The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  “I have been in Mauritania,” he said, “and do you know who was our host? The President! We had a good time in the palace.” The Marine guy asked questions and answered them himself.

  When the man failed to impress me with all the talk and humiliation, and with the threat to arrest my family since the Mauritanian president was an obedient servant of the U.S., he started to hurt me more. He brought ice-cold water and soaked me all over my body, with my clothes still on me. It was so awful; I kept shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. Technically I wasn’t able to talk anymore. The guy was stupid: he was literally executing me but in a slow way. SSG Mary gestured to him to stop pouring water on me. Another detainee had told me a “good” interrogator suggested he eat in order to reduce the pain, but I refused to eat anything; I couldn’t open my mouth anyway.

  The guy was very hot when Mary stopped him because she was afraid of the paperwork that would result in case of my death. So he found another technique, namely he brought a CD player with a booster and started to play some rap music. I didn’t really mind the music because it made me forget my pain. Actually, the music was a blessing in disguise; I was trying to make sense of the words. All I understood was that the music was about love. Can you believe it? Love! All I had experienced lately was hatred, or the consequences thereof.

  “Listen to that, Motherfucker!” said the guest, while closing the door violently behind him. “You’re gonna get the same shit day after day, and guess what? It’s getting worse. What you’re seeing is only the beginning,” said the Marine. I kept praying and ignoring what they were doing.

  “Oh, ALLAH help me. . . . Oh Allah have mercy on me” SSG Mary kept mimicking my prayers, “ALLAH, ALLAH. . . . There is no Allah. He let you down!” I smiled at how ignorant she was, talking about the Lord like that. But the Lord is very patient, and doesn’t need to rush to punishment, because there is no escaping him.

  Detainees knew the policy in the camp: if the MI believes that you’re hiding crucial information, they torture you in Camp Delta, in India Block, but if that doesn’t work, they kidnap you to a secret place and nobody knows what they’re doing with you. During my time in Delta Camp two individuals were kidnapped and disappeared for good, namely Abdullah Tabarak Ahmad from Morocco and Mohammed al-Qahtani from Saudi Arabia.26 I started to get the feeling that I was going to be kidnapped because I really got stuck with my interrogators, and so I started to gather Intels.

  “The camp out there is the worst one,” said a young MP.

  “They don’t get food?” I wondered.

  “Something like that,” he replied.

  Between 10 and 11 p.m., SSG Mary handed me over to Mr. X, who gave orders to the guards to move me to his specially prepared room. It was freezing cold and full of pictures showing the glories of the U.S.: weapons arsenals, planes, and pictures of George Bush. “Don’t pray! You’ll insult my country if you pray during my national anthem. We’re the greatest country in the free world, and we have the smartest president in the world,” he said. For the whole night I had to listen to the U.S. anthem. I hate anthems anyway. All I can remember was the beginning, “Oh say can you see . . .” over and over. I was happy that no ice-cold water was poured over me. I tried at the beginning to steal some prayers, but Mr. X was watching closely by means of cameras and the one-way mirror. “Stop the fuck praying, you’re insulting my country!” I was really tired and worn out, and I was anything but looking for trouble, and so I decided to pray in my heart. I was shaking all night long.

  Between 4 and 5 a.m., Mr. X released me, just to be taken a couple of hours later by SFC Shally to start the same routine over. But the hardest step is the first step; the hardest days were the first days, and with every day going by I grew stronger. Meanwhile I was the main subject of talk in the camp. Although many other detainees were suffering similar fates, I was “Criminal Number One,” and I was being treated that way. Sometimes when I was in the rec yard, detainees shouted, “Be patient. Remember Allah tests the people he loves the most.” Comments like that were my only solace beside my faith in the Lord.

