Binyam Mohamed returns from Gitmo

How Binyam is coping with his first few days of freedom.

“I still think I might wake up tomorrow morning and find myself back in Guantánamo Bay,” Binyam Mohamed told me, as we took a walk in the countryside after his release last week. “It would all be the same. I’d just find that I had just been allowed to spend a rather longer-than-normal visit with my attorney.”

Adjusting after seven years in prison is not easy; adjusting after the surreal nightmare of seven years of torture, much harder. Binyam and I talked as we climbed a hill in the West Country. Only hours earlier he had been in a cell in Camp Five. Back then, he was allowed a maximum of three paces in one direction before a concrete wall turned him around. The freedom of this field, where only the sheep were fenced in, seemed unreal.

The day before, Binyam had flown into RAF Northolt. A phalanx of the press waited at the entrance to the air force base in West London. For Binyam it was a confusing welcome. Here were many of the people who had worked hard for his freedom, writing and broadcasting about the horrors of his rendition to torture in Morocco. When we had carried their newspaper articles into his prison cell, he had hope. But, to keep his spirits up, I never took him the hostile editorials.

“Terror suspect flown back to Britain by private jet!” the Daily Express now shouted at him. Indeed, he did fly in on a Gulfstream – paradoxically, the same brand of “private jet” used by the CIA in July 2002 to carry him to 18 months of medieval mistreatment in Morocco.

“Treated like royalty!” screamed the Express headline. It is true that I waited with his sister Zuhra, and his military attorney Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, in the “Royal Suite” at RAF Northolt. Binyam, in the meantime, was undergoing two hours of questioning by the British police, less typical of the welcome accorded to Her Majesty.

The police were worried, reporting that dozens of photographers on motorcycles were revving their engines just outside the base. Our prospects of carrying Binyam away to recuperate quietly in the countryside seemed dim. But in the end we did escape, running the gauntlet of the Northolt gate.

The next day, Binyam and I walked and he talked about his future. Seven years of his life had been taken from him; how he could hope to make up for that time in the years ahead? Was his life destined to be defined by the stolen years? Would he only ever be asked to talk about the torture?

Binyam was reticent about the media. We discussed how, if he spoke to only one journalist, he would risk alienating the rest. He knew that if he had to talk to everyone, he would risk losing a tenuous grip on his new reality. He knew that the more that his picture was published, the less likely it was that he could ever live a normal life.

But he had returned home with only one clear ambition -- to help secure justice for the 241 men who he left behind in Guantánamo. There was Shaker Aamer -- who Binyam had hoped would be on the same Gulfstream flight as himself. Shaker would have been coming home to his wife and four children, but he is remains Internment Serial Number 239, still unable to hold Faris -- a child he has never met, born after he was seized in Pakistan.

Binyam never told the men on his block that he was slated for freedom. He felt it would be unkind. How could he tell Mohammed el Gharani, snatched by the Pakistanis and sold to the Americans at the age of 14, that he – Binyam – was headed home, when Mohammed was left behind? So he hedged, and hinted that he was packing his meagre belongings for a move to another cellblock.

Now some of Binyam’s first, strange meetings on a West Country farm were with other British men he had met in Guantánamo Bay. This only deepened the confusion in his mind. Was he here, or was he there?

These former prisoners respectfully urged him to face as much of the media as he could. He was, they told Binyam, the only voice for the men left behind.

So Binyam decided that he would try to speak out. It would have to be incremental. And some things he simply could not confront. He would not, he insisted, go into the details of the harshest abuses. The torture had been designed to humiliate; repeating it all now would merely add to the degradation.

But Binyam knew he had to talk about some of his mistreatment. We talked about the music torture, that had been designed to destroy his sanity. When we had spoken in Guantánamo Bay, he had described Eminem music, played incessantly at him in the ‘Dark Prison.’ Back then, I could never play him the music for him to identify it, as I had only been allowed a pen and paper for the interviews. Now, with my laptop in front of us, we could identify the songs. I played him White America. He flinched. He knew, warily, that he encounter songs like this at random as he walked through the rest of his life.

As the days went by, Binyam slowly decompressed, beginning a process that will take months, if not years. But he began to emerge more frequently from his room. In the kitchen, my seven-month-old son Wilf reached out to tug on Binyam’s beard. Binyam smiled gently at the child, a twinkle in his eyes perhaps for the first time in seven years.