A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (17 page)

He had paid little attention to the character of his cell when he had been brought to it that morning. He saw now that it was four and a half feet by six. The floor was mercifully dry. A dim bulb hung from the ceiling, and near it were a very small window that let in almost no light and a very small hole for ventilation, obviously inadequate. The air was rank. There was a thin mat and a blanket, nothing more. It was a box for a man.

Remembering his torture of fifteen years ago and knowing the stories of other victims, he was terrified. He tried to pray and recite the Quran, but he had trouble keeping his thoughts from what might happen to him. His jailers let him sauté in this imaginative broth for some hours, then at last the door opened and guards came in and blindfolded him and bound his hands. They marched him in silence down several corridors until coming to a very low doorway that had to be entered on hands and knees. The guards kicked him through, and on the other side someone removed his handcuffs and ordered him to take off his clothes. When he was naked, they re-shackled his hands behind his back and made him bend one leg so that his foot was pointed back and up toward his hands. Then they shackled the ankle of the leg to his wrists. It is hard to stand on one leg for a long time even when not wearing a blindfold, which removes the visual cues that help a person balance. Eventually Abu Omar fell to the hard floor, with no hands to break his fall. The guards stood him back up, he fell again, and they stood him up again. Each time he fell, he tried to land on a part of his body that would not hurt, but there was no such part. This went on some time, the guards laughing at each fall. In the future this torment would last what seemed like hours, but today it was shorter.

At length, he was held in place, or maybe his foot was unshackled and he was sat down on a chair, and a man asked him questions: Who were his family? Where had he grown up? With what friends? Where did he go to college? Why did he join al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya? Who recruited him? Who were his colleagues? What had he done with them? Why did he preach against the Egyptian government? Why did he conspire to commit terrorism? Wasn’t he plotting to kill officials? To overthrow Mubarak? If he was innocent, why did he leave Egypt? Where did he go? What did he do there? Who did he live with? Who else did he know there? What else did he do there? What else? Where did he go next? What did he do there and who did he know? And after that? And that? Which Egyptians did he know in Italy? Which other North Africans? Did he know Abu So-and-so? Did he know the deputy imam at this mosque? How long had he known him? With whom did this deputy imam associate? Abu Imad, the imam of Viale Jenner, was a terrorist—he knew this, of course? Come now, what did he know about Abu Imad’s plots? Nothing? Of course he must know something. Who was Abu Imad planning to bomb? Who was Abu Omar planning to bomb? Where? When? What were they planning with their brothers in Egypt? Who recruited the men? Who got the weapons? How were they moved? How were the papers worked out? Come, come, he must know all of this. No? No? Well. They would see about that—and a fist smashed into his head.

It is bad to be struck but worse to be struck when you cannot see the blow coming, because you cannot flinch to soften it. Before Abu Omar could recover, another fist smashed into him. Then another. Then another. The questions continued. It seemed to Abu Omar as if there were hundreds. When his interrogator exhausted one subject, he moved to another, then doubled back and revisited the first—whether to check Abu Omar’s answers or wear him out, Abu Omar did not know. When his answers did not satisfy, there were more blows. Hours seemed to pass this way. At some point that day, or perhaps during a later session, the blindfold was removed and someone put a photograph of an Arab before him. Did Abu Omar know this man? What was his name? Where did he live? What did he do for the jihad? Another photo would follow, then another. There were scores of photos, mostly of men who had emigrated to Italy. Abu Omar knew some of them, but whatever he said about them, he would later not tell.

Eventually his questioners pressed to his skin a metal stick that must have been a kind of cattle prod, for electricity shot out of it and into him with horrible effect. Other victims have said such jolts contorted their muscles into grotesque positions, made their jaws clamp shut, and set their teeth grinding together. Some victims felt as if something were exploding inside them or the flesh were being ripped from their bones or their bodies were trying to tear themselves apart only to be held in place by the thin check of their skin. Some felt their eyeballs pushing up from inside, straining to burst from their sockets. Some thought their brains or hearts would rupture. Abu Omar screamed madly. His tormentor paused, gave him a few seconds to recover, then electrocuted him again. Then again. And again. And again. Each time he stopped, Abu Omar cried and pled. He promised to tell them anything, absolutely anything—they had only to name it. But the stick was put back to him. This may have gone on for minutes or hours. He lost all sense of time.