  Nothing really interesting changed in my routine: cold room, standing up for hours, interrogators repeating the same threats about me being kidnapped and locked up forever.27 Mr. X made me write tons of pages about my life, but I never satisfied him. One night he undressed me with the help of a blond female and a male guard. Expecting the cold room, I had put shorts on over my pants to reduce the cold that was penetrating through my bones, but he was extremely mad, which led him to make a female guard undress me. I never felt so violated. I stood up all the night in the ice-cold room praying, ignoring all his barking and ordering me to stop praying. I couldn’t have cared less about whatever he was going to do.28

  The boss of the group, Mr. Richard Zuley, crawled from behind the scene. SSG Mary told me a couple of times before his visit about a very high level government person who was going to visit me and talk to me about my family. I didn’t take the information negatively; I thought he was going to bring me some messages from my family. But I was wrong, it was about hurting my family. Mr. Zuley was escalating the situation with me relentlessly.

  Mr. Zuley came around 11 a.m., escorted by SSG Mary and the new male sergeant. He was brief and direct. “My name is Captain Collins. I work for the Department of Defense. My government is desperate to get information out of you. Do you understand?”29

  “Yes.”

  “Can you read English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Captain Collins” handed me a letter that he had obviously forged. The letter was from DoD, and it said, basically, “Ould Slahi is involved in the Millennium attack and recruited three of September 11 hijackers. Since Slahi has refused to cooperate, the U.S. government is going to arrest his mother and put her in a special facility.”

  I read the letter. “Is that not harsh and unfair?” I said.

  “I am not here to maintain justice. I’m here to stop people from crashing planes into buildings in my country.”

  “Then go and stop them. I’ve done nothing to your country,” I said.

  “You have two options: either being a defendant or a witness,”

  “I want neither.”

  “You have no choice, or your life is going to change decidedly,” he said.

  “Just do it, the sooner, the better!” I said. Richard Zuley put the forged letter back in his bag, closed it angrily, and left the room. Mr. Zuley would lead the team working on my case until August or September 2004. He always tried to make me believe that his real name was Captain Collins, but what he didn’t know was that I knew his name even before I met him.

  After that meeting I had no doubt about the intentions of “Captain Collins”; he was just seeking the required formalities to kidnap me from the camp to an unknown place. “Your being here required many signatures. We’ve been trying for some time to get you here,” one of my guards would tell me later. Captain Collins was also putting together a complete team which would execute the Abduction. All of this was carried out in secrecy; participants knew only as much as they needed to. I know for instance that SSG Mary didn’t know about the details of the plan.

  On Monday August 25, 2003, around 4 p.m., SSG Mary reserved me for interrogation in Gold Building. By then I had spent the weekend on Romeo Block, which was entirely emptied of any other detainees, in order to keep me isolated from the rest of the community. But I saw it as a positive thing: the cell was warmer and I could see daylight, while in India Block I was locked in a frozen box.

  “Now I have overall control. I can do anything I want with you; I can even move you to Camp Four,” said SSG Mary.30

  “I know why you moved me to Romeo Block,” I said. “It’s because you don’t want me to see anybody.” SSG Mary didn’t comment; she just smiled. It was more of a friendly talk. Around 5:30 p.m., she brought me my cold MRE. I had gotten used to my cold portions; I didn’t savor them, but I had been suffering weight loss like never before, and I knew in
order to survive I had to eat.

  I started to eat my meal. SSG Mary was going in and out, but there was nothing suspicious about that, she had always been that way. I barely finished my meal, when all of a sudden Mary and I heard a commotion, guards cursing loudly (“I told you motherfucker . . . !”), people banging the floor violently with heavy boots, dogs barking, doors closing loudly. I froze in my seat. Mary went speechless. We were staring at each other, not knowing what was going on. My heart was pounding because I knew a detainee was going to be hurt. Yes, and that detainee was me.

  Suddenly a commando team consisting of three soldiers and a German shepherd broke into our interrogation room. Everything happened quicker than you could think about it. Mr. X and a masked guard punched me violently, which made me fall face down on the floor.

  “Motherfucker, I told you, you’re gone!” said Mr. X. His partner kept punching me everywhere, mainly on my face and my ribs. He, too, was masked from head to toe; he punched me the whole time without saying a word, because he didn’t want to be recognized. The third man was not masked; he stayed at the door holding the dog’s collar, ready to release it on me.

