The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  “We have people who still believe that you conspired with Ressam,” said SSG Mary when I told her not to ask me about Ahmed Ressam because the FBI had settled his case since he had started cooperating.

  “Obviously there is no way out with you guys,” I addressed SSG Mary.

  “I’m telling you how!” she responded.

  Now, thanks to the unbearable pain I was suffering, I had nothing to lose, and I allowed myself to say anything to satisfy my assailants. Session followed session since I called Captain Collins.

  “People are very happy with what you’re saying,” said SFC Shally after the first session. I answered all the questions he asked me with incriminating answers. I tried my best to make myself look as bad as I could, which is exactly the way you can make your interrogator happy. I made my mind up to spend the rest of my life in jail. You see most people can put up with being imprisoned unjustly, but nobody can bear agony day in and day out for the rest of his life.

  SFC Shally started to take the shape of a human being, though a bad one. “I write my report like newspaper articles, and the members of the community submit their comments. They’re really happy,” Sergeant Shally said.

  “So am I,” I said. I was wondering about the new, half-happy face of SFC Shally. Normally Shally is an angry person; if he talks to you he always looks at the roof, he hardly ever looks anybody in the eyes. He can barely lead a dialogue, but he’s very good when it comes to monologues. “I divorced my wife because she was just so annoying,” he once said to me.

  “Your request to see SSG Mary is not approved, in the meantime I am working on your case,” he said.

  “Alright!” I knew that SFC Shally was a trial, and that the DoD still wanted me to deal with the “bad guy.”

  “I told you I’m good at breaking detainees,” he said.

  “But since you don’t know my limit, you drove me beyond it,” I responded. When I started to talk generously to SFC Shally, Richard Zuley brought SSG Mary back into the picture; for some reason the team wanted her back, too.

  “Thank you very much for getting the sergeant back,” I said.

  SSG Mary looked both sad and happy. “I enjoy talking to you, you’re easy to talk to, and you have pretty teeth,” she told me before I was kidnapped from Camp Delta. Mary was the closest person to me; she was the only one I could relate to.

  “I can never do what Captain Collins is doing; all he’s worried about is getting his job done,” said SSG Mary, commenting on Zuley’s methods when Shally was absent. Mary and Shally were now interrogating me in turn. They dedicated the whole time until around November 10, 2003 to questioning me about Canada and September 11; they didn’t ask me a single question about Germany, where I really had the center of gravity of my life. Whenever they asked me about somebody in Canada I had some incriminating information about that person, even if I didn’t know him. Whenever I thought about the words, “I don’t know,” I got nauseous, because I remembered the words of SFC Shally, “All you have to say is, ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember, and we’ll fuck you!’ Or Captain Collins saying, “We don’t want to hear your denials anymore!” And so I erased these words from my dictionary.

  “We would like you to write your answers on paper; it’s too much work to keep up with your talk, and you might forget things when you talk to us,” said SFC Shally.

  “Of course!” I was really happy with the idea because I would rather talk to a paper than talk to him; at least the paper wouldn’t shout in my face or threaten me. SFC Shally drowned me in a pile of papers, which I duly filled with writings. It was a good outlet for my frustration and my depression.

  “You’re very generous in your written answers; you even wrote a whole bunch about Abu Mohammed al-Kanadi, whom you really don’t know,” SFC Shally accurately said, forgetting that he forbade me to use the words “I don’t know.”

  “Captain Collins reads your writing with a lot of interest,” said SFC Shally. I was extremely frightened, because this statement was ambiguous. “We’re gonna give you an assignment about Ahmed Laabidi. He is detained in Florida and they cannot make him talk; he keeps denying everything. You better provide us a Smoking Gun against him,” said SFC Shally. I was so sad: how rude was this guy, to ask me to provide a smoking gun about somebody I hardly know?

  “All I can say is that Ahmed L. is a criminal and should be locked up the rest of his life. I’m ready to testify against him in court,” I said, though I was not ready to lie in court to burn an innocent soul.

