Lying Down in the Dirt: An Interview with Denis Johnson

Janet Steen | Longreads | February 2018 | 13 minutes (3,523 words)

In 2002, while I was the literary editor at Details magazine, I interviewed Denis Johnson on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of what is perhaps still his most famous book, Jesus’ Son. When he died last year, at the age of 67, I wondered if I could locate the cassette I’d recorded the interview on all those years ago.

Eventually it surfaced, on a dusty ancient Sony type-1 normal bias, and there, suddenly, was Denis — before books like Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke, and before his last recent posthumous book of stories The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which, as it turns out, would be his only other collection of stories. On the recording he is soft-spoken and easy and open, but there is still a hint of the jangly “Fuckhead” he drew on for the stories, a guy who finds it “painful to be amongst humans,” who made the rest of us feel less ashamed for finding it so hard.

(This interview has been greatly edited for clarity, but the full audio is available below. -Ed.)

* * *

Janet Steen: Have you reread any of the stories in Jesus’ Son lately?

Denis Johnson: Not really lately. But it happens I’m very familiar with the book. For a couple of years before it was published, and then several years after, when I would give a reading, I would read one of those stories, or two of them. I’d look around for something I hadn’t read out loud in a while in that book, and that was kind of my routine. I ended up reading all of the stories out loud several times. Three, four readings a year. I became really familiar with the sound of the stories.

I haven’t looked at them lately though. I never really got tired of reading them out loud. I just quit because I started to feel like I was beating a dead horse, and I felt like I should read something a little more recent.

JS: What did you feel towards them when you read them, even if you would sit down and read them by yourself?

DJ: Well, I don’t know. I rarely read them to myself, but reading them out loud I really enjoyed the humor in them. People would almost always come up to me afterwards and say, “I didn’t realize those were funny. I thought those stories were just sad.” When you read them out loud, people laugh a lot, because the characters are humorous. It’s just their situations are generally very, very bleak.

JS: There’s some slapstick humor in them, too.

DJ: Yeah, but I think people get overwhelmed by the depravity and the bleakness, and so they don’t really notice sometimes, and then they’re surprised when they sit in an audience and hear everybody laughing. It’s my experience that there were generally people that were surprised after the readings.

There’s nobody who can disguise himself. Eventually we’re all outed in one way or another.

JS: Yeah, there’s also, I think, a real sweetness to the book.

DJ: Yeah. It’s candid. The narrator doesn’t try and depict himself as anything less than a really screwed up human. That can be kind of endearing.

When I first wrote the first stories that are in that book, I was really excited by the voice. I didn’t know exactly what it was about it, but I wrote three or four of them in one day. I was just thrilled. I thought, this is really the kind of thing that I would enjoy reading if I were 16 years old again. Like Catcher in the Rye or something. Catcher in the Rye was my book when I was a kid. I thought, this has the same kind of flavor for me. And didn’t know exactly what it was about it, but at the same time, I thought I’d never publish these things. They’re too weird, and too frankly autobiographical. I guess at that point I thought it was important for me to hide the fact that I’m not right in the head.

And then as I got older, five years later, I thought, what difference does it make? Everybody I meet knows within seconds. There’s no hiding it. And the people who don’t meet me aren’t going to care that somebody wrote these stories.

I mean, one day it just dawned on me it made no difference at all how much of me might or might not be revealed in the stories.

JS: Was that kind of liberating?

DJ: Yeah. I mean I think maybe in a way I became more humble. I think after going through the common humiliations of a human life, I realized it just doesn’t matter. There’s nobody who can disguise himself. Eventually we’re all outed in one way or another.

JS: So I’m right to assume that that main character is pretty close to you in a lot of ways.

DJ: Yeah, in fact the first stories were just anecdotes that I told people about me as I would go along through life, and sometimes they’d say, you should write these down. My reply always was: once you tell it, it’s not worth writing down. But then one day I just did and I don’t know why. And then what happened — and I didn’t realize this until reading these stories out loud and becoming a student of them — what happened was, I would take these anecdotes, which are just interesting tales, and put one with another. A lot of those stories are two anecdotes shoved together in such a way to make you wonder why. There’s sort of a formal question about why would this be a story. Why isn’t it just an anecdote, why would the author suggest that this is somehow a whole, if small, work of art? I don’t think anybody can answer the question.

JS: Yeah, I always found it interesting that you can read this book in any order, and it’s almost like the time just keeps looping back and forth.

DJ: Yeah, that’s true. The original manuscript had the stories much less in chronological order, they were completely jumbled. Jonathan Galassi, the editor, asked me to put them in chronological order, and they almost are. I think there are a couple out of sequence in terms of the character’s journey, but pretty much he’s the youngest at the beginning and he’s the oldest at the end.

JS: Yeah, there’s definitely a progression in his experience. In a way the book is kind of a reflection of your life in the ’70s. Is that fair to say?

DJ: Yeah, well the first two or three that I wrote were like that, three or four, and then I began to rope in stories that other people had told me, things that happened to other people.The character claims these as his own experiences, so eventually it became fiction.

