18 Years at Guantanamo Without Charge. Hundreds of Paintings.

In the early days of America’s war on terror, U.S. authorities detained Ahmed Rabbani thinking he was someone else. They soon realized their mistake but later said he himself had facilitated terrorists.

Rabbani denies that, and he was never charged with a crime. After 18½ years at Guantanamo Bay, he stepped off a plane in Pakistan in February—a free but broken man.

Years of hunger strikes and force feeding have left him unable to eat most solid food. “I never, never, ever sleep at night,” he said. “If I fall asleep, I wake back up immediately.”

Through it all, he said, his only means of escape was art. He began making paintings inside his cell, standing day and night at an easel, sometimes forgetting where he was and what had happened since he was detained in 2002. By the time of his release, he had made hundreds of paintings on canvas and scraps of fabric torn from old prisoner clothing or bedsheets.

Art is among the few existing testaments to life inside the Guantanamo Bay facility, which opened a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hold foreign suspects in America’s war on terror. In May, 20 of Rabbani’s paintings were shown at a gallery in the Pakistani city of Karachi. U.S. authorities didn’t allow some works depicting torture and suffering to be taken from Guantanamo, but other artists re-created them from descriptions written by Rabbani’s lawyer.

“They didn’t just damage me, they damaged my whole family,” Rabbani, now 53 years old, said in a video interview from his Karachi home.

He was cleared for release from Guantanamo in October 2021, after a government review board determined he didn’t pose “a continuing significant threat” to national security—standard language accompanying prisoner releases. Rabbani’s lawyer says he should never have been held at all. He says his client was taken by Pakistani authorities who misidentified him and handed him over to U.S. intelligence officers for a $5,000 reward. 

When he was detained, on Sept. 10, 2002, Rabbani didn’t know his wife was pregnant. He said he found out about it three years later from a letter—the first communication he had received from her since his detention. He met his 20-year-old son, Jawwad, for the first time upon his return to Pakistan in February.

The U.S. Defense Department didn’t comment on the circumstances under which Rabbani was initially detained. 

Parts of Rabbani’s account are corroborated in a declassified summary of a 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), then chair of the committee, said the findings documented “a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.” 

The Detention

Rabbani said he was working as a taxi driver in Karachi at the time of his detention. He spoke three languages—Urdu, Arabic and English—making him a valuable resource for foreign visitors. He said he didn’t ask his passengers too many questions. 

“I was working to feed my family,” he said. “That’s all.”

His detention was a case of mistaken identity. U.S. intelligence officers believed Rabbani was a man named Hassan Ghul, an alleged associate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“Interestingly, he denies being Hassan Ghul—claiming Hassan Ghul is someone else,” read a CIA cable about the interrogation cited in the Senate report. Within a day, it was determined Rabbani was indeed the wrong man, the report said.

But an acquaintance arrested alongside him, Muhammad Madni, told interrogators that Rabbani himself had links to al Qaeda, the report said. He gave them information that led to the arrest the next day of 11 other men—including Rabbani’s older brother, Abdul. Abdul was also released and returned to Pakistan in February, without ever being charged. 

Rabbani said he was transferred several times to camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan known as black sites—secret CIA interrogation facilities. There, he said, he was tortured until he told his captors anything he thought they wanted to hear. Loud techno music blasted at all hours. He stood in darkness, awake and in pain, for what felt like days. He believed he was underground, in a dungeon.   

“All this time I never saw the sun,” he said. 

Rabbani spent at least 540 days in CIA custody and was subjected to unauthorized “enhanced interrogation techniques,” according to the Senate report. These included forced standing, cold temperatures and attention grasps, a practice of suddenly grabbing the detainee with both hands, by the collar, and drawing him close. He said he also suffered other abuses: sleep deprivation, beatings, stress positions.

In September 2004, he was hooded and led onto a plane that flew him to Guantanamo.

The Allegation

Only a few documents related to Rabbani’s case have ever been made public. A detainee profile described him as a facilitator for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of orchestrating the 2000 bombing of USS Cole, an American warship, both of whom are being held at Guantanamo pending military trials. The profile says Rabbani operated safe houses and arranged travel for al Qaeda operatives and their families. 