  “Ahmed Laabidi is facing the death penalty if we can make him guilty of drug smuggling,” SSG Mary said once, showing me his picture. I burst out laughing as soon as I saw the expression on his face and the Bob Barker–Calvin Klein prison uniform.7

  “What are you laughing at?” Mary asked me.

  “It’s just funny!”

  “How can you laugh at your friend?” I felt guilty right away, even though I knew I was not laughing at him. After all, my situation was worse than his. I was laughing at the situation: I could read everything that was going on in his head just from the expression on his face. I’d been made to take that same picture many times, in Senegal, in Mauritania, in Germany, in Jordan, in Bagram, and in GTMO. I hate the pose, I hate the look, I hate the height measure. Let me tell you something, whenever you see that bleak-looking face in a jail uniform, posing in front of a height measure scaled on a wall, you can be sure that is not a happy person.

  In fact, I really felt bad for that poor guy. He had sought asylum in Canada for a certain time but the Canadians refused his petition, partly because they considered him as Islamist. Ahmed Laabidi was willing to try his chances in the U.S., where he faced the harsh reality of the highly electrified environment against Muslims and Arabs, and where the U.S. gave him asylum in a high-level security prison and now was trying to link him to any crime. When I saw his face, I knew he was like, “Screw these Americans. How much I hate them! What do they want from me? How did I end up in jail when I came here seeking protection?”

  “I talked today with the Canadians and they told me they don’t believe your story about Ahmed Laabidi being involved in drug smuggling into the U.S., but we know he is,” he told me once.

  “I can only tell you what I know,” I said.

  “But we want you to give an evidence linking Ahmed Laabidi to the Millennium Plot. Things like, he supports the Mujs or believes in Jihad are good, but not good enough to lock him up the rest of his life,” he told me.

  “Oh, yes, I will,” I said. He handed me a bunch of papers and I went back in my cell. Oh, my God, I am being so unjust to myself and my brothers, I kept thinking, and then repeating “Nothing’s gonna happen to us. . . . They’ll go to hell. . . . Nothing’s gonna happen to us. . . . They’ll . . . .” I kept praying in my heart, and repeating my prayers. I took the pen and paper and wrote all kinds of incriminating lies about a poor person who was just seeking refuge in Canada and trying to make some money so he could start a family. Moreover, he is handicapped. I felt so bad, and kept praying silently, “Nothing’s gonna happen to you dear brother . . .” and blowing on the papers as I finished. Of course it was out of the question to tell them what I knew about him truthfully, because SFC Shally already gave me the guidelines: “Captain Collins is awaiting your testimony against Ahmed Laabidi with extreme interest!” I gave the assignment to SFC Shally, and after evaluation, I saw Captain Collins smiling for the first time.

  “Your writing about Ahmed was very interesting, but we want you to provide more detailed information,” he said. I thought, What information does the idiot want from me? I don’t even remember what I’ve just written.

  “Yes, no problem,” I said. I was very happy that God answered my prayers for Ahmed Laabidi when I learned in 2005 that he was unconditionally released from custody and sent back to his country. “He’s facing the death penalty,” SSG Mary used to tell me! I was really in no better situation.

  “Since I am cooperating, what are yo
u going to do with me?” I asked SFC Shally.

  “It depends. If you provide us a great deal of information we didn’t know, it’s going to be weighed against your sentence. For instance, the death penalty could be reduced to life, and life to thirty years,” he responded. Lord have mercy on me! What harsh justice!

  “Oh, that’s great,” I replied. I felt bad for everybody I hurt with my false testimonies. My only solaces were, one, that I didn’t hurt anybody as much as I did myself; two, that I had no choice; and three, I was confident that injustice will be defeated, it’s only a matter of time. Moreover, I would not blame anybody for lying about me when he gets tortured. Ahmed was just an example. During this period I wrote more than a thousand pages about my friends with false information. I had to wear the suit the U.S. Intel tailored for me, and that is exactly what I did.

