Читать книгу Guantánamo Diary - Mohamedou Ould Slahi - Страница 12

ONE

Jordan–Afghanistan–GTMO

July 2002–February 2003

The American Team Takes Over . . . Arrival at Bagram . . . Bagram to GTMO . . . GTMO, the New Home . . . One Day in Paradise, the Next in Hell

Amman airport, July 19, 2002, 10 p.m.¹

The music was off. The conversations of the guards faded away. The truck emptied.

I felt alone in the hearse truck.

The waiting didn’t last: I felt the presence of new people, a silent team. I don’t remember a single word during the whole rendition to follow.

A person was undoing the chains on my wrists. He undid the first hand, and another guy grabbed that hand and bent it while a third person was putting on the new, firmer and heavier shackles. Now my hands were shackled in front of me.

Somebody started to rip my clothes with something like a scissors. I was like, What the heck is going on? I started to worry about the trip I neither wanted nor initiated. Somebody else was deciding everything for me; I had all worries in the world but making a decision. Many thoughts went quickly through my head. The optimistic thoughts suggested, Maybe you’re in the hands of Americans, but don’t worry, they just want to take you home, and to make sure that everything goes in secrecy. The pessimistic ones went, You screwed up! The Americans managed to pin some shit on you, and they’re taking you to U.S. prisons for the rest of your life.

I was stripped naked. It was humiliating, but the blindfold helped me miss the nasty look of my naked body. During the whole procedure, the only prayer I could remember was the crisis prayer, Ya hayyu! Ya kayyum! and I was mumbling it all the time. Whenever I came to be in a similar situation, I would forget all my prayers except the crisis prayer, which I learned from life of our Prophet, Peace be upon him.

One of the team wrapped a diaper around my private parts. Only then was I dead sure that the plane was heading to the U.S. Now I started to convince myself that “everything’s gonna be alright.” My only worry was about my family seeing me on TV in such a degrading situation. I was so skinny. I’ve been always, but never that skinny: my street clothes had become so loose that I looked like a small cat in a big bag.

When the U.S. team finished putting me in the clothes they tailored for me, a guy removed my blindfold for a moment. I couldn’t see much because he directed the flashlight into my eyes. He was wrapped from hair to toe in a black uniform. He opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out, gesturing for me to do the same, a kind of AHH test which I took without resistance. I saw part of his very pale, blond-haired arm, which cemented my theory of being in Uncle Sam’s hands.

The blindfold was pushed down. The whole time I was listening to loud plane engines; I very much believe that some planes were landing and others taking off. I felt my “special” plane approaching, or the truck approaching the plane, I don’t recall anymore. But I do recall that when the escort grabbed me from the truck, there was no space between the truck and the airplane stairs. I was so exhausted, sick, and tired that I couldn’t walk, which compelled the escort to pull me up the steps like a dead body.

Inside the plane it was very cold. I was laid on a sofa and the guards shackled me, mostly likely to the floor. I felt a blanket put over me; though very thin, it comforted me.

I relaxed and gave myself to my dreams. I was thinking about different members of my family I would never see again. How sad would they be! I was crying silently and without tears; for some reason, I gave all my tears at the beginning of the expedition, which was like the boundary between death and life. I wished I were better to people. I wished I were better to my family. I regretted every mistake I made in my life, toward God, toward my family, toward anybody!

I was thinking about life in an American prison. I was thinking about documentaries I had seen about their prisons, and the harshness with which they treat their prisoners. I wished I were blind or had some kind of handicap, so they would put me in isolation and give me some kind of humane treatment and protection. I was thinking, What will the first hearing with the judge be like? Do I have a chance to get due process in a country so full of hatred against Muslims? Am I really already convicted, even before I get the chance to defend myself?

I drowned in these painful dreams in the warmth of the blanket. Every once in a while the pain of the urine urge pinched me. The diaper didn’t work with me: I could not convince my brain to give the signal to my bladder. The harder I tried, the firmer my brain became. The guard beside me kept pouring water bottle caps in my mouth, which worsened my situation. There was no refusing it, either you swallow or you choke. Lying on one side was killing me beyond belief, but every attempt to change my position ended in failure, for a strong hand pushed me back to the same position.

I could tell that the plane was a big jet, which led me to believe that flight was direct to the U.S. But after about five hours, the plane started to lose altitude and smoothly hit the runway. I realized the U.S. is a little bit farther than that. Where are we? In Ramstein, Germany? Yes! Ramstein it is: in Ramstein there’s a U.S. military airport for transiting planes from the middle east; we’re going to stop here for fuel. But as soon as the plane landed, the guards started to change my metal chains for plastic ones that cut my ankles painfully on the short walk to a helicopter. One of the guards, while pulling me out of the plane, tapped me on the shoulder as if to say, “you’re gonna be alright.” As in agony as I was, that gesture gave me hope that there were still some human beings among the people who were dealing with me.

When the sun hit me, the question popped up again: Where am I? Yes, Germany it is: it was July and the sun rises early. But why Germany? I had done no crimes in Germany! What shit did they pull on me? And yet the German legal system was by far a better choice for me; I know the procedures and speak the language. Moreover, the German system is somewhat transparent, and there are no two and three hundred years sentences. I had little to worry about: a German judge will face me and show me whatever the government has brought against me, and then I’m going to be sent to a temporary jail until my case is decided. I won’t be subject to torture, and I won’t have to see the evil faces of interrogators.

After about ten minutes the helicopter landed and I was taken into a truck, with a guard on either side. The chauffeur and his neighbor were talking in a language I had never heard before. I thought, What the heck are they speaking, maybe Filipino? I thought of the Philippines because I’m aware of the huge U.S. military presence there. Oh, yes, Philippines it is: they conspired with the U.S. and pulled some shit on me. What would the questions of their judge be? By now, though, I just wanted to arrive and take a pee, and after that they can do whatever they please. Please let me arrive! I thought; After that you may kill me!

The guards pulled me out of the truck after a five-minute drive, and it felt as if they put me in a hall. They forced me to kneel and bend my head down: I should remain in that position until they grabbed me. They yelled, “Do not move.” Before worrying about anything else, I took my most remarkable urine since I was born. It was such a relief; I felt I was released and sent back home. All of a sudden my worries faded away, and I smiled inside. Nobody noticed what I did.

About a quarter of an hour later, some guards pulled me and towed me to a room where they obviously had “processed” many detainees. Once I entered the room, the guards took the gear off my head. Oh, my ears ached so badly, and so did my head; actually my whole body was conspiring against me. I could barely stand. The guards started to deprive me of my clothes, and soon I stood there as naked as my mother bore me. I stood there for the first time in front of U.S. soldiers, not on TV, this was for real. I had the most common reaction, covering my private parts with my hands. I also quietly started to recite quietly the crisis prayer, Ya hayyu! Ya kayyum! Nobody stopped me from praying; however, one of the MPs was staring at me with his eyes full of hatred. Later on he would order me to stop looking around in the room.

A medic, a tall white corpsman in his early twenties, gave me a quick medical check, after which I was wrapped in Afghani cloths. Yes, Afghani clothes in the Philippines! Of course I was chained, hands and feet tied to my waist. My hands, moreover, were put in mittens. Now I’m ready for action! What action? No clue!

The escort team pulled me blindfolded to a neighboring interrogation room. As soon as I entered the room, several people started to shout and throw heavy things against the wall. In the melee, I could distinguish the following questions:

“Where is Mullah Omar?”

“Where is Osama bin Laden?”

“Where is Jalaluddin Haqqani?”

A very quick analysis went through my brain: the individuals in those questions were leading a country, and now they’re a bunch of fugitives! The interrogators missed a couple of things. First, they had just briefed me about the latest news: Afghanistan is taken over, but the high level people have not been captured. Second, I turned myself in about the time when the war against terrorism started, and since then I have been in a Jordanian prison, literally cut off from the rest of the world. So how am I supposed to know about the U.S. taking over Afghanistan, let alone about its leaders having fled? Not to mention where they are now.

I humbly replied, “I don’t know!”

“You’re a liar!” shouted one of them in broken Arabic.

“No, I’m not lying, I was captured so and so, and I only know Abu Hafs . . .” I said, in a quick summary of my whole story.²

“We should interrogate these motherfuckers like the Israelis do.”

“What do they do?” asked another.

“They strip them naked and interrogate them!”

“Maybe we should!” suggested another. Chairs still were flying around and hitting the walls and the floor. I knew it was only a show of force, and the establishment of fear and anxiety. I went with the flow and even shook myself more than necessary. I didn’t believe that Americans torture, even though I had always considered it a remote possibility.

“I am gonna interrogate you later on,” said one, and the U.S. interpreter repeated the same in Arabic.

“Take him to the hotel,” suggested the interrogator. This time the interpreter didn’t translate.

And so was the first interrogation done. Before the escort grabbed me, in my terrorizing fear, I tried to connect with the interpreter.

“Where did you learn such good Arabic?” I asked.

“In the U.S.!” he replied, sounding flattered. In fact, he didn’t speak good Arabic; I just was trying to make some friends.

The escort team led me away. “You speak English,” one of them said in a thick Asian accent.

“A little bit,” I replied. He laughed, and so did his colleague. I felt like a human being leading a casual conversation. I said to myself, Look how friendly the Americans are: they’re gonna put you in a Hotel, interrogate you for a couple of days, and then fly you home safely. There’s no place for worry. The U.S. just wants to check everything, and since you’re innocent, they’re gonna find that out. For Pete’s sake, you’re on a base in Philippines; even though it’s a place at the edge of legality, it’s just temporary. The fact that one of the guards sounded Asian strengthened my wrong theory of being in the Philippines.

I soon arrived, not at a hotel but at a wooden cell with neither a bathroom nor a sink. From the modest furniture—a weathered, thin mattress and an old blanket—you could tell there had been somebody here. I was kind of happy for having left Jordan, the place of randomness, but I was worried about the prayers I could not perform, and I wanted to know how many prayers I missed on the trip. The guard of the cell was a small, skinny white female, a fact which gave me more comfort: for the last eight months I had been dealt with solely by big, muscular males.

I asked her about the time, and she told me it was about eleven, if I remember correctly. I had one more question.

“What day is it?”

“I don’t know, every day here is the same,” she replied. I realized I had asked too much; she wasn’t even supposed to tell me the time, as I would learn later.

I found a Koran gently placed on some water bottles. I realized I was not alone in the jail, which was surely not a Hotel.

As it turned out, I was delivered to the wrong cell. Suddenly, I saw the weathered feet of a detainee whose face I couldn’t see because it was covered with a black bag. Black bags, I soon would learn, were put on everybody’s heads to blindfold them and make them unrecognizable, including the writer. Honestly, I didn’t want to see the face of the detainee, just in case he was in pain or suffering, because I hate to see people suffering; it drives me crazy. I’ll never forget the moans and cries of the poor detainees in Jordan when they were suffering torture. I remember putting my hands over my ears to stop myself from hearing the cries, but no matter how hard I tried, I was still able to hear the suffering. It was awful, even worse than torture.

