The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

  “No, I’m not. Don’t you understand the seriousness of your case?”

  “So, you kidnapped me from my house, in my country, and sent me to Jordan for torture, and then took me from Jordan to Bagram, and I’m still worse than the people you captured with guns in their hands?”

  “Yes, you are. You’re very smart! To me, you meet all the criteria of a top terrorist. When I check the terrorist check list, you pass with a very high score.”

  I was so scared, but I always tried to suppress my fear. “And what is your FBI check list?”

  “You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to Jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline.”

  “And what crime is that?” I said.

  “Look at the hijackers: they were the same way.”

  “I am not here to defend anybody but myself. Don’t even mention anybody else to me. I asked you about my crime, and not about x’s or y’s crimes. I don’t give a damn!”

  “But you are part of the big conspiracy against the U.S.”

  “You always say that. Tell me my part in this ‘big conspiracy!’”

  “I am going to tell you, just sabr, be patient.”

  My sessions continued with arguments of this nature. Then one day when I entered the interrogation room in Brown Building, I saw video equipment already hooked up. To be honest, I was terrified that they were going to show me a video with me committing terrorist attacks. Not that I have done anything like that in my life. But my fellow detainee Mustafa from Bosnia told me that his interrogators forged an American passport bearing his picture. “Look: We now have definitive evidence that you forged this passport and you were using it for terrorist purposes,” they told him. Mustafa laughed wholeheartedly at the silliness of his interrogators. “You missed that I’m a computer specialist, and I know that the U.S. government would have no problem forging a passport for me,” he said. The interrogators quickly took the passport back and never talked about it again.

  Scenarios like that made me very paranoid about the government making up something about me. Coming from a third-world country, I know how the police wrongly pin crimes on political rivals of the government in order to neutralize them. Smuggling weapons into somebody’s house is common, in order to make the court believe the victim is preparing for violence.

  “Are you ready?” said Robert.

  “Y-e-e-s!” I said, trying to keep myself together, though my blushing face said everything about me. Robert hit the play button and we started to watch the movie. I was ready to jump when I saw myself blowing up some U.S. facility in Timbuktu. But the tape was something completely different. It was a tape of Osama bin Laden speaking to an associate I didn’t recognize about the attack of September 11. They were speaking in Arabic. I enjoyed the comfort of understanding the talk, while the interrogators had to put up with the subtitles.

  After a short conversation between UBL and the other guy, a TV commentator spoke about how controversial the tape was. The quality was bad; the tape was supposedly seized by U.S. forces in a safehouse in Jalalabad.

  But that was not the point. “What do I have to do with this bullshit?” I asked angrily.

  “You see Osama bin Laden is behind September 11,” Robert said.

  “You realize I am not Osama bin Laden, don’t you? This is between you and Osama bin Laden; I don’t care, I’m outside of this business.”

  “Do you think what he did was right?”

  “I don’t give a damn. Get Osama bin Laden and punish him.”

  “How do you feel about what happened?”

  “I feel that I’m not a part of it. Anything else doesn’t matter in this case!” When I came back to Lima Block I was telling my friends about the masquerade of the “definitive evidence” against me. But nobody was surprised, since most of the detainees had been through such jokes.

  During my conversations with Robert and his associate, I brought up an issue that I believe to be basic.

  “Why are you guys banning my incoming mails?”

  “I checked, but you have none!”

  “You’re trying to say that my family is refusing to respond to me?”

  The brothers in the block felt bad for me. I was dreaming almost every night that I had received mail from my family. I always passed on my dreams to my next door neighbors, and the dream interpreters always gave me hope, but no mails came. “I dreamt that you got a letter from your family,” was a common phrase I used to hear. It was so hard for me to see other detainees having pictures of their families, and having nothing—zip—myself. Not that I wished they never got letters: on the contrary, I was happy for them, I read their correspondence as if it were from my own mom. It was customary to pass newly received mails throughout the block and let everybody read them, even the most intimate ones from lovers to the beloved.

  Robert was dying to get me cooperating with him, and he knew that I had brought my issue to the detainees. So he was working with the mail people to get me something. A recipe was prepared and cooked, and around 5 p.m. the postman showed up at my cell and handed me a letter, supposedly from my brother. Even before I read the letter, I shouted to the rest of the block, “I received a letter from my family. See, my dreams have come true, didn’t I tell you?” From everywhere my fellow detainees shouted back, “Congratulations, pass me the letter when you’re done!”

  I hungrily started to read, but I soon got a shock: the letter was a cheap forgery. It was not from my family, it was the production of the Intel community.

  “Dear brothers, I received no letter, I am sorry!”

  “Bastards, they have done this with other detainees,” said a neighbor. But the forgery was so clumsy and unprofessional that no fool would fall for it. First, I have no brother with that name. Second, my name was misspelled. Third, my family doesn’t live where the correspondent mentioned, though it was close. Fourth, I know not only the handwriting of every single member of my family, but also the way each one phrases his ideas. The letter was kind of a sermon, “Be patient like your ancestors, and have faith that Allah is going to reward you.” I was so mad at this attempt to defraud me and play with my emotions.