  At the beginning of this phase of cooperation the pressure hardly relieved. I was interrogated day and night, and I also had visits from interrogators from the FBI and other agencies who were using my vulnerability. It was so rude to question a human being like that, especially somebody who is cooperating. They made me write names and places and addresses in Germany, Canada, and Mauritania. They showed me military maps, pointing out places of interest. I was shown thousands of pictures. I knew them all by heart because I had seen them so many times; everything was deja-vu. I was like, What ruthless people!

  The whole time, the guards were driven madly against me.

  “Show him no mercy. Increase the pressure. Drive the hell out of him crazy,” said Captain Collins. And that was exactly what the guards did. Banging on my cell to keep me awake and scared. Taking me violently out of my cell at least twice a day for cell search. Taking me outside in the middle of the night and making me do PT I couldn’t due to my health situation. Putting me facing the wall several times a day and threatening me directly and indirectly. Sometimes they even interrogated me, but I never said a word to my interrogators because I knew the interrogators were behind everything.

  “You know who you are?” said Yoda’s associate.

  “Uh . . .”

  “You are a terrorist,” he continued.

  “Yes, Sir!”

  “If we kill you once it wouldn’t do. We must kill you three thousand times. But instead we feed you!”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The water diet kept working on me harshly. “You haven’t seen nothing yet,” they kept telling me.

  “I am not looking forward to see that. I’m just fine without further measures.”

  The guards were working in a two-shift routine, day shift and night shift. Whenever the new shift showed up, they made their presence known by banging heavily on the door of my cell to scare me. Whenever the new shift appeared my heart started to pound because they always came up with new ideas to make my life a living hell, like giving me very little food by allowing me about 30 seconds to one minute to eat it, or forcing me to eat every bit of food I got in a very short time. “You better be done!” they would shout. Or they made me clean the shower excessively, or made me fold my towels and my blanket in an impossible way again and again until they were satisfied. To forbidding me any kind of comfort items, they added new rules. One: I should never be lying down; whenever a guard showed up at my bin hole, I always had to be awake, or wake up as soon as a guard walked into my area. There was no sleeping in the terms that we know. Two: My toilet should always be dry! And how, if I am always urinating and flushing? In order to meet the order, I had to use my only uniform to dry up the toilet and stay soaked in shit. Three: My cell should be in a predefined order, including having a folded blanket, so I could never use my blanket.

  That was the guards’ recipe. I always showed more fear than I felt as self-defense technique. Not that I would like to play the hero; I’m not, but I wasn’t scared of the guards because I just knew they had orders from above. If they reported back that “detainee wasn’t scared!” the doses would have been increased.

  Meanwhile, I had my own recipe. First of all, I knew that I was really just a stone’s throw away from Camp Delta. The interrogators and the guards always hinted at the “God-forsaken nowhere” I was in, but I ignored them completely, and when the guards asked me “Where do you think you are?” I just responded, “I’m not sure, but I am not worried about it; since I am far from my family, it doesn’t really matter to me where I am.” And so I always closed the door whenever they referred to the place. I was afraid that I would be tortured if they knew I knew where I was, but it was kind of solacing, knowing that you are not far from your fellow detainees.

  Once I figured out how to tell day from night, I kept count of the days by reciting 10 pages of the Koran every day. In 60 days I would finish and start over, and so I could keep track of the days. “Shut the fuck up! There is nothing to sing about,” said Sergeant Big Boss when he heard me reciting the Koran. After that I recited quietly so nobody could hear me. But my days of the week were still messed up; I failed to keep track of them until I glimpsed SFC Shally’s watch when he pulled it out of his pocket to check the time. He was very vigilant and careful but it was too late, I saw it was a little past 10 a.m., Friday, October, 17, 2003, but he didn’t notice. Friday is a very important Muslim holiday, and that was the reason I wanted to keep track of the weekdays. Besides, I just hated the fact that they deprived me of one of my basic freedoms.

