The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  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 th
eir 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 t
he 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.