It started out being almost pure reminiscence and then it became lying, and if you put it between covers a lie becomes a work of fiction. But I think — I’m not sure about this — but I think that every tale told in that book, all the incidents happened either to me or to somebody I knew, or it was told to me by somebody I knew about somebody they knew. I think it’s all actually stolen stuff.

Sometimes there’s nothing better than lying down in the dirt, being completely hopeless and helpless… But the problem is you can’t do that for long. There’s always a steam roller headed your way.

JS: Did you think of yourself as a fuck-up back then the way the guy in the book does?

DJ: It really burned my ass to think of myself that way, but that was my nickname: Fuckhead.

JS: That was your nickname?

DJ: Yes, it was. I was not happy about it. It didn’t strike me as a friendly nickname. It struck me as a label to warn others: don’t be around this guy too much, he’s going to do something disastrous. Now it sounds as if, [if] everybody’s pals, some of them are called Fuckhead. But in fact at the time I felt that it isolated me from my fellow idiots. And we were actually all idiots.

JS: Do you ever feel nostalgic for that time in your life?

DJ: Well, just for the self abandonment of it. Just sometimes there’s nothing better than lying down in the dirt, being completely hopeless and helpless, because then of course you have no responsibilities, and that kind of appeals to me. But the problem is you can’t do that for long. There’s always a steam roller headed your way. You have to get up and cope, you have to rally, you have to get a job for at least a few minutes, come up with a couple of bucks. Life for someone who doesn’t want to live it is really hard.

---

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up

---

JS: Yeah. Do you have much contact with this milieu in the book now, in your life?

DJ: No, not really. I have no idea what goes on with that. I’m in a lot of recovery groups, so I see people coming out of that world, and maybe some of them go back to that world, but I don’t visit them in their homes when they’re shooting up or anything. I only see them when they’re chasing it, ready to try and get out of it. I hear about it, but I don’t really see it or experience it. I don’t get around the clubs, I don’t hang around bars very much or any of that.

JS: Yeah, I would assume as a father now you’re in contact with probably your kids’ friends’ parents and stuff. A different world.

DJ: Yeah.

JS: Do you think the world now is a harder place for somebody like Fuckhead to survive in?

DJ: Oh gee, I don’t know. I really don’t. I just can’t answer that question. It’s never been easy for anybody, I guess. It’s never been easy for anybody who is prone to addiction, but there is help now. I think it’s more available, more accessible, better publicized, so in a sense it’s easier to get out of that world once you’re in it, but I just don’t know. I hear the dope is stronger now, and cheaper. More likely to kill you, more likely to keep you in that world, I guess.

JS: When did you yourself get out of that world?

DJ: It was kind of — there were stages, I guess. The first thing I stopped doing was heroin, and that was in ’75, ’76, and then it was ’78 when I got off alcohol. I kept doing pot a little bit for a while, and then the last time I had any pot was in ’83, and those are the drugs that I consider addicting and dangerous for me for various reasons. I tried to experiment with magic mushrooms.

JS: Yeah, I think you wrote about that.

DJ: Right, but that was more in the nature of an experience. I was quite certain it would never be repeated. I never really felt it was an addicting substance. Pot was different. If I did pot now, if I didn’t think to myself that it was addicting, then I would start doing it more. Even though it may not be physically addicting, it’s something I can become habituated to pretty easily, I think.

JS: Was your experience with writing a whole lot different when you were indulging in substances?

DJ: Yeah, there was hardly any writing at all. I managed to publish a few poems and a couple of stories. In my own mind I was right up there with Shakespeare or somebody. It wasn’t until I got sober that I began to worry, will I be able to write? I really looked back at the last — and by that time it may have been 10 years that I had been publishing, writing and publishing and thinking of myself as a writer — and looking back, I’d published fewer than 40 poems, and a couple of stories. As an annual average that’s very little writing, and then I thought it doesn’t really matter if I get sober and I don’t write again because I’m not really writing now. I wasn’t tempted to use that as an excuse to stay screwed up.

JS: Right. Of course, you’ve been way way more prolific since you stopped.

DJ: Yeah, more and more all the time.

It’s as hard as I thought it would be. It’s as painful to be amongst humans as I expected it to be.

JS: Yeah. I know this is kind of weird — to talk about yourself as an influential writer, because it risks sounding arrogant or something — but what do you think it was about this book, these stories, that has been so influential to people?

DJ: I don’t know. I’ve met people who say, “This book is the reason I’m a writer.”

JS: Yeah, I’ve heard that too.

DJ: I think I might say that about the Catcher in the Rye, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. And what those have in common with Jesus’ Son is that they speak to the experience of the youthful soul. They’re kind of about the journey of a youthful soul, so maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud now.