  The next day, Robert pulled me for interrogation.

  “How’s your family doing?”

  “I hope they’re doing well.”

  “I’ve been working to get you the letter!”

  “Thank you very much, good effort, but if you guys want to forge mail, let me give you some advice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I smiled. “If you don’t really know, it’s okay. But it was cheap to forge a message and make me believe I have contact with my dear family!” I said, handing the strange letter back.

  “I don’t do shit like that,” Robert said.

  “I don’t know what to believe. But I believe in God, and if I don’t see my family in this life, I hope to see them in the afterlife, so don’t worry about it.” I honestly don’t have proof or disproof of whether Robert was involved in that dirty business. But I do know that the whole matter is much bigger than Robert; there are a bunch of people working behind the scene.2 The FBI was in charge of my case through Robert and his team, but I was taken for interrogation a couple of times by other intelligence agencies without his consent or even knowledge. As to letters from my family, I received my first letter, a Red Cross message, on February 14, 2004, 816 days after I was kidnapped from my house in Mauritania. The message was seven months old when it reached me.

  Agent Robert finally came forth on his promise to deliver the reasons why his government was locking me up. But he didn’t show me anything that was incriminating. In March 2002 CNN had broadcast a report about me claiming that I was the coordinator who facilitated the communication between the September 11 hijackers through the guestbook of my homepage. Now Robert showed me the report.3

  “I told you that you fucked
up,” Robert said.

  “I didn’t design my homepage for al Qaeda. I just made it a long time ago and never even checked on it since early 1997. Besides, if I decided to help al Qaeda, I wouldn’t use my real name. I could write a homepage in the name of John Smith.” Robert wanted to know everything about my homepage and why I even wrote one. I had to answer all that bullshit about a basic right of mine, writing a homepage with my real name and with some links to my favorite sites.

  In one session, Robert asked, “Why did you study microelectronics?”

  “I study whatever the heck I want. I didn’t know that I had to consult the U.S. government about what I should or should not study,” I said wryly.

  “I don’t believe in the principle of black and white. I think everybody is somehow in between. Don’t you think so?” Robert asked.

  “I’ve done nothing.”

  “It is not a crime to help somebody to join al Qaeda and he ended up a terrorist!” Robert told me repeatedly. I understood exactly what he meant: Just admit that you are a recruiter for al Qaeda.

  “Might be. I’m not familiar with U.S. laws. But anyway, I didn’t recruit anybody for al Qaeda, nor did they ask me to!” I said.

  As a part of his “showing me the evidences against me,” Robert asked a colleague of his for help. It was Michael, one of the FBI agents who interrogated me back in Nouakchott in February 2000. Michael is one of those guys, when they speak you think they’re angry, and they might not be.

  “I am happy that you showed up, because I would like to discuss some issues with you,” I said.

  “Of course, Michael is here to answer your questions!” said Robert.

  “Remember when you guys came to interrogate me in Mauritania?” I began. “Remember how sure you were that I was not only involved in Millennium, but that I was the brain behind it? How do you feel now, knowing that I have nothing to do with it?”

  “That’s not the problem,” Michael answered. “The problem was that you weren’t honest with us.”

  “I don’t have to be honest to you. And here’s a news flash for you: I’m not going to talk to you unless you tell me why I am here,” I said.

  “That’s your problem,” Michael said. You could tell that Michael was used to humbled detainees who probably had to cooperate due to torture. He was by then interrogating Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He spoke very arrogantly; he as much as told me, “You’re gonna cooperate, even against your will, ha! ha!” I admit I was rude with him, but I was so angry since he had wrongly accused me of having been part of the Millennium Plot and now was dodging my requests to him to come clean and say he and his government were wrong.

  Michael looked worn out from his trip; he was very tired that day. “I don’t see why you don’t cooperate,” he said. “They share food with you, and speak to you in a civilized way,” he said.

  “Why should I cooperate with any of you? You’re hurting me, locking me up for no reason.”

  “We didn’t arrest you.”

  “Send me the guy who arrested me, I’d like to talk to him.” After that tense discussion, the interrogators left and sent me back to my cell.

  “For these next sessions, I have asked for Agent Michael to help me in laying out your case. I want you to be polite to him,” Robert said at our next session.

  I turned to his colleague. “Now you’re convinced that I am not a part of Millennium. What’s the next shit you’re gonna pull on me?”

  “You know, sometimes we arrest people for the wrong thing, but it turns out they are involved in something else!” Michael said.

  “And when are you going to stop playing this game on me? Every time there is a new suspicion, and when that turns out to be incorrect, I get a new one, and so on and so forth. Is there a possibility in the world that I am involved in nothing?”

  “Of course; therefore you have to cooperate and defend yourself. All I am asking is for you to explain some shit to me,” said Rober t. When Michael arrived he had a bunch of small papers with notes, and he started to read them to me. “You called Raouf Hannachi and asked him to bring you some sugar. When you told him about Hasni being back in Germany, he said, ‘Don’t say this over the phone.’ I wouldn’t say something like that to anybody I called.”

  “I don’t care what Raouf Hannachi says over the phone. I am not here on behalf of Raouf; go and ask him. Remember, I’m asking you what I have done.”