  I tried to find out everybody’s name who was involved in my torture—not for retaliation or anything like that; I just didn’t want those people to have the upper hand over any of my brothers, or anybody, no matter who he is. I believe they should not only be deprived of their powers, but they should also be locked up. I succeeded in knowing the names of the boss himself, Richard Zuley, two of my interrogators, two of the guards, and other interrogators who weren’t involved directly in my torture but could serve as witnesses.

  When I first met Americans I hated their language because of the pain they made me suffer without a single reason; I didn’t want to learn it. But that was emotion; the call of wisdom was stronger, and so I decided to learn the language. Even though I already knew how to conjugate “to be” and “to have,” my luggage of English was very light. Since I wasn’t allowed to have books, I had to pick up the language mostly from the guards and sometimes my interrogators, and after a short time I could speak like common folk: “He don’t care, she don’t care, I ain’t done nothin’, me and my friend did so and so, F—this and F—that, damn x and damn y . . .”

  I also studied the people around me. My observations resulted in knowing that only white Americans were appointed to deal with me, both guards and interrogators. There was only one black guard, but he had no say. His associate was a younger, white Army specialist but the latter was always in charge. You might say, “How do you know the ranks of the guards, when they were covered?” I wasn’t supposed to know who was in charge, nor should they have given me a hint as to who the boss was, but in America it’s very easy to notice who the boss is: there’s just no mistaking him.

  My suspicion of me being near Camp Delta was cemented when one day I got some of the diet I was used to back in Delta Three. “Why did they give me a hot meal?” I asked the sarcastic head guard. “Doctor said we had to.” I really looked like a ghost, just bones, no meat. In a matter of weeks I had developed gray hair on the lower half of the sides of my head, a phenomenon people in my culture refer to as the extreme result of depression. Keeping up the pressure was vital in the process of my interrogation. The plan worked: the more pressure, the more stories I produced and the better my interrogators felt toward me.

  And then, slowly but surely, the guards were advised to give me the opportunity to brush my teeth, to give me more warm meals, and to give me more showers. The interrogators started to interrogate me without torture or threats; instead, they started using a reward system that included candies and cookies. From what I could see, SSG Mary was the one who took the first steps, but I am sure there had been a meeting ab
out it. Everybody in the team realized that I was about to lose my mind due to my psychological and physical situation. I had been so long in segregation.

  “Please, get me out of this living hell!” I said.

  “You will not go back to the population anytime soon.” SSG Mary told me. Her answer was harsh but true: there was no plan to get me back. The focus was on holding me segregated as long as they could and gathering information from me.

  I still had nothing in my cell. Most of the time I recited the Koran silently. The rest of the time I was talking to myself and thinking over and over about my life and the worst-case scenarios that could happen to me. I kept counting the holes of the cage I was in. There are about four thousand one hundred holes.

  Maybe because of this, SSG Mary happily started to give me some puzzles that I could spend my time solving. “If we discover that you lied to us, you’re gonna feel our wrath, and we’re gonna take everything back. This can all go back to the old days, you know that,” SFC Shally used to tell me whenever he gave me a puzzle. My heart would pound, but I was like, What a jackass! Why can’t he let me enjoy my “reward” for the time being? Tomorrow is another day.

  I started to enrich my vocabulary. I took a paper and started to write words I didn’t understand, and SFC Shally and SSG Mary explained them to me. If there is anything positive about SFC Shally, it is his rich vocabulary. I don’t remember asking him about a word he couldn’t explain to me. English was his only real language, though he claimed to be able to speak Farsi. “I wanted to learn French, but I hated the way they speak and I quit,” he said.

  Captain Collins wants to see you in a couple of days,” SSG Mary said. I was so terrified; at this point I was just fine without his visit.

  “He is welcome,” I said. I started to go to the toilet relentlessly. My blood pressure went crazily high. I was wondering what the visit would be like. But thank God the visit was much easier than what I thought. Captain Collins came, escorted by SFC Shally. He was, as always, practical and brief.