The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  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.