  “I just want you to explain these conversations to me—and there’s much more,” said Michael.

  “No, I am not answering anything before you answer my question. What have I done?”

  “I don’t say you’ve done anything, but there are a lot of things that need to be clarified.”

  “I’ve answered those questions a thousand and one times; I told you I mean what I am saying and I’m not using any code. You’re just so unjust and so paranoid. You’re taking advantage of me being from a country with a dictatorship. If I were German or Canadian, you wouldn’t even have the opportunity to talk to me, nor would you arrest me.”

  “In asking you to cooperate, we’re giving you an opportunity. After we share the cause of your arrest with you, it will be too late for you!” Michael said.

  “I don’t need any opportunities. Just tell me why you arrested me, and let it be too late.” Agent Robert knew me better than Agent Michael did; thus, he tried to calm both of us down. Michael was trying to scare me, but the more he scared me, the sharper and less cooperative I got.

  The camp was locked down the whole day. Around 10 p.m. I was pulled out of my cell and taken to Brown Building. The room was extremely cold. I hate to be woken up for interrogation, and my heart was pounding: Why would they take me so late?

  I don’t know how long I’d been in the room, maybe two hours. I was just shaking. I made my mind up not to argue anymore with the interrogators. I’m just gonna sit there like a stone, and let them do the talking, I said to myself. Many detainees decided to do so. They were taken day after day to interrogation in order to break them. I am sure some got broken because nobody can bear agony the rest of his life.

  After letting me sweat, or let’s say “shake,” for a couple hours, I was taken to another room in Brown Building, where Agents Robert and Michael and another FBI agent who called himself Chris sat. This room was acceptably cold. The military people were watching and listening from another room as usual.

  “We couldn’t take you during day because the camp was locked down,” said Robert. “We had to take you now, because Michael is leaving tomorrow.”

  I didn’t open my mouth. Robert sent his friends out. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. “Are you OK? Did anything happen to you?” But no matter how he tried, there was no making me talk.

  The team decided to take me back to the cold room. Maybe it wasn’t so cold for somebody wearing regular shoes, underwear, and a jacket like the interrogators, but it was definitely cold for a detainee with flip-flops and no underwear whatsoever.

  “Talk to us!” Robert said. “Since you refuse to talk, Michael is going to talk to you anyway.”

  Michael started his lecture, “We have been giving you an opportunity, but you don’t seem to want to take advantage of it. Now it’s too late, because I am going to share some information with you.”

  Michael put down three big pictures of four individuals who are believed to be involved in the September 11 attack. “This guy is Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He was captured in Karachi on September 11, 2002, and since then I’ve been interrogating him. I know more about him than he knows about himself. He was forthcoming and truthful with me. What he told me goes along with what we know about him. He said that he came to your house on advice of a guy named Khalid el Masri, whom he met on a train. Ramzi bin al-Shibh wanted somebody to help him getting to Chechnya.”

  “That was around October 1999,” he continued. “He showed up at your house with these two guys,” he said, pointing at Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi. “The other guy,” he said, pointing at
Mohamed Atta, “was not able to see you because he had a test. You advised them to travel through Afghanistan instead of Georgia, because their Arab faces would give them away and they probably would have been turned back. Furthermore, you gave them a phone contact in Quetta of a guy named Omar Abdel-Rahman . These guys traveled shortly after that meeting with you to Afghanistan, met Osama bin Laden, and swore a pledge to him. Bin Laden assigned them to the attack of September 11, and sent them back to Germany.”

  He went on. “When I asked Ramzi what he thinks about you, he replied that he believes you to be a senior recruiter for Osama bin Laden. That’s his personal opinion. However, he said that without you, he would never have joined al Qaeda. In fact, I’d say without you September 11 would never have happened. These guys would have gone to Chechnya and died.”

  Agent Michael excused himself and left. I was kept the rest of the night with Robert and Agent Chris, both staring at me in an eerie silence. I was so scared. The guy made me believe I was the one behind September 11. How could that possibly have happened? I was like, Maybe he’s right. And yet anybody who knew the basics about the attack, which were published and updated through time, can easily see what a swiss cheese Michael was trying to sell me. The guys he mentioned were reportedly trained in 1998, and joined al Qaeda and were assigned to the attack then. How could I possibly have sent them in October 1999 to join al Qaeda, when they not only already were al Qaeda, but had already been assigned to the attack for more than a year?

  I was kept up the rest of the night and forced to see pictures of dead body parts which were taken at the site of the Pentagon after the attack. It was a nasty sight. I almost broke down, but I managed to keep myself silent and together.

  “See the result of the attack?” Robert asked.

  “I don’t think he foresaw what these were going to do,” said Agent Chris. They were talking to each other, asking and answering each other. I kept myself as the present-absent. They kept sliding those nasty pictures in front of me the whole night. At the break of dawn, they sent me back to a cell in a new block, Mike Block. I prayed and tried to sleep, but I was kidding myself. I could not get the human body parts out of my head. My new neighbors, especially David Hicks and Bisher al-Rawi, tried to help me.4