What Happened to the Bennetts(81)

    DETAINEE DEATH AT GITMO DISPLAYS HORROR OF SANCTIONED TORTURE

The case of Rohan Doha demonstrates what went wrong during those days when enhanced methods of interrogation were approved at Gitmo. The military interrogators trying to get information from Doha, later revealed to be an innocent goatherd, engaged in “pressure-point control tactics,” mainly the common “peroneal strike,” a blow to the side of the leg above the knee. Doha was subjected to leg strikes while in shackles and beaten until he lost consciousness. He was also sleep-deprived for three days, “sleep-depped” in the vernacular, and chained to the ceiling. Reportedly, Doha sustained over 100 strikes in a 24-hour period, and died from a blood clot lodged in his heart. The medical examiner specified that Doha’s legs had been “pulpified.” His autopsy states the method of death was homicide. More than one official spoke on background, stating that the murder of Doha was “sadistic.”



I shuddered. It was coming back to me now, the fear and mourning in the wake of 9/11, the entry into Afghanistan and Iraq, the debate over whether enhanced methods of interrogation were torture, or were reliable. It was the days of Donald Rumsfeld, Jack Bauer, and the awful photos of Abu Ghraib, which took its cue from Gitmo, using the same methods.

I scrolled through the articles about Doha, getting the horrifying gist. Doha had been tortured to death in one of our darkest moments in history. It appalled me, but I didn’t see what it had to do with me.

I kept going, reading the rest of the articles, and there was nothing more pertaining to Gitmo and Ricks. I searched under Hart and Gitmo, and got no results. I even searched under John Milo and Gitmo, but got no results. The only thing I knew that connected Ricks to Gitmo was the Doha interrogation.

I scrolled back to the initial article, where Ricks had produced affidavits stating that he was not involved because he was in the infirmary. The documents probably saved his presidential run. Nowadays there were precious few things that could disqualify a presidential candidate, but sadistically beating an innocent man to death was one of them.

I looked away, trying to collect my thoughts. My birthday kept sticking in my mind. It must have been the one in 2003 that I’d had at Gitmo. I scrolled to my online calendar in Dropbox, but it only went back as far as 2017. I had kept a paper Week-at-a-Glance calendar until then.

I thought back to that birthday. I remembered I had gone on a booze cruise on Guantánamo Bay to celebrate with Sam and Rowena, the two other court reporters. She brought a cake from the base, and he brought a bottle of cheap champagne.

I pictured it clearly, then remembered why. I had taken photos on a camera Lucinda had lent me. I had the film developed, but she had made a print for me as a keepsake. I had scanned and saved the photo digitally in my Gitmo archive, now deleted.

Then it struck me. I had saved a duplicate in Favorites because it was my birthday. I navigated to my photos and scrolled back to 2003, then to November. The wintry Pennsylvania thumbnails switched to the golden sun and palm trees of Cuba.

I reached November 3 and found photos from the cruise, scrolling through shots of the setting sun. I stopped at the last photo taken that night, of Sam, Rowena, and me. We were standing on a boat, smiling at the camera and toasting with plastic wineglasses. Two military escorts flanked us, since we weren’t permitted to travel off-base alone, and a third had taken the picture. I didn’t remember their names because we’d met them that night and hadn’t seen them again.

I enlarged the photo and got my answer.

Happy Birthday to me.





Chapter Fifty-Two



I hit the road for Delaware, back in my car, my brain on fire. Now I understood why Milo tried to kill me on Coldstream Road. I had a photo of us with our military escorts, one of whom was a young Michael Ricks, who would later become a senator. The photo was taken on November 3, 2003, the day that Rohan Doha was sadistically killed during an interrogation—when Senator Ricks was claiming to have been in the infirmary.

I accelerated, heading east. My photo proved that Ricks was covering up any involvement with Doha’s murder, which would torpedo his presidential run. Military interrogators worked with the CIA back then, and Ricks and his CIA buddies must have been revising the record to save Ricks’s political future, getting the other interrogators to scrub Ricks’s role. There was only one loose end. Me.

Ricks must have remembered my photo and gotten in touch with his old friend Paul Hart. Hart must have started the affair with Lucinda to get to the photo or find out if I remembered it, but when she broke it off, he engaged Milo to kill me. It was an open question whether Ricks knew, but I was betting he did. Milo had double-crossed them both.

I reached for my phone to call Lucinda, then realized I no longer had one. It was too risky to call her anyway. Her phone was probably tapped, whether by the FBI or CIA, I wasn’t sure. The only thing I knew for certain was that a rogue CIA operator connected with Senator Ricks could still be after me. I was guessing he was the driver of the black SUV that had chased me through the cornfield. And he could even have been the old man in the cemetery.

I’ll find him.

Suddenly I realized that the threat to my family didn’t end with Milo. On the contrary, we were safe only if Milo was alive, so the FBI could question him and expose Ricks and the conspiracy.

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel. George would kill Milo when he found him. It was the last thing I wanted now, but I couldn’t call him off. I had no way to reach him, even if he would’ve listened to me.