86% of Guantanamo Bay Inmates Sold to American Troops in Response to $5,000 Bounty Offer

 

By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Gamel Sadek was living a quiet life as a school teacher in Kandahar in March 2002 when his life was suddenly shattered.

While eating lunch one day with his wife and sons, two Afghan police came to his door and arrested him, taking him to a CIA black site at Bagram Air Base and then to Guantánamo Bay prison in occupied Cuban territory where he was tortured for the next ten years.

The U.S. government alleged that Sadek, an Egyptian who had fought with the mujahadin in the 1980s, was a member of al-Qaeda involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, though never developed any proof of this.

In reality, Sadek was sold out by his neighbor, who was paid a $5,000 bounty by U.S. soldiers under a program initiated by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Sadek’s story is spotlighted in the film, I Am Gitmo, written and directed by Philippe Diaz, which won a best actor award at the 2023 Marbella International Film Festival in Spain and the Special Jury Award at the Socially Relevant Film Festival in New York.

Though Sadek is not real, his is the story of the overwhelming majority of Guantánamo Bay inmates. Eighty-six percent of them were sold to American troops in a bounty program modeled after the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which resulted in the torture and deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.^[1]

Since 2002, 775 men have been detained at Guantánamo Bay, though only eight have been convicted of any crimes, with four of those convictions reversed.

Some 37 prisoners currently remain incarcerated in Guantánamo under these conditions. President Joe Biden has not only kept the facility open but provided funding for its upgrade even though he promised to close it when he campaigned for the presidency.

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Diaz said that he was inspired to make I Am Gitmo after he read the book Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, which was made into a feature film starring Jodi Foster called The Mauritanian. Diaz said that he almost fell from his chair reading the film’s script because it had only about two minutes depicting torture when Ould Slahi wrote about being tortured in vivid detail over nearly 300 pages.

Also in the film, Ould Slahi’s interrogator cracked jokes with him, and presented what Diaz called “the trope of the white hero” in which Foster, who plays his lawyer, saves the day by rescuing him from captivity. At the end, Ould Slahi is depicted making a lot of money off his book and living well, as if there is a happy ending to the story.

Diaz said that, in reality, most Guantánamo Bay inmates cannot go back to their own countries and are forced to go to “rehabilitation camps” in Saudi Arabia when they committed no crime.

While there are organizations out there calling for the closing of Guantánamo Bay, none is advocating for reparations for the victims of a torture regimen coming from the top of the U.S. government that has scarred victims.

Diaz says that he hopes I Am Gitmo will contribute to such a movement, which would entail the U.S. government being held accountable for the atrocities that it perpetrated.

In contrast to The Mauritanian, I Am Gitmo depicts Guantánamo Bay as the monstrosity that it is. The name of the film comes from a revolt where inmates refused guards’ orders to give their name during a cell count, proclaiming in unison, “I Am Gitmo.”

Diaz makes a point of presenting in graphic detail the torture that Sadek and other inmates experienced, including their being chained to the ceiling and floor, being sexually assaulted, subjected to mock executions, sleep and food deprivation, forced hooding, being buried underground and the water torture method designed to simulate drowning.

Diaz said that he wants the viewer to get a sense of what it was like for people to be tortured. In one memorable scene, the viewer is made to feel the coffin closing as Sadek is being buried.

The strength of Sadek’s character comes to light in a scene when he comes to the defense of an elderly inmate who was beaten by a sadistic guard because he was praying without authorization.

In this scene, Diaz provides commentary on the U.S. military’s contempt for Muslim culture, fanned by demagogic politicians and the media.

Diaz also shows how the U.S. government manufactured evidence against terrorist suspects in order to frame them.

Sadek’s chief interrogator, John Anderson (played by Eric Pierpoint), is given a photo purporting to show Sadek with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s; however, the person said to be Sadek had his back facing the camera and cannot actually be identified.

Sadek’s Imam also allegedly confessed to Sadek’s membership in al-Qaeda, though we find out that the confession was induced through torture, and that the tape broadcasting it was garbled so it was not clear what the Imam actually said.

When Sadek is shown media accounts of his case, he is amazed to learn that he was a coordinator of al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan—which he never was.

Diaz suggests that this kind of biased media coverage helps solidify the public impression that Guantánamo Bay prisoners are the “worst of the worst”—as they were consistently called—and deserving of their fate.

I Am Gitmo is a superb film overall with great character development and dialogue. Some of the most stimulating scenes are ones depicting discussions between Sadek’s character and his lawyer (Bob Levin played by Paul Kampf) and chief interrogator, Anderson.

In those discussion, Sadek tells Anderson that Arabs had been victims of Western imperial machinations over centuries and that he was proud to join the mujahadin in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet Union, an atheistic power that had dishonored Muslims.

When Anderson accuses Sadek of being part of the 9/11 plot because he supposedly fought with Osama bin Laden, Sadek tells Anderson that he never knew bin Laden and that most Arabs believe that bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11.

Rather they believe that al-Qaeda was a CIA creation and that the CIA and Israeli Mossad had planned 9/11 to provide a reason for the U.S. invading the entire Middle East.”

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Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/04/22/eighty-six-percent-of-guantanamo-bay-inmates-were-sold-to-american-troops-in-response-to-5000-bounty-offer/