The female guard at my door stopped the escort team and organized my transfer to another cell. It was the same as the one I was just in, but in the facing wall. In the room there was a half-full water bottle, the label of which was written in Russian; I wished I had learned Russian. I said to myself, a U.S. base in the Philippines, with water bottles from Russia? The U.S. doesn’t need supplies from Russia, and besides, geographically it makes no sense. Where am I? Maybe in a former Russian Republic, like Tajikistan? All I know is that I don’t know!

The cell had no facility to take care of the natural business. Washing for prayer was impossible and forbidden. There was no clue as to the Kibla, the direction of Mecca. I did what I could. My next door neighbor was mentally sick; he was shouting in a language with which I was not familiar. I later learned that he was a Taliban leader.

Later on that day, July 20, 2002, the guards pulled me for routine police work, fingerprints, height, weight, etcetera. I was offered a female interpreter. It was obvious that Arabic was not her first language. She taught me the rules: no speaking, no praying loudly, no washing for prayer, and a bunch of other nos in that direction. The guard asked me whether I wanted to use the bathroom. I thought he meant a place where you can shower; “Yes,” I said. The bathroom was a barrel filled with human waste. It was the most disgusting bathroom I ever saw. The guards had to watch you while you were taking care of business. I couldn’t eat the food—the food in Jordan was, by far, better than the cold MREs I got in Bagram—so I didn’t really have to use the bathroom. To pee, I would use the empty water bottles I had in my room. The hygienic situation was not exactly perfect; sometimes when the bottle got filled, I continued on the floor, making sure that it didn’t go all the way to the door.

For the next several nights in isolation, I got a funny guard who was trying to convert me to Christianity. I enjoyed the conversations, though my English was very basic. My dialogue partner was young, religious, and energetic. He liked Bush (“the true religious leader,” according to him); he hated Bill Clinton (“the Infidel”). He loved the dollar and hated the Euro. He had his copy of the Bible on him all the time, and whenever the opportunity arose he read me stories, most of which were from the Old Testament. I wouldn’t have been able to understand them if I hadn’t read the Bible in Arabic several times—not to mention that the versions of the stories are not that far from the ones in the Koran. I had studied the Bible in the Jordanian prison; I asked for a copy, and they offered me one. It was very helpful in understanding Western societies, even though many of them deny being influenced by religious scriptures.

I didn’t try to argue with him: I was happy to have somebody to talk to. He and I were unanimous that the religious scriptures, including the Koran, must have come from the same source. As it turned out, the hot-tempered soldier’s knowledge about his religion was very shallow. Nonetheless I enjoyed him being my guard. He gave me more time on the bathroom, and he even looked away when I used the barrel.

I asked him about my situation. “You’re not a criminal, because they put the criminals in the other side,” he told me, gesturing with his hand. I thought about those “criminals” and pictured a bunch of young Muslims, and how hard their situation could be. I felt bad. As it turned out, later on I was transferred to these “criminals,” and became a “high priority criminal.” I was kind of ashamed when the same guard saw me later with the “criminals,” after he had told me that I was going to be released at most after three days. He acted normally, but he didn’t have that much freedom to talk to me about religion there because of his numerous colleagues. Other detainees told me that he was not bad toward them, either.

The second or the third night an agent named William pulled me out of my cell himself and led me to an interrogation, where the same female Arabic interpreter already had taken a seat. William was a Japanese American who worked with the CIA, as his colleague later informed me; his specialty was in brutalizing detainees who were considered important, but not valuable enough to get them tickets to the secret CIA prisons. You could tell he was the right man for the job: he was the kind of man who wouldn’t mind doing the dirty work. The detainees back in Bagram used to call him William the Torturer; he reportedly was responsible for torturing even innocent individuals the government released.³

William didn’t need to shackle me because I was in shackles 24 hours a day. I slept, ate, used the bathroom while completely shackled, hand to feet. He opened a file in his hand and started by means of the female Arabic interpreter. He was asking me general questions about my life and my background. When he asked me, “What languages do you speak?” he didn’t believe me; he laughed along with the interpreter, saying, “Haha, you speak German? Wait, we’re gonna check.”

Suddenly a tall white man wearing shorts and an oversized badge around his neck entered the room. He introduced himself as Michael, which he pronounced in the German way, MeeShaEel. There was no mistaking it, he was the one in charge. He scanned the room quickly, saying something to his colleagues I didn’t understand, then switched languages immediately.

“Sprichst du Deutsch?” he blurted.

“Ja Wohl,” I replied. Michael was not completely fluent, but his German was fairly acceptable, given that he was born and lived his whole life in the United States. He later told me that he studied German as a foreign language to further his CIA career and connect better to his German roots. He confirmed to his colleague that my German was “better than his.”

Both looked at me with some respect after that, though the respect was not enough to save me from William’s wrath. William asked me where I learned to speak German, and said that he was going to interrogate me again later.

Michael faced me and said, “Wahrheit macht frei, the truth sets you free.”

When I heard him say that, I knew the truth wouldn’t set me free, because “Arbeit” didn’t set the Jews free. Hitler’s propaganda machinery used to lure Jewish detainees with the slogan, “Arbeit macht frei,” Work sets you free. But work set nobody free.

Michael took a note in his small notebook and left the room. William sent me back to my room and apologized to the female interpreter.

“I am sorry for keeping you awake for so long,”

“No problem!” she replied.

After several days in isolation I was transferred to the general population, but I could only look at them because I was put in the narrow barbed-wire corridor between the cells. I felt like I was out of jail, though, and I cried and thanked God. After eight months of total isolation, I saw fellow detainees more or less in my situation. “Bad” detainees like me were shackled 24 hours a day and put in the corridor, where every passing guard or detainee stepped on them. The place was so narrow that the barbed wire kept pinching me for the next ten days. I saw Omar Deghayes being force-fed; he was on a forty-five day hunger strike. The guards were yelling at him, and he was bouncing a dry piece of bread between his hands. All the detainees looked so worn out, as if they had been buried and after several days resurrected, but Omar was a completely different story: he was bones without meat. It reminded me of the pictures you see in documentaries about WWII prisoners.⁴

Detainees were not allowed to talk to each other, but we enjoyed looking at each other. The punishment for talking was hanging the detainee by the hands with his feet barely touching the ground. I saw an Afghani detainee who passed out a couple of times while hanging from his hands. The medics “fixed” him and hung him back up. Other detainees were luckier: they were hung for a certain time and then released. Most of the detainees tried to talk while they were hanging, which made the guards double their punishment. There was a very old Afghani fellow who reportedly was arrested to turn over his son. The guy was mentally sick; he couldn’t stop talking because he didn’t know where he was, nor why. I don’t think he understood his environment, but the guards kept dutifully hanging him. It was so pitiful. One day one of the guards threw him on his face, and he was crying like a baby.

We were put in about six or seven big barbed-wire cells named after operations performed against the U.S: Nairobi, U.S.S. Cole, Dar-Es-Salam, and so on. In each cell there was a detainee called English, who benevolently served as an interpreter to translate the orders to his co-detainees. Our English was a gentleman from Sudan named Abu Mohamed. His English was very basic, and so he asked me secretly whether I spoke English. “No,” I replied—but as it turned out I was a Shakespeare compared to him. My brethren thought that I was denying them my services, but I just didn’t know how bad the situation was.

Now I was sitting in front of bunch of dead regular U.S. citizens. My first impression, when I saw them chewing without a break, was, What’s wrong with these guys, do they have to eat so much? Most of the guards were tall, and overweight. Some of them were friendly and some very hostile. Whenever I realized that a guard was mean I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face:

“You speak English?” he asked.

“No English,” I replied.

“We don’t like you to speak English. We want you to die slowly,” he said.

“No English,” I kept replying. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction that his message arrived. People with hatred always have something to get off their chests, but I wasn’t ready to be that drain.

Prayer in groups wasn’t allowed. Everybody prayed on his own, and so did I. Detainees had no clues about prayer time. We would just imitate: when a detainee started to pray, we assumed it was time and followed. The Koran was available to detainees who asked for one. I don’t remember asking myself, because the handling by the guards was just disrespectful; they threw it to each other like a water bottle when they passed the holy book through. I didn’t want to be a reason for humiliating God’s word. Moreover, thank God, I know the Koran by heart. As far as I recall, one of the detainees secretly passed me a copy that nobody was using in the cell.

After a couple of days, William the Torturer pulled me to interrogate me. The same female acted as an interpreter.

“Tell me your story,” William asked.

“My name is, I graduated in 1988, I got a scholarship to Germany. . . .” I replied in very boring detail, none of which seemed to interest or impress William. He grew tired and started to yawn. I knew exactly what he wanted to hear, but I couldn’t help him.

He interrupted me. “My country highly values the truth. Now I’m gonna ask you some questions, and if you answer truthfully, you’re gonna be released and sent safely to your family. But if you fail, you’re gonna be imprisoned indefinitely. A small note in my agenda book is enough to destroy your life. What terrorist organizations are you part of?”

“None,” I replied.

“You’re not a man, and you don’t deserve respect. Kneel, cross your hands, and put them behind your neck.”

I obeyed the rules and he put a bag over my head. My back was hurting bad lately and that position was so painful; William was working on my sciatic problem.⁵ He brought two projectors and adjusted them on my face. I couldn’t see, but the heat overwhelmed me and I started to sweat.

“You’re gonna be sent to a U.S. facility, where you’ll spend the rest of your life,” he threatened. “You’ll never see your family again. Your family will be f**cked by another man. In American jails, terrorists like you get raped by multiple men at the same time. The guards in my country do their job very well, but being raped is inevitable. But if you tell me the truth, you’re gonna be released immediately.”

I was old enough to know that he was a rotten liar and a man with no honor, but he was in charge, so I had to listen to his bullshit again and again. I just wished that the agencies would start to hire smart people. Did he really think that anybody would believe his nonsense? Somebody would have to be stupid: was he stupid, or did he think I was stupid? I would have respected him more had he told me, “Look, if you don’t tell me what I want to hear, I’m gonna torture you.”

Anyway, I said, “Of course I will be truthful!”

“What terrorist organizations are you part of?”

“None!” I replied. He put back the bag on my head and started a long discourse of humiliation, cursing, lies, and threats. I don’t really remember it all, nor am I ready to sift in my memory for such bullshit. I was so tired and hurt, and tried to sit but he forced me back. I cried from the pain. Yes, a man my age cried silently. I just couldn’t bear the agony.

After a couple of hours William sent me back to my cell, promising me more torture. “This was only the start,” as he put it. I was returned to my cell, terrorized and worn out. I prayed to Allah to save me from him. I lived the days to follow in horror: whenever William went past our cell I looked away, avoiding seeing him so he wouldn’t “see” me, exactly like an ostrich. He was checking on everybody, day and night, and giving the guards the recipe for every detainee. I saw him torturing this other detainee. I don’t want to recount what I heard about him; I just want to tell what I saw with my eyes. It was an Afghani teenager, I would say 16 or 17. William made him stand for about three days, sleepless. I felt so bad for him. Whenever he fell down the guards came to him, shouting “no sleep for terrorists,” and made him stand again. I remember sleeping and waking up, and he stood there like a tree.

