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 preceded 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.”
The Mauritanian Page 7
