“Holy shit,” Todd said.
Zeitoun was in disbelief. It had been a dizzying series of events—arrested at gunpoint in a home he owned, brought to an impromptu military base built inside a bus station, accused of terrorism, and locked in an outdoor cage. It surpassed the most surreal accounts he’d heard of third-world law enforcement.
Inside the cage, Todd ranted and swore. He couldn’t believe it. But then again, he noted, it was not unprecedented. During Mardi Gras, when the local jails were full, the New Orleans police often housed drunks and thieves in temporary jails set up in tents.
This one, though, was far more elaborate, and had been built since the storm. Looking at it, Zeitoun realized that it was not one long cage, but a series of smaller, divided cages. He had seen similar structures before, on the properties of his clients who kept dogs. This cage, like those, was a single-fenced enclosure divided into smaller ones. He counted sixteen. It looked like a giant kennel, and yet it looked even more familiar than that.
It looked precisely like the pictures he’d seen of Guantánamo Bay. Like that complex, it was a vast grid of chain-link fencing with few walls, so the prisoners were visible to the guards and each other. Like Guantánamo, it was outdoors, and there appeared to be nowhere to sit or sleep. There were simply cages and the pavement beneath them.
The space inside Zeitoun and Todd’s cage was approximately fifteen by fifteen feet, and was empty but for a portable toilet without a door. The only other object in the cage was a steel bar in the shape of an upside-down U, cemented into the pavement like a bike rack. It normally served as a guide for the buses parking in the lot and for passengers forming lines. It was about thirty inches high, forty inches long.
Across from Zeitoun’s cage was a two-story building, some kind of Amtrak office structure. It was now occupied by soldiers. Two soldiers stood on the roof, holding M-16s and staring down at Zeitoun and Todd.
Todd raged, wild-eyed and protesting. But the guards could hear little of what he said. Even Zeitoun, standing near him, could hear only muffled fragments. It was then that Zeitoun realized that there was a sound, a heavy mechanical drone, cloaking the air around them. It was so steady and unchanging that he had failed to notice it.
Zeitoun turned around and realized the source of the noise. The back of their cage nearly abutted the train tracks, and on the tracks directly behind them stood an Amtrak train engine. The engine was operating at full power on diesel fuel, and, Zeitoun realized in an instant, was generating all the electricity used for the station and the makeshift jail. He looked up at the monstrous grey machine, easily a hundred tons, adorned with a small red, white, and blue logo, and knew that it would be with them, loud and unceasing, as long as they were held there.
One guard was assigned to them. He sat on a folding chair about ten feet in front of the cage. He stared at Zeitoun and Todd, his face curious and disdainful.
Zeitoun was determined to get a phone call. He reached for the chain-link fence in front of him, intending to get the attention of an officer of some kind he saw near the back door of the station. Todd did so, too, and was immediately set straight by the guard who had been assigned to watch them.
“Don’t touch the fence!” the guard snapped.
“Don’t touch the fence? Are you kidding?” Todd asked.
But the soldier was not joking. “You touch the fence again I’ll fuck you up.”
Todd asked where they were supposed to stand. He was told they could stand in the middle of the cage. They could sit on the steel rack. They could sit on the ground. But if they touched the fence again there would be consequences.
There were a dozen other guards roaming behind the terminal. One walked by, led by a German shepherd. He made sure to pause meaningfully at their cage, giving Zeitoun and Todd a look of warning before moving on.
Zeitoun could barely stand. There was a stabbing pain in his foot he had ignored until now. He took off his shoe to find his instep discolored. There was something wedged under his skin—some kind of metal splinter, he thought, though he couldn’t remember where or when he’d gotten it. The area was purple in the center, ringed by white. He needed to clear out the splinter or the foot would get worse, and quickly.
Zeitoun and Todd took turns sitting on the steel rack. It was only wide enough for one person, so they traded ten-minute shifts.
After an hour, the doors to the station burst open. Nasser and Ronnie appeared, escorted by three officers. Zeitoun and Todd’s cage was opened, and Nasser and Ronnie were pushed inside. The cage was locked again. The four men were reunited.
Under the rumble of the engine, the men compared their experiences thus far. All four had been strip-searched. Only Todd had been told why they were being held—possession of stolen goods was the only charge mentioned—and none had been read their rights. None had been allowed to make a phone call.
Nasser had tried to explain the cash he had in his knapsack. The police and soldiers were in the city to prevent the widespread looting everyone had heard about. Nasser, being equally concerned about the looting, had decided to keep his money, his life savings, with him.
His interrogators did not accept this. Nasser had had no luck explaining that legions of immigrants kept their money in cash, that trust in banks was tenuous. He explained that one reason a person in his position kept his money in cash was for the possibility, however remote, that he would be stopped, questioned, detained—or deported. With cash he could hide it, keep it, direct its retrieval if he was sent away.
The four men didn’t know what would happen to them, but they knew they would spend the night in the cage.
The Syrian names of Zeitoun and Dayoob, their Middle Eastern accents, the ten thousand dollars cash, Todd’s cash and MapQuest printouts—it all added up to enough evidence that the four of them knew that their predicament would not be straightened out anytime soon.
