By JAMES RISEN
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — At first, the Americans seemed confused about Suleiman Abdullah Salim. They apparently had been expecting a light-skinned Arab, and instead at a small airport outside Mogadishu that day in March 2003, they had been handed a dark-skinned African.
“They said, ‘You changed your face,’” Mr. Salim, a Tanzanian, recalled the American men telling him when he arrived. “They said: ‘You are Yemeni. You changed your face.’”
That was the beginning of Mr. Salim’s strange ordeal in United States custody. It has been 13 years since he was tortured in a secret prison in Afghanistan run by the Central Intelligence Agency, a place he calls “The Darkness.” It has been eight years since he was released — no charges, no explanations — back into the world.
Even after so much time, Mr. Salim, 45, is struggling to move on. Suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress, according to a medical assessment, he is withdrawn and wary. He cannot talk about his experiences with his wife, who he says worries that the Americans will come back to snatch him. He is fearful of drawing too much attention at home in Stone Town in Zanzibar, Tanzania, concerned that his neighbors will think he is an American spy.
When he speaks, not in his native Swahili but in the English he learned from his jailers, Mr. Salim nearly whispers. “Many times now I feel like I have something heavy inside my body,” he said in an interview. “Sometimes I walk, and I walk, and I forget, I forget everything, I forget prison, The Darkness, everything. But it is always there. The Darkness comes.”
Mr. Salim was one of 39 men subjected to some of the C.I.A.’s most brutal techniques — beatings, hanging in chains, sleep deprivation and water dousing, which creates a sensation of drowning, even though interrogators had been denied permission to use that last tactic on him, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the agency’s classified interrogation program.
In a series of recent interviews in Dubai, Mr. Salim described his incarceration by the C.I.A. and the United States military as a terrorism suspect. His account closely parallels those provided by other detainees, witnesses and court documents, and confirms details in the Senate report about his treatment.
Today, back in Stone Town, Mr. Salim is trying to support his family, though some of his attempts at jobs have not worked out. He now breeds pigeons, raising them for a local market. They are both his livelihood and his solace.
They help him, Mr. Salim said. They quiet his mind.
A Life Interrupted
Exactly why Mr. Salim fell into American hands remains murky; leaks to the press at the time of his capture suggested that intelligence officials suspected he had links to Al Qaeda, but the C.I.A. has never publicly disclosed the reasons. An agency spokesman declined to comment for this article.
Mr. Salim had been drifting into a nomadic life in one of the world’s poorest regions, where the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had promised allies cash rewards for terrorism suspects. Governments and warlords turned over hundreds of men to the United States, in many cases with little evidence of wrongdoing.
Mr. Salim grew up on Africa’s eastern edges, but from boy to man never quite found himself. One of eight children in a family in Stone Town, a historic district of Zanzibar City, he apprenticed on the local fishing piers, then joined the crews going out for kingfish and barracuda in the Indian Ocean.
He dropped out of school after ninth or 10th grade and headed for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, where he worked in a clothing shop. He moved a few years later to Mombasa, on Kenya’s coast, where he ferried cargos of dried fish, rice and oil with a crew of two.
Then the outside world intruded. In August 1998, Qaeda suicide truck bombers blew up the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr. Salim said a man whose boat he used for the cargo runs was suspected of involvement in the plot. (Mr. Salim said that while he was in prison, American officials told him that the man had died, but he knows no other details.) The boat was soon seized by a Somali pirate, he said.
Mr. Salim moved on to Kismayu, a Somali port town, and was hired as a harbor pilot. It was a good job, maybe too good for a foreigner with no ties to Somalia’s powerful clans and militias. “You had to pay off militias every time you moved a ship,” he said. “The clans were trouble, so I left.”
By 2000, he was sleeping in a mosque and begging on the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital. Eventually, a shop owner offered him odd jobs and work as a driver for him and his sister, who Mr. Salim said worked for Mohammed Dheere, a Somali warlord.
Hanging in Chains
They asked him over and over about his appearance, Mr. Salim said. “They said: ‘You are not Suleiman. You changed your face.’ I say: ‘Go to Tanzania. Go see my mother and take a picture of me.’”
He was turned over to the Kenyan authorities, who flew him to Nairobi. But after questioning him, the Kenyans sent him back to Somalia and the Americans. (Kenyan officials did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Salim’s case.)
This time the Americans kept him. News accounts, including an article in The New York Times, soon appeared quoting United States and Kenyan officials describing the capture of a Qaeda operative from Yemen identified as Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, who was wanted in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. Mr. Salim said he never used the name Hemed and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism.
The news reports also said Mr. Dheere, who died in 2012, had agreed to hunt down suspects, including the man identified in the press as Mr. Hemed, for the C.I.A. in return for money.
From Somalia, the C.I.A. flew Mr. Salim to a United States base in Djibouti. He was blindfolded and stripped, and an object was inserted in his rectum while the Americans photographed him, according to court documents. Just before he left Djibouti, Mr. Salim recalled, one of the captors told him that he was going to the “prison of the pharaohs.”
He was flown to Afghanistan, not Egypt as he guessed from what his captor said, and taken to the pitch-black, stinking and cavernous building that Mr. Salim calls The Darkness.
The Americans routinely hauled him from his cell to a room where, he said, they hanged him from chains, once for two days. They wrapped a collar around his neck and pulled it to slam him against a wall, he said. And they shaved his head, laid him on a plastic tarp and poured gallons of ice water on him, inducing a feeling of drowning.
“A guy says to me, ‘Here the rain doesn’t finish,’” Mr. Salim recalled. Several men wrapped him in the tarp and kicked him “many times, many times,” he added. At one point, a cast that a prison doctor had put on his hand — a finger had been broken by the Somali gunmen — became waterlogged. The doctor cut it off, and the water dousing continued.
Mr. Salim described other grisly practices by his jailers: placing him in a coffin-like box, his arms stretched and chained, on top of cleaning chemicals; strapping him to a gurney and injecting him with drugs that made him woozy; bringing dogs into a room to threaten him.
The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that Mr. Salim was one of at least six detainees in 2003 who were “stripped and shackled nude, placed in the standing position for sleep deprivation, or subjected to other C.I.A. enhanced interrogation techniques.” The report said officials at C.I.A. headquarters had approved the use of some of the harsh tactics against Mr. Salim, but rejected interrogators’ requests for water dousing.
While 39 men endured the enhanced techniques, they were among at least 119 captives who went through the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons. Many were later released without charges. A quarter were men who were picked up by mistake or on evidence that proved unreliable, a Senate inquiry later found. Others were low-level militants; some were suspected terrorist leaders, including accused plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Read more: After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of ‘The Darkness’
Source: NYtimes