Whenever I saw William around, my heart started to pound, and he was often around. One day he sent the female interpreter to me to pass me a message.

“William is gonna kick your ass.”

I didn’t respond, but inside me I said, May Allah stop you! But in fact William didn’t kick my rear end; instead Michael pulled me for interrogation. He was a nice guy; maybe he felt he could relate to me because of the language. And why not? Even some of the guards used to come to me and practice their German when they learned that I spoke it.

Anyway, he recounted a long story to me. “I’m not like William. He’s young and hot-tempered. I don’t use inhumane methods; I have my own methods. I want to tell something about American history, and the whole war against terrorism.”

Michael was straightforward and enlightening. He started with American history and the Puritans, who punished even the innocents by drowning them, and ended with the war against terrorism. “There is no innocent detainee in this campaign: either you cooperate with us and I am going to get you the best deal, or we are going to send you to Cuba.”

“What? Cuba?” I exclaimed. “I don’t even speak Spanish, and you guys hate Cuba.”

“Yes, but we have an American territory in Guantánamo,” he said, and told me about Teddy Roosevelt and things like that. I knew that I was going to be sent further from home, which I hated.

“Why would you send me to Cuba?”

“We have other options, like Egypt and Algeria, but we only send them the very bad people. I hate sending people over there, because they’ll experience painful torture.”

“Just send me to Egypt.”

“You sure do not want that. In Cuba they treat detainees humanely, and they have two Imams. The camp is run by the DOJ, not the military.”⁶

“But I’ve done no crimes against your country.”

“I’m sorry if you haven’t. Just think of it as if you had cancer!”

“Am I going to be sent to court?”

“Not in the near future. Maybe in three years or so, when my people forget about September 11.” Michael went on to tell me about his private life, but I don’t want to put it down here.

I had a couple more sessions with Michael after that. He asked me some questions and tried to trick me, saying things like, “He said he knows you!” for people I had never heard of. He took my email addresses and passwords. He also asked the German intelligence agents who were present in Bagram to interrogate me, but they refused, saying that German law forbids them from interrogating aliens outside the country.⁷ He was trying the whole time to convince me to cooperate so he could save me from the trip to Cuba. To be honest, I preferred to go to Cuba than to stay in Bagram.

“Let it be,” I told him. “I don’t think I can change anything.”

Somehow I liked Michael. Don’t get me wrong, he was a sneaky interrogator, but at least he spoke to me according to the level of my intellect. I asked Michael to put me inside the cell with the rest of the population, and showed him the injuries I had suffered from the barbed wire. He approved: in Bagram, interrogators could do anything with you; they had overall control, and the MPs were at their service. Sometimes Michael gave me a drink, which I appreciated, especially with the kind of diet I received, cold MREs and dry bread in every meal. I secretly passed my meals to other detainees.

One night Michael introduced two military interrogators who asked me about the Millennium Plot. They spoke broken Arabic and were very hostile to me; they didn’t allow me to sit and threatened me with all kind of things. But Michael hated them, and told me in German, “If you want to cooperate, do so with me. These MI guys are nothing.” I felt myself under auction to whichever agency bids more.

In the population we always broke the rules and spoke to our neighbors. I had three direct neighbors. One was an Afghani teenager who was kidnapped on his way to Emirates; he used to work there, which was why he spoke Arabic with a Gulf accent. He was very funny, and he made me laugh; over the past nine months I had almost forgotten how. He was spending holidays with his family in Afghanistan and went to Iran; from there he headed to the Emirates in a boat, but the boat was hijacked by the U.S. and the passengers were arrested.

My second neighbor was a twenty-year-old Mauritanian guy who was born in Nigeria and moved to Saudi Arabia. He’d never been in Mauritania, nor did he speak the Mauritanian dialect; if he didn’t introduce himself, you would say he was a Saudi.

My third neighbor was a Palestinian from Jordan named Ibrahim. He was captured and tortured by an Afghani tribal leader for about seven months. His kidnapper wanted money from Ibrahim’s family or else he would turn him over to the Americans, though the latter option was the least promising because the U.S. was only paying $5,000 per head, unless it was a big head. The bandit arranged everything with the family regarding the ransom, but Ibrahim managed to flee from captivity in Kabul. He made it to Jalalabad, where he easily stuck out as an Arab mujahid and was captured and sold to the Americans. I told Ibrahim that I’d been in Jordan, and he seemed to be knowledgeable about their intelligence services. He knew all the interrogators who dealt with me, as he himself spent 50 days in the same prison where I had been.

When we spoke, we covered our heads so guards thought we were asleep, and talked until we got tired. My neighbors told me that we were in Bagram, in Afghanistan, and I informed them that we were going to be transferred to Cuba. But they didn’t believe me.

Around 10 a.m. on August 4, 2002 a Military unit, some armed with guns, appeared from nowhere. The armed MPs were pointing their guns at us from upstairs, and the others were shouting at the same time, “Stan’ up, Stan’ up . . .” I was so scared. Even though I expected to be transferred to Cuba some time that day, I had never seen this kind of show.

We stood up. The guards kept giving other orders. “No talking . . . Do not move . . . Ima fucking kill yo’ . . . I’m serious!” I hated it when Ibrahim from Palestine asked to use the bathroom and the guards refused. “Don’t move.” I was like, Can’t you just keep it till the situation is over? But the problem with Ibrahim was that he had dysentery, and he couldn’t hold it; he had been subjected to torture and malnutrition in Kabul during his detention by the Northern Alliance tribal leader. Ibrahim told me that he was going to use the bathroom anyway, which he did, ignoring the shouting guards. I expected every second a bullet to be released toward him, but that didn’t happen. The bathroom inside our shared cells was also an open barrel, which detainees in punishment cleaned every day for every cell. It was very disgusting and smelled so bad. Being from a third world country, I have seen many unclean bathrooms, but none of them could hold a candle to Bagram’s.

I started to shake from fear. One MP approached the gate of our cell and started to call the names, or rather the numbers, of those who were going to be transferred. All the numbers called in my cell were Arabs, which was a bad sign. The brothers didn’t believe me when I told them we were going to be transferred to Cuba. But now I felt myself confirmed, and we looked at each other and smiled. Several guards came to the gate with a bunch of chains, bags, and other materials. They started to call us one by one, asking each detainee to approach the gate, where he got chained.

One of the guards shouted my number. I proceeded to the gate like a sheep being led to her butcher. At the gate, a guard yelled, “Turn around!” which I did, and “Both hands behind!”

When I slid my hands through the bin hole behind my back, one of the guards grabbed my thumb and bent my wrist. “When you fuckin’ move, I’m gonna break your hand.” Another guard chained my hands and my feet with two separate chains. Then a bag was put over my head to blindfold me. The gate was opened, and I was roughly pushed and thrown over the back of another detainee in a row. Although I was physically hurt, I was solaced when I felt the warmth of another human being in front of me suffering the same. The solace increased when Ibrahim was thrown over my back. Many detainees didn’t exactly understand what the guards wanted from them, and so got hurt worse. I felt lucky to have been blindfolded, for one, because I missed a lot bad things that were happening around me, and for two, because the blindfold helped me in my daydreaming about better circumstances. Thank ALLAH, I have the ability to ignore my surroundings and daydream about anything I want.

We were supposed to be very close to each other. Breathing was very hard. We were 34 detainees, all of whom were Arab except for one Afghani and one from the Maldives.⁸ When we were put in a row, we were tied together with a rope around our upper arms. The rope was so tight that the circulation stopped, numbing my whole arm.

We were ordered to stand up, and were pulled to a place where the “processing” continued. I hated it because Ibrahim kept stepping on my chain, which hurt badly. I tried my best not to step on the chain of the man in front of me. Thank God the trip was short: somewhere in the same building we were set down next to each other on long benches. I had the feeling that the benches made a circle.

The party started with dressing the passengers. I got a headset that prevented me from hearing. It gave me such a painful headache; the set was so tight that I had the top of my ears bleeding for a couple of days. My hands were now tied to my waist in the front, and connected with a chain all the way to my feet. They connected my wrists with a six-inch hard plastic piece, and made me wear thick mittens. It was funny, I tried to find a way to free my fingers, but the guards hit my hands to stop moving them. We grew tired; people started to moan. Every once in a while one of the guards took out one of my ear plugs and whispered a discouraging phrase:

“You know, you didn’t make any mistake: your mom and dad made the mistake when they produced you.”

“You gonna enjoy the ride to the Caribbean paradise. . . .” I didn’t answer any provocation, pretending not to understand what he said. Other detainees told me about having been subject to such humiliation, too, but they were luckier; they understood no English.

My flipflops were taken away, and I got some made-in-China tennis shoes. Over my eyes they put really ugly, thick, blindfolding glasses, which were tied around my head and over my ears. They were similar to swimming goggles. To get an idea about the pain, put some old goggles around your hand and tie them tight, and stay that way for a couple of hours; I am sure you will remove them. Now imagine that you have those same goggles tied around your head for more than forty hours. To seal the dressing, a sticky pad was placed behind my ear.

Sometime during the processing we got a cavity search, to the laughter and comments of the guards. I hated that day when I started to learn my miserable English vocabulary. In such situations you’re just better off if you don’t understand English. The majority of the detainees wouldn’t speak about the cavity searches we were subject to, and they would get angry when you started to talk about them. I personally wasn’t ashamed; I think the people who did these searches without good reason should be ashamed of themselves.

I grew sick, tired, frustrated, hungry, nauseous, and all other bad adjectives in the dictionary. I am sure I wasn’t the only one. We got new plastic bracelets carrying a number. My number turned out to be 760, and my next, with ISN 761, was Ibrahim. You could say my group was the 700 series.⁹

Ibrahim used the bathroom a couple of times, but I tried not to use it. I finally went in the afternoon, maybe around 2 p.m.

“Do you like music?” the guard who was escorting me there asked when we were alone.

“Yes, I do!”

“What kind?”

“Good music!”

“Rock and Roll? Country?” I wasn’t really familiar with these types he mentioned. Every once in a while I used to listen to German radio with different kinds of Western music, but I couldn’t tell which one was which.

“Any good music,” I replied. The good conversation paid off in the form that he took my blindfold off so that I could take care of my business. It was very tricky, since I had chains all around my body. The guard placed me gently back on the bench, and for the next couple of hours waiting was the order. We were deprived from the right of performing our daily prayers for the next forty-eight hours.

Around four p.m., the transport to the airport started. By then, I was a “living dead.” My legs weren’t able to carry me anymore; for the time to come, the guards had to drag me all the way from Bagram to GTMO.

We were loaded in a truck that brought us to the airport. It took five to ten minutes to get there. I was happy for every move, just to have the opportunity to alter my body, for my back was killing me. We were crowded in the truck shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh. Unluckily I was placed facing the back of the vehicle, which I really hate because it gives me nausea. The vehicle was equipped with hard benches so that the detainees sat back to back and the guards sat at the very end shouting, “No talking!” I have no idea how many people were in the truck; all I know is that one detainee sat on my right, and one on my left, and another against my back. It is always good to feel the warmth of your co-detainees, somehow it’s solacing.