JS: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

DJ: Tom Sawyer was the type of book — and Huckleberry Finn — [that], when I was a kid, I immediately began imitating. I got myself a stack of paper and I was 9 years old. A bunch of pens and I sat down to write Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t get very far. And Tom Sawyer, too. The first things I wrote on my own were imitations of chapters of Tom Sawyer. I remember writing one where the barber’s son shaved the head of one of the teachers, which is very much like a chapter in Tom Sawyer where they get the toupee off the guy’s head.

JS: Are you still writing plays?

DJ: Oh yeah.

JS: I loved the one that I saw in New York a couple of years ago.

DJ: Oh really?

JS: Yeah.

DJ: That’s in Chicago right now, that one.

JS: Oh really.

DJ: It’s called Hellhound.

JS: Yes, exactly. I saw a reading in New York.

DJ: They did a workshop of it in New York too. It’s in Chicago right now. They’re doing a really good production.

I’ve been writing a lot of plays. Trying to restrain myself. I have a contract to write a novel that I’ve been working on for years. I just settled down recently to finish it, and the rule is: no more plays until it’s done.

JS: Well, it wouldn’t be a terrible thing, I don’t think, if you broke that rule.

Anyway, it was great to talk to you about this.

DJ: Yeah, I’m sorry, you can see I’ve become really gabby.

JS: That’s great.

DJ: I’m out in the wilderness here.

JS: You’re still in Idaho?

DJ: Yeah, I’ve just been here a couple of months. I’m going to go down to Arizona in a few weeks.

JS: Oh, that’s where you — I remember you said when I talked to you before that you were splitting your time, right?

DJ: Yeah, I was probably in Texas then. Now I’m tri-parting my time among Arizona, Texas, and Idaho. Something’s got to give there.

JS: Is that because of teaching?

DJ: No. Texas is kind of because of teaching. I go there every couple of years. But Arizona, my folks are down there, so I like to get around them a little bit. Idaho, we just got a place up here so we got to come up and pluck the weeds every once in a while.

JS: Do you have a lot of land there?

DJ: 120 acres.

JS: Wow.

DJ: If you walk around [it], it’s exactly two miles to walk around. But it’s hard to walk around. Got a lot of hills and ravines and vines and trees and stuff.

JS: It must be amazing though.

DJ: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.

When life decides it’s going to visit you, it will visit you. You can’t hide.

JS: I have one more question for you: are you at all interested in doing magazine writing these days?

DJ: Not so much. I kind of replaced that with writing plays. The trouble with plays is I’m going bankrupt.

JS: Because they just don’t make money?

DJ: Yeah, [and] you have to go there and help them out with the production and so on. It’s fun to do that anyway.

JS: Yeah, I would think.

DJ: There’s no money in it so I’m slowly — actually, rapidly going broke, but I just don’t have that much time to get around. It’s just hard. Details asked me to do something.

JS: We were sort of tossing around this idea — I know you’ve written about this before — but the idea of living off the grid and if there was anything you wanted to say about that, either your own experience or people that you know or you’re around in Idaho. Just the idea of living that way.

DJ: Yeah, living that way appeals to me less and less.

JS: Oh it does?

DJ: Yeah, I just like to be out here in the summer now. It’s tough to go 35 miles to get a quart of milk.

JS: Yeah. That’s a different way of life.

DJ: It really [i]s. It’s so nice living in Austin, you just go — I don’t even have to put on my shoes, I can just go barefoot down to the Seven Eleven and get some milk. That really makes a difference in your life, your whole day. Plus I can go to plays, I can go to movies, all that suddenly became a lot more fun. I don’t know why.

JS: So you’re not as reclusive as you used to be.

DJ: No, and actually the interview thing, I’m more willing to do that now, as you can see. A lot of that has to do with being involved with theater productions, because I want to help the actors get somebody in there to see them. They work so hard. It’s really chastening to see how hard they work. I just can’t say, no I won’t do an interview, I won’t help you at all. Working on productions, I’m involved with people a lot more.

Like, really things have changed a lot for me in the last three, four years. I am a lot less reclusive.

JS: Well, it’s nice to know you can change and adapt and just have different phases in your life. That seems very healthy to me.

DJ: Yeah, it’s as hard as I thought it would be. It’s as painful to be amongst humans as I expected it to be. I think I’ve been about as freaked out as I can get, from time to time. This summer we did a production of a play of mine in New York that was kind of a disaster from the get go.

JS: I didn’t see that.

DJ: Oh my God, it turned out to be a good production on some nights when everybody could get it together, but it was just really hard.

JS: Why?

DJ: Things just went wrong. We had to get a new set designer, the guy didn’t get along with the director, this affected the actors, it was just on and on. It was really something. If you ask each person you’ll get a different story as to why it was bad, and I think a lot will blame the author of the play. I try to blame everybody else, but I’m afraid my inexperience had a lot to do with it. It was just hard, it was really painful.

JS: But there must be enjoyable aspects of it, or you wouldn’t be bothering to go.

DJ: It was enlightening. It was great. It was one of those things that you hate going through. You wouldn’t do it again, but it was really a valuable experience.

JS: Yeah, collaborations really are interesting. You sort of forget, as a writer, that that even takes place.