“We’re screwed, friends,” Todd said.
In the cage, the men had few options: they could stand in the center, they could sit on the cement, or they could lean against the steel rack. No one wanted to sit on the ground. The cement beneath them was filthy with dirt and grease. If they made a move toward the fence, the guards would yell obscenities and threaten retribution.
For the first hours in the cage, Zeitoun’s overriding goal was to be granted a phone call. All the men had made the request repeatedly during processing, and had been told that there were no phones functioning.
This seemed to be fact. They saw no one talking on cell phones or landlines. There was a rumor that satellite phones were working and that there was one phone, connected to a fax line, in the upstairs office of the bus station.
Every time a guard passed, they begged for access to this or any phone. At best they got shrugs and glib answers.
“Phones don’t work,” a guard told them. “You guys are terrorists. You’re Taliban.”
The day’s light was dimming. Processing had taken three hours, and the four men had been in the cage for three more. They were each given small cardboard boxes with the words BARBECUE PORK RIB printed on the side. Inside was a set of plastic cutlery, a packet of cheese spread, two crackers, a packet of orange-drink crystals, and a bag of pork ribs. These were military-style meals, ready to eat.
Zeitoun told the guard that he and Nasser were Muslims and could not eat pork.
The guard shrugged. “Then don’t eat it.”
Zeitoun and Nasser ate the crackers and cheese and gave the rest to Todd and Ronnie.
With the darkness coming, the sound behind them seemed to grow louder. Already he was tired, but Zeitoun knew that the engine would ensure that none of them slept. He had worked on ships before, in engine rooms, but this was louder than that, louder than anything he had ever known. In the glare of the floodlights, it resembled a great furnace, moaning and ravenous.
“We can pray,” Zeitoun said to Nasser.
He had caught Nasser’s eye, and he knew what he was thinking. They ne
eded to pray, were urged to do so five times a day, but Nasser was nervous. Would this arouse more suspicion? Would they be mocked or even punished for worshiping?
Zeitoun saw no reason not to do so, even while being held in an outdoor cage. “We must,” he said. If anything, he thought, they needed to pray more often, and with great fervor.
“What about wuduu?” Nasser asked.
The Qur’an asked that Muslims wash themselves before their prayers, and there was no means of doing so here. But Zeitoun knew that the Qur’an allowed that if there was no water available, Muslims could use dust to cleanse themselves, even if only ceremoniously. And so they did so. They took gravel from the ground and rubbed it over their hands and arms, their heads and feet, and they knelt and performed salaat. Zeitoun knew their prayers were arousing interest from the guards, but he and Nasser did not pause.
As the night went black, the lights came on. Floodlights from above and from the building opposite. The night grew darker and cooler, but the lights stayed on, brighter than day. The men were not given sheets, blankets, or pillows. Soon there was a new guard on duty, sitting on the chair opposite them, and they asked him where they were supposed to sleep. He told them that he didn’t care where they slept, as long as it was on the pavement, where he could see them.
Zeitoun didn’t care about sleep this night. He wanted to stay awake in case a supervisor of some sort, a lawyer, any civilian at all, happened by. The other men tried to rest their heads on the pavement, in the crooks of their arms. No one slept. Even when someone would find themselves in a place where they might be able to rest, the sound of the engine, its vibrations in the ground, took over. There could be no sleep in this place.
Somewhere in the small hours, Zeitoun tried to drape himself over the steel rack, stomach-down. He found a minute or so of rest this way, but it was a position he could not maintain. He tried to lean his back against it, arms crossed. It could not be done.
Other guards occasionally walked by with their German shepherds, but the night was otherwise uneventful. There was only the face of the guard, his M-16 by his side, the floodlights coming from every angle, illuminating the faces of Zeitoun’s fellow prisoners, all drawn, exhausted, half-mad with fatigue and confusion.
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 7
When the sky began to pale into dawn, Zeitoun realized he had not slept at all. He had closed his eyes for a few minutes at a time, but had not found sleep. He’d refused to lie on the pavement, but even if he could have brought himself to do so, even if he could quell the panic about his situation, his family, his home, the uninterrupted drone of the engine would have kept him awake.
He watched as the night guard left and was replaced by a new man. The new guard’s expression was the same as his predecessor’s, seeming to take for granted the guilt of the men in the cage.
Zeitoun and Nasser performed their wuduu and their salaat, and when they were done, they stared at the guard, who was staring at them.
Zeitoun became more alert, even optimistic, as the sky brightened. He assumed that with each day since the hurricane, the city would find its way toward some kind of stability, and that the government would soon send help. With that help, the chaos that had brought him to this cage would be reined in and the misunderstanding manifested here would be mitigated.
Zeitoun convinced himself that the previous day had been an aberration, that today would bring a return to reason and procedure. He would be allowed a phone call, would learn about the charges against him, might even see a public defender or a judge. He would call Kathy and she would hire the best lawyer she could find, and this would be over in hours.
* * *
The other men in the cage, all of whom had finally found some rest during the night, woke one by one, and stood to stretch. Breakfast was brought. Again it was MREs, this time including ham slices. Zeitoun and Nasser ate what they could and gave the rest to Todd and Ronnie.
As the prison awoke, Zeitoun examined the chainlink structure closely. It was about 150 feet long. The razor wire was new, the portable toilets new. The fencing was new and of high quality. He knew that none of this had existed before the storm. New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal had never before been used as a prison. He did some rough calculations in his mind.
It would have taken maybe six flatbed trucks to get all the fencing to the station. He saw no forklifts or heavy machinery; the cages must have been assembled by hand. It was an impressive feat, to get such a construction project completed so soon after the storm. But when had they done it?
Zeitoun had been brought into the station on September 6, seven and a half days after the hurricane passed through the city. Even under the best of circumstances, building a prison like this would have taken four or five days. That meant that within a day of the storm’s eye passing over the region, officials were making plans for the building of a makeshift outdoor prison. Fencing and razor wire would have had to be located or ordered. The toilets and floodlights and all other equipment would have had to be borrowed or requisitioned.
It was a vast amount of planning and execution. A regular contractor would have wanted weeks to complete the task, and would have used heavy machinery. Without machines, dozens of men would be needed. To do it as quickly as they had, fifty men would be needed. Maybe more. And who were these men? Who did this work? Were there contractors and laborers working around the clock on a prison days after the hurricane? It was mind-boggling. It was all the more remarkable given that while the construction was taking place, on September 2, 3, and 4, thousands of residents were being plucked from rooftops, were being discovered alive and dead in attics.
At midday, Zeitoun heard something strange: the sound of buses at the bus station. He looked up to see a school bus arriving at the far end of the lot. From it descended thirty or more prisoners, one woman among them, in orange jumpsuits.
They were the incarcerated from the Jefferson Parish and Kenner jails—those who had been in jail before the storm. Within the hour, the long row of cages began to fill. And again, just like Guantánamo, all prisoners could be seen by anyone, from any angle. Now, with the orange uniforms completing the picture, the similarities were too strong to ignore.
Quickly after each group was locked into a cage, they were warned about touching the fence. Any touching of any fence would result in severe consequences. And so they came to know the strange rules of their incarceration. The pavement would be their bed, the open-door toilet would be their bathroom, and the steel rack would be the seat they could share. But for the first hour, while the new prisoners got acquainted with their new cells, there was much yelling from the guards about where and how to stand and sit, what not to touch.
A man and a woman were housed one cage away from Zeitoun, and soon a rumor abounded that the man was a sniper, that it had been he who had been shooting at the helicopters that had tried to land on the roof of a hospital.
Lunch was different than previous meals. This time the guards brought ham sandwiches to the cages and then stuffed them through the holes in the wire.
Again Zeitoun and Nasser did not eat.
The presence of dogs was constant. There were at least two always visible, their handlers sure to parade them past the cages in close proximity. Occasionally one would explode into barking at some prisoner. Someone in Zeitoun’s cage mentioned Abu Ghraib, wondering at what point they’d be asked to pose naked, in a vertical pyramid, and which guard would lean into the picture, grinning.
By two o’clock there were about fifty prisoners at the bus station, but Zeitoun’s cage was still the only one with its own dedicated guard.
“You really think they consider us terrorists?” Nasser asked.
Todd rolled his eyes. “Why else would we be alone in this cell while everyone else is crammed together? We’re the big fish here. We’re the big catch.”
Throughout the day, a half-dozen more prisoners came through the station and were brought to the cages. These men were dressed in their civili
an clothes; they must have been picked up after the storm, as Zeitoun and his companions had been. The pattern was clear now: the prisoners who were being transferred from other prisons came by bus and weren’t processed, while those arrested after the storm were processed inside and brought through the back door.
By overhearing the guards and prisoners talking, Zeitoun realized the prison had been given at least two nicknames by the guards and soldiers. A few referred to it as Angola South, but far more were calling it Camp Greyhound.
In the afternoon, one of the guards approached a man in the cage next to Zeitoun’s. He talked to an orange-clad prisoner for a few moments, gave him a cigarette, and then returned to the bus station.
Moments later, the guard reappeared, leading a small television crew. The guard led them straight to the man he’d given a cigarette to. The reporter—Zeitoun could see now the crew was from Spain—conducted an interview with the prisoner, and then, after a few minutes, he approached Zeitoun with the microphone and began to ask a question.
“No!” the guard yelled. “Not that one.”
The crew was ushered back into the station.
“Holy shit,” Todd said. “They bribed that dude.”
As they were leaving, the cameraman swept his lens over the whole outdoor jail, Zeitoun included. There was a bright light attached to the camera, and being viewed that way, in the glare of a floodlight and shown to the world as a criminal in a cage, made Zeitoun furious. It was a lie.
But Zeitoun had a sudden hope, given that the crew was Spanish, that the footage might be broadcast to his brother in Málaga. Ahmad would see it—he saw everything—and he would tell Kathy, and Kathy would know where he was.