Yasser Talal al-Zahrani

摘要

Nothing much distinguished Yasser Talal al-Zahrani from the 500 or so other prisoners held by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba. In his loose-fitting orange clothes and flip-flops, he spent the long days sitting or lying in his wire-mesh cell. He washed with water from one bucket, made water in another. Five times a day, when the call to prayer came over the camp pa system (sometimes overlaid, or garbled, with announcements in English), he would spread a towel on the cement floor and pray. At least it was not hard to determine Mecca's direction. The sun blazed in through the mesh and baked the roof of corrugated iron. If he left his cage to be escorted, in leg shackles, to interrogation or the hospital, humidity quickly soaked his shirts with sweat.