After they stopped, he continued to shake with spasms, and flashes of light darted before his eyes. In his ears the sound of a dentist’s drill buzzed. Where the stick had touched him for a prolonged time, his skin was singed. In later sessions he would be electrocuted on his nipples, penis, scrotum, ears, nose, spine, soles—whatever part of his body his torturers fancied. Sometimes he passed out.

On this day or one like it, his tormentors removed his blindfold, gave him pen and paper, and told him to write a statement of his crimes. He could not easily work the pen after the electrocution, but he tried to please them. When he was done, he was given a declaration that said he had not been mistreated, which he signed. Then he was given his clothes and dressed himself in pain, and his guards returned him to his cell. Rather than leave him in relative peace, they chained his hands to an eyelet on the wall that he had not seen before. He was in so much pain that the chaining was at first unworthy of notice, but his hands soon ached miserably, and after several hours they began to swell.

Not knowing when he would be tortured again was its own torture. Each time a door opened in the passageway or footsteps came his way, he became frantic. When the steps continued past his cell, he praised God, but the terror returned almost immediately. Sometimes the steps stopped outside his door, the food slot was slid open, and a pair of eyes looked in at him. Then the slot slid shut, the owner of the eyes walked away, and the unnatural hush that was the jail’s usual state returned. Two dozen prisoners may have been within shouting distance, but Abu Omar did not hear them, and they did not hear him. Forbidden to speak, each was alone among many.

THEY CAME
for him again after two or three days. He was blindfolded, walked to the torture chamber, and made to strip naked. The questions began, and the photographs were put before him. He was tortured. Sometimes they beat him with fists, sometimes with thick cables. Very often he was electrocuted. At some point they put headphones on him and blared music so loud that he lost most of the hearing in one ear. He was given a document renouncing his asylum in Italy, and he did not hesitate to put his name to it—he would have renounced his children if they had asked. Sometimes his interrogators said they were certain he was a terrorist mastermind, but other times they said they knew he was just a small fish. One interrogator asked him for the passcode to his mobile phone account, which made him think his kidnappers had brought his cell phone to Egypt. Another interrogator claimed to have visited Milan shortly before the kidnapping, and he described the streets between the flat on Via Conte Verde and the mosque on Viale Jenner. Abu Omar thought, without foundation, that this proved Egypt had taken part in the kidnapping. One interrogator said Abu Imad, the imam of Viale Jenner, would be the next person kidnapped. Egypt, the interrogator claimed, had a deal with Italy whereby the latter would export any Egyptian Islamist at the request of the Egyptian government. Abu Omar believed this claim too, also without foundation. During another session, he was told that Egypt had no complaint against him but had to hold him because “the Americans imposed you on us.”

“Why, then, do you abuse me so?” Abu Omar said.

“It is our family tradition,” the man answered.

During a pause in one session, Abu Omar heard a cassette tape being ejected from a recorder, turned over, and put back in. He wondered who would listen to the recording.

At the end of nearly every session, he was made to sign more statements. Back in his cell, when he was not chained to the wall, he was often made to lie on his rude bed, on pain of beating if he stood up. Sometimes his guards kept him awake for long stretches—he did not know how long. When it was cold, he froze, when it was hot, he burned, and he became rheumatic and arthritic and had pain when he breathed. The insects worked on him, and his skin grew abhorrent. Now and then he fainted. When he slept, it was without rest. His nightmares were peopled by assailants he could not see, and he woke screaming, his body twitching uncontrollably. One morning he found his beard had turned white.

In time his isolation made him desperate enough to risk opening the slot of his door a crack when other prisoners walked by. He wanted only to glimpse someone who was not a demon. He thought he recognized a few Islamist leaders, one of whom, he believed, was Abu Yasser, formally
Refai Ahmed Taha Musa, a high leader of Gamaa who had last been seen in Syria in October of 2001 and who was believed to have been rendered to Egypt. It was generally assumed that he had been executed. Seeing Abu Yasser alive gave Abu Omar a brief joy.

Every two or three days the guards came for him—sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, sometimes in the dead of night—and he was tortured. This went on for seven months. It felt like seven years.

But a day came when an officer told Abu Omar he would soon be leaving. He wept. He had often said to himself that the Italian government would not abandon him, and he had even thought the Italian ambassador himself might visit him and offer his protection. He inferred now that his hope had not been misplaced. He envisioned his return to Milan and his reunion with his wife and the brothers in the mosques. Over and over, he played the scenes in his mind.