DJ: It’s hard to make the shift from being God to being one of the gang. It’s tough. But it can be done.

JS: But as far as day to day living, you don’t mind having people in close proximity and not having a big swath of land and all that?

DJ: Yeah, it’s all right. Even having a swath of land, I quarrel with the neighbor. He’s suing me. It’s just like having a guy in the apartment next door. He’s got his 120 acres, and I’ve got mine, it doesn’t matter. In New York it would be 120 square feet, but it’s the same damn story. You just can’t avoid it. People are everywhere.

JS: Yes they are.

DJ: If it’s not people — I had a place in the Yukon, 50 miles from the nearest human — and a freaking grizzly bear started marauding. And whenever I wasn’t there he’d tear the place up.

JS: Oh man.

DJ: Basically, when life decides it’s going to visit you, it will visit you. You can’t hide.

*

* * *

Janet Steen is a writer and editor. She has written and edited for mainstream magazines and less conventional essay sites. She helps people edit their books and is a curator of a new reading series in Brooklyn called Murmrr Lit.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

from Longreads http://ift.tt/2CqC0BY

Guantánamo, Forever

Amos Barshad | The Marshall Project & Longreads | February 2018 | 16 minutes (4,100 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

The message came in on a spring day via the undisclosed U.S. government facility that approves all correspondence out of the military prison in Guantánamo Bay. It was a request for representation from Haroon Gul, a detainee, to Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, an attorney. Gul had never had a lawyer. He was one of the last men in Guantánamo without one.

Now, in 2016, his request was urgent. After nearly a decade of nothing, he was being given the chance to explain himself. It would happen through the Periodic Review Board, an administrative body that considers whether Guantánamo prisoners who have not been charged should be transferred home or to another country. A board representative wrote Sullivan-Bennis an email explaining that Gul, also identified as detainee number ISN 3148, “has requested in writing that you assist him with … proceedings before the PRB, at no cost to the Government.” When the email arrived, Gul’s first hearing was weeks away.

Guantánamo lawyers are famously overworked. At the time, Sullivan-Bennis was juggling five other clients. She and her coworkers at the human rights organization Reprieve asked themselves: How can we possibly handle another one? “And then everyone was like, ‘Let’s just try,’” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “Because otherwise he’ll be alone.’”

She typed Gul a brief note saying that she’d take his case and that she’d come see him soon. She asked if he wanted anything from Guantánamo’s all-purpose department store, the Navy Exchange.

“Dear Honorable Miss Shelby Sullivan Bennis,” he wrote back in sloping, cursive handwriting, “I have no words to express my feeling of gratitude, appreciation and Thanks for your timly legal and moral help in my PRB hearing. I was in a helpless and hopeless state of my mind in my legal affairs you gave me emotional psycholgcal help.”

A few weeks later, they met for the first time in a windowless cement cellblock on prison grounds. Gul sat across a plastic-top table from Sullivan-Bennis in a loose-fitting, tan-colored T-shirt, with his ankle shackled to a metal ring secured to the floor. He’d been detained in Guantánamo since 2007, shortly after Afghan National Directorate of Security forces burst with guns into the rural guesthouse where he was staying outside Jalalabad and threw a bag over his head.

For the first time, he told his story to a lawyer. He was in his early 30s, like her. He had a wife, Halimah, and a 10-year-old daughter, Maryam, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Gul himself grew up in a Pakistani camp after violence forced his family to flee his home in Afghanistan. Despite harsh camp conditions, he’d earned an economics degree at Hayatabad Science University. He spoke four languages, including Pashto and Dari. While at Guantánamo he’d learned a fifth, English.

And like nearly every other detainee held at Guantánamo since 9/11, Gul had never been charged with a crime. The U.S. government was justifying his detainment under the law of war. In a secret government dossier on Gul released by Wikileaks, Gul (also known as Haroon al-Afghani) is described as “high risk” and of “high intelligence value.” The dossier alleges that he was an explosives expert and a high-ranking military strategist who had executed attacks on the Northern Alliance on behalf of Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, a party affiliated with al Qaeda in the 2000s. U.S. intel also indicates that, in 2001, Gul attempted to help Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.

Gul was too polite to put it this way, but he was effectively saying that it was all, all of it, bullshit. His affiliation with HIG was the same as that of millions of other Afghans: The group ran the refugee camps he needed to survive. He said he supported his family by selling small goods, like used books and jars of honey. He said the reason he was in that guesthouse that night was because he was on the road, selling, trying to scrape together some money. He said the Afghans had grabbed the wrong person.

The government’s allegations were built on secret interrogations and unidentified sources named things like IZ-10026. Sullivan-Bennis came to believe that Gul was innocent. It had happened before: An alleged al Qaeda agent named Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri was detained for 13 years before his release; during his PRB hearing, the government admitted it may have had the wrong man.

