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- [00:00]
Mike Baumgartner
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- [00:19]
Sarah Koenig
Previously on Serial. They show me like they are here to help us. Ah yeah. So they also get some snack type items based on. Based on their compliancy status.
- [00:34]
Mike Baumgartner
We need to gather information. These are the people that we need to get it from. They would talk, they would be like, why am I still here? Can you send me home?
- [00:43]
Ahmed Arashidi
We don't know what's going to happen. It's like there's no foreseeable outcome. There's no, like, how long am I gonna stay in this prison?
- [00:57]
Sarah Koenig
From Serial Productions in the New York Times. This is Serial Season four. Guantanamo One prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. Mike Bumgarner was on a plane on the tarmac waiting to take off when his BlackBerry buzzed. He wanted to ignore it, but then he saw it was his boss, a general. When the general calls, you generally answer. He scooted to the back of the plane.
- [01:28]
Mike Baumgartner
So I'm hiding back there from a BlackBerry and talking to the general. He said, mike, he says, I need you to go down to Guantanamo and take command.
- [01:37]
Sarah Koenig
His own command meant he'd be in charge of a whole brigade, boosted into the rarer air of the senior officers. This was the call he'd been waiting for.
- [01:46]
Mike Baumgartner
And he said, will you accept it? I said, yes. He said, you don't want to think about it? He said, it's got some issues.
- [01:54]
Sarah Koenig
This was early spring of 2005. Mike Baumgartner was in his mid-40s. He'd spent the last two decades rising in the military police corps, stationed all over the place. Guantanamo would be his biggest assignment yet. He'd be the de facto warden of one of the most controversial prisons on the planet. But the place had been operational a few years already. And a prison's a prison, right?
- [02:16]
Mike Baumgartner
To be honest, I didn't really think it was going to be that hard.
- [02:19]
Sarah Koenig
It would be hard. It would be the worst year. Not just Mike Baumgartner's worst year. Some former detainees agree it would be Guantanamo's worst year. By the end of Baumgartner's tenure, hand to hand combat would break out between guards and detainees. Severe new protocols would prompt worldwide condemnation. And the worst would happen, three men would die. Apart from the superlative designation of the worst year, about the only thing the US military and the prisoners agree on about that time is that before it got horrible, it was going pretty well. For Guantanamo. A fragile detente was taking seed. Until they betrayed us. Or until they betrayed us, depending on who you ask. This episode is part one of the worst year, the less worst part, Mike Baumgarner's first months on the job, when each side took stock of the other's power. About a week after the call, Baumgartner arrived at Guantanamo. A week. No prep, just get down here stat. From the airport, they whooshed him across the bay on a fast boat straight into a waiting car that delivered him straight to his new commander, Army Brigadier General Jay Hood, who has a kindly face and does not suffer fools, and.
- [03:45]
Mike Baumgartner
He doesn't beat around the bush. When I came in that office, there maybe have been four seconds of courtesy of like, hey, how you doing? Good trip? Yes, sir.
- [03:53]
Sarah Koenig
Right to business. General Hood gave him a rapid fire rundown. 540 some detainees, here's how many in segregation, here's how many in discipline blocks. General Hood didn't want to be interviewed for this story, but Baumgarner said Hood's main point was, was about pr. Bumgarner says Hood told him the military was losing the public relations war over Guantanamo.
- [04:15]
Mike Baumgartner
Hey, we're under a lot of scrutiny right now. The US public, our government, internationally, we're not trusted.
- [04:28]
Sarah Koenig
When Baumgartner's previous commander mentioned that this assignment had some issues, this is what he was talking about. By April of 2005, when Baumgartner arrived at Guantanamo, General Hood had withstood several scandals. The worst one was Abu Ghraib, the US run prison in Iraq. Hood had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib. But appalling photos had come out, proof that guards had inflicted sadistic abuse and humiliation on prisoners there. And the shadow of that abuse fell over Guantanamo. Critics were saying if it was happening in Iraq, if it was happening in CIA black sites, because news of that torture was leaking out too, surely it was happening in Guantanamo. So that was one thing. Then there were allegations that guards and interrogators at Guantanamo were intentionally mishandling the Koran, an issue that would very soon inspire deadly protests in Afghanistan and then in the Middle East, Sudan, Indonesia. And on top of all that, right in Hood's backyard, a good old fashioned sex scandal. Turned out four male officers, including a one star general, were having swingy affairs with a female nurse. And other female civilian contractors on the base. That's why Baumgartner had to hightail it to Guantanamo to take charge. His libidinous predecessor had been booted off the island. Meanwhile, human rights groups were starting to call the place a gulag. Even some influential congressional Republicans were wavering on their support for Guantanamo. President Bush and the DOD were feeling the pressure. So now General Hood was saying, we gotta change the narrative about Guantanamo. We need to show the outside world what compliance looks like.
- [06:02]
Mike Baumgartner
We've got to convince one, make sure it is right, continue to make it better, and at the same time get the world to understand that we are doing it in a first class manner, professionally, the way it should be done with no detainee abuse occurring.
- [06:20]
Sarah Koenig
So the mission, as Baumgartner understood it from that first meeting with General Hood, was nothing short of don't let the critics close down Guantanamo. Make sure this place stays open. The President's counting on you. Mike Baumgartner didn't take this metaphorically. He took it literally. He was the son and grandson of military men. It's how he was raised. If you're in charge, you fulfill the mission. No excuses from here on out. He thought, I gotta make this place the best possible version of itself. Before he made any changes, Baumgartner reviewed the whole operation. A few things about the place displeased him. First, he found it surprisingly uptight in some respects.
- [07:07]
Mike Baumgartner
As an example, when I arrived, they could not have a straw because some felt it could be fabricated to make a weapon.
- [07:16]
Sarah Koenig
The senior staff seemed to think anything could be turned into a weapon, as if these detainees had superhuman skills. Baumgarner thought, a lot of the security stuff we're doing, it's over the top. The way we transported them to Guantanamo, for instance, and on occasion around the camp with the earmuffs, the blacked out goggles, the many chains, the nutty secrecy over stuff he didn't think mattered. Leadership would freak out if anyone said anything to an outsider about the computer system where they logged their notes about daily activity inside the prison blocks. It was called dims.
- [07:48]
Mike Baumgartner
Dims? Detainee Information Management System. DIMS is where we put. He ate. He ate his nut bar and he had two cartons of milk he got moved to wreck at this time. I mean, that's how benign. All the stuff that's. I mean, not all the stuff, but for me to say. 293 moved over to Echo and we gave him an extra pair of socks.
- [08:12]
Sarah Koenig
All that classified, you can't Mention Dems.
- [08:15]
Mike Baumgartner
Can't talk about it.
- [08:16]
Sarah Koenig
His second observation was about discipline. He thought, you guys are doing it wrong.
- [08:21]
Mike Baumgartner
It was crazy. It was bizarre. We had items that they called privileged items that you were given.
- [08:29]
Sarah Koenig
Additionally, privileged items were anything extra a detainee had on top of the basics. Prayer beads, for example, or an extra.
- [08:37]
Mike Baumgartner
Sheet, down to how many ketchup packages you get, or hot sauce or sugar or whatever. We would regulate those. And that you're gonna lose your ketchup for two weeks. Wow.
- [08:51]
Sarah Koenig
Big whoop. In other words, when fewer condiments didn't correct a detainee's behavior, the detainee was supposed to get moved to the discipline blocks. The prison was organized into areas called camps. Camp one, Camp two, and so on.
- [09:05]
Mike Baumgartner
And then we had, oh, we're going to take you over to Camp 3. Camp 3 was the discipline camp. Camp 3 was huge. Camp 3 would hold 300, 350 people. And it was full. And we had people waiting in line to go to Camp 3. Everybody in the whole place owed discipline time where they had to go to Camp 3. I said, okay, what makes Camp 3 so different? I mean, it looks just like the same. It really was no different. I mean, there wasn't any real difference in being in Camp 3 as being in Camp 2, just right across the little walkway.
- [09:43]
Sarah Koenig
The third thing and hardest to deal with was the attitude of the guards. What Baumgartner called the guard culture, in candor.
- [09:52]
Mike Baumgartner
I don't think I've ever said this publicly before. You would find among the greatest bulk of the guards, I'd say more than half. They truly despise the detainees. I hate to say that number. It may have been smaller some. If they. If, you know, if the life was hard on the detainee, that was okay with them. I mean, if we didn't respect the Islamic religion, that was okay with them.
- [10:20]
Sarah Koenig
As one guard commander told me, it just seemed like a big babysitting operation. We were babysitting so they could get intel. The worst detainees, he said, and Baumgartner agreed, would holler and spit at you, throw shit and piss at you, call you vile names incessantly. Bang on their metal cages, break their toilets, demand this and that, have you trotting up and down the tiers. Some of these guards were right out of high school on their first deployment. They're working 12 hour shifts. It's Cuba, blazing hot and dripping humidity. The prison tiers were like hot houses, powered by provocation and retaliation, tit for tat. So that was the State of the place when Bum Garner got there. Weirdly strict, weirdly lax, weirdly tense. Baumgarner had done some detention work before. He'd run security at different bases, including overseas. He'd been a director at the Army's military police school, even worked as a sheriff's deputy for a minute during college. He thought, all due respect, General Hood's an artilleryman. These senior guys making the rules, they don't have a background in corrections, so they don't get it.
- [11:25]
Mike Baumgartner
I was a military police. I felt like I understood the insides detainee that understood prisoners and how you do this kind of stuff.
- [11:34]
Sarah Koenig
He thought he could fix it. Massive reset for the prisoners. That was Baumgartner's first big move.
- [11:44]
Mike Baumgartner
We reset all discipline. Everybody got amnesty or whatever. They were all forgiven. All prior events are forgiven. Clean slate start anew today.
- [11:56]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgartner's strategy was to double down on the carrots and sticks, make the compliant camps more comfortable and the non compliant camps more miserable. He'd make the differences stark.
- [12:08]
Mike Baumgartner
A big bright line. Big bright line. Good is over here, bad is over here, and bad within the conventions. I'm going to make bad as bad as I possibly can.
- [12:20]
Sarah Koenig
Within the conventions means the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which defines international standards and protections for POWs. During Baumgartner's first meeting with General Hood, Hood had explicitly told Baumgartner, go look at the Geneva Conventions. We're taking so much public heat over allegations of abuse and unfairness. Look at the conventions. See what you can implement here. Baumgarner was familiar with the Geneva Conventions. He'd written a thesis about it just a couple years earlier in military college. The topic of his paper was topical. What set of laws are we supposed to follow when fighting terrorists? And now here was Baumgartner on the ground floor of that still unanswered question, walking not just a fine line, but an invisible one. The Bush administration's position so far had been that Geneva didn't apply to the men held at Guantanamo because they weren't prisoners of war in the traditional sense. They weren't typical soldiers. They were rogues, terrorists. So we didn't have to extend them the Geneva protections, especially the ones prohibiting torture or coercion, or crucially, the one about giving POWs access to the courts. But the ones about food, water, religion, reading material, medical care, those seemed okay, right? Baumgartner had to figure out what else was okay. How far should he go? How far could he go? That's after the break. What I like about the New York Times app is how much variety it gives me. I start my day with a cup of coffee and wordle and connections, which is all in the New York Times app. It's well organized, it's multimedia. I can also save my articles easily in this area.
- [14:16]
Mike Baumgartner
I can add politics or Paul Krugman or Jamal Bouie. I like him.
- [14:20]
Sarah Koenig
I like that. The cooking tab on top is really easily accessible. So if I'm on my way home and I'm just thinking, oh, what am I gonna make for dinner? I'll just quickly go on to cooking and say, oh, I've got this in my pantry. The photos are just phenomenal. I have my saved articles, my entire history, which is actually very interesting. I'm just scrolling through the home tab. There's already so much stuff. I'm like, oh, interesting. I spent a lot of time too, on Wirecutter. I like that it's just right there. I loved how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for the New York Times app. All the times all in one place.
- [14:55]
Mike Baumgartner
Download it now@nytimes.com app.
- [15:01]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgartner and his team developed a sort of cast system among the detainees, demarcated by the color of their clothing. Initially, they put everyone in a tan outfit. Consistent good behavior would get you a coveted white one, bad behavior, a dreaded orange one. If you followed the rules, your sleeping pad would be softer, closer to a mattress than a yoga mat. You could keep more stuff in your cell, talk to your neighbors.
- [15:24]
Mike Baumgartner
More guards are very are nicer to you. There's less urgency placed on things. You know they'll talk to you if you don't do this. They may be more of a discussion. You go over to a discipline camp or November.
- [15:39]
Sarah Koenig
November block over in Camp 3 was Baumgartner's discipline innovation, where he sent the most unruly detainees. He refurbished it to make it as isolating and unpleasant as possible. November block was called Administrative Segregation, or ad seg, designed to break you down. In the courtyard, parked like a harbinger, was a barber chair. Upon arrival, your hair would get cut, your beard shaved off, all your stuff taken away, including your clothes, your underwear. All that remained to ward off the blasting ac. No sleeping pad. Every single item had to be handed back after you used it. A cup, a toothbrush, the blanket they gave you at night. The only human beings you interacted with on November Black were guards who'd periodically Open the little flap on your door. And the guards in November block, Baumgartner said they were handpicked for qualities he characterized as hard robot, no personality, no discussion. I tell you, once you do it, or else I'm going to send in a 5 man IRF team in riot gear to make you do it in November. You can't talk to any other detainee.
- [16:44]
Mike Baumgartner
If you start trying to talk to somebody, we're not going to allow that. How do you not allow somebody to talk to? And what we would do would drown it out either from the guards just start yelling and all the guards would just start yelling, or we would turn on the big fans on the end of the halls.
- [17:01]
Omar Degais
Vacuums, the noise from the vacuum, I forgot to mention a huge giant vacuum. Clean is on.
- [17:10]
Sarah Koenig
That is Ahmed Arashidi, formerly known as detainee number 590, formerly nicknamed the General by U.S. personnel at Guantanamo. A nom duguer he says caused him nothing but strife. Ahmed Arashidi was a talker, a troublemaker, a big personality who could influence others to make trouble, too. That's how his jailers saw him. He's originally from Morocco, but he spoke English. He'd worked in London as a cook at a couple fancy hotels. He told Eina. He remembered his first encounter with Baumgartner. It was a couple months after Baumgartner's arrival. Arashidi and a handful of other detainees had been stewing over in the new discipline center up November Block.
- [17:48]
Omar Degais
Isolated. This is not normal isolation. This is different isolation. This is isolated from isolations.
- [17:55]
Sarah Koenig
Arashidi says he'd organized a protest. They'd all rip up their shirts and when they got replacement shirts, they'd rip those up too. Super annoying for the staff. Pretty soon, who should appear on his block but Mike Baumgarner himself, the big chicken, some detainees called him because of the eagle insignia on his army colonel's uniform.
- [18:14]
Omar Degais
And he walked down the corridor and he was on his own. And it's very unusual for the colonel to walk on his own. Usually he's with someone, you know.
- [18:26]
Mike Baumgartner
As I walked onto this tier, he had a plastic shield in front of his cell. And that that normally meant that he was prone to throwing stuff or spitting on guards. And so we'd put you where there's a shield. Well, he had his face pressed up again. It was the weirdest, most bizarre sight to me, seeing that face pressed up against that thing and yelling at the top of his lungs.
- [18:51]
Omar Degais
I even called him a Nazi. I called him all kind of Names, bad names, you know, you are a torturer. You are this. You are this, and you are this. And he keeps on walking to the end of the block and came back. And he stood by the door of my cell. And he was smiling. He looks almost happy, as if I was praising him.
- [19:15]
Mike Baumgartner
You know, I stopped. I did not know he spoke English, but I started talking to him.
- [19:20]
Omar Degais
I could. I was just short of breath. Trying to tell him everything.
- [19:26]
Sarah Koenig
All at once, a torrent of complaints, especially about the guards.
- [19:31]
Omar Degais
Your soldiers are abusing us. You are soldiers. You're doing this to us. You're doing that to us. Why are you allowing your soldiers to abuse us? He says, no, I'm not. I said, yes, and you are in trouble that you are encouraging them to do that by allowing them to be anonymous.
- [19:51]
Sarah Koenig
The guards at Guantanamo covered the name tags on their uniforms, ostensibly so that the terrorists couldn't track them down later or harm their families. The result of the no names was that detainees had a hard time complaining if a specific guard beat them up because they couldn't identify them. Arashidi says he asked Baumgartner, why don't you give each guard a number in place of the name tag?
- [20:11]
Omar Degais
As soon as I said that, his eye popped out. And at that particular moment, he says, let's sit down and talk tomorrow.
- [20:23]
Sarah Koenig
Mike Baumgartner and Ahmed Ershi differ on some of the details of this encounter. When exactly the name tag issue came up, for example, was a long time ago. But their memories agree on the main elements. Mike Baumgartner was astonished by this eloquent yeller, Ahmed Arashidi. And Ahmed Arashidi was astonished by this new colonel, Mike Baumgartner, who was listening, sitting down and talking. As far as Baumgartner knew, no warden had ever done that before. It would turn out to be his most radical move at Guantanamo.
- [20:56]
Omar Degais
Let's sit down and talk tomorrow, he says, but first, tell your friends to stop tearing up this shirt. Tell your friend to stop tearing up this shirt. And if you have any concern, just write it down, and then we can sit down and talk about it. I said to him, did you know that we are in isolation? We are not allowed a pen and a paper, and you're asking me to write everything down. I said, no worry. And he asked, God, he says, get them all a pen and a paper. And he said to me, write it down, everything. And we sit down tomorrow.
- [21:34]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgartner's goal was a calm camp, to keep his guys safe by getting guys like Arashidi to settle down. To do that, he'd need more than the threat of November block. He figured maybe it's a little unusual to meet one on one with a detainee, but let me just hear what he wants. That night, Arashidi gathered the concerns of his fellow detainees. He said some of them were upsetting to hear, as if the men were falling apart or maybe already broken. One guy asked, please, can you let us have more than 24 hours between the 30 day stretches of isolation? Another guy, one of his demands not so upsetting.
- [22:12]
Omar Degais
In one of his demands, he says, can you ask them to bring some mixed nuts? Because I missed eating nuts. But we're talking about degradation. You know what I mean about, you know, and this guy talking about nuts. We miss having nuts. I miss having nuts. I want some nuts.
- [22:33]
Sarah Koenig
Next day, Baumgartner and some of his staff, dressed in their desert camouflage, and Arashidi in his orange detainee scrubs, sat down at a little picnic table near Baumgartner's office. The two men weren't so far apart in age. They both had a lot of confidence and a temper, as Arashidi remembers it. They met for a few hours and then again the next day. Arashidi said he was impressed by the consideration Baumgartner showed his staff. With each detainee request, he'd turn to his colleagues, ask their opinions. For his part, Baumgarner said Arashide seemed smart and a little strange.
- [23:08]
Mike Baumgartner
He was a different fellow mercurial comes to mind. Oh, really? Yeah. He's the one that drew me a map.
- [23:20]
Sarah Koenig
It was a drawing of a path representing an aspirational timeline for the prison. At the beginning of the path was the past, which Arashidi labeled the Dark Ages. Bad food, poisoned water, lack of respect for their religion, everything bad.
- [23:35]
Mike Baumgartner
And he's got these all along this path. And then the transitions to where, you know, good food, you know, respect for our faith, and it leads to, I don't know if nirvana, but, you know, happiness.
- [23:50]
Sarah Koenig
On the far right, he got the picture. The talks were fruitful. The camp administration would end up adopting a new prisoner design menu with four daily options, including one for those with delicate digestion. They'd provide detainees with bottled water. Wall clocks would be installed in the camps so that detainees wouldn't have to rely on the guards, who typically answered daytime or nighttime when you asked them the time. Even better.
- [24:18]
Omar Degais
For the first time, we were allowed to have the light dimmed in our cells for the first time after 9 o'clock.
- [24:25]
Sarah Koenig
Blessed dimness after years of blazing lights. 24, 7 rec time expanded, Arashide said, to two hours instead of 20 minutes. And instead of 20 sheets of toilet paper, a guy could get a whole roll. Baumgartner wasn't about to get rid of November Block or abolish Irfings, but he agreed to some new guard protocols to fix the name tag problem. He agreed to Arashiddi's number solution. Each guard would wear an assigned number on his or her uniform. Baumgartner agreed to stop the guard force from calling the detainees packages when moving them around the camps. And he agreed to Arashiddi's proposal for how to stop the guards from stomping up and down the metal floors during prayer time.
- [25:04]
Mike Baumgartner
He said, why don't you put out prayer cones? And that became accepted where General J. Hood and Admiral Harry Harris was talking to the White House about the prayer cones and it was just became accepted prayer calls. Of course, I always thought that was so crazy. Remember when he said prayer call, I go, what is a prayer? He goes I don't know. Why don't you take a traffic cone and put a big P on it and put it out whenever it's prayer time. And so that'll tell everybody to be quiet on the tier. And the guards saw that and they respected it too. It got to the point though, they say, well it squeaks over here and your guards continue to walk up and down the tier, but there's a squeaky part right here, so quit walking over there. And they would put a prayer cone over the squeaky part. I mean that's the extent at which it went to. It's not like we were blowing them off, we were trying to cooperate with them.
- [25:52]
Sarah Koenig
Arashidi though, was conflicted about his own role in this extraordinary two day summit. On one hand he said he felt like a hero. The prisoners had won important concessions. On the other hand, maybe he was selling his fellow prisoners short in some way, negotiating over small practical questions. Toilet paper rather than the actual shitthe biggest, most pressing question why are you still holding us illegally without charge?
- [26:17]
Omar Degais
So I thought maybe I'm giving the wrong message to Baumgartner and to the authority in Guantanamo by maybe the wrong message that these guys just wanted better food and better treatment and we are willing to stay in Guantanamo indefinitely. They're going to think that we are okay with it, it's okay, you can keep us here for the rest of our lives.
- [26:42]
Sarah Koenig
The prospect of indefinite detention, no clear system for how this all ends, that trumped Every other complaint, every other demand. When would Baumgartner negotiate about? A major aspect of the Bush administration's campaign to show the world that Guantanamo wasn't Abu Ghraib was to beckon visitors inside the camp. Dignitaries, politicians, reporters. During one press conference a few months after Baumgartner's arrival, President Bush said it about four go down there, take a look, see for yourself. And people did. The charm offensive, helped along by Baumgartner's soothing North Carolina accent and folksy manner, was working pretty well. Occasionally, Baumgartner told me he misstepped on a bus full of visitors. He once described a young female guard as cute as a puppy. General J. Hood was standing right next to him and gave him one of the worst ass chewings I've ever had in my life. But at the same time, three months into the worst year, prisoners at Guantanamo were hunger striking. Hunger strikes were not new. They'd been going on sporadically since the camp's earliest days. But this one persisted, and the outside world noticed, which, of course, was the point. The timing of the hunger strike was opportune. It seemed the detainees were wise to the uptick in visitors. Also, one of the organizers of the strike told us they knew that news reports of hunger strikes, nonviolent protests in which detainees hurt their own selves, seemed to penetrate the American consciousness. And in a way other news from Guantanamo didn't. Some of the most in depth reporting came from Tim golden at the New York Times. He wrote a great magazine story about this period, which is how I know that it was late July when Baumgarner broke this first hunger strike in a maneuver that would shape the rest of his time at Guantanamo. He did it by negotiating not with Arashidi this time, but with another detainee Baumgartner had met soon after Arashide, a guy named Shakar Amer, a British resident who wielded his charisma brilliantly inside and outside Guantanamo. Shakar Amer was beloved by many of the detainees, especially Saudis like himself. And there were a lot of them. Most of the Arabs at Guantanamo were Saudis. And so Shacker had sway with Baumgartner, too. He told Baumgartner, this hunger strike, I can end it. They made a deal. If Shacker stopped the hunger strike, Baumgartner would try to further improve whatever conditions he could inside the camps in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. And so it was. Baumgartner walked the blocks with Shacker, unshackled, a first, and saw with amazement how other detainees Whooped in celebration. He watched as Shakar Amer spread the word surgically among the camp's other leaders. Drop the hunger strike. The big chicken is going to work with us. And Baumgarner rejoiced when, just like that, most of the hunger strikers started eating again. Victory. Now, instead of individual negotiations, Baumgartner was ready to start a council of detainees which would communicate grievances to the camp administration. Arashidi says he'd suggested this to Baumgartner. I've also read versions where Shacker Amer is credited with it. But Baumgartner says he did it because Geneva Convention POWs have a right to self representation. Baumgartner knew this might be delicate to pull off. Not everyone above or below him was fully on board. Why give these detainees a sense of authority? Why let them kibitz? But Baumgarner had faith. About a week after he walked the blocks with Shakar Amer, six detainees were brought together to a wreck yard outside Alpha Block in Camp One for a sanctioned meeting with camp administration. And these six, according to Baumgartner, they were some of the most powerful detainees in the camp. An Egyptian religious leader named Allah Muhammad Saleem.
- [30:42]
Mike Baumgartner
Very smart guy. He was brilliant.
- [30:44]
Sarah Koenig
Abdul Zayf from Afghanistan, who'd been a Taliban cabinet minister.
- [30:48]
Mike Baumgartner
I mean, he was a big dog.
- [30:49]
Sarah Koenig
A Saudi engineer who went to university in the States and proudly admitted his membership in Al Qaeda. Hassan Al Sharabi.
- [30:56]
Mike Baumgartner
Al Sharabi. He was very handsome fellow.
- [30:59]
Sarah Koenig
Always looked like he just stepped out of the shower. Beard perfectly trimmed, meticulous.
- [31:04]
Mike Baumgartner
His clothes always. I don't know how he did it, really. I mean, I wish I could have looked like him.
- [31:08]
Sarah Koenig
And finally, Shacker.
- [31:10]
Mike Baumgartner
Effervescent, bubbly personality. He can charm the pants off. He seems like such a nice guy.
- [31:19]
Sarah Koenig
You can hear it, right? He liked some of these guys, the San and Shakar especially. He figured a couple of them would instantly kill him if they got the chance. The Sana Sharbi had said as much without a muss of his. His gleaming black hair. But aside from that, Baumgartner said he respected them. Not necessarily their beliefs, but their stature. The second time the group met, Baumgarner joined. He sat with them. The prisoners had no leg irons on, no cuffs. Freestyle.
- [31:46]
Mike Baumgartner
I thought by this point we were doing pretty good on meeting their demands of the camp administration, and I think they probably felt that way too, because we didn't stay on that. Maybe 10. I mean, very briefly, if that. I mean, even if at all, we Went to the big issue. You got to get us set free.
- [32:05]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgartner told them that I cannot do. He was the warden, full stop. Freedom and justice were above his pay grade. Surely they could understand that.
- [32:15]
Mike Baumgartner
It was what I tried to get them to understand is you're going to be here, you're going to be here and I can try to help make your life little better while you're here or you continue to be miserable. And that's why I was trying to understand that you're not leaving.
- [32:42]
Sarah Koenig
Remember, Baumgartner had rushed down to Guantanamo to take over. No time for language or cultural training. The prison was holding hundreds of Muslim men from umpteen Afghans and Saudis and Yemenis and Pakistanis and Algerians. Suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives. Sure, Baumgartner was interacting with a few of the detainees individually, but on the whole Baumgarner knew very little about his prisoners. He was endearingly, if disturbingly frank about that.
- [33:11]
Mike Baumgartner
I couldn't. I didn't know the difference between a terrorist and an Arab.
- [33:14]
Sarah Koenig
He lamented a few times that he deployed to Iraq after he deployed to Guantanamo instead of the other way around. That way he would have recognized that some of the things he thought were terrorist viewpoints were simply Arab viewpoints. He misunderstood or maybe half understood who he was dealing with. A gap I'd venture stretches to this day. For instance, Baumgartner believed to a man all the detainees, well, maybe not shacker, but definitely everyone else would be willing to die for their cause, which he understood to be entwined with conservative Islam. So he tried to keep an eye on the religious leaders among them.
- [33:50]
Mike Baumgartner
These guys are very powerful and there's only a handful of them and I can't give you any names. I can remember one of them. Sort of strange. He was a. We called him the Viking. Red beard, red complexion, red hair.
- [34:01]
Sarah Koenig
Marat Kurnaz Murat Karnas, a German resident whose family was from Turkey.
- [34:06]
Omar Degais
That's funny. Yeah.
- [34:07]
Sarah Koenig
Was Marat a religious leader at Guantanamo?
- [34:11]
Omar Degais
No, of course not.
- [34:12]
Sarah Koenig
No, no. To hear Marat tell it, he was a nobody. Only 19 when he got to Guantanamo. He didn't speak Arabic or Pashto. He could barely talk to anyone. He hadn't even been to a religious madrasa like some of the other detainees.
- [34:25]
Omar Degais
They, it's funny what said. They never would accept my religious things about between the Arabs. It's funny who said that.
- [34:36]
Sarah Koenig
Marat struggled to remember Baumgartner, but a lot of personnel remember Marat. He wasn't at Guantanamo that long, relatively speaking. But he stuck out to people because he stuck out. He was a very large person, a martial artist who missed his practice so dearly. He was once seen bench pressing two smaller men out in the rec yard. He was sort of European. He spoke German, also some English, plus the reddish hair. Maybe that's why Baumgartner attributed special leadership powers to him. I don't mean to imply that Baumgarner's information was all wrong. I think it was partly wrong in the same way so much about Guantanamo was partly wrong. We craved order, rhyme and reason. So out of scraps of information that were true, we took leaps and liberties and created narratives that often weren't true that showed a warped picture of who these men really were. Baumgartner trusted the information he had access to.
- [35:29]
Mike Baumgartner
He.
- [35:29]
Sarah Koenig
He believed what he read in the hopped up detainee files about their terrorist links. He believed the intelligence research about how Al Qaeda continues to organize even in confinement. He believed the detainees had a sort of org chart, an organized org chart, Very, very organized.
- [35:45]
Mike Baumgartner
Organized, cellular by function, organized.
- [35:50]
Sarah Koenig
In other words, in much the same way terrorist cells out in the world are organized.
- [35:55]
Mike Baumgartner
You would have those that actually specialized in message passing. You would have guys who would be the muscle, if you will, the attackers, the front line soldier, if you will. You would have a. And Shocker actually told me this. You sort of had the political affairs guys.
- [36:13]
Ahmed Arashidi
I mean, every block had a leader.
- [36:18]
Sarah Koenig
That's Omar Degais, originally from Libya, but his family escaped to Britain when he was young. He and other former detainees told us, yeah, there was some organization, but not like that. It was loose. People on the block would vote and designate someone as the go to person to make group decisions when need be or to interact with the camp administration. It wasn't an Al Qaeda thing, Omer said. It was just a we're in prison together thing. Maybe they only vote for a person because he speaks English, or maybe he's a leader in one block, but then he gets moved to a different block and now he's a regular Joe.
- [36:48]
Ahmed Arashidi
And it didn't depend on his background, whether he was what he was before or who he was. It all depended on how active he was inside prison. So, like for example, Shakir was very active and he spoke for people and he translated and he helped and he tried to. So that will be considered by others that he would spot him.
- [37:15]
Mike Baumgartner
Shocker. He had to be somebody Al Qaeda. I mean, he just had, in my mind, he had to be. There was no way he could Exert just off of his dynamic personality.
- [37:27]
Sarah Koenig
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he was wrong. We never had good evidence to prove Shaker Amer was Al Qaeda. Shakar didn't want to be interviewed for this story. He was cleared for release in 2007, though he wasn't allowed to leave Guantanamo for another eight years. And Murat Kurnas, the guy from Germany? He left Guantanamo in 2006 after spending four years there. He'd later learn both US and German officials determined soon after his arrest that he wasn't Taliban or Al Qaeda or a real threat to anyone's national security, right or wrong. This picture Baumgartner had of detainees who were ideologically fiercer than Americans, who didn't fear death the same way we did, who were highly secretly organized. Of course it influenced detainee policy, how we treated them and how we responded when they scared us. That's after the break. New York Times games make me feel like I'm amazing. Wordle makes me feel things that I don't feel anyone else I absolutely love. Spelling bee. The Times crossword puzzle is a companion that I've had longer than anyone outside of my immediate family. When I can finish a hard puzzle without pins, I feel like the smartest person in the world.
- [38:53]
Mike Baumgartner
When I have to look up a clue to help me, I'm learning something new.
- [38:57]
Sarah Koenig
It gives me joy every single day. Join us and play all New York times games@nytimes.com games the unprecedented coming together of prison staff and prisoners was short lived. The same week the detainee council was forming coincided with a flare up of violence in the camps involving a mini fridge. A Tunisian detainee was called in for an interrogation. Here's Arashidi again.
- [39:24]
Omar Degais
And after they locked him down to the ground, the interrogator starts swearing and cursing the prisoner. And then he picked up a fridge and he threw the fridge at the face of the prisoner.
- [39:39]
Sarah Koenig
It sounds unlikely, I know, but there's documentation. Some of the details differ, report to report, but they all reflect the debased rage between the personnel and prisoners that Baumgartner observed when he first got to Guantanamo. In an investigative memo dated August 8, 2005, the detainee, Hisham Al Slati says an interrogator came to his cell. Slati tells him he doesn't want to talk. So the interrogator says fuck you. Next day he comes again. Slati again says no. But then a fellow detainee in charge of his block, possibly Hasana Sharabi, who is participating in the nascent detainee council tells him to go ahead. So Slati does. But once he gets to the interrogation room, it's not his usual team. There's a female presentation. Slati says, forget it. I don't want to talk to you. The interrogator says, you will talk. Slati says, I have the right not to talk to you. He's getting agitated. The interrogator puts his finger in Slati's face, starts insulting his mother, calls her a bitch. So Slati spits at the interrogator, and that's when the interrogator hit him with the refrigerator that was in the intel room and then hit him in the face with a chair. When word got back to the prisoners in the camps, Arashidi says some people wanted to rise up right away, but.
- [40:54]
Omar Degais
People said, look, let's not do it. You know, let's keep it calm, okay?
- [40:59]
Sarah Koenig
Some people still hoped to break the exhausting, reactive rhythm of the camps. The council was underway. Maybe it would work again. Accounts vary about the exact order of events during this first tumultuous week of August, but according to Arashidi, the prisoners had checked their rage over the mini fridge incident. But then, meeting number three of the council. Bumgarner wasn't there. But his recollection is that some of the prisoners started passing notes to each other, which was against the ground rules. Tim golden, in his magazine account, wrote that when an officer tried to confiscate the notes, quote, some of the detainees popped them into their mouths and started chewing. When General Hood got wind of what.
- [41:38]
Mike Baumgartner
Had happened, he disbanded the council and said he didn't like us using the word counsel either. He. He said, I never want to hear that word. And that's pretty much when he told me, I'm not. You're going to not be talking too much to detainees. He never say, I could not totally talk, but he started reigning my interaction with him in.
- [42:02]
Sarah Koenig
Oh, really? He was like, shut it down now?
- [42:04]
Mike Baumgartner
Pretty much so, yes, pretty much so.
- [42:11]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgartner said he pushed back a little, but not much. He knew Hood was powerful. He didn't want to get fired. On the heels of that breakdown, another incident. Irishidi said a Kuwaiti detainee was summoned to the interrogation room.
- [42:26]
Omar Degais
When he refuses to attend the interrogation, they came with the Earth team. They beat him up, humiliated, in front of us. The first one, we didn't see the Tunisian because he was in the interrogation room. But the second one happened in front of us inside our one of safe books. I Was there. I was present.
- [42:47]
Sarah Koenig
Oh, you saw it.
- [42:48]
Omar Degais
So, yeah, okay. When that happened, automatically everybody start banging, breaking things. And few minutes later, bam. Garner came onto myself. He came onto myself. And he wanted to stay in on what was going on, as if he. He's not part of it, and he says, I've got nothing to do with it. It's not his decision to do that.
- [43:15]
Sarah Koenig
Irish was mad. He thought the real purpose of Baumgarner's visit wasn't to find out what had happened to make them upset, but to take the temperature of the blocks, try to get a beat on how bad this was going to be. Baumgartner had given his word that he'd curbed the violence. But now he seemed to be shrugging. If he wasn't going to make his guards behave, why should the prisoners behave? Whatever gossamer of trust and respect they'd begun to weave floated away. Prisoners broke the breakables in their cells, mostly the foot pedals on their toilets. They banged and yelled. Some prisoners suspected the violence against the Tunisian, then the Kuwaiti, was a provocation, that the guards and interrogators had sabotaged their attempt at self representation, that Baumgartner had betrayed them.
- [43:56]
Omar Degais
You know, so he went away. And that's it. It started so the Hanger Sheikh started that particular night.
- [44:02]
Sarah Koenig
A renewed, reinvigorated hunger strike, egged on by shocker. Amer Baumgartner had had it with Shacker. They'd been working together for weeks, productively, or so Baumgartner had thought.
- [44:14]
Mike Baumgartner
So he's playing a very important role initially. And then when he went against me, I got Hood's concurrence to put him out in Camp Echo permanently. And he stayed in Echo for the rest of the time. So he was away from the general population for the remainder of my time.
- [44:33]
Sarah Koenig
Oh, my God.
- [44:33]
Mike Baumgartner
He never went back.
- [44:34]
Sarah Koenig
And because you were afraid he would have an influence.
- [44:36]
Mike Baumgartner
Yes, exactly. He had sort of betrayed me.
- [44:50]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgarner was stressed out. He was juggling criticism from all sides. His detainee counsel had failed. His boss had called off the experiment. He worried General Hood didn't have much confidence in him, that the interrogators also didn't appreciate him giving away comforts to detainees that they themselves wanted to use as bargaining chips. And the guards, Baumgarner's own rank and file, also grousing about Baumgartner.
- [45:15]
Mike Baumgartner
He wasn't counseling private praise in public. He was, get your fucking shit together. Get your head out of your ass. Unfuck yourself you know, type of guy.
- [45:26]
Sarah Koenig
Yeah, that's Steve Timmis, a Navy master at arms in charge of the Guard force. In the discipline camps. He told me the crap. Morale was in large part because all the higher ups seemed scared for their careers, scared they'd be embarrassed or blamed in the press for screw ups. And all that fear and finger pointing trickled down, often via Baumgartner.
- [45:45]
Mike Baumgartner
I was on the receiving end that once. Most of the time I had my shit in one sock. But the other guys that made mistakes, he would just go off. You know, you tell that guard he's been trained to do it this way. Why do you do it this way? Yeah, I was a holler. Yeah, I'm not proud of that. At that time I had a very, very, very short fuse and it built throughout the period is the stress. I mean, I wouldn't, I would have told you then, no, no, everything's cool. I'm not under stress. And I really thought that.
- [46:22]
Sarah Koenig
But he was working every day until 11pm midnight, sleeping maybe four hours a night red faced as detainees are refusing food in protest. He's eating like a fool. His words. Baumgartner said he probably gained 40 or 50 pounds. So yes, he was stressed. And now a big new hunger strike had started, this time with a big demand that Baumgartner had no control over because it pushed beyond menu plans and prayer cones straight to the heart of the matter. Either try us for crimes or let us go. They were saying, in essence, treat us like proper POWs, abide by the Geneva Conventions, give us the protections of your laws, access to your courts. The press was all over it, tracking the upward arrow of the hunger striker numbers dozens, then 76. Sometime in September, the camp says it's 131 hunger strikers. Attorneys representing the detainees say the number is more like 200. Meanwhile, controversial legislation about standards for detainee treatment is wending through Congress. Baumgartner had tried the carrots. He tried to work with the detainees to reason with them. A big stick was nigh. Arashidi's analysis is that during this time Baumgartner, stymied and under pressure, made a calculated move from good guy, who was genuinely trying to do the right thing by the prisoners, to, to tough guy. I don't think that's quite it. I think it's more likely that while he was at Guantanamo, Baumgartner was always the same guy, basically a reasonable guy, but also a cop through and through. With a cop's, what's the problem? Just follow the rules.
- [47:58]
Mike Baumgartner
Logic really hate to say that if the IRV team ever had to be deployed, the responsibility in my opinion went to the detainee because they forced the circumstance. All you had to do was comply with what you're being asked to do. And it was just very simple type thing. Give me this back or do this, you know, give me your hands.
- [48:17]
Sarah Koenig
That I understand, like in an operational way why that feels very straightforward to you. On the other hand, would you also sit back and be like, I get it. These guys, you know, a lot of them are saying I don't deserve to be here. I was grabbed off a bus at the border of whatever I was visiting my. Whatever I was going to teach in a school. You guys think I'm someone I'm not. I've been here for four years. I haven't talked to my parents. They don't know whether I'm dead or alive. I feel like I'm dying. I hate the food. I can't speak to anyone. I miss my sisters. Fuck you. I'm not going to do anything you ask me to do. Why would I cooperate? All I have the only power. I was on a roll now and I couldn't stop his argument. It's their own fault if five guys in riot gear spray them with tear gas, rush into their cell, knock them to the ground and hogtie them. Makes me nuts. First off because look how you made me hurt you is the bully's faulty rationale. But also because the part that gets left out, the part the government and the military never seem to acknowledge, is that the whole time we had all the power, an imbalance poisoned by the reality that our intel was flawed. We weren't clear in our own minds about who we had or what they knew or why we were even holding them. And so why is it surprising in any way or even wrong frankly for a detainee to push back against our ill used power either for the sake of Islamic Jihad or for the sake of due process. Once I drew breath and apologized for my soapboxing. Baumgartner said, I don't disagree with anything you just said, but back then I.
- [49:56]
Mike Baumgartner
Can'T say that I fully took into consideration all you just described. What now in life after 15 years. I do look back with a different perspective on it all at that time that I've really taken large consideration there. Probably thought of it, but not much more than a few seconds. As long as it was safe and secure and I knew I wasn't harming them. I didn't really get into the Thinking about the woes on their life, I'm sorry to say, perhaps I should have, but I didn't, I didn't. I think I was getting. Every day I got closer to it. You get close to that until something happens.
- [50:39]
Sarah Koenig
Here's what happened. Baumgarner felt he was losing control of the camp. The hunger strikers filled the detainee hospital, which is where they'd get tube fed if they refused to eat. Tube fed in a hospital sounds to me like one of the worst places to be anytime, anywhere. But Baumgartner said, oh, no, it was nice in there.
- [50:59]
Mike Baumgartner
It was always air conditioned, cool. You had to lay on the bed. You got meals brought to you, served to you like you're the king. You got attractive nurses who paid attention to you constantly.
- [51:10]
Sarah Koenig
The nurses were attractive because they were female. But for Bumgarner, it was the lozenges that broke this camel's back.
- [51:19]
Mike Baumgartner
When you get the tube dropped down so many times, your throat becomes irritated. And so the nurses would give them lozenges or cough drops and they get to choose the flavor they want. I initially thought give them, you know, give them, make them be happy. So what? So what? They had lozenges, who cared? But then I, I've slowly began, not slowly. I pretty much began to see we're not running things anymore. They're running things. They were bringing us to our knees on resources and just messing, from our perspective, messing with us constantly. I mean, we're now being. The terms are being dictated by them. They have the offensive. They're the ones dictating what's going on in the camps, which was not good.
- [52:04]
Sarah Koenig
Consultants from the Federal Bureau of Prisons were brought down to assess the situation, including a forensic psychiatrist. They agreed with Baumgartner. You gotta take back control. And so he endorsed a new approach to the hunger strike, one that the camp administration would call life saving and that prisoners and most everyone else would call horrifying. Force feeding. Chairs. By early December, the first five restraint chairs were shipped to the island. Soon 20 more would be en route. No more cushy hospital feedings at your convenience. If you refuse to eat, we're going to put you in the chair. Your legs, arms, torso, all strapped in. The camp even customized the chairs, Baumgarner said, so you couldn't move your head. And then a tube was snaked through your nose down to your stomach. Not everyone was voluntarily getting into that chair. So the ordeal was sometimes preceded by an irfing, then guards holding you down to strap you in. Detainees are peeing on themselves, shitting themselves. Baumgartner said they did it on purpose. Detainees who experienced it said it was because they either put too much liquid inside you or cruelly added a laxative or just left you there too long.
- [53:13]
Mike Baumgartner
We put a pad under it and said what happens, happens. You're not coming out of this chair till you're fed. I know that sounds probably hard. That's probably. If I can think, all things that we did in Guantanamo, that's probably the harshest thing we did. Matter of fact, I'm sure. The chair, the chair.
- [53:30]
Sarah Koenig
Did you watch it?
- [53:31]
Mike Baumgartner
Oh, yeah, many times. Many, many, many, many, many times.
- [53:35]
Sarah Koenig
Even some personnel were traumatized by the process. Never mind the detainees who underwent this.
- [53:40]
Omar Degais
Fresh hell, you couldn't take it. Somebody pushing and inserting a tube into your nose, down your gut, and then pour it out violently and then put it again. You couldn't take it. It was the worst period in Guantanamo history.
- [54:02]
Sarah Koenig
From where Baumgartner sat, though, what he saw was success.
- [54:07]
Mike Baumgartner
Peaceful as could be. I mean, very little misconduct. Very, very, very, very little misconduct.
- [54:13]
Sarah Koenig
When he'd arrived all those months ago, the discipline camps had been at capacity with a wait list. Now they were sparse. For a number of days. They actually closed November. An empty discipline block.
- [54:25]
Mike Baumgartner
There was no detainees on it. That's unheard of. To have that, that so momentous, that doesn't mean a lot to you, but I'm telling you, that is huge. That is huge.
- [54:39]
Sarah Koenig
Baumgartner had done it. His goal was a quiet camp, and he'd achieved a quiet camp. November block was quiet. The hunger strike was broken. And from then on, for the next five months, he said, all was well. The longest stretch of calm Guantanamo had ever seen. Baumgarner dubbed it the period of peace. Soon enough, he'd understand Peace, like compliance, is in the eye of the beholder. That's next time. Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional reporting by Cora Currier. Fact checking by Ben Phelan. Music supervision. Sound design and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Original score by Sofia Dele Alessandre. Editing help from Jen Guerra and Ira Glass. Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali. Additional research by Amir Khafaji and Sami Yousafzai. Translation by Mohammad Raza Sahibzada. Additional production from Katie Mingle and Emma Grillo. Our standards editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Maya Gandhi. The art from our show comes from Pablo Del Khan and Max Gutter. Supervising producer for Serial Productions is Nde Chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller. Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of the New York Times. Special thanks to Janelle Pifer, Brad Fisher, Maddie Masiello, Daniel Powell, Marian Lozano, Clive Stafford Smith, Tim golden and Esther Whitfield.