Kerry Pither

The following excerpt from Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror ran in the Globe and Mail on Saturday, August 23, 2008. Another excerpt ran on Macleans.ca on November 5, 2008.

November 12, 2001 –  Damascus 

The lock slid open and the door swung into the cell. Ahmad had to jump out of the way. The guard ordered him out and led him back upstairs into a room, where he tied a piece of rubber over his eyes.

Then the interrogation started. Someone said they’d received information about him and read out the names and addresses of his family in Toronto, the make and colour of his car, and its licence plate number. They knew his address, the man said, and read it out to him. He had the wrong apartment number, so Ahmad corrected him.

Then the beating started. Ahmad was punched in the face and kicked at. The men in the room screamed insults at him, his family, and his faith.

One of the interrogators leaned in and told Ahmad that they were going to bring Rola, the woman he’d been going to Damascus  to marry,  in and rape her, there, in front of him.

Ahmad was terrified — did they have Rola? He knew this kind of thing happened in Syria. He pleaded with them, saying that he had told them the truth.

“No,” the man yelled. “We need to hear something new!” 

“I can’t invent something,” said Ahmad. 

“No,” the man replied. “You can invent something. 

Then things got worse. Ahmad was ordered to strip down to his shorts and lie on his stomach on the floor. In pain from the beating, he moved slowly. The men yelled at him to move faster as he struggled out of his shirt and pants. When Ahmad was lying down, the men grabbed his hands and handcuffed them behind his back, then lifted his feet up and tied his wrists to his ankles with a rope. He was like a sheep ready for slaughter, Ahmad says.

Ice water was poured all over his body, then he was whipped on his feet, legs, knees, and back with a thick metal cable. The pain was sharp and fierce, but the first strokes were the worst. After a few lashings, Ahmad’s feet and legs went numb, but that was what the dousing with ice water was for – to bring the feeling back. He could see the interrogators’ shoes from under the blindfold. The ones without the cable kicked him in the face and his back and legs.

Ahmad begged the men to stop, asking why they were doing this to him. They just laughed. “They were asking me to repeat my story, and I kept repeating what happened, and they said, ‘That’s not what we want to hear.’ They kept threatening me and mocking me and said they were going to inflict permanent injury – they said I wouldn’t be able to have kids later on.”

Ahmad lost track of how often he was taken down to his cell and back up for more torture but remembers that eventually he couldn’t walk and had to be dragged up and down the stairs. In his cell, without the blindfold, he saw his legs were covered in blood. His feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes.

“After I just couldn’t take it any more, I told them, ‘I’m willing to say whatever you want me to say,’” Ahmad recalls.

The men asked him about people he knew in Canada – including Abdullah Almalki and Maher Arar. Ahmad told them he knew Abdullah but not very well.  They’d probably talked three or four times. Ahmad knew that Abdullah and his family were well connected in Ottawa’s Muslim community, and had consulted him about finding someone to marry. Ahmad had also stopped in to see Abdullah in Ottawa before going to the Syrian Embassy to apply for a visa to go and meet Rola.

Ahmad told his interrogators that he had met Maher  too, but knew him even less than he knew Abdullah. 

The interrogators wanted Ahmad to say he had seen both Abdullah and Maher in Afghanistan. Ahmad told them the truth: that he thought he had seen Abdullah in Afghanistan in an administration building with a group that was applying for a permit for a NGOs project, but that he hadn’t spoken to him.

“They said, ‘They were with you in Afghanistan.’ I said no, I briefly saw Abdullah … but I didn’t see Maher in Afghanistan.

“‘No, you saw Maher in Afghanistan. You have to say that.’” 

“I said no, I didn’t know Maher from Afghanistan. So they started punching and beating me. So later on, I said yes, I had seen him in Afghanistan.”

Then the men got to the heart of the interrogation: They wanted Ahmad to confess to a plot. 

“You wanted to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa!” 

Ahmad thought quickly. He worried that if he agreed that the target was the U.S. Embassy, he would be sent to the United States, not back to Canada, so he changed the story slightly. “It wasn’t the U.S. Embassy,” he said. “It was the Canadian Parliament.”