The PRB process, though, is not about guilt or innocence. It’s akin to a parole hearing: Are you ready to repent? One of Sullivan-Bennis’s supervising attorneys had called it “having to roll over and show them your tummy.” Gul believed he had committed no crimes for which to repent. But he wouldn’t be the first to be granted freedom through the review board by expressing remorse for things he’d never done.

Thomas Wilner is one of the lawyers who won the two landmark Supreme Court cases that established habeas corpus rights for Guantánamo detainees. The PRB process “is not based on evidence,” he told me. “You have to be contrite. What do you tell a client who wants to go, ‘Fuck you! I’m innocent!’”

That first meeting between Gul and Sullivan-Bennis would come just four days before the PRB convened. Then came the hearing.

“So he sits in this white room with oddly comfortable chairs that the detainees have never been allowed to sit in before,” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “They prop him up at the head of the table, and he sinks into this enormous beige puffy chair and he faces this enormous screen.” On the giant screen were the floating heads of a six-member board representing the Department of Justice and the other federal agencies that weigh in on the clearance process for Guantánamo. “And then, essentially, it’s an interrogation.”

Later, Sullivan-Bennis would identify all manner of reasons why the hearing didn’t break their way. But in her view it all came down to prep—they just didn’t have enough time.

“In making this determination,” the official ruling read, “the Board considered the detainee’s … failure to acknowledge or accept responsibility for past activities. The Board welcomes seeing the detainee’s file in six months with greater candor.”

So Gul was not recommended for transfer. But it was OK. Much higher profile Guantánamo detainees had been released through the PRB. That included Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who’d been implicated both in recruiting three of the 9/11 hijackers and in planning the foiled “Millennium Plot” to detonate explosives at LAX. In all, 36 detainees have been cleared and released through the review board. At least seven of those had not been granted a transfer after their first hearing before eventually winning their freedom.

Toward the end of President Obama’s second term, he had greatly accelerated the process of clearing out Guantánamo. By the end of the Bush administration the detainee population was 245; by the end of the Obama administration, it was 41. As president, Hillary Clinton would likely have been as eager to cut these last men loose: Before leaving her post as secretary of state, in January 2013, Clinton had sent Obama a forceful and detailed memo urging him to shutter the prison for good.

The detainees refer to securing a transfer as “getting your paper.” In the late summer of 2016, there was real reason to hope that Gul would get his. He’d be prepared, properly prepared, for the next PRB hearing. Gul finally, finally, had a lawyer.

A Guantanamo guard keeps watch over detainees attending a class in “Life Skills” at Camp 6 high-security detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

* * *

There are two prison camps left at Guantánamo. Camp 7 houses 15 high-profile detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the infamous KSM, the alleged “architect of 9/11.” The detainees engaged in military tribunals through the OMC, the Office of Military Commissions, are housed in Camp 7. Slowly, very slowly, legal cases against them are moving forward. And perhaps it’s counterintuitive because of the extremity of their alleged crimes, but they actually have large and extremely competent legal teams behind them, made up of a combination of civilian and JAG attorneys.

Gul is in Camp 6, with the 20 or so other non–high-profile detainees. The allegations against the detainees here are murky or relatively minor or, often enough, both. If their cases had been brought through the federal court system in the United States, they might well have been tried and—convicted or not—released by now. But because of their relatively lesser status, they’re left alone. The OMC system is deeply flawed, defense attorneys and legal experts say. But KSM is still moving toward some form of justice. Someone like Gul—a nobody—had no reason to believe he’d ever be afforded a reckoning.

But he tried. There are two detainees at Guantánamo who have chosen not to engage with the American legal system, according to Reprieve, and had never had representation. Gul was the last detainee to seek a lawyer and not have one.

---

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up

---

The exact reasons as to why Gul went so long without representation are messy and rife with the surreality that has come to define Guantánamo. According to Sullivan-Bennis, for a while, prison guards didn’t give Gul access to the official blue envelopes required for all legal correspondence. Their reasoning was that Gul didn’t have an active legal case, so why would he need the blue envelopes? In effect, Gul was being told, once you have a lawyer, you can seek out a lawyer.

Gul eventually managed to get word out to the network of attorneys who take on this kind of work, a tight-knit group informally known as the “GTMO bar.” Some never responded. Some wrote back to say they just couldn’t take on more clients.

For his first three years in Guantánamo, Gul only interacted with prison guards and detainees. In 2010, he was allowed to get a letter out to his family through the International Committee of the Red Cross. He wrote, “I am in Gitmo. Pray for me … I am OK.” Since, he’s been allowed one glitchy, heavily censored phone call every four to six weeks.

Working Gul’s case required long hours in Guantánamo, in those claustrophobic cement rooms. Pretty quickly, Sullivan-Bennis became someone he could talk to. About anything.

Haroon Gul. (Courtesy of Shelby Sullivan-Bennis)

He felt his tragedy was grand, for sure. Gul said he suffered physical trauma. As Reprieve would write, after his arrest, he was “blindfolded, shackled, and hung by his arms while they were still cuffed behind his back, stripped and tortured.” Once at Guantánamo, Reprieve said, his interrogators “denied him access to bathroom facilities,” “lowered the thermostat to freezing,” and shackled him for up to 12 hours at a time “without water or food in a position that allowed him neither to fully stand nor sit, preventing any sleep.”