  “Who told you to do that? You’re hurting the detainee!” screamed SSG Mary, who was no less terrified than I was. Mr. X was the leader of the assailing guards, and he was executing Captain Collins’s orders. As to me, I couldn’t digest the situation. My first thought was, They mistook me for somebody else. My second thought was to try to recognize my environment by looking around while one of the guards was squeezing my face against the floor. I saw the dog fighting to get loose. I saw SSG Mary standing up, looking helplessly at the guards working on me.

  “Blindfold the Motherfucker, if he tries to look —”

  One of them hit me hard across the face, and quickly put the goggles on my eyes, ear muffs on my ears, and a small bag over my head. I couldn’t tell who did what. They tightened the chains around my ankles and my wrists; afterwards, I started to bleed. All I could hear was Mr. X cursing, “F-this and F-that!” I didn’t say a word, I was overwhelmingly surprised, I thought they were going to execute me.

  Thanks to the beating I wasn’t able to stand, so Mr. X and the other guard dragged me out with my toes tracing the way and threw me in a truck, which immediately took off. The beating party would go on for the next three or four hours before they turned me over to another team that was going to use different torture techniques.

  “Stop praying, Motherfucker, you’re killing people,” Mr. X said, and punched me hard on my mouth. My mouth and nose started to bleed, and my lips grew so big that I technically could not speak anymore. The colleague of Mr. X turned out to be one of my guards, a tall white sergeant in his late twenties who I called Big Boss. Mr. X and Big Boss each took a side and started to punch me and smash me against the metal of the truck. One of the guys hit me so hard that my breath stopped and I was choking; I felt like I was breathing through my ribs. I almost suffocated without their knowledge. I was having a hard time breathing due to the head cover anyway, plus they hit me so many times on my ribs that I stopped breathing for a moment.

  Did I pass out? Maybe not; all I know is that I kept noticing Mr. X several times spraying Ammonia in my nose. The funny thing was that Mr. X was at the same time my “lifesaver,” as were all the guards I would be dealing with for the next year, or most of them. All of them were allowed to give me medication and first aid.

  After ten to fifteen minutes, the truck stopped at the beach, and my escorting team dragged me out of the truck and put me in a high-speed boat. Mr. X and Big Boss never gave me a break; they kept hitting me, Mr. X while talking, Big Boss silently, and jerking on my shackles in order to make them stab me. “You’re killing people,” said Mr. X. I believe he was thinking out loud: he knew his was the most cowardly crime in the world, torturing a helpless detainee who completely went to submission and turned himself in. What a brave operation! Mr. X was trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing.

  Inside the boat, Mr. X made me drink salt water, I believe it was directly from the ocean. It was so nasty I threw up. They would put any object in my mouth and shout, “Swallow, Motherfucker!”, but I decided inside not to swallow the organ-damaging salt water, which choked me when they kept pouring it in my mouth. “Swallow, you idiot!” I contemplated quickly, and decided for the nasty, damaging water rather than death.

  Mr. X and Sergeant Big Boss escorted me for about three hours in the high-speed boat. The goal of such a trip was, first, to torture the detainee and claim that “the detainee hurt himself during transport,” and second, to make the detainee believe he was being transferred to some far, faraway secret prison. We detainees knew all of that; we had detainees reporting they had been flown around for four hours and found themselves in the same jail where they started. I knew from the beginning that I was going to be transferred to Camp Echo, about a five-minute ride. Camp Echo had a very bad reputation: just hearing the name gave me nausea.31 I knew the whole long trip I was going to take was meant to terrorize me. But what difference does it make? I cared less about the place, and more about the people who were detaining me. No matter where I got transferred, I would still be a detainee of the U.S. Armed Forces; and as for rendition to a third country, I thought I was through with that because I was already sent to Jordan for eight months. The politics of the DoD toward me was to take care of me on their own; “September 11 didn’t happen in Jordan; we don’t expect other countries to pry Intels off detainees as we do,” Mr. X said once. The Americans obviously were not satisfied with the results achieved by their “torture allies.”

