NARRATIVES OF LOSS: WAITING, GUESSING, AND REMEMBERING The current report takes ‘Closing Bagram’ narratively further, telling the stories and suffering of 11 repatriated detainees and their families following their disappearance. The former report focuses widely on the political and legal conditions the US created – with which Pakistan cooperated – to make Bagram detentions possible and to prolong their duration, making this a defining feature of the war on terror along with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. This report widens its scope to bring into view additional aspects of the detention timeline, including the circumstances that brought detainees to Afghanistan; their capture by American or Afghan forces; their reports of appearing before the DRB and maltreatment by prison guards, including torment, torture, and abuse; and finally – released without charges, years later – their return to and reintegration in Pakistan. At the same time, this report tells the stories of detainees’ families discovering their loved ones had disappeared and were sequestered in Bagram and what it meant to them to finally be reunited. Upon finding out, families began interacting with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),15 which facilitated telephonic, video, and written communication with detainees and became interlocutors with JPP as they sought justice for their sons, brothers, and husbands. Waiting The logistics of detention introduced what can be conceptualized as the violence of waiting to detainees’ and their families’ lives. The detainees discussed in this report failed to return from work or errand-related travel that had taken them close to or across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,16 and in one instance the Pakistan-Iran border. Families had no idea what happened to their loved ones and could only guess. Waiting for weeks to months at a time with no news, presuming death, families were shocked to receive a letter from the ICRC notifying them that their missing relative was held in Bagram. This news inaugurated the process of waiting into their lives, which this report analyzes as a form of violence. Drawing from Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman who argue that violence and torture are not only physical ordeals, but also “felt interior experiences”,17 it shows how waiting as an emotional action became enmeshed in detainees and families everyday lives. It is in this way that the report explores how their families narrate the real-time experience of losing their sons, brothers, and husbands. It asks how the families’ lived experiences are reorganized over the duration of detainment by the process of waiting — starting with news about their loved one who had gone missing. Once JPP reached out, the families then became embroiled in seeking justice. This process was also marked by waiting: to provide information to JPP as its investigators arranged visits and interviews; to learn about opportunities for audio and video calls; to hear from  This is an international organization that helps victims of war and those affected by conflict and violence.  Including Torkham in Khyber Agency and Chaman in Balochistan. 17  Das, Veena & Kleinman, Arthur. “Introduction,” Violence and Subjectivity. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2000. 15 16 7