But like anyone, in or out of indefinite detention, he was obsessed with the minor indignities of his life, too. Slights from guards. Uncomfortable living conditions. “He’d never had anyone to talk to about this injustice or that one,” said Sullivan-Bennis. “His detention is the overarching one—but there are hundreds beneath that.”

And really, he just loved to chat. He’d talk about Afghan politics, which Sullivan-Bennis couldn’t engage him much on, and American politics, which she happily could. During the 2016 primaries, Gul watched a lot of the lefty news channel Democracy Now! He told Sullivan-Bennis, “Bernie is concerned with the people!” One day Sullivan-Bennis got a memo from the team that reviews detainee correspondence. “It said, ‘Your client has written a letter to someone besides yourself. And then at the bottom of the memo it said, ‘That person was Bernie Sanders.’”

Most of Sullivan-Bennis’s clients were older than her, some by decades. They were proper, careful, reserved. Gul was a bit of a ballbuster. He’d laugh that they were both too young to know anything. Once, he picked up that Sullivan-Bennis was in a bad mood and riffed: “It’s OK! It’s Guantánamo! It makes everyone feel like they’re at war!”

As they got to know each other, Sullivan-Bennis pushed forward on another front—Gul’s habeas corpus case in the federal court system in D.C. Habeas corpus establishes that a detainee cannot be held indefinitely without grounds.

For Reprieve, this represented the crux of the injustice of his detention. Say Gul had been a high-level HIG operative. Wasn’t it long past time for the government to prove as much in court? Also, in the years since, the Afghan government had actually reached a peace deal with HIG. They were now a legally recognized political party running candidates for office. And besides: Obama had declared the war in Afghanistan over in 2014. So why were we still holding war prisoners?

But Sullivan-Bennis said she hit a wall putting Gul’s case together: The U.S. government wasn’t cooperating. Of the thousands of documents that purportedly made up the case against Gul, only 24 pages had at first been declassified and turned over. As Sullivan-Bennis explained, “It sounds insane, but it’s not at all automatic that, if you’re imprisoned in Guantánamo, you know why.”

Shelby Sullivan-Bennis (Greg Kahn for The Marshall Project)

* * *

In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. A month or so after, the ramifications of the shock victory not yet settled, I spoke with Sullivan-Bennis. On the campaign trail Trump had promised to keep Guantánamo open and to load it up with “bad dudes”; he’d also promoted torture of wartime detainees like Gul. “Frankly, we’re hopeful,” she said, “and we’re terrified.”

Gul fell into a pit. “He’s said to me so many times, ‘Shelby, I can’t wait another year. I should go home. I should be at home,’” Sullivan-Bennis said. Gul would express concern for his daughter’s education. When she was able to study, she was an excellent student, regularly one of the best in her class. She loved it so much, Gul explained, that she’d even inspired her mother to go back to school. But life in the refugee camps could be unstable. And in those times, Sullivan-Bennis said, Gul would “repeat over and over, ‘She hasn’t been able to get to school. She hasn’t been able to get to school.’”

In the early months of 2017, Gul and Sullivan-Bennis prepped carefully for Gul’s second PRB hearing. They worked on explaining, in as detailed and direct a manner as possible, Gul’s life before Guantánamo. Gul was prone to circular answers. Sullivan-Bennis drilled him as if she was preparing a client for cross examination. “No,” she would tell him, good-naturedly pushing back as he rambled, “that’s not exactly it.”

They also worked on explaining what his life after would be like. Gul had charted out a business plan for a honeybee farm that he would run in coordination with a local university in Pakistan. Agricultural students would be employed on the farm in a work-study capacity. There’d be a bakery on site, too.

In regard to the extremist ideology of al Qaeda that had purportedly got him locked up in the first place, Gul knew what he would say. It does not comport with his belief system. Al Qaeda oppresses women. He wants schooling for his wife and daughter.

One question was still present: contrition. Gul and Sullivan-Bennis knew the board was looking for repentance. Gul had never wavered from his claim of innocence. And so he had never before raised the possibility of asking for forgiveness. But this was now his second go-around. Post-Trump, perhaps he’d be more desperate than ever. Willing to compromise his truth.

Sullivan-Bennis waited for him to make his decision. “I would never counsel him to lie,” she said. “But I think the detainees should be given the tools to make those decisions for themselves.”

In March, Gul had his hearing. Once again he was trotted into the white room and plopped into the oddly comfortable beige chair. Once again he faced the floating heads on the screen. Once again he made his case for release.

“He answered everything quickly and directly,” Sullivan-Bennis reported back at the time. “We presented the business plans. I think he was great. I think he did really well.”

Gul knew men that had gotten out by throwing themselves at the mercy of the review board. But even then, years into his detention—and with a shred of hope finally in grasp—he didn’t budge. He didn’t apologize. Sullivan-Bennis said, “I don’t think he would ever consider it.”