  But I think when torture comes into play, things get out of control. Torture doesn’t guarantee that the detainee cooperates. In order to stop torture, the detainee has to please his assailant, even with untruthful, and sometimes misleading, Intels; sorting information out is time-consuming. And experience shows that torture doesn’t stop or even reduce terrorist attacks: Egypt, Algeria, Turkey are good examples. On the other hand, discussion has brought tremendously good results. After the unsuccessful attack on the Egyptian president in Addis Ababa, the government reached a cease-fire with Al Gawaa al-Islamiyah, and the latter opted later on for a political fight. Nevertheless, the Americans had learned a lot from their torture-practicing allies, and they were working closely together.

  When the boat reached the coast, Mr. X and his colleague dragged me out and made me sit, crossing my legs. I was moaning from the unbearable pain.

  “Uh . . . Uh . . . ALLAH . . . ALLAH. . . . I told you not to fuck

  with us, didn’t I?” said Mr. X, mimicking me. I hoped I could stop moaning, because the gentleman kept mimicking me and blaspheming the Lord. However, the moaning was necessary so I could breathe. My feet were numb, for the chains stopped the blood circulation to my hands and my feet; I was happy for every kick I got so I could alter my position. “Do not move Motherfucker!” said Mr. X, but sometimes I couldn’t help changing position; it was worth the kick.

  “We appreciate everybody who works with us, thanks gentlemen,” said Captain Collins. I recognized his voice; although he was addressing his Arab guests, the message was addressed to me more than anybody. It was nighttime. My blindfold didn’t keep me from feeling the bright lighting from some kind of high-watt projectors.

  “We happy for zat. Maybe we take him to Egypt, he say everything,” said an Arab guy whose voice I had never heard, with a thick Egyptian accent. I could tell the guy was in his late twenties or early thirties based on his voice, his speech, and later on his actions. I could also tell that his English was both poor and decidedly mispronounced. Then I heard indistinct conversations here and there, after which the Egyptian and another guy approached. Now they’re talking directly to me in Arabic:

  “What a coward! You guys ask for civil rights? Guess you get none,” said the Egyptian.

  “Somebody like this coward takes us only one hour in Jordan to spit everything,” said the Jordanian. Obviously, he
didn’t know that I had already spent eight months in Jordan and that no miracle took place.

  “We take him to EEEgypt,” said the Egyptian, addressing Captain Collins.

  “Maybe later,” Captain Collins said.

  “How poor are these Americans! They really are spoiling these fuckers. But now we’re working with them,” said the Egyptian guy, now addressing me directly in Arabic. When I heard Egypt, and a new rendition, my heart was pounding. I hated the endless world tour I was forcibly taking. I seriously thought rendition to Egypt on the spot was possible, because I knew how irritated and desperate the Americans were when it came to my case. The government was and still is misled about my case.

  “But you know we’re working with Americans in the field,” said the Egyptian. He was right: Yemeni detainees had told me that they were interrogated by Jordanians and Americans at the same table when they were captured in Karachi and afterward transferred to a secret place on September 11, 2002.32

  After all kinds of threats and degrading statements, I started to miss a lot of the trash talk between the Arabs and their American accomplices, and at one point I drowned in my thoughts. I felt ashamed that my people were being used for this horrible job by a government that claims to be the leader of the democratic free world, a government that preaches against dictatorship and “fights” for human rights and sends its children to die for that purpose: What a joke this government makes of its own people!

  What would the dead average American think if he or she could see what his or her government is doing to someone who has done no crimes against anybody? As much as I was ashamed for the Arabic fellows, I knew that they definitely didn’t represent the average Arab. Arabic people are among the greatest on the planet, sensitive, emotional, loving, generous, sacrificial, religious, charitable, and light-hearted. No one deserves to be used for such a dirty job, no matter how poor he is. No, we are better than that! If people in the Arab world knew what was happening in this place, the hatred against the U.S. would be heavily watered, and the accusation that the U.S. is helping and working together with dictators in our countries would be cemented. I had a feeling, or rather a hope, that these people would not go unpunished for their crimes. The situation didn’t make me hate either Arabs or Americans; I just felt bad for the Arabs, and how poor we are!