Anarchistcook’s Weblog

 Food Not Bombs cofounder Keith McHenry participating in the May Day protests in Istanbul.

ABU GHRAIB

The lights of Ortaköy sparkled on the dark waters of the Bosphorus. The outdoor cafes were animated with lively conversations that floated gently on the pleasant May breeze. Stars above the cafes shimmered in harmony with the waves lapping against the stone docks. A string of five-star restaurants offering seafood harvested that morning from the Marmara or the Black Sea stood next to one another along the southern edge of Europe. Asia was just a short ferry ride across the inky black. 

My girlfriend, Canan, gave me the birthday gift of an elegant dinner with six of her best friends. One couple and four of Canan’s girlfriends. The eight of us had participated in some of the No NATO protests that had become a weekly Istanbul ritual.

Canan’s son Baris had emailed me in 2004 asking for help in starting a Food Not Bombs group so my documentary film companion Liz and I added Istanbul to our tour. By the end of the visit Canan and I had made plans for her to visit me in Arizona when I returned to the United States which evolved into my agreeing to live with her in her beautiful hill top apartment in the Levent district of Istanbul.

“How did the Food Not NATO action at Taksim Square go?” asked Aysun as she scooted closer to the white clothed table. “There were more media than protesters,” I chuckled. We talked about the massive May Day rally in Üsküdar.  Opposition to President George W. Bush’s arrival at the NATO summit that June united the complex universe of the Turkish left. I didn’t know much about the political differences between local activists but as the conversation continued it was clear that many things were not so different from our sectarian struggles in the American left.

It didn’t take long before the subject of torture came up. News that the US tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib had just broken the month before. The now famous photo of black-hooded Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, standing with his arms outstretched on a box wired to a truck battery and images of US Specialist Lynndie England posing before naked detainees had been enlarged and mounted on foam core and greeted anyone passing through Taksim Square. Full color postcards of the grotesque images pre-addressed to the United Nations General Secretary and demanding a war crimes tribunal be formed were generously handed out to all who passed. 

Canan’s girlfriend Miray commented, “I am not surprised that the US tortures it’s prisoners. The Turkish government is no better.” 

She shared that she had been jailed, beaten and smashed to the floor, her limbs ripped and her ligaments torn before she was placed in a cell so small, she couldn’t extend her legs. She spent days in the cage, nearly naked, knees to her chest.  The military arrested her for participating in a march against the war on the Kurds. 

Ashti described a similar experience, captured for the crime of speaking her native tongue. Hawre told of having survived the tiny cell just for being Kurdish. The couple shared a similar account of their tendons and ligaments being torn before they were caged. 

I asked everyone at the table if those administering the torture tried to get information from them.

“No, no they just tortured me,” Miray said followed by the others concurring that they too had not been questioned.

Torturing to obtain intelligence might be a myth designed to justify torture to the public, at least that was my experience as I started to admit for the first time to anyone that I too was a survivor.

Plates of olives, dolmas, and hummus and metal platers of boney fresh fish were gracefully set before the us. 

I started to share my experience.

“Police picked me up as I was driving to my apartment in San Francisco,” I said, trembling to a memory that I had kept to myself. “I was shoved into a windowless van, driven to a basement garage and dragged down a maze of dimly lit hallways to a pitch-black room. I had the impression that five or six men had been waiting for my arrival. I was smashed to a cold concrete floor.” I was already facing twenty-five to life in prison from the three cases I had caught in the first half of 1994. 

A look of compassion radiated from Canan and her friends. The waiter glided around the table topping off our water glasses. 

“They ripped off my shoes, pants, and shirt, grabbed me by my arms and legs, lifted me into the air, and then bludgeoned me against the cement floor.” I could hear my ligaments and tendons rip over the yelling of insults and profanity. What felt like a steel-toed boot crashed repeatedly into my ribs. Someone smashed his fist against the side of my scull screaming, “Fuck you, asshole!” so loud it almost drowned out the tearing sounds of the tendons in my legs and arms. My mind was spinning in surrender.

The vulgar insults continued as they lifted my pulverized body from the cold floor and shoved me in a tiny cell that felt like a cage hanging from the ceiling.  

“Americans even torture their own,” Miray softly noted. We all shook our heads. 

“Yes, I was never interrogated.” I added. Ashti nodded in agreement. “They could kill you but their goal is to send you out into the community to share your story to discourage people from supporting your work.” 

I didn’t need to say more. The cake arrived with one huge burning candle. I made a wish that I no longer remember, cut pieces for everyone, and moved on to happier subjects. 

But I couldn’t get that memory of the tiny stress-position cell out of my head. Just as the others attending my party must have done, I struggled to press my bare feet against the corner of the cage desperate to straighten out my legs. That seemed to be the only solution to the horrible pain. I tried turning onto my side but it was impossible and I became desperately obsessed with lengthening my legs. But I couldn’t.

Maybe an hour passed. Maybe it was five hours, I don’t really know but a moment came when I tried to come to terms with the impossibly of finding relief, discarding any hope of removing my knees from my chest. I drifted off into a fog of disassociation my eyes slowly adjusting to a dark barely illuminated by a slice of light that snuck under a door. I could see that my cell was in fact hanging by chains.

Hour after hour passed in silence interrupted by the occasional muffled thud of what might have been a door or the pinging of plumbing. The moments of unbearable pain and fear fused in a mental timelessness.  

The terror cut to my bones when a sliver of light shot from under a metal door. A huge monster of a man stomped up to the cage. The clanging of keys clicked the iron bars free. The hulking silhouette whipped the cell door open and swiftly pulled me to the floor. The brute thrusted my blue jeans at my chest and pushed me out into the blinding light of a long hallway.  

A uniformed police officer grabbed my other arm and joined the other guy forcing me to the front door and shoving me out into the cold drizzle on the top step of the police headquarters. I turned to see that the clock in the lobby said it was three o’clock in the morning. A taxi splashed down Bryant Street. I struggled to slide my aching legs into my jeans, in the first long seconds of what would become two decades of relentless pain in my legs and arms. 

With no wallet or shoes, I started the long, miserable hike out to St Mary’s Hospital believing that they would see me because I had been their guest in 1988. The emergency room receptionist was clearly unhappy to see a wet, shirtless, and shoeless man make an appearance. I recall that she asked if I was on drugs or had possibly stopped taking my meds. “No, I was beaten by the police,” I insisted. 

She was in a difficult position. A man with no identification stood before her marked with scrapes and bruises. She excused herself to find help. A nurse would see me she thought. “We are required to have the police interview victims of assault,” the nurse said. 

I asked to make a call to my attorney. After some back and forth she relented. I woke my friend and lawyer Randy Baker. “Don’t say anything to the officer until I arrive,” he reminded me. 

The policeman and Randy found me waiting in a lobby chair draped in a blanket. The officer proceeded with his investigation. Who attacked me? I think it was the police but it was dark. I was released into the street outside police headquarters. The investigator’s kind smile turned to a confused expression. When was the assault? I wasn’t sure. Randy told the officer that I had failed to return home three days before. The officer noted this in his report. A nurse arrived and said, “we will see you now.”

“Don’t tell people about this Keith. No one will believe you and it could discredit your work,” Randy told me on the way to my apartment. He would have to retrieve me from St Mary’s two more times that year. 

I was hobbling down Market Street during a protest one day. A friend, Holbrook Teeter, walked with me. “What happened Keith?” he asked since I was struggling to keep up with the march. I told him that I had recently endured yet another police beating. I knew Holbrook from his work as a mental health counselor in the Tenderloin. He asked me for details and I provided the basics. “You should stop in to see me. I see a number of Guatemalan and El Salvadorian torture survivors. What happened to you wasn’t just police brutality, it was torture.”

SOUP STREET  – A memoir by Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry

https://foodnotbombs.net/soup_street.html