Letters and drawings from Haroon Gul who is a prisoner at the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba. (Courtesy of Shelby Sullivan-Bennis)

* * *

In April 2017, while on prison camp grounds in Guantánamo, Sullivan-Bennis ran into a government interpreter she knew. She heard, “‘Oh, I think they’re giving Haroon his Final Determination today.’ And I was like, ‘What?!’”

The Final Determination was the government’s response to Gul’s second review board hearing. Per protocol, Gul and Sullivan-Bennis should have been notified it was coming down. No such notification occurred, Sullivan-Bennis said. “I just happened to be physically present at the camp at that particular moment in the morning,” she said, “and I just, like, barged into the meeting.”

It was the same kind of windowless cement room where Sullivan-Bennis and Gul always had their meetings. Gul was on one side of the plastic-top table. Sullivan-Bennis, an interpreter, and a military representative sat on the other.

The military rep read a brief statement: “The Periodic Review Board, by consensus, determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

Gul listened and stayed silent. The representative asked if Gul had any questions. Gul said no. “And he just looked at me,” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “And I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ And he said, ‘It’s OK. It doesn’t matter.’ And I said, ‘Yes it does.’”

That afternoon, Sullivan-Bennis and Gul met one-on-one. “He’s not a defeatist person,” she said. “But for four hours he told me he was giving up on his life.” Gul wasn’t done seeking legal recourse. He was was done with it all. “He was saying he wanted to give up on his family,” Sullivan-Bennis explained. “He was saying he was giving them false hope. He wanted to let them go and continue their lives.”

Then he apologized. “He said, ‘I’m sorry you have to suffer me.’” Mustering some deep reserves of enthusiasm, Sullivan-Bennis tried to push back. She told him, “This doesn’t mean the end of everything.”

Immediately after Trump’s election, no one actually knew what he would do with Guantánamo or its “forever prisoners.” Months in, it seemed his administration was taking the path of least resistance.

In an email, Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Major Ben Sakrisson confirmed the facts: “Since January 2017, no PRBs resulted in a transfer decision.” Furthermore, five men who had been cleared for transfer by the Obama administration were not being released. The Pentagon did not reply to queries about Gul’s case.

A few months ago, when it became clearer what was happening at Guantánamo, I spoke to Wilner, the Supreme Court lawyer who had won habeas rights for detainees. “Obama was not being honest about his commitment to ending this,” he told me, fuming. “I think, in the back of his mind, he liked the idea that he could keep people except those he wanted to release.”

Frustrated, horrified, he unleashed a bellow somewhere in the direction of the former president: “You left it in Trump’s hands, and now the poor bastards are stuck there! You’re leaving Donald Trump a lawless prison!”

* * *

An outdoor recreation area stands within the “Gitmo” maximum security detention center on October 22, 2016 at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

In the fall of 2017, I visited Guantánamo Bay. I sat in on hearings in the Expeditionary Legal Complex. It’s a war court, prefab, plopped in the middle of a disused tarmac. That week, the ELC was holding pretrial hearings in the 9/11 trial, the Office of Military Commission case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other detainees charged with conspiring to execute the attacks.

In an infamous photo of KSM from the night of his capture, he looks wild and disheveled and dazed, but also imposing somehow—a menace, a threat. In person, escorted into court by two soldiers in fatigues and blue plastic gloves, in a camo jacket over a white robe, he looked shrunken.

I sat in the back of the courtroom in a viewing gallery separated, with respect to the preservation of classified information, by three panes of soundproof glass and a 40-second audio delay. Little placards posted throughout the room listed rules. Nᴏ ᴅʀᴀᴡɪɴɢ, ᴅᴏᴏᴅʟɪɴɢ, ꜱᴋᴇᴛᴄʜɪɴɢ. Nᴏ ʙɪɴᴏᴄᴜʟᴀʀꜱ.

The defense pushed for discovery. One defense lawyer wanted all information about CIA torture sites, down to the actual building materials. She wanted to know what kind of wall it was that her client’s head had been slammed into over and over again. She wanted to know weather conditions and smell—“smell in the context of torture can be important.”

Another defense lawyer charted out a long list of witnesses he’d like to call over the question of war hostilities. They were major names from a former era. Paul Wolfowitz. Condoleezza Rice. Colin Powell. Donald Rumsfeld. At some point during his presentation, lead prosecutor Brigadier General Mark Martins stood at his desk, hunched over his microphone, and announced, “I’m invoking national security privilege.”

Something had been deemed to be potentially classified. The court gallery was cleared. While it was sorted, we went outside and baked in the Cuban sun near vending machines stocked with Pepsi and Andy Capps’ Hot Fries. We watched a woman feed chocolate to a long, lone iguana. A soldier standing guard behind us clucked, worried about the gastrointestinal impact. That iguana, he told us, was going to have a “bad time.”