The arrival at the airport was obvious because of the whining of the engines, which easily went through the earplugs. The truck backed up until it touched the plane. The guards started to shout loudly in a language I could not differentiate. I started to hear human bodies hitting the floor. Two guards grabbed a detainee and threw him toward two other guards on the plane, shouting “Code”; the receiving guards shouted back confirming receipt of the package. When my turn came, two guards grabbed me by the hands and feet and threw me toward the reception team. I don’t remember whether I hit the floor or was caught by the other guards. I had started to lose feeling and it would have made no difference anyway.

Another team inside the plane dragged me and fastened me on a small and straight seat. The belt was so tight I could not breathe. The air conditioning hit me, and one of the MPs was shouting, “Do not move, Do not talk,” while locking my feet to the floor. I didn’t know how to say “tight” in English. I was calling, “MP, MP, belt . . .” Nobody came to help me. I almost got smothered. I had a mask over my mouth and my nose, plus the bag covering my head and my face, not to mention the tight belt around my stomach: breathing was impossible. I kept saying, “MP, Sir, I cannot breathe! . . . MP, SIR, please.” But it seemed like my pleas for help got lost in a vast desert.

After a couple minutes, Ibrahim was dropped beside me on my right. I wasn’t sure it was him, but he told me later he felt my presence beside him. Every once in a while, if one of the guards adjusted my goggles, I saw a little. I saw the cockpit, which was in front of me. I saw the green camo-uniforms of the escorting guards. I saw the ghosts of my fellow detainees on my left and my right. “Mister, please, my belt . . . hurt . . . ,” I called. When the shoutings of the guards faded away, I knew that the detainees were all on board. “Mister, please . . . belt. . . .”

A guard responded, but he not only didn’t help me, he tightened the belt even more around my abdomen.

Now I couldn’t endure the pain; I felt I was going to die. I couldn’t help asking for help louder. “Mister, I cannot breathe . . .” One of the soldiers came and untightened the belt, not very comfortably but better than nothing.

“It’s still tight . . .” I had learned the word when he asked me, “Is it tight?”

“That’s all you get.” I gave up asking for relief from the belt.

“I cannot breathe!” I said, gesturing to my nose. A guard appeared and took the mask off my nose. I took a deep breath and felt really relieved. But to my dismay, the guard put the mask back on my nose and my mouth. “Sir, I cannot breathe . . . MP. . . . MP.” The same guy showed up once more, but instead of taking the mask off my nose, he took the plug out of my ear and said, “Forget about it!” and immediately put the ear plug back. It was harsh, but it was the only way not to smother. I was panicking, I had just enough air, but the only way to survive was to convince the brain to be satisfied with the tiny bit of air it got.

The plane was in the air. A guard shouted in my ear, “Ima gonna give you some medication, you get sick.” He made me take a bunch of tablets and gave me an apple and a peanut butter sandwich, our only meal since the transfer procedure began. I’ve hated peanut butter since then. I had no appetite for anything, but I pretended I was eating the sandwich so the guards don’t hurt me. I always tried to avoid contact with those violent guards unless it was extremely necessary. I took a bite of the sandwich and kept the rest in my hand till the guards collected the trash. As to the apple, the eating was tricky, since my hands were tied to my waist and I wore mittens. I squeezed the apple between my hands and bent my head to my waist like an acrobat to bite at it. One slip and the apple is gone. I tried to sleep, but as tired as I was, every attempt to take a nap ended in failure. The seat was as straight as an arrow, and as hard as a stone.

After about five hours, the plane landed and our ghosts were transferred to another, maybe bigger plane. It was stable in the air. I was happy with every change, any change, hoping for the betterment of my situation. But I was wrong, the new plane wasn’t better. I knew that Cuba was quite far, but I never thought it to be that far, given the U.S.’s high speed airplanes. At some point, I thought that the government wanted to blow up the plane over the Atlantic and declare it an accident, since all the detainees had been interrogated over and over and over. But this crazy plan was the least of my worries; was I really worried about a little death pain, after which I would hopefully enter paradise with God’s mercy? Living under God’s mercy would be better than living under the U.S.’s mercy.

The plane seemed to be heading to the kingdom of far, far away. Feeling lessened with every minute going by; my body numbed. I remember asking for the bathroom once. The guards dragged me to the place, pushed inside a small room, and pulled down my pants. I couldn’t take care of my business because of the presence of others. But I think I managed with a lot of effort to squeeze some water. I just wanted to arrive, no matter where! Any place would be better than this plane.

After I don’t know how many hours, the plane landed in Cuba. The guards started to pull us out of the plane. “Walk! . . . Stop!” I couldn’t walk, for my feet were unable to carry me. And now I noticed that at some point I had lost one of my shoes. After a thorough search outside the plane, the guards shouted, “Walk! Do not talk! Head down! Step!” I only understood “Do not talk,” but the guards were dragging me anyway. Inside the truck, the guards shouted “Sit down!” Cross your legs!” I didn’t understand the last part but they crossed my legs anyway. “Head down!” one shouted, pushing my head against the rear end of another detainee like a chicken. A female voice was shouting all the way to the camp, “No Talking,” and a male voice, “Do not talk,” and an Arabic translator who dutifully but clumsily tried to keep up with his angry American colleagues, struggling with their curses and dirty words. “Keep your head down.” I was completely annoyed by the American way of talking; I stayed that way for a long time, until I got cured by meeting other good Americans. At the same time, I was thinking about how they gave the same order two different ways: “Do not talk” and “No talking.” That was interesting.

By now the chains on my ankles were cutting off the blood to my feet. My feet became numb. I heard only the moaning and crying of other detainees. Beating was the order of the trip. I was not spared: the guard kept hitting me on my head and squeezing my neck against the rear end of the other detainee. But I don’t blame him as much as I do that poor and painful detainee, who was crying and kept moving, and so kept raising my head. Other detainees told me that we took a ferry ride during the trip, but I didn’t notice.

After about an hour we were finally at the promised land. As much pain as I suffered, I was very happy to have the trip behind me. A Prophet’s saying states, “Travel is a piece of torture.” This trip was certainly a piece of torture. Now I was only worried about how I was going to stand up if they asked me to. I was just paralyzed. Two guards grabbed me and shouted “Stan’ up.” I tried to jump but nothing happened; instead they dragged me and threw me outside the truck.

The warm Cuban sun hit me gracefully. It was such a good feeling. The trip started in Bagram on August 4, 2002 at 10 a.m., and we arrived in Cuba around 12:00 or 1:00 p.m. on August 5th, which meant we spent more than thirty hours in an ice-cold airplane.¹⁰ I was luckier than a Sudanese brother who froze totally. He happened to ask the guard to turn down the A/C on the plane. The guard not only refused to meet his wish, but he kept soaking him with water drops all the way to Cuba. The medics had to put him in a room and treat him with a blazing fire.

“When they started the fire, I said to myself, here you go, now they start the torture!” he told us. I laughed when he recounted his story in Camp Delta’s Oscar Block the next morning.

I could tell they had changed the guard team for a better one. The old team used to say “Wader”; the new team says “Water.” The old team used to say, “Stan’ up”; the new team, “Stand up.” The old team was simply too loud.

I could also tell the detainees had reached their pain limit. All I heard was moaning. Next to me was an Afghani who was crying very loudly and pleading for help, but each time he rose up the MPs pounded him back down to the ground. He was speaking in Arabic, “Sir, how could you do this to me? Please, relieve my pain, Gentlemen!” But nobody even bothered to check on him. The fellow was sick back in Bagram. I saw him in the cell next to ours; he was vomiting all the time. I felt so bad for him. At the same time, I laughed. Can you believe it, I stupidly laughed! Not at him; I laughed at the situation. First, he addressed them in Arabic, which no guards understood. Second, he called them Gentlemen, which they were most certainly not.

In the beginning I enjoyed the sunbath, but the sun grew hotter with every minute that went by. I started to sweat, and grew very tired of the kneeling position I had to remain in for about six hours. Every once in a while a guard shouted, “Need water!” I don’t remember asking for water, but it’s likely that I did. I was still stuck with the blindfold, but my excitement about being in a new correctional facility with other human beings I could socialize with, in a place where there would be no torture or even interrogation, overwhelmed my pain; that and the fact that I didn’t know how long the detention was going to last. And so I didn’t open my mouth with any complaints or moans, while many brothers around me were moaning and even crying. I think that my pain limit had been reached a long time before.

I was dead last to be “processed”; people who got hurt on the plane probably had priority, such as the Sudanese man. Finally two escorting guards dragged me into the clinic. They stripped me naked and pushed me into an open shower. I took a shower in my chains under the eyes of everybody, my brethren, the medics, and the Army. The other brothers who preceeded me were still stark naked. It was ugly, and although the shower was soothing, I couldn’t enjoy it. I was ashamed and I did the old ostrich trick: I looked down to my feet. The guards dried me and took me to the next step. Basically the detainees went through a medical check, where they took note of everybody’s biological description, height, weight, scars, and experienced the first interrogation inside the clinic. It was like a car production line. I followed the steps of the detainee who preceded me, and he followed somebody else’s steps, and so on and so forth.

“Do you have any known diseases?” asked the young nurse.

“Yes, sciatic nerve and hypotension.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“Where did they capture you?”

“I don’t understand,” I replied. The doctor repeated the nurse’s question, but I still didn’t understand. He spoke too quickly.

“Never mind!” the doctor said. One of my guards gestured to me, putting one of his hands over the other. Only then did I understand the doctor’s question.

“In my country!”

“Where are you from?”

“Mauritania,” I replied as the guards were dragging me to the next step. Medics are not supposed to interrogate detainees, but they do anyway. Personally I enjoy conversations with everybody and I couldn’t care less about them breaking the rules.

It was cool and crowded inside the hospital. I was solaced by the fact that I saw detainees who were in the same situation as me, especially after they wrapped us in the orange uniform. Interrogators were disguised among the Medics to gather information.

“Do you speak Russian?” an old civilian, an Intel wreck of the cold war, asked me. He interrogated me a couple of times later on, and told me that he once worked with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Mujahideen leader in Afghanistan during the war with the Soviets who supposedly used to turn over Russian detainees to the U.S. “I interrogated them. They’re now U.S. citizens, and among my best friends,” he told me. He claimed to be responsible for a section of the GTMO Task Force. Interrogators like him were sneaking around, trying to converse “innocently” with the detainees. However, interrogators have a hard time mixing in with other people. They’re simply very clumsy.

The escort led me to a room with many detainees and interrogators at work. “What’s your name? Where are you from? Are you married?”

“Yes!”

“What’s the name of your wife?” I forgot the name of my wife and several members of my family as well because of the persistent state of depression I had been in now for the last nine months. Since I knew that nobody was going to buy such a thing, I went, “Zeinebou,” just a name that came to my mind.