The U.S. Defense Department didn’t provide responses to The Wall Street Journal’s questions about Rabbani’s detention and treatment. It provided legal documents pertaining to Rabbani, including an unclassified summary of facts the U.S. government submitted to a U.S. court in 2013 to substantiate his detention. 

The summary says Rabbani, who also goes by the name Badr, confessed to attending extremist training camps in Afghanistan, working for high-ranking extremist leaders and helping plan terrorist activities. It says he met Osama bin Laden and ran safe houses for al Qaeda and Taliban forces.

Rabbani denies all of it. He said he made false confessions while being tortured. Defense lawyers say this was a common pattern among Guantanamo detainees. 

“They were beating the s—out of people to get information out of them,” said Thomas Wilner, a defense attorney for several Guantanamo detainees. “A lot of the intelligence they got was just wrong.” 

The Art

Under the Obama administration, some attempts were made to make life at Guantanamo more tolerable for detainees. In 2009, lawyers said, basic classes were offered for the first time, in subjects such as English, computer science and art. 

Rabbani, who had dabbled in drawing as a child, opted for art. But the rules were so prohibitive that he gave up after a few sessions. Inmates painted with one ankle chained to the floor. Each time they wanted to use a brush or a dab of color, the teacher had to pass it to a guard who would examine it before handing it to them. Most of the daily hourlong class was spent waiting for materials.

Around 2011, a friend convinced Rabbani that a new teacher had turned the program around and that he should come back. When he took up painting again, it consumed him. He asked his lawyers to bring him DVDs about famous artists and watched a 2000 biopic about the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock over and over, he said.

His lawyers brought him brushes made entirely of plastic. Only acrylic paint was allowed because oils came in metal tubes that could be fashioned into knives or other tools.

Rabbani made sketches of his cell, a small windowless room with a toilet next to his bed. Other paintings re-created memories of life before his arrest, like a pilgrimage to the Islamic holy site of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. A few, the ones that were censored, showed dark scenes of suffering: a man hung by his wrists from a metal beam overhead; a chair to which Rabbani was strapped for force feeding during his hunger strikes.

“You can imagine why they wouldn’t let these pictures out,” said Rabbani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. “It’s not an issue of national security, but of national embarrassment.”

The Defense Department said that all detainee-produced items undergo security screening to ensure that they don’t “jeopardize the security of detention operations or the security of current or former U.S. government personnel.”

Stafford Smith wrote detailed descriptions of each artwork that wasn’t allowed out of Guantanamo. Eight were initially prohibited from leaving, though three were later released.

“Slightly left of center is the feeding chair, which looks rather like an electric chair, with seven leather restraint straps, their buckles falling open—two for the ankles, two across the upper legs, two for the wrists, and one across the chest,” reads Stafford Smith’s description of a painting showing the room where Rabbani alleges he was painfully force-fed during his yearslong hunger strike. The lawyer titled the description “Dining Out in Guantanamo Bay.” 

In late 2017, Rabbani was one of eight artists in Guantanamo whose work was exhibited at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 

Guantanamo is being slowly dismantled. A total of 779 men were at some point detained there. Like Rabbani, most were eventually released without ever having been charged with a crime.

Of the 30 detainees who remain, two have been convicted and nine await trial on charges including conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, hijacking or hazarding a vessel or aircraft, and terrorism in the Sept. 11 case. Seven former prisoners pleaded guilty to war-crimes charges and were transferred out of Guantanamo. Nine died in custody.  

Then President Barack Obama pledged to close the facility, arguing it had damaged America’s reputation and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Facing opposition from Congress, he chose instead to downsize it. Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, rescinded Obama’s directive to close the facility. The Biden administration has revived a modest effort to transfer additional detainees from the prison.

Rabbani says he doesn’t expect he will ever fully recover, physically or mentally.

“Some things will never be fixed,” he said.

Write to Feliz Solomon at [email protected]