The day of his departure arrived, and he was blindfolded and taken to an office, where the blindfold was briefly removed and he was told to sign two documents before him. One said that he had not been abused, the other that he had arrived in prison with no possessions. The papers were dated September 14, 2003, which was how he learned he had been in prison seven months. He signed the papers and was ordered to take off his prison uniform and was given the cut-off pajamas the Americans had dressed him in. He was mildly surprised they had been kept all these months. After he had put them on and was again blindfolded, his hands and feet were shackled and he was led outside the building at a shuffle. It was the first time in seven months he had been out of doors, and the fresh air, notwithstanding that Cairene air tastes of lead and soot, was a miracle to him. He was put aboard a microbus, the preferred transit of the Egyptian torturer, and told to lie on the floor, where he was covered with blankets so he would not be seen.

After the bus had driven for some minutes, one of his chaperons said, “Do you know where you are going?”

“To the airport,” Abu Omar said. “Back to Italy. Home.”

The chaperon said nothing.

After forty-five minutes, the bus stopped and Abu Omar was ordered out. He did not hear airplanes or other sounds one would associate with airports. He was led into a building and shoved roughly forward to a room, where he was set upon by many fists, boots, and curses. It was his welcome, he soon understood, to the Tora Prison complex, south of Cairo. The prisons of Tora run from a lightly secured farm camp to the most fortified prison in the nation. The latter, run by the State Security Service, is known as al-Aqrab, the Scorpion. It was apparently to the Scorpion that Abu Omar had been brought. When his hosts were done with their violent greeting, they sat him bleeding in a chair and asked his full name, age, job, and other basic personal information, apparently for the prison’s records. Even torture has its bureaucracy. Then he was taken through several hallways and down stairs to a cell well below ground. One of the guards opened the door and said Abu Omar had come to a place where nobody could find him, a place lost to the world.

“Here, the flies don’t even come,” the guard said.

He told Abu Omar he must never remove his blindfold, even in his cell. If he tried, he would get a “torture party.” They would be watching. Abu Omar asked to know the
qiblah
, the direction of Mecca, toward which a Muslim must face during prayer, but the guard would not tell him. He asked where the lavatory was, and the guard took off the blindfold for a moment and said, “You’re in the lavatory.” Abu Omar saw before him a bowl of dirty water and, for his evacuations, a small hole whose stench he had already smelled. The cell had no light and only the tiniest of ventilation shafts, which accounted for the sodden weight of the air. It was no bigger than his last cell—two steps in any direction exhausted it. There was no bed, only a sheet of cardboard and a thin blanket.

The guard said that whenever Abu Omar heard a key in his door, he must go immediately to the wall opposite and kneel with both hands against it. If he failed to do so before a guard entered, he would be educated with a cattle prod. He also said that Abu Omar’s name was now 27, the number of his cell. If Abu Omar failed to answer to 27, he would be educated with the prod. He would also, although the guard did not then say so, learn to answer to Whore, Cunt, and Anus, also on penalty of electrical education.

The guard shut him inside and left him alone. His despair, after his expectation of freedom, was thorough. He tried to console himself with the thought that maybe they would not treat him quite so badly here, but they soon rid him of that idea. At Tora he was to have two interrogations a day, as opposed to the one every few days at the previous prison. The first session ran from late morning until late afternoon, the second from night until nearly dawn. He was introduced to new tortures. In one, he was strapped naked to an iron grate through which electricity was shot, which added to the usual electrical agony a feeling like being seared on a griddle. Sometimes the effect was enhanced by throwing water on him. In another torture, his tormentors lay him on a water-soaked mattress and set a wooden chair over his chest and another chair over his thighs. Two brutes would sit on the chairs to weigh them down, electricity would be sent through the mattress, and Abu Omar’s body would leap up and crash into the crossbars of the chairs, which kept him in contact with the current. At other times, he was electrocuted through clamps attached to his nipples or penis or through a kind of wire hat placed on his head, which left his thinking muddled for days. In another torture, he was hung on a door in a crucifix-like position and battered with cables and clubs all over his body, his genitals not excepted. In another, they draped him over a trapeze, hands and ankles bound together, and beat him all over. “Let Italy help you,” they said when he cried for mercy. During one session, he was thrown face-first to the floor, naked and with his hands tied behind his back. A guard dropped his pants and mounted him as if for rape. Abu Omar screamed hysterically before passing out and did not know if the rape had been completed. The same thing happened another time.