“What languages do you speak?”

“Arabic, French, German.”

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” asked a male interrogator in uniform who was helping his black female colleague typing in laptop.

“Bist du so-and-so?” I asked, using a German name I had been given in Afghanistan. The guy’s nametag said Graham, and so he was shocked when I mentioned his name. The black woman stared at him in confusion.

“Who told you about me?”

“Michael, from Bagram!” I said, explaining that in Bagram Michael told me about him, in case I needed a German translator in GTMO.

“We’ll keep the conversation in English, but very simple,” he said. Michael’s CIA colleague avoided me for the rest of his time in GTMO.

I was listening to the interrogation of a Tunisian fellow detainee.

“Did you train in Afghanistan?”

“No.”

“You know if you lie, we’re gonna get the information from Tunisia!”

“I am not lying!”

The medical check resumed. A black female corpsman took a thousand and one tubes of blood off me. I thought I was going to pass out or even die. A blood pressure check showed 110 over 50, which is very low. The doctor immediately put me on small red tablets to increase my blood pressure. Pictures were taken. I hated the fact that my privacy was being disrespected in every way. I was totally under the mercy of somebody I didn’t trust and who might be ruthless. Many detainees would smile for the camera. I personally never smiled, and I don’t think that on that day, August 5th, 2002, any detainee did.

After the endless processing, the escort team took me out of the clinic. “Keep your head down!” It was already dark outside but I couldn’t tell what time it was. The weather was nice. “Sit down.” I sat outside for about thirty minutes before the escort team picked me up and put me in a room and locked me to the floor. I didn’t notice the lock, nor had I ever been subject to it before. I thought the room was to be my future home.

The room was bare but for a couple of chairs and a desk. There was no sign of life. “Where are the other detainees?” I said to myself. I grew impatient and decided to go outside the room and try to find other fellow detainees, but as soon as I tried to stand up the chains pulled me down hard. Only then did I know that something was wrong with my assumptions. As it turned out, I was in the interrogation booth in Brown Building, a building with history.

All of a sudden three men entered the room: the older guy who spoke to me earlier in the clinic, an FBI agent who introduced himself as William, and a young Moroccan man who served as an interpreter.¹¹

“Comment vous vous appelez?” asked William in a thick accent.

“Je m’appelle . . . . . . ,” I answered, and that was the end of William’s French. Interrogators always tend to bring the factor of surprise as a technique.

I glimpsed one of the guy’s watches. It was nearly 1 a.m. I was in a state where my system had gotten messed up; I was wide awake in spite of more than forty-eight hours of sleeplessness. The interrogators wanted to use that weakness to facilitate the interrogation. I was offered nothing such as water or food.

William led the interrogation, and the Moroccan man was a good translator. The other guy didn’t get the chance to ask questions, he just took notes. William didn’t really come up with a miracle: all he did was ask me some questions I had been asked uninterruptedly for the past three years. He spoke a very clear English, and I almost didn’t need the translator. He seemed to be smart and experienced. When the night grew late, William thanked me for my cooperation.

“I believe that you are very open,” he said. “The next time we’ll untie your hands and bring you something to eat. We will not torture you, nor will we extradite you to another country.” I was happy with William’s assurances, and encouraged in my cooperation. As it turned out, he was either misleading me or he was unknowledgeable about the plans of his government.

The three men left the room and sent the escort team to me, which led me to my cell. It was in Oscar Block, a block designed for isolation.¹² I was the only detainee who had been picked for interrogation from our entire group of thirty-four detainees. There was no sign of life inside the block, which made me think that I was the only one around. When the guard dropped me in the frozen-cold box I almost panicked behind the heavy metal door. I tried to convince myself, It’s only a temporary place, in the morning they’re going to transfer me to the community. This place cannot be for more than the rest of the night! In fact, I spent one whole month in Oscar Block.

It was around 2 a.m. when the guard handed me an MRE. I tried to eat what I could, but I had no appetite. When I checked my stuff I saw a brand new Koran, which made me happy. I kissed the Koran and soon fell asleep. I slept deeper than I ever had.

The shoutings of my fellow detainees woke me up in the early morning. Life was suddenly blown into that dark Oscar Block. When I arrived earlier that morning, I never thought that human beings could be possibly stored in a bunch of cold boxes; I thought I was the only one, but I was wrong, my fellow detainees were only knocked out due to the harsh punishment trip they had behind them. While the guards were serving the food, we were introducing us to ourselves. We couldn’t see each other due to the design of the block but we could hear each other.

“Salam Alaikum!”

“Waalaikum Salam.”

“Who are you?

“I am from Mauritania . . . Palestine . . . Syria . . . Saudi Arabia . . .!”

“How was the trip?”

“I almost froze to death,” shouted one guy.

“I slept the whole trip,” replied Ibrahim.

“Why did they put the patch beneath my ear?” said a third.

“Who was in front of me in the truck?” I asked. “He kept moving, which made the guards beat me all the way from the airport to the camp.”

“Me, too,” another detainee answered.

We called each other with the ISN numbers we were assigned in Bagram. My number was 760. In the cell on my left was 706, Mohammed al-Amin from Mauritania. He was about twenty years old, and had been captured in Pakistan and sold to the Americans. Though Mauritanian, he had never really been in the country; I could tell because of his Saudi accent. On my right was the guy from the Maldives, whose number was 730. He spoke poor Arabic, and claimed to have been captured in Karachi, where he attends the University. In front of my cell they put the Sudanese, next to each other.¹³

Breakfast was modest: one boiled egg, a hard piece of bread, and something else I don’t know the name of. It was my first hot meal since I left Jordan. Oh, the tea was soothing! I like tea better than any food, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been drinking it. Tea is a crucial part of the diet of people from warmer regions; it sounds contradictory but it is true.

People were shouting all over the place in indistinct conversations. It was just a good feeling when everybody started to recount his story. Many detainees suffered, some more and some less. I didn’t consider myself the worst, nor the luckiest. Some people were captured with their friends and their friends disappeared from the face of the earth; they most likely were sent to other allied countries to facilitate their interrogation by torture, such as the detainees who were sent to Egypt and Jordan. I considered the arrival to Cuba a blessing, and so I told the brothers, “Since you guys are not involved in crimes, you need to fear nothing. I personally am going to cooperate, since nobody is going to torture me. I don’t want any of you to suffer what I suffered in Jordan. In Jordan, they hardly appreciate your cooperation.”

I wrongly believed that the worst was over, and so I cared less about the time it would take the Americans to figure out that I was not the guy they are looking for. I trusted the American justice system too much, and shared that trust with the detainees from European countries. We all had an idea about how the democratic system works. Other detainees, for instance those from the Middle East, didn’t believe it for a second and trust the American system. Their argument lay on the growing hostility of extremist Americans against Muslims and the Arabs. With every day going by, the optimists lost ground. The interrogation methods worsened considerably as time went by, and as you shall see, those responsible for GTMO broke all the principles upon which the U.S. was built and compromised every great principle such as Ben Franklin’s “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

All of us wanted to make up for months of forced silence, we wanted to get every anger and agony off our chests, and we listened to each other’s amazing stories for the next thirty days to come, which was our time in Oscar Block. When we later got transferred to a different block, many fellow detainees cried for being separated from their new friends. I cried, too.

The interrogation escort team showed up at my cell.

“Reservation!” said one of the MPs, holding the long chains in his hands. Reservation is the code word for being taken to interrogation. Although I didn’t understand where I was going, I prudently followed their orders until they delivered me to the interrogator. His name was Hamza, or at least that was what he was called, and he was wearing a U.S. Army uniform. He was an intelligence officer in the Kentucky National Guard, a man with all the paradoxes you may imagine. He spoke Arabic decently, with a Jordanian accent; you could tell he grew up among Arabic-speaking friends.¹⁴

I was terrified when I stepped into the room in Brown Building because of the CamelBak on Hamza’s back, from which he was sipping. I never saw a thing like that before. I thought it was a kind of tool to hook on me as a part of my interrogation. I really don’t know why I was scared, but the fact that I never saw Hamza nor his CamelBak, nor did I expect an Army guy, all these factors contributed to my fear.

The older gentleman who interrogated me the night before entered the room with some candies and introduced Hamza to me, “I chose Hamza because he speaks your language. We’re going to ask you detailed questions about you r cousin Abu Hafs. As to me, I am going to leave soon, but my replacement will take care of you. See you later.” He stepped out of the room leaving me and Hamza to work.

Hamza was a friendly guy. He was a reserve officer in the U.S. Army who believed himself to be lucky in life. Hamza wanted me to repeat to him my whole story, which I’ve been repeating for the last three years over and over. I got used to interrogators asking me the same things. Before the interrogator even moved his lips I knew his questions, and as soon as he or she started to talk, I turned my “tape” on. But when I came to the part about Jordan, he felt very sorry!

“Those countries don’t respect human rights. They even torture people,” he said. I was comforted: if Hamza criticized cruel interrogation methods, it meant that the Americans wouldn’t do something like that. Yes, they were not exactly following the law in Bagram, but that was in Afghanistan, and now we are in a U.S. controlled territory.

After Hamza finished his interrogation, he sent me back and promised to come back should new questions arise. During the session with Hamza, I asked him to use the bathroom. “No. 1 or No. 2?” he asked. It was the first time I heard the human private business coded in numbers. In the countries I’ve been in, it isn’t customary to ask people about their intention in the bathroom, nor do they have a code.

I never saw Hamza in an interrogation again. The FBI’s William resumed his work a couple of days later, only the FBI team was now reinforced by José, a Hispanic American who spoke unaccented English and fluent Spanish. José was another friendly guy. He and William worked very well together. For some reason, the FBI was interested in taking my case in hand. Although a military interrogator came with the team a couple of times and asked some questions, you could tell that William had the upper hand.¹⁵

The team worked on my case for over a month, on almost a daily basis. They asked me all kind of questions, and we spoke about other political topics beside the interrogation. Nobody ever threatened me or tried to torture me, and from my side I was cooperating with the team very well. “Our job is to take your statements and send them to the analysts in D.C. Even if you lie to us, we can’t really tell right away until more information comes in,” said William.

The team could see very clearly how sick I was; the prints of Jordan and Bagram were more than obvious. I looked like a ghost.

“You’re getting better,” said the Army guy when he saw me three weeks after my arrival in GTMO. On my second or third day in GTMO I had collapsed in my cell. I was just driven to my extremes; the MREs didn’t appeal to me. The Medics took me out of my cell and I tried to walk the way to the hospital, but as soon as I left Oscar Block I collapsed once more, which made the Medics carry me to the clinic. I threw up so much that I was completely dehydrated. I received first aid and got an IV. The IV was terrible; they must have put some medication in it that I have an allergy to. My mouth dried up completely and my tongue became so heavy that I couldn’t ask for help. I gestured with my hands to the corpsmen to stop dripping the fluid into my body, which they did.

