{"id":196549,"date":"2021-10-04T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=196549"},"modified":"2021-10-01T10:27:53","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T09:27:53","slug":"mansoor-adayfi-detainee-441-lost-and-found-at-guantanamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/10\/mansoor-adayfi-detainee-441-lost-and-found-at-guantanamo\/","title":{"rendered":"Mansoor Adayfi: Detainee #441, Lost and Found at Guant\u00e1namo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mansoor Adayfi – Common Dreams<\/p><\/div>\n

30 Sep 2021 – <\/em>Guant\u00e1namo Bay, located on the southern tip of Cuba, is home to the notorious U.S. military prison known as \u201cGitmo,\u201d where 779 men have been held, most without charge, and brutalized over the past twenty years. One of these prisoners, Yemeni-born Mansoor Adayfi, or \u201cDetainee #441,\u201d was held for 14 years, until 2016. He is now living in exile in Serbia, where the U.S. forced him to relocate despite having no connection to the country. Adayfi\u2019s memoir has just been published. In it, he describes the horror of Guant\u00e1namo, and how he and his fellow prisoners maintained their sanity, built solidarity, and survived.<\/p>\n

\n

Mansoor Adayfi spoke on the Democracy Now! news hour from Belgrade. He smiles and laughs throughout the conversation, despite having endured years of torture and arbitrary imprisonment. He picked up most of his nearly fluent English from the guards at Guant\u00e1namo. He described the remarkable diversity of the prison population into which he was thrust:<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine around 50 nationalities, 20 languages, different backgrounds,\u201d Mansoor Adayfi said. \u201cPeople who were at Guant\u00e1namo were artists, singers, doctors, nurses, divers, mafia, drug addicts, teachers, scholars, poets. That diversity of culture interacted with each other, melted and formed what we call Guant\u00e1namo culture, what I call \u2018the beautiful Guant\u00e1namo.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Mansoor Adayfi\u2019s eloquent memoir, \u201cDon\u2019t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guant\u00e1namo,\u201d is a deeply personal testament to the horror of the prison. It\u2019s also a searing indictment of the brutality of the U.S. military and of those in charge there, including General Geoffrey Miller, a relentless torture advocate who would go on to \u201cGitmoize\u201d Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the string of Presidents\/Commanders in Chief, from George W. Bush to Obama to Trump and now to Biden.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease allow me to take you on a journey through Guant\u00e1namo,\u201d Adayfi writes in the book\u2019s introduction. \u201cBuckle up and prepare yourself. I will be your guide, but don\u2019t worry \u2014 you won\u2019t have to wear the orange jumpsuit, shackles, or hood. You will be free every night to leave behind the fences and isolation cells and rejoin your life. But I think you will come back and join me again to see a side of Guant\u00e1namo few people have experienced, where yes, there is much pain, but there are also unexpected moments of beauty and joy that will take your breath away. This is my Guant\u00e1namo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born into a large family in rural Yemen, Mansoor did well in school and was sent to Afghanistan to help with a research project when he was just 18. He recounted what happened there:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne day, after 9\/11, I was kidnapped by the warlords\u2026American airplanes were throwing a lot of flyers [pamphlets] offering a large bounty of money. I was sold to the CIA<\/span> as an al-Qaeda general, middle-age Egyptian, a 9\/11 insider. I was taken to the black site, where I was tortured for over two months.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mansoor Adayfi – The Intercept<\/p><\/div>\n

He\u2019ll never forget what happened there:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one knows how many people actually died there. There was no limitation to what they could do to you \u2014 hang on the ceiling all the time, upside down, even blindfolded, naked\u2026Standing, and there\u2019s no rest. Twenty-four hours, sleep deprivation, beating, waterboarding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shackled and hooded, he was flown 40 hours from Afghanistan to Guant\u00e1namo. His captors hung a \u201cBeat Me\u201d sign around his neck, and the guards on board obliged, beating him throughout the journey. At Guant\u00e1namo, the abuse continued. Eventually, the prisoners organized themselves, and began a hunger strike.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur bodies were the battlefield, because Americans torture us, abuse us and beat us on our bodies; also, we were torturing our bodies by hunger strike, by trying to resist. It was a slow journey toward death.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he suffered countless beatings and horrendous interrogations at the hands of the guards, he still felt compassion for those who returned from a combat tour in Iraq or Afghanistan: \u201cI saw how the guards came back, many of them were mentally devastated. When you see a broken soul, it\u2019s the most severe pain.\u201d Another guard moved him deeply when she refused a direct order to drag Mansoor to an interrogation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHope, it was a matter of life or death. You have to keep hoping,\u201d Mansoor reflected. \u201cThat place was designed just to take your hope away.\u201d<\/p>\n

He defiantly wears an orange scarf, rejecting the warnings given him by a Guant\u00e1namo prison psychologist and an International Committee of the Red Cross representative, who said the color orange might trigger post-traumatic stress.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I have learned at Guant\u00e1namo, I will never keep silent,\u201d Mansoor Adayfi, Detainee #441, concluded on Democracy Now!, \u201ckeeping silent only gives the oppressor a means to oppress you more. So, I will never keep silent.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Sep 2021 – Yemeni-born Mansoor Adayfi, or \u201cDetainee #441,\u201d was held for 14 years, until 2016. He is now living in exile in Serbia, where the U.S. forced him to relocate despite having no connection to the country. Adayfi\u2019s memoir has just been published. “I was sold to the CIA and was taken to the black site, where I was tortured for over two months.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":196551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[93,703,867,133,1464,1266,880,572,70,2686,492,174],"class_list":["post-196549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-afghanistan","tag-al-qaeda","tag-anglo-america","tag-cia","tag-guantanamo","tag-rendition","tag-state-terrorism","tag-torture","tag-usa","tag-war-of-terror","tag-war-on-terror","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}