Everyone on both sides was muddling forward together, hoping to instill the process with legitimacy. But there was no precedent here. It was hard to ignore the overarching fact: all these years later, and the case was still in pretrial hearings. Everything was trivial. Everything was huge.

And yet, there was something to be said for the sheer existence of the proceedings. Some semblance of jurisprudence was lurching along.

As for Gul’s case, Sullivan-Bennis is still engaged in the habeas process. A year and a half after Reprieve took him on as a client, she said she is still struggling with basic discovery. For one, she said the government had conducted extensive searches but could not find any transcripts of Gul’s many interrogations. The Justice Department declined to comment, citing active litigation.

In January, hoping to bring renewed attention to their indefinite detention, 11 of Gul’s fellow “forever prisoners” filed new habeas petitions in the U.S. District Court in D.C. The motions, which Sullivan-Bennis called “kind of like a class-action lawsuit for GTMO detainees,” were filed simultaneously at 8:30 a.m. on January 11, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison. Reprieve was involved in the action, but out of concern that a new petition might hurt his case, Gul was not.

Days later, Trump announced during his State of the Union address that he had signed an executive order to “keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay,” officially reversing an Obama-era order to shut down the prison.

As a government cable leaked a few days earlier made clear, “The E.O. does not signal a significant policy shift with respect to detentions. Rather, it affirms Guantánamo Bay will continue to … serve as one of several options the United States maintains for the detention of terrorists.” Both sides were making noise. The status quo, however, was not being threatened.

“I’m relieved, to be honest,” Sullivan-Bennis said of Trump’s order, adding that she and other lawyers in the GTMO bar had expected worse. They’d imagined that Trump might explicitly ban the possibility of detainees being transferred out. “Officially, at least, they still have an avenue for release. Whether or not we’re ever going to see this happen is another question.”

When I first began communicating with Sullivan-Bennis, a month before the 2016 election, I did so believing I was tracking the process of getting a man released from Guantánamo. But for now, Trump, it seems, has shut the doors.

I wasn’t able to see Gul while I was in Guantánamo. Press are not granted communication with detainees. He was a few miles away—exact location, undisclosed—in Camp 6. He’d been there for years. Surely, now, he’d be there for years to come.

And yet, Gul still talks about the future. He’s written to Sullivan-Bennis, “I am working on some projects to make my life after Gitmo better. I am still thinking about my wife and daughter.” What else can he do?

Sullivan-Bennis had instructed Gul to stop engaging with the Periodic Review Board. She could no longer force optimism. “I would be hugely surprised if anyone left Guantánamo in the next four years,” she told me. “But I don’t like to say it out loud.”

* * *

Amos Barshad has written for The FADER, Grantland, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and The Arkansas Times. He lives in New York City.

Published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

from Longreads http://ift.tt/2EXXN5A

'World's deadliest spider' may actually help save its own victims

He’s big. He drips venom. He’s angry. His name is Colossus.

from FOX News http://ift.tt/2Cq8oEI

Bizarre research paper explores threat of alien galactic cyber attack

Do Earthlings need to be prepared for the potential of an alien cyber attack?

from FOX News http://ift.tt/2oEsnq1

Rare blue ice stacks 'as high as a three-story building' form along Michigan's Great Lakes

In the middle of her work shift Sunday morning, Tori Burley received a text from her father that gave her a tingle of excitement: "The blue ice is back!"

from FOX News http://ift.tt/2CpEmAV

Discovery of giant hand axes suggest a prehistoric 'Game of Thrones' scenario in ancient Europe

Even our earliest human ancestors made and used technology — something we can look back on thanks to the lasting nature of stone tools.

from FOX News http://ift.tt/2oF3eLU

Friday Hack Chat: Everything PCB

It was not too long ago that all PCB design packages were proprietary. Getting PCBs made was expensive, and if you tried to do this over the Internet, the best way was to download a board house’s proprietary software, design your board in their software suite, and send your boards off to be made. A 5 cm square board would cost two hundred dollars. I know this to be true because I’ve said it before, and no one has corrected me.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking Everything PCB with OSH Park. OSH Park is the leading creators of perfect purple PCBs. They have POGs, and for the last two weeks, they’ve been one of the few places you can send some Gerbers to and have it manufactured in a timely manner if you live in the US. Because China was closed.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about everything PCB. How do you do castellated holes? How do you mill slots and square or otherwise non-round holes? Internal cutouts? Stop mask expansion? Artwork? Panelization? Why purple? More POGs!

Our guests for this chat will be [Dan Sheadel] and [Drew Fustini] of OSH Park, and they’re going to be there answering all your questions. [Dan] has been around OSH Park from the beginning and enjoys designing tiny useless robots and mentoring students building better ones. [Drew] is an Open Source hardware developer, firmware designer, a BeagleBoard board member, and is usually found at hardware meetups wearing purple.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down Friday, March 2nd at noon, Pacific time. Want to know what time this is happening in your neck of the woods? Have a countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

from Hackaday http://ift.tt/2oxyE7H