The interrogator seemed pleased. “He was feeling very happy now, like this new information was even juicier,” Ahmad recalls.

Mission accomplished. Ahmad’s blindfold was removed, and he was handed a pen and paper and told to write it all down. 

Ahmad started to write down the fabricated story but changed his mind and instead wrote the truth. A few hours later, guards came for him, kicking the cell door open so that it hit Ahmad, throwing him against the back wall.

“They were shouting at me, screaming, the whole dictionary of insults. Then they started kicking me … and grabbed me by my hair and beard, dragged me upstairs, handcuffed me from the back, and took me inside the room.”

The man who’d been in charge of his interrogation was there. 

“You want to change your story now?” he yelled at Ahmad. 

“He brought a cigarette out. I felt the heat of the cigarette on my cheek. They were kicking me and beating me and then they laid me down, and then he started burning my shins and I was screaming like crazy. And then he said, ‘I am going to burn your eyes now.’

“I said I’d write down whatever they wanted.”  

Spring 2008 – Canada 

Every time Ahmad El Maati hears the sound of rushing water, he’s reminded of the underground cell in Cairo. Sometimes the sound triggers flashbacks that force him to relive his experience there – the buzz of the electric shock torture, the sound of prisoners screaming, his own torture and the fear, humiliation, and hopelessness he felt. His nightmares often wake him.

Unlike many survivors of modern-day “stealth” torture, Ahmad has visible scars. They’re from the cigarette burns administered to his shin in Syria.

But the scars are the least of his problems. Ahmad has endured seven surgical procedures since his release. Most have been to help him walk properly again. Before his detention, his knee injury from wrestling in high school was an annoyance that stopped him from running long distances.

Now he can barely walk more than a city block without resting. 

The injury was exacerbated by the crippling fall in Nasr City, the forced kneeling during the long torture sessions, and the trauma of the beatings themselves. And then there’s his back – he’s had surgery to decompress a herniated disk that shot pain down his right leg. His doctors say that was likely brought on by the cold, confined cell in Syria and positional torture in Egypt.

Lately he’s noticed that his entire left leg goes numb if he stands for more than five minutes, so doctors are sending him for a new round of tests. Unable to exercise, Ahmad is battling his weight, and that, of course, is causing a litany of other complications.

But it’s the emotional scars that torment him the most. Ahmad has difficulty remembering what happened to him at what time – a common coping mechanism among torture survivors.

He has been diagnosed by Dr. Donald Payne, a psychiatrist specializing in treating victims of torture, as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms include “difficulty sleeping, with bad dreams of his experiences; frequent intrusive memories of his experiences, marked upset with reminders of his experiences in detention, excessive anxiety and depression, excessive irritability and poor concentration.”

Ahmad worries that his mother bears the brunt of his irritability. “I have lost my patience. This just kills me. My mother is suffering from that because she’s the one who lives with me.”

More than anything, he says, he wishes he could return to his life on the road as a truck driver. But even if his physical condition improved enough, the inability to concentrate and memory problems make retraining almost impossible.

Now, Ahmad rarely leaves the apartment he shares with his mother. When he does, it’s usually to see lawyers or doctors. Sometimes journalists too. And they all want him to remember what he has both consciously and subconsciously tried to forget.

He has stopped going to places where people know him. He can tell they’re all scared that, just by associating with him, they’ll incriminate themselves. It’s not just that people are afraid of him.

Now he’s afraid of others, too. “I’m now very suspicious of people,” he says. Convinced that his phones are tapped and that he’s still being followed, he feels he has no privacy.

He has tried making new friends, but that hasn’t been easy either. There’s the trust issue, and then there’s the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

Not long ago Ahmad suggested to a friendly neighbour that they go to the mosque together. Their friendship grew until CSIS came knocking on the man’s door.

“They tried to scare him off, and it frightened him,” Ahmad says. 

It has been 61/2  years since Ahmad left for his wedding in Syria. The future he’d imagined for himself back then – a simple life with Rola, children, and steady work – bears no resemblance to the shattered existence he struggles through today.

Four and a half years after his release, he wonders if he’ll ever be able to marry or find work again. Physical and psychological issues aside, being labelled a terrorist doesn’t do much for one’s eligibility for either employment or marriage.