Later that night the guards brought me back to my cell. I was so sick I couldn’t climb on my bed; I slept on the floor for the rest of the month. The doctor prescribed Ensure and some hypotension medicine, and every time I got my sciatic nerve crisis the corpsmen gave me Motrin.

Although I was physically very weak, the interrogation didn’t stop. But I was nonetheless in good spirits. In the Block we were singing, joking, and recounting stories to each other. I also got the opportunity to learn about the star detainees, such as his excellence Mallah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who fed us with the latest news and rumors from camp, and the Jordanian Abu Huzaifa, who had been transferred to Oscar Block due to his “behavior.”¹⁶

Abu Huzaifa told us how he was tortured in Kandahar with other detainees. “They put us under the sun for a long time, we got beaten, but brothers don’t worry, here in Cuba there is no torture. The rooms are air-conditioned, and some brothers even refuse to talk unless offered food,” he said.

“I cried when I saw detainees blindfolded and taken to Cuba on TV. The American Defense Secretary spoke on TV and claimed these detainees are the most evil people on the face of the earth. I never thought that I would be one of these ‘evil people,’” said Ibrahim, the Sudanese who suffered hypothermia during the flight to Guantánamo.

Ibrahim had been working as an Arabic teacher for a Kuwaiti relief organization, helping to educate Afghani refugees. He was captured with four other colleagues of his in his domicile in Peshawar after midnight under the cries of his children; he was pried off his kids and his wife. The same thing exactly happened to his friends, who confirmed his story. I heard tons of such stories and every story made me forget the last one. I couldn’t tell whose story was more saddening. It even started to undermine my story, but the detainees were unanimous that my story was the saddest. I personally don’t know. The German proverb says: “Wenn das Militar sich bewegt, bleibt die Wahrheit auf der Strecke.” When the Military sets itself in motion, the truth is too slow to keep up, so it stays behind.

The law of war is harsh. If there’s anything good at all in a war, it’s that it brings the best and the worst out of people: some people try to use the lawlessness to hurt others, and some try to reduce the suffering to the minimum.

On September 4, 2002, I was transferred to Delta Block, and so the interrogators ended the isolation and put me in with general population. On the one hand, it was hard for me to leave the friends I’d just made, and on the other hand I was excited about going to a dead normal Block, and being a dead average detainee. I was tired of being a “special” detainee, riding all over the world against my will.

I arrived in Delta Block before sunset. For the first time in more than nine months, I was put in a cell where I could see the plain. And for the first time I was able to talk to my fellow detainees while seeing them. I was put in cell number 5, between two Saudis from the South. Both were very friendly and entertaining. They had both been captured by the Pakistanis and sold to the U.S. When the prisoners tried to free themselves from the Pakistani Army, which was working on behalf of the U.S., one of them, an Algerian, grabbed the AK47 of a Pakistani guard and shot him. In the melee, the other captured detainees asserted control of the transport bus; the guards fled, and the detainees fled too—just as far as where another army, a U.S. division, was awaiting them, and they were captured again. The bus escape attempt caused many casualties and injuries. I saw an Algerian detainee who was completely disabled due to the amount of bullets he had taken.

I had a good time in Delta Block at the beginning, but things started to get ugly when some interrogators started to practice torture methods on some detainees, though shyly. As far as I heard and saw, the only method practiced at first was the cold room, all night. I know a young Saudi man who was taken to interrogation every night and put back in his cell in the morning. I don’t know the details of what exactly happened to him because he was very quiet, but my neighbors told me that he refused to talk to his interrogators . One of my neighbors also told me that he was also put in the cold room two nights in a row because he refused to cooperate.

Most of the detainees by then were refusing to cooperate after they felt they had provided everything relevant to their cases. People were desperate and growing tired of being interrogated all the time, without hope of an end. I personally was relatively new and wanted to take my chances: maybe my fellow detainees were wrong! But I ended up bumping into the same brick wall as anybody else. Detainees grew worried about their situation and the absence of a due process of law, and things started to get worse with the use of painful methods to extract information from detainees.

Around mid-September, 2002, not long after my transfer to Delta Block, a new team with two agents with rhyming names, John and Don, pulled me to interrogation and introduced themselves as the team that was going to assess me for the next two months.

“How long am I going to be interrogated?”

“As long as the government has questions for you!”

“How long is that?”

“I can only tell you that you will not spend more than five years here,” said John. The team was communicating with me through an Arabic interpreter who looked like he was in his late forties.

“I’m not ready to be asked the same questions again and again!”

“No, we have some new questions.” But as it turned out they were asking me the very same questions I had been asked for the last three years. Even so, I was reluctantly cooperating. I honestly didn’t see any advantages in cooperating, I just wanted to see how far things were going to go.

Around the same time another interrogator, a CIA agent who called himself Peter, pulled me to interrogation. He was a very tall, skinny white man in his early forties. He had an organized goatee, and spoke perfect Arabic with a distinct Tunisian accent . Peter possessed the kind of confidence and authority his job required. He was straightforward with me, and even shared with me what the U.S. government was saying about other detainees and about me. He was talking, and talking, and talking some more: he was interested in getting me to work for him, as he had tried with other North African Arabs.¹⁷

“Next Thursday, I’ve arranged a meeting with the Germans. Are you going to talk to them?”

“Yes, I am.” That was the first lie I detected, because the FBI’s William had told me, “No foreign government is going to talk to you here, only us Americans!” In fact, I heard about many detainees meeting with non-American interrogators, such as the Uighur detainees from China. Agents from Chinese intelligence services came to GTMO and were helping the U.S. to extract information from the Uighur detainees. These foreign interrogators threatened some of their interviewees with torture when they got back home.

“I hope I see you in another place,” said the Chinese interrogator to one of the Uighur detainees. “If we see each other in Turkistan, you’re gonna talk a lot!”¹⁸

But I was not afraid of talking to anyone. I had done no crimes against anybody. I even wanted to talk to prove my innocence, since the American motto was “GTMO detainees are guilty until proven innocent.” I knew what was awaiting me when it came to foreign interrogators, and I wanted to get things out off my chest.

The day came and the guards pulled me and took me to a building called Orange Trailer, where detainees usually met CIA and foreign intelligence agents. Two German gentlemen were sitting on the other side of the table, and I was looking at them, locked on the floor. The older man was quieter than the younger one, who played the bad guy role during the interrogation. Neither introduced himself, which was completely against the German customs and laws; they just stood in front of me like ghosts, the same as the rest of the secret interrogators.¹⁹

“Do you speak German, or do we need an interpreter?” asked the younger agent.

“I am afraid we don’t,” I replied.

“Well, you understand the seriousness of the matter. We’ve come from Germany to talk to you.

“People have been killed,” continued the older man.

I smiled. “Since when are you allowed to interrogate people outside Germany?”

“We are not here to discuss the judicial grounds of our questioning!”

“I might, sometime in the future, be able to talk to the press and give you away,” I said. “Though I don’t know your names, I’ll recognize your pictures, no matter how long it takes!”

“You can say whatever you want, you’re not gonna hurt us! We know what we’re doing,” he said.

“So clearly you guys are using the lawlessness of this place to extract information out of me?”

The younger agent jumped in. “Herr Salahi, if we wanted to, we could ask the guards to hang you on the wall and kick your ass!”²⁰ When he mentioned the crooked way he was thinking, my heart started to pound, because I was trying to express myself carefully and at the same time avoid torture.

“You can’t scare me, you’re not talking to a child. If you continue speaking to me with this tone, you can pack your luggage and go back to Germany.”

“We are not here to prosecute you or scare you, we would just be grateful if you would answer a couple of questions we have,” said the older agent.

“Look, I’ve been in your country, and you know that I was never involved in any kind of crimes. Plus, what are you worried about? Your country isn’t even threatened. I’ve been living peacefully in your country and never abused your hospitality. I am very grateful for all that your country helped me with; I don’t stab in the back. So what theater are you trying to play on me?”

The younger agent adjusted his tone. “Herr Salahi, we know that you are innocent, but we did not capture you, the Americans did. We are not here on behalf of the U.S. We work for the German government, and lately we stopped some bad plots. We know you cannot possibly know about these things. However, we only want to ask you about two individuals, Christian Ganczarski and Karim Mehdi, and we would be grateful if you would answer our questions about them.”²¹

“It’s just funny that you’ve come all the way from Germany to ask about your own people! Those two individuals are good friends of mine. We attended the same mosques, but I don’t know them to be involved in any terrorist operations.”

The session didn’t last much longer than that. They asked me how I was doing and about the life in the camp and bid me farewell. I never saw the Germans after that.

Meanwhile, the team with Agents John and Don kept questioning me.

“Do you know this guy, Ramzi bin al-Shibh?” asked John.

“No, I don’t,” I honestly answered.

“But he knows you!”

“I am afraid you have another file than mine!”

“No, I read your file very thoroughly.”

“Can you show me his picture?”

“Yes. I’m going to show it to you tomorrow.”

“Good. I might know him by another name!”

“Do you know about the American bases in Germany?”

“Why do you ask me about that? I didn’t go to Germany to study the American bases, nor am I interested in them in any way!” I angrily replied.

“My people respect detainees who tell the truth!” the skinny agent said, while his colleague Agent Don took notes. I took the hint that he was calling me a liar in a stupid way. The session was terminated.

The next day John and Don reserved me in the interrogation booth and showed me two pictures. The first one turned out to be that of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was suspected of having participated in the September 11 attack and who was captured in Karachi in a joint operation exactly one year later. The second picture was of Mohamed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers. As to Mohamed Atta, I had never heard of him or saw him, and as to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, I figured I’ve seen the guy, but where and when? I had no clue! But I also figured that the guy must be very important because the agencies were running fast together to find my link with him.²² Under the circumstances, I denied having seen the guy. Look at it, how would it have looked had I said I’d seen this guy, but I don’t know when and where? What interrogator would buy something like that? Not one! And to be honest with you, I was as scared as hell.

The FBI team reserved me again the next day and showed me the picture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and I denied that I knew him, the same way I had the day before. My denial that I knew a man that I don’t really know, I just saw him for a very short time once or twice and had no association whatsoever with him, gave fuel to all kind of wild theories linking me to the September 11 attack. The investigators were just drowning and were looking for any straw to grab, and I personally didn’t exactly want to be that straw.

“We’d like you to take a polygraph test,” said John.

“It’s not compulsory,” his partner added. But I knew that refusing to take the test would be seen as a clear indication that I was guilty, though there had been no discussion of what crime I was supposed to be guilty of. The agents explained the poly-graph process to me through an interpreter, and I agreed to take the test. I asked when the test would happen.

“In the next few days!”

