The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  But has there ever, in all of recorded human history, been an interrogation that has gone on, day in and day out, for more than six years? There is nothing an interrogator could say to me that would be new; I’ve heard every variation. Each new interrogator would come up with the most ridiculous theories and lies, but you could tell they were all graduates of the same school: before an interrogator’s mouth opened I knew what he or she was going to say and why he or she was saying it.

  “I am your new interrogator. I have very long experience doing this job. I was sent especially from Washington D.C. to assess your case.”

  “You are the most important detainee in this camp. If you cooperate with me, I am personally going to escort you to the airport. If you don