half the people you got have been tortured. None of this evidence is admissible. You don't even have in evidence for half of this shit. That other stuff you have or here or say, it's like, all of this stuff has been said, now the facts are on the table. it was a lot of really crappy command decisions. A lot of these people should've never been detained in the first place. A lot of these people should've never been kept in detention in Kandahar in bog room and all these little miniature camps all over the place. And they certainly should not have been falling across to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And they shouldn't have been kept there? And it's like, it's just so super frustrating. It was all for nothing. And they'll get out of it and nobody will give a shit. Nobody's gonna give a shit in time. You know, and I hope that people look at this stuff. I hope that people take this in and realize that this is 2011 baby, it's a whole new world. We are going into a whole new dark world of law and the imposition of the corporate world into our lives. And they have no rules. They will stop at nothing. It's the Muslims now but like, just like with the Nazis, just like what the Abbott said, man, they're gonna come for this and then they're gonna come for this, and then they're gonna come for this. And when they're all out of people to come forward they're gonna come for you, the freaks and the weirdos and just anybody that doesn't fit in with their system. And they'll be here. If it's 100 years from now or if it's 10 years from now, they're coming. They're breaking the walls down in the law, in the legal system every day, they have no one to answer for, they've totally proven that, they prove it every day that Guantanamo Bay is open. They're ruining this country. Everything, everything that we've always fought for, they've ruined it. They've shit on it in a matter of a decade. This one fiasco has really destroyed anything that we could believe in, in like what a democracy is, we've made fools of ourselves in front of the whole nation and in front of the whole world and in front of God that everybody keeps talking about. Everybody's so worried about God. God, God, God, would do this for God, would do that for God. Do we beat people up for God? Is that what we do now? We put them in cages for God? Is that the God that you wanna believe in, Christian white world? I mean, I don't know it's so just like, I just have a lot of emotion that's really like kind of clicking into place that I felt like I've repressed in the past about this 'cause I knew it was lies before, but I took that out on myself and now I know it wasn't me and it's not, I don't have to blame it on me anymore. It's not a lie, it's them. But what's the saying you're gonna do for me. I'm probably just gonna turn it into one of these old veterans sitting on the side of the street going, do you remember Guantanamo Bay? It's crazy and secretly title. All lies, is just drunk and shitty and homeless 'cause no one, when this is over, TV's off everybody gets to go home and go to bed. Everybody else got to clean their hands of it. Now sinners are stuck in the the hell of our memories forever and worse and Crimea river for the sinners. But I mean, the innocent people that live with this forever is who my heart really goes out to is all of the people that were just with their families and detained and that we beat thoroughly. And that we punched and we kicked, we yelled at and we call them sand niggers and we called them everything that we possibly could. We hit him, we were just really fucking shitty to them and they were all innocent every day of every God damn day, we went out there and we acted like we wanted to act and we did a lot of really miserable things to innocent men because we'd been given a flimsy set of orders that we wanted to believe 'cause we were violent and we wanted to believe. The violence that we were enacting was right. And it was not, it was never was, it's never been right and it never will be right. And that nothing will ever rectify that. We live with that for everyone now. These are the things that we learned from the concentration camps of World War II that we have obviously not learned our lessons from. They try to clean up their act. They try to change their demeanor about going about it but if you asked me, it's still a concentration camp, it's a concentration of a racial minority in a camp. I don't know what else to call it. I mean, and that's a trick that we learned from the Nazis as well as pincher attacks. Like when we tried to come in from Turkey and from Kuwait at the same time, another Nazi technique. It's like, if you ask me this place is getting a little hail Hitler and and it's all happening under the guise of it being this nationalistic patriotic bullshit that everybody keeps spewing and it's just not true anymore. And it's all been based on lies and we've all been turned into fools and if we don't start fighting it, it's gonna take everything over. It's game over, man. I mean, sorry, that's just kind of a large emotional lump of stuff, but that's my sentiment on this place now where we stand, where I stand with it and where it stands in my head and my memory, and, I think that's it. 

Interviewer: Well, we need 20 seconds of quiet time and Johnny needs it for room tone but I wanna thank you, but I'll thank you again when Johnny finishes that. 

- [Man With Low Voice] Begin room tone. End room tone.