he Saturday Profile
By SCOTT SAYARE
Lakhdar
The Saturday
After Guantánamo, Starting Anew, in Quiet Anger
By SCOTT SAYARE
Published: May 25, 2012
Nice, France
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Lakhdar Boumediene was kept at Guantánamo from
January 2002 until May 15, 2009 as terrorism suspect No. 10005, when he
was released and put aboard a plane to France.
Related in Opinion
-
Opinion: My Guantánamo Nightmare (January 8, 2012)
IT was James, a thickset American interrogator nicknamed “the Elephant,” who first told Lakhdar Boumediene
that investigators were certain of his innocence, that two years of
questioning had shown he was no terrorist, but that it did not matter,
Mr. Boumediene says.
The interrogations would continue through what ended up being seven
years, three months, three weeks and four days at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
An aid worker handling orphans in Sarajevo, Mr. Boumediene (pronounced
boom-eh-DIEN) found himself swept up in the panic that followed Sept.
11, 2001. He likens himself to a caged cat, toyed with and tormented by
fate and circumstance.
“I learned patience,” Mr. Boumediene, 46, said. He is a private man,
trim and square-jawed and meticulously kempt, his eyes set in deep gray
hollows. “There is no other choice but patience.”
The United States government has never acknowledged any error in
detaining Mr. Boumediene, though a federal judge ordered his release,
for lack of evidence, in 2008. The government did not appeal, a Defense
Department spokesman noted, though he declined to answer further
questions about Mr. Boumediene’s case. A State Department representative
declined to discuss the case as well, except to point to a Justice
Department statement announcing Mr. Boumediene’s transfer to France, in
2009.
More than a decade has passed since his arrest in Bosnia, since American
operatives shackled his feet and hands, dropped a black bag over his
head and flew him to Guantánamo. Since his release three years ago, Mr.
Boumediene, an Algerian by birth, has lived anonymously in the south of
France, quietly enraged but determined to start anew and to resist the
pull of that anger.
He calls Guantánamo a “black hole.” Islam carried him through, he says.
In truth, though, he still cannot escape it, and is still racked by
questions. “I think back over everything in my life, all the stages, who
my friends were, who I did this or that with, who I had a simple coffee
with,” Mr. Boumediene said. “I do not know, even now, why I was at
Guantánamo.”
THERE were early accusations of a plot to bomb the American Embassy in
Sarajevo; he lived in that city with his family, working for the Red
Crescent, the Muslim branch of the Red Cross. President George W. Bush
hailed his arrest in a State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002.
In time, those accusations disappeared, Mr. Boumediene says, replaced by
questions about his work with Muslim aid groups and suggestions that
those groups financed Islamic terrorism. According to a classified
detainee assessment from April 2008, published by WikiLeaks,
investigators believed that he was a member of Al Qaeda and the Armed
Islamic Group of Algeria. Those charges, too, later vanished.
In a landmark case that bears Mr. Boumediene’s name, the Supreme Court
in 2008 affirmed the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their
imprisonment in court. Mr. Boumediene petitioned for his release.
In court, the government’s sole claim was that Mr. Boumediene had
intended to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against the United
States. A federal judge rejected that charge as unsubstantiated, noting
that it had come from a single unnamed informer. Mr. Boumediene arrived
in France on May 15, 2009, the first of two non-French former detainees
to settle here.
Mr. Boumediene retreated into himself at Guantánamo, he says. He speaks
little of his past now; with few exceptions, his neighbors know him only
as a husband and a father. He lives with the wife and two daughters
from whom he was once taken, and a son born here two years ago. More
than vengeance, or even justice, he wants a return to normalcy.
He lives at the whim of the French state, though. France has permitted
Mr. Boumediene to settle in public housing in Nice, where his wife has
family, but he is not a French citizen, nor has he been granted asylum
or permanent residence. His Algerian and Bosnian passports, misplaced by
the American authorities, have not been reissued, leaving him
effectively stateless.
Money comes in a monthly transfer to his French bank account. He does
not know who, exactly, pays it. (The terms of his release have not been
made public or revealed even to him.) He has been seeking work for
years.
RECRUITERS typically scan his résumé with an air of approval, he said,
until noting that it ends in 2001. He tells them that his is a
“particular case,” that he spent time in prison. He avoids the word
“Guantánamo,” he said, as it often stirs more fear than sympathy.
Related in Opinion
-
Opinion: My Guantánamo Nightmare (January 8, 2012)
Mr. Boumediene arrived at Guantánamo on Jan. 20, 2002, nine days after
the camp began operations. He was beaten on arrival, he said. Refusing
food for the final 28 months of his detention, he was force-fed through a
tube inserted up a nostril and down his throat, he said. There was a
hole in the seat of the chair to which he was chained, sometimes
clothed, sometimes not; as the liquid streamed into his stomach, his
bowels often released.
He emerged gaunt, with wrists scarred from seven years of handcuffs,
almost unable to walk without the shackles to which he had grown
accustomed, he said. Crowds terrified him, as did rooms with closed
doors, said Nathalie Berger, a doctor who worked with Mr. Boumediene
shortly after his release.
Dr. Berger was moved, she said, by his equanimity and his “strength to live.”
“He has no hate for the American people,” she said, though Mr. Bush is
another matter. Mr. Boumediene has been disappointed too by President
Obama, who pledged to close Guantánamo but has not done so.
Born in the hills of northwestern Algeria, Mr. Boumediene served for two
years in the Algerian military before following a friend to Pakistan in
1990, to aid refugees of the Afghan civil war.
He found work as a proctor at an orphanage and school operated by a
Kuwaiti aid organization, a post that investigators later seized on as
evidence of ties to terrorism.
A man identified as a director of the group, Zahid al-Shaikh, is the
brother of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11
attacks, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2006 and is now to be
tried before a military court. Mr. Shaikh’s signature appeared on Mr.
Boumediene’s contract, but the two had little interaction, Mr.
Boumediene said.
He moved to Yemen, studying at the French cultural center in Sana;
fighting there drove him to Albania, where he worked for the Red
Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. Deadly riots erupted in
1997, and he received a transfer to Bosnia.
Violence seemed to trail him, his interrogators noted. He has come to understand their suspicions, he said.
In Nice, Mr. Boumediene has grown friendly with a neighbor, Babette. She
brings him coffee, he said, and gifts for his young son. They share
meals at Christmas and on Muslim holy days.
He feared she might no longer come if she knew his past. In January,
though, it was the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and
there was media coverage. Babette asked if it was true.
“I told her, ‘It’s fate, and it’s life,’ ” Mr. Boumediene said. She
still comes to call, he said, and still calls him “my brother.”
“Little by little, now, there are people who know who I am,” he said.
Some offer cautious words of encouragement, others their apologies.
“I do not know what the right reaction is,” he said, but he does like a reaction, just the same.
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