In the meantime I was transferred to Lima Block, where I met an Algerian-Bosnian man named Mustafa Ait Idir for the first time. He was another one of the star detainees. Mustafa heard about my story, and like any other curious person, he wanted to have more information. On my side, I also wanted to converse with cultured people. As far as I could tell, Mustafa was a decent guy; I had a hard time picturing him as a criminal.²³

Lima Block was filled with European and North African detainees. For the first time I got to know the Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, and the Danish, Swedish, French, and Bosnian detainees as well. I was happy to be with the detainees from the Maghreb; being from the region, I could understand their jokes much better and quicker than the amazing ones from detainees from the Arab peninsula, and they got my jokes, too. The other Mauritanian on the block and I tried to get to know each other, but we weren’t allowed. Our only contact was when he and I felt sick and were transferred to the Navy hospital in the same truck, but we couldn’t talk much. On the way, he and our Syrian translator got into a heated debate about the job of translators in GTMO, and I used the distraction to look outside through the clumsily blinded window. I saw a woman jogging, and a bunch of water supply pipes. I was reminded that there’s a life outside GTMO, and I suddenly felt very afraid. Grimly, I realized that I felt safer shackled in a truck surrounded by guards who were given firearms as soon as we left the camp’s gate.

The day of the polygraph came, and the escort team led me silently to Gold Building. I always wanted to know where I was going and why. I remember one time when the escorting team refused to tell me where I was going: I thought they were taking me to my execution.²⁴

When I entered the room where the test was supposed to take place, I expected to see a huge machine. I had told my neighbors in Lima Block about the upcoming polygraph test, and my neighbor Jabir Jubran Al Fayfi, who had been an MP in the Saudi army, told me he had taken one before. His description of the test was not exactly comforting. Adding to that, an Egyptian novel fell into my hands a few days before the test that dramatically described an Egyptian double agent undergoing a lie detector test that was given by the Israeli Mossad. If I believed in conspiracies, I would have assumed the interrogators sent the librarian to deliver me that particular book, but I couldn’t tell if it was to scare me or encourage me, or what the lesson was supposed to be. In the novel, after much sweating and panting, the Egyptian emerged victorious; the moral seemed to be that you could lie and pass the test, but if you are telling the truth, you can still fail.²⁵

From the book and from Jabir I somehow imagined the lie detector as a big, elliptical-like machine I would climb onto and be wired everywhere. Then I would start running and sweating as interrogators beside me threw random questions at me and recorded my vital signs, which would indicate my truthfulness or lack thereof. I expected a great deal of shouting and intimidation, like in the Egyptian novel. But when I entered the room, I found a big table with a laptop, a blood pressure cuff, a big belt, a small printer, and many thin cables and other stuff I didn’t understand. I was relieved because the equipment looked much less intimidating than I’d imagined. American genius never stopped impressing me: with such a small device they can decide whether or not you are lying!

The guards sat me in a chair next to the empty table and left me alone. The tester was watching me from the next room to see how I behaved. When he decided to end his self-imprisonment behind the mirror he entered the room, accompanied by an interpreter whose Arabic was very weak. It was entertaining to watch the exchange between them as the interpreter struggled to keep up with his sermon.

He started with stories of his great achievements, naming many high-profile people suspected of heinous acts of violence whom he had saved and sent home. The stories in the Thousand and One Nights paled in comparison to his imagination. He walked me through the technological part briefly, mostly to scare me and convince me to tell him the truth, as Abu Zubaydah and others supposedly had when he tested them. He ran a belt around my abdomen and another one around my rib cage to measure the pattern of my breathing. He placed a cuff around my upper arm to measure the changes in my blood pressure, and wrapped a sensor around the tip of my index finger, explaining that if I lied I would sweat and thus drive down the temperature on my finger. Then he hit the real meat, conducting a comprehensive and thorough interrogation. ²⁶

He laid out pictures of some of the suspected 9/11 hijackers and planners and asked me whether I knew or ever met them. I couldn’t understand his logic, because he kept showing me more than one picture at a time and asking questions about them, as if they were joined and did everything together. Why didn’t he take them one by one? I told the tester that I never met or talked to any one of them, even though I remembered seeing Ramzi bin al-Shibh once. But I couldn’t remember where, so I decided to skip that information because I was too scared, especially because I could see the FBI and the tester clearly suspected him of being a 9/11 co-conspirator.

The tester told me the results of the test were “inconclusive.” He seemed to notice his mistake of not separating the guys and asking about them individually, but his attempts to convince me to take the test one more time fell on deaf ears. I was tired like never before, and I told him that I didn’t really need freedom that badly. The whole process was tedious and long, “comme un jour sans pain,” as the French say, except it really was a day without bread. I was sent back to my cell, sure they were now planning on me staying for the long haul.

After a couple of days, I was taken to interrogation.

“How are you?” said John. It had been a long time since I’d seen him.

“Good!”

John and his colleague talked about the polygraph and tried to get me to agree to take it again, but I refused. I really couldn’t see what good it would do. They also tried to gather intels from me about other detainees. The Joint Task Force was starting to turn up the heat against the detainees. Treatment in the interrogation rooms was getting worse and worse, and visits from the so-called IRF team to pick up “non-compliant detainees” were commonplace. One time, the whole unit was deployed to search detainees at the same time. It was in the dead of night when I was pulled out of my cell and searched by the guards, with the TV camera on me and contractors watching the whole show. I wasn’t the only one; the whole block of forty-eight detainees was searched. The relationship between the Joint Detention Group and the detainees was becoming very tense, and there was nothing much detainees could do to change their situation: the deck was stacked against us, and JDG held all the cards.²⁷

In Major General Dunlavey’s era, there were many issues, most of which were initiated by the desperation of the detainees. Endless interrogation. Disrespect of the Holy Koran by some of the guards. Torturing detainees by making them spend the night in a cold room (though this method was not practiced nearly as much as it would be in General Geoffrey Miller’s time). So we decided to go on a hunger strike; many detainees took part, including me. But I could only strike for four days, after which I was a ghost.²⁸

“Don’t break, you’re gonna weaken the group,” said my Saudi neighbor.

“I told you guys I’m gonna hunger strike, not that I’m gonna commit suicide. I’m gonna break,” I replied.

The situation grew even worse when General Miller took over. He was a hardworking man, the kind of man to be picked for the dirtiest job, when many others had failed. General Miller was a very radical hater. He completely changed the detention policies in GTMO in all aspects. He used to tour the blocks nonstop, giving guards and interrogators instructions for what to do with us. I personally don’t know what he told them, but as someone on the receiving end of his orders, I definitely felt the pain.

General Miller was responsible for a kind of class society he created in the camp. Blocks were defined by their levels, and there were five levels. The best was Level One, for so-called highly compliant detainees. Level Four was for isolation as a disciplinary measure, and Level Five was reserved for people who were considered of high intelligence value. Detainees of this level are completely under the mercy of their interrogators, which was very convenient for the interrogators. The system was designed to keep us on edge all the time: One day in paradise, and the next in hell.

In the beginning, when we were informed about the new system, it was a given to me that I was Level One. But to my dismay, I was put with the pariah block, the supposed worst of the worst. I was like, what the heck is going on, I’ve never been in trouble with the guards, and I am answering my interrogators and cooperating with them. But I missed that cooperation meant telling your interrogators whatever they want to hear.

I was put once more in Oscar Block toward the end of 2002.

An escort team appeared in front of my cell.

“760 reservation!” they said.

“OK, just give me a second!” I put my clothes on and washed my face. My heart started to pound. I hated interrogation; I had gotten tired of being terrified all the time, living in constant fear day-in and day-out for the last thirteen months.

“Allah be with you! Keep your head on! They work for Satan!” yelled my fellow detainees to keep me together, as we always did when somebody got pulled for interrogation. I hated the sounds of the heavy metal chains; I could hardly carry them when they were given to me. People were always getting taken from the block, and every time I heard the chains I thought it would be me. You never know what’s going to happen in the interrogation; people sometimes never came back to the block, they just disappeared. It happened to a Moroccan fellow detainee, and it would happen to me, as you’re going to learn, God willing.

When I entered the room in Brown Building, it was crowded with another new FBI-led team. William introduced me to an FBI agent named Robert and someone from the New York Police Department he called Tom; with them was a military intelligence officer and a young Moroccan man who they explained was a French, not an Arabic, interpreter.²⁹

“Hi!”

“Hi!” they said, almost in unison.

“I’ve chosen Robert and Tom based on their experience and maturity,” William said. “ They’ll be assessing your case from now on. There are a couple of things that need to be completed in your case. For instance, you didn’t tell us everything about Raouf Hannachi. He’s a very important guy.”³⁰

“First, I told you what I know about Raouf Hannachi, even though I don’t need to be providing you information about anybody. We’re talking here about me. Second, in order to continue my cooperation with you, I need you to answer me one question: WHY AM I HERE? If you don’t give me the answer, you can consider me a non-existent detainee.” Later on I learned from my great lawyers Nancy Hollander, Sylvia Royce, and Theresa Duncan that the magic formulation of my request is a Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus. Obviously that phrase makes no sense to the average, mortal man like me. The average person would just say, “Why the hell are you locking me up?” I’m not a lawyer, but common sense dictates that after three years of interrogating me and depriving me of my liberty, the government at least owes me an explanation why it’s doing so. What exactly is my crime?

“It makes no sense: It’s like somebody who quits a 10-mile trip after traveling nine miles,” said William. It would have been more accurate had he said “a million mile trip after traveling one mile.”

“Look, it’s as simple as ABC: answer me the question and I’ll cooperate with you fully!”

“I have no answer!” William said.

“Neither do I!” I replied.

“It says in the Koran somebody who kills one soul is considered to have killed all of humanity,” said the French translator, trying to reach a breakthrough. I looked at him disrespectfully with the side of my face.

“I am not the guy you’re looking for!” I said in French, and I repeated it in plain English.

Tom, the NYPD officer, started. “I am sure you’re against killing people. We’re not looking for you. We’re looking for those guys who are out there trying to hurt innocents.” He said this while showing me a bunch of ghostly pictures. I refused to look at them, and whenever he tried to put them under my sight I looked somewhere else. I didn’t even want to give him the satisfaction of having taken a look at them.

“Look, Ahmed Ressam is cooperating, and he has a good chance of getting his sentence reduced to twenty-seven years—and Ressam is really a bad person. Somebody like you needs only to talk for five minutes, and you’re a free man,” said Robert. He was everything but reasonable. When I contemplated his statement, I was like, God, a guy who is cooperating is gonna be locked up for 27 more years, after which he won’t be able to enjoy any kind of life. What kind of harsh country is that?” I am sorry to say that Robert’s statement wasn’t worth an answer. He and William tried to reason with the help of the MI guy, but there was no convincing me to talk.³¹

You could tell that the interrogators were getting used to detainees who refused to cooperate after having cooperated for a while. Just as I was learning from other detainees how not to cooperate, the interrogators were learning from each other how to deal with non-cooperating detainees. The session was closed and I was sent back to my cell. I was satisfied with myself, since I now officially belonged to the majority, the non-cooperating detainees. I minded less being locked up unjustly for the rest of my life; what drove me crazy was to be expected to cooperate, too. You lock me up, I give you no information. And we both are cool.

The sessions continued with the new team. William rarely attended the sessions; “I won’t come as long as you don’t give us every piece of information you have,” he once said. “Still, because we’re Americans we treat you guys according to our high standards. Look at ISN 207, we’re offering him the latest medical technology.” The detainee he mentioned, a young Saudi named Mishal Alhabiri, had been gravely injured in detention, and the JTF people said that he tried to commit suicide. Interrogators brought up his situation a couple of times to showcase that the U.S. was treating detainees humanely.³²

“You want just to keep him alive because he might have some Intels, and if he dies, they’re gonna die with him!” I responded. U.S. interrogators always tended to mention free food and free medical treatment for detainees. I don’t really understand what other alternatives they have! I personally have been detained in non-Democratic countries, and the medical treatment was the highest priority. Common sense dictates that if a detainee goes badly ill there will be no Intels, and he’ll probably die.

We spent almost two months of argumentation. “Bring me to the court, and I’ll answer all your questions,” I would tell the team.

“There will be no court!” they would answer.

“Are you a Mafia? You kidnap people, lock them up, and blackmail them,” I said.

“You guys are a law enforcement problem,” said Tom. “We cannot apply the conventional law to you. We need only circumstantial evidence to fry you.”

“I’ve done nothing against your country, have I?”

“You’re a part of the big conspiracy against the U.S.!” Tom said.

“You can pull this charge on anybody! What have I done?”

“I don’t know, you tell me!”

“Look, you kidnap me from my home in Mauritania, not from a battlefield in Afghanistan, because you suspected me of having been part of the Millennium Plot—which I am not, as you know by now. So what’s the next charge? It looks to me as if you want to pull any shit on me.”

“I don’t want to pull any shit on you. I just wish you had access to the same reports as I do!” said Robert.

“I don’t care what the reports say. I’d just like you to take a look at the reports from January 2000 linking me to the Millennium Plot. And you now know that I’m not a part of it, after the cooperation of Ahmed Ressam.

“I don’t think that you are a part of it, nor do I believe that you know Ahmed Ressam,” Robert said. “ But I do know that you know people who know Ressam.”

“I don’t know, but I don’t see the problem if it is the case,” I replied, “Knowing somebody is not a crime, no matter who he is.”

A young Egyptian who was serving as interpreter that day tried to convince me to cooperate. Like almost every other interpreter in GTMO, he called himself Mohamed. “Look, I have come here sacrificing my time to help you guys, and the only way to help yourself is to talk,” he said.

“Aren’t you ashamed to work for these evil people, who arrest your brothers in faith for no reason than being Muslim?” I asked him. “Mohamed, I am older than you are, speak more languages, I have a higher college grade, and I’ve been in many more countries than you have. I understand you’re here to help yourself and make money. If you’re trying to fool anybody, it’s only yourself!” I was just so mad because he talked to me as if I were a child. Robert and Tom were just staring.

These conversations took place again and again in different sessions. I kept saying, “You tell why I am here, I’ll cooperate; you don’t tell me, I’m not gonna cooperate. But we can talk about anything else beside interrogation.”

Robert welcomed that idea. He assured me that he was going to ask his boss to provide him the cause of my arrest, because he didn’t know it himself. In the meantime he taught me a lot about American culture and history, the U.S. and Islam, and the U.S. and the Arab world. The team started to bring movies in; I saw The Civil War, Muslims in the U.S., and several other Frontline broadcasts regarding terrorism. “All of this shit happens because of hatred,” he would say. “Hatred is the reason for all disasters.”

“I am gonna show you the evidence bit by bit,” said Robert one day. “There is a big al Qaeda guy who told us that you are involved.”³³

“I guess you shouldn’t ask me questions then, since you have a witness. Just take me to court and roast me,” I said. “What have I done, according to your witness?”

“He said you are a part of the conspiracy.” I grew tired of the words Big Conspiracy against the U.S. Robert could not give me anything to grab onto, no matter how much I argued with him.

As to Tom from the NYPD, he was not an argumentative guy; “If the government believes that you’re involved in bad things, they’re gonna send you to Iraq or back to Afghanistan,” he said.³⁴

“So if you guys torture me, I’m gonna tell you everything you want to hear?”

“No, look: if a mom asks her kid whether he’s done something wrong, he might lie. But if she hits him, he’s gonna admit it,” replied Tom. I had no answer to this analogy. Anyway, the “big al Qaeda” guy who testified against me turned out to be Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Ramzi was said to have said that I helped him to go to Chechnya with two other guys who were among the hijackers, which I hadn’t done. Though I had seen him once or twice in Germany, I didn’t even know his name. Even if I had helped them to go to Chechnya, that would be no crime at all, but I just hadn’t.

By then I knew about the horrible torture that Ramzi bin al-Shibh had suffered after his arrest in Karachi. Eyewitnesses who were captured with him in Karachi said, “We thought he was dead. We heard his cries and moans day and night until he was separated from us.” We had even heard even rumors in the camp that he died under torture. Overseas torture was obviously a common practice and professionally executed; I heard so many testimonies from detainees who didn’t know each other that they couldn’t be lies. And as you shall see, I was subject to torture in this base of GTMO, like many other fellow detainees. May Allah reward all of us.

“I don’t believe in torture,” said Robert. I didn’t share with him my knowledge about Ramzi having been tortured. But because the government has sent detainees including me, Mamdouh Habib, and Mohamed Saad Iqbal overseas to facilitate our interrogation by torture, that meant that the government believes in torture; what Robert believes in doesn’t have much weight when it comes to the harsh justice of the U.S. during war.³⁵

As for Tom, he was interested in getting information as quickly as possible using classic police methods. He offered me McDonald’s one day, but I refused because I didn’t want to owe him anything. “The Army are fighting to take you to a very bad place, and we don’t want that to happen!” he warned me.

“Just let them take me there; I’ll get used to it. You keep me in jail whether or not I cooperate, so why should I cooperate?” I said this still not knowing that Americans use torture to facilitate interrogations. I was very tired from being taken to interrogation every day. My back was just conspiring against me. I even sought Medical help.

“You’re not allowed to sit for such a long time,” said the female Navy physiotherapist.

“Please tell my interrogators that, because they make me sit for long hours almost every day.”

“I’ll write a note, but I’m not sure whether it will have an effect,” she replied.

It didn’t. Instead, in February 2003, Tom washed his hands of me.³⁶

“I am going to leave, but if you’re ready to talk about your telephone conversations, request me, I’ll come back,” he said.

“I assure you, I am not going to talk about anything unless you answer my question: Why am I here?”

¹ A Council of Europe investigation confirms that a CIA-leased Gulf-stream jet with the tail number N379P departed Amman, Jordan, at 11:15 p.m. on July 19, 2002, for Kabul, Afghanistan. An addendum to that 2006 report listing the flight records is available at http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2006/20060614_Ejdoc162006PartII-Appendix.pdf.

EDITOR’S NOTE ON THE FOOTNOTES: None of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s attorneys holding security clearances has reviewed the footnotes in this book, contributed to them in any way, or confirmed or denied my speculations contained in them. Nor has anyone else with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed the footnotes, contributed to them in any way, or confirmed or denied my speculations contained in them.

² Abu Hafs is MOS’s cousin and former brother-in-law. His full name is Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, and he is also known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. Abu Hafs married the sister of MOS’s former wife. He was a prominent member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, the group’s main advisory body, in the 1990s and up until the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. It has been widely reported that Abu Hafs opposed those attacks; the 9/11 Commission recorded that “Abu Hafs the Mauritanian reportedly even wrote Bin Ladin a message basing opposition to the attacks on the Qur’an.” Abu Hafs left Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and spent the next decade under house arrest in Iran. In April 2012 he was extradited to Mauritania, where he was held briefly and then released. He is now a free man. The relevant section of the 9/11 Commission report is available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch7.pdf.

³ At his December 15, 2005, Administrative Review Board (ARB) hearing, MOS described a U.S. interrogator in Bagram who was Japanese American and whom Bagram prisoners referred to as “William the Torturer.” ARB transcript, 23. MOS’s 2005 ARB hearing transcript is available at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo/detainees/760-mohamedou-ould-slahi/documents/2.

⁴ Omar Deghayes was released and returned to the United Kingdom, his country of residence, on December 18, 2007.

⁵ At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS indicated that an interrogator nicknamed “William the Torturer” made him kneel for “very long hours” to aggravate his sciatic nerve pain and later threatened him. ARB transcript, 23.

⁶ Department of Justice. This is not true, of course. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is located on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and is run by a U.S. military joint task force under the command of the U.S. Southern Command.

⁷ Press accounts indicate that MOS was eventually interrogated by both German and Canadian intelligence agents in Guantánamo; later in the manuscript, in the scene where he meets with what appear to be BND interrogators in GTMO, MOS specifically references such a prohibition on external interrogations. See footnote on page 49; see also http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/from-germany-to-guantanamo-the-career-of-prisoner-no-760-a-583193-3.html; and http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2008/07/27/csis_grilled_trio_in_cuba.html.

⁸ In-processing height and weight records indicate that thirty-five detainees arrived in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. The records of that group are available at http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/reports/heights-and-weights-files/ISN_680-ISN_838.pdf. An official list of Guantánamo detainees that the Pentagon released in May 2006 is available at http://archive.defense.gov/news/May2006/d20060515%20List.pdf.

⁹ Ibrahim Mahdi Achmed Zeidan was released from Guantánamo on November 7, 2007.

¹⁰ A 2008 investigation by the British human rights organization Reprieve found that transfers of prisoners from Bagram to Guantánamo typically involved a stop at the U.S. air base in Incirlik, Turkey, and the Rendition Project has found that a C-17 military transport plane, flight number RCH233Y, flew from Incirlik to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, carrying thirty-five prisoners. See http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimony-of-other-physicians/journey_of_death.pdf; and http://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/pdf/PDF%20154%20[Flight%20data.%20Portuguese%20flight%20logs%20to%20GTMO,%20collected%20by%20Ana%20Gomes].pdf.

¹¹ The FBI led MOS’s interrogations for his first several months in Guantánamo, waging a well-documented struggle to keep him out of the hands of military interrogators. The protracted interagency conflict between the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency over the military’s interrogation methods has been widely documented and reported, most notably in a May 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General titled A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (hereafter cited as DOJ IG). The report, which is available at http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0805/final.pdf, includes substantial sections devoted specifically to MOS’s interrogation. “The FBI sought to interview Slahi immediately after he arrived at GTMO,” the DOJ Inspector General reported in one of those sections. “FBI and task force agents interviewed Slahi over the next few months, utilizing rapport building techniques.” At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS described an “FBI guy” who interrogated him shortly after his arrival and told him, “We don’t beat people, we don’t torture people, it’s not allowed.” DOJ IG, 122, ARB transcript 23.

¹² The March 3, 2003, Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures instructed that arriving prisoners be processed and held for four weeks in a maximum security isolation block “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process” and “to [foster] dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.” The document is available at http://www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/gitmo-sop.pdf (hereafter cited as SOP).

¹³ Mohammed al-Amin was born in Mauritania but moved to Saudi Arabia for religious studies. He was released and transferred to Mauritania on September 26, 2007. Ibrahim Fauzee, who is from the Maldives, was released on March 11, 2005.