Confessions of an Innocent Man:
Torture and Survival
in a Saudi Prison
By William Sampson
McClelland & Stewart,
419 pages, $35
I can't remember having a more difficult time reading a book than with William Sampson's account of torture and interrogation in a Saudi Arabian prison. There are passages of beatings and rape that triggered my gag reflex. There were times I had to put the book down and walk around the block. Finally, I stopped reading it at night and read it only in daytime.
Confessions of an Innocent Man reads like the transcript of a traumatized man's debriefing of a horror that lasted more than two and a half years. It is a 400-plus-page, unsparing, unrelieved and relentless account of human degradation and abandonment. That's what makes it difficult to read -- it's numbing; and that's what makes it so powerful. This isn't shaped to be a thriller; this is raw testimony.
The story begins in a tedious, almost tawdry setting. Saudi Arabia has a native population of 14 million, plus seven million guest workers of many nationalities. William Sampson, a Canadian who also has British citizenship, arrived there in 1998 to work as a consultant on water-treatment projects for a Saudi development fund. His job sounds boring; the English-language expatriate community he describes seems aimless and interested only in parties; his portrait of Saudi Arabia conveys a sterile, ossified society, a giant shopping mall under religious martial law. The ubiquitous religious police, the mutawa, are like clouds of mosquitoes, harassing anyone whose dress or demeanour offends the Council for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
Despite the prohibition on alcohol in the country, the embassies, the clubs and many of the private corners of Saudi society seem soaked in it. Sampson seems to be as aimless as the rest of the expatriate community, hanging around illegal but tolerated bars like the Celtic Corner and the Empire Club. Against this surreal background, there have been a number of bombings targeting Westerners, and some think it's the work of Islamic terrorists, possibly al-Qaeda, targeting the offensive Western presence.
But that is not the official Saudi theory, and in December, 2000, Sampson's nightmare began. He is picked up because his name is on a cell phone caller list, and because he is familiar with some of the owners of the bars where the expatriates hang out. At first, he is convinced this is a bureaucratic bungle; soon he finds himself accused of being a ringleader of a car bombing. The police dragnet starts to scoop up Westerners almost randomly.
The Saudi authorities, it appears, cannot allow the idea to stand that there are armed Islamic insurgents operating in the country, opposing the government and the presence of Westerners. Instead, the Saudis describe the bombings as a massive turf war between Western bootleggers trying to control the multimillion-dollar illegal alcohol trade. In other words, there are no local problems; they're all caused by foreigners. Nine westerners, Sampson among them, will be the scapegoats.
Sampson is stripped and chained in solitary confinement, systematically deprived of sleep for days, as he is made to confess to planting a bomb that killed a British engineer. Each day he is hung over a metal bar and lacerated across the soles of his feet, beaten with rattan canes, bound and whipped. He breaks down after six days and begs to be allowed to confess to anything. But even signing the laborious and ridiculously contradictory confession that is dictated to him doesn't end his torment. The confession is constantly revised over ensuing weeks and widened to include other names.
The abuse escalates into beatings with ax handles and bamboo canes until his scrotum, his buttocks and his legs are black -- everywhere but his face, so that there is no external evidence of his torment. In one of the most difficult passages in the book, he is anally raped several times. "I slid to the floor. Lying there crying." He is grabbed by his hair, face pushed to the floor, and made to eat his own waste. "I was a gibbering, tear-sodden wreck, with no resemblance to what had once been a man. . . . No questions had been asked of me, only sodomy and beatings were on the schedule that night."
Sampson's account of torture and interrogation will go on for 200 more pages of torment. He will undergo two trials, more revised confessions, more interrogations and a televised confession; he will suffer a heart attack, undergo heart surgery and be sentenced to death by beheading. In some of the most poignant pages, he is horrified to find that his father has come from Canada to try to help him, and Sampson fears he will also come to harm.
Some of the most angry and contemptuous passages in the book, however, are reserved for the Canadian embassy, and an unnamed consul he calls "the Muppet," who visits him and only adds to his torment by presuming he's guilty, appearing to side with his tormentors. "The first consul congratulated my interrogators and himself on developing such a good relationship."
The Canadian embassy retains a Saudi lawyer for him, but Sampson and his father consider him a stooge for the authorities. Sampson quotes his father saying, "The hypocrisy, downright dishonesty and treachery of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs is appalling."
Whatever the full facts are behind the Canadian government actions or omissions is hard for the reader to judge, but Sampson's animosity is unbridled. In the end, he will renounce his Canadian citizenship, refuse to speak with embassy officials, and make his contempt for Ottawa a major feature of his book.
Sampson is convinced he is going to die, and almost welcomes an end to his nightmare. The resignation turns to rebellion as he becomes abusive of his guards, rejects food and water, screams like a madman whenever they approach, and repels them by smearing his own excrement over the walls so they are afraid to enter his cell. It is hard to tell from his account whether he is feigning madness or has begun to descend into it.
Then, almost as suddenly as it began, his imprisonment ended. In a show of clemency, but still maintaining his guilt, the Saudi government released him and the other Westerners, whom he sees for the first time in almost three years: "I began to build up a picture of what had happened since my arrest. The scope of the terrorist campaign and correspondent attempts of the Saudi Arabian government to conceal it by arresting Westerners was greater than I had imagined. The bombings of Western businesses and shooting of Westerners had continued throughout 2001 and 2002. I learned that nine of us had been arrested but the number expanded considerably when I later began my investigations. . . . Each of those arrested had been subjected to psychological torture (or coercive interrogation, as it is euphemistically labelled), and six of us had also been subjected to several of the brutal methods of physical torture that our captors so enjoyed inflicting."
Why were they released? The British paper The Guardian recently concluded: "All the men were released after an al-Qaeda attack in May, 2003, by nine suicide bombers in Riyadh that killed 35 people and injured 200. The attack made it clear the allegations against the men were false."
In the end, the most disturbing dimension of Sampson's story is how easy it is for a human being to disappear into a hell lasting years because it suits bureaucratic or political expedience, in this case the need to create an appearance of state security in the war on terror. The case of another Canadian, Maher Arar, who was sent into equivalent oblivion in Syria by bureaucratic bungling of the war on terror, comes inescapably to mind. Summary detention and suspension of habeas corpus have become common in the post-9/11 era, as has the practice of deporting suspects to countries that practise torture for interrogation. How many more Sampsons and Arars are out there right now?
Mark Starowicz is the author of Making History, and heads the Documentary Production Unit of CBC Television.
Chapter One
Readers can find the first chapter of Confessions of an Innocent Man today on our website, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/bookclub.