The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr

Meal portions were usually small enough to keep the prisoners in a state of low-grade hunger. Several times Omar found powder or partially dissolved tablets in the plastic glass he got with his food. The drugs produced dizziness, sleepiness or hyperalertness. Tasteless and invisible, they were not detectable beforehand. Omar was never told what they were or why he had been drugged. Once, when he was being transferred, Omar learned that his brother Abdurahman was in an adjacent prison yard. Abdurahman, forced by the CIA to choose between life imprisonment and cooperation, had chosen the latter. Omar had no idea that his brother was in Guantanamo to spy on detainees.

"How are you? How are you?" Abdurahman yelled in Arabic.

According to Abdurahman, Omar told him to stick to the story the family had agreed upon -- the Khadrs did charity work and knew nothing of Al Qaeda.

"But how is your health?" Abdurahman yelled.

"It's OK," Omar yelled back. "I'm just losing my left eye and all. They don't want to operate on it."

It was the only time they encountered one another. Guards and interrogators continually reminded Omar that no one in the world knew where he was. No one would know if they decided to kill him. He heard gunshots. He heard the sounds other prisoners made when they were dragged back from interrogation rooms. Around the time of Omar's arrival, detainees watched as guards rushed into the cell of a prisoner named Jumah Al-Dousari and began kicking him in the stomach and bashing his head against the floor. "When they took him out," one detainee later reported, "they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood." It was the kind of beating Omar witnessed repeatedly.

In July 2004, when Omar was seventeen, he was moved to Camp V. In his new cell the fluorescent ceiling lights stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he went for weeks without seeing daylight. His cell was kept cold; Omar spent a lot of his time trying to stay warm: balling himself up, covering his extremities to the extent it was possible, making the best use of his blanket and mattress pad when they hadn't been confiscated. His metal cot was a problem: It briskly gave away his body heat.

After a day in his Camp V cell, Omar had nothing more to see, touch, taste, hear or smell. He was accompanied only by his own disordered thoughts. He tried to sleep the time away, but the cold was inimical to sleep, and the incessant lighting had divested him of his feel for night and day. Over the course of any given month, Omar did not know whether he would get to see the sun, have a conversation with another human being or be allowed to wear clothes. For the past four years, Guantanamo has held him dead-still in the vacuum of his cell without ever allowing him to come to rest. The institution has made it clear to him that this will remain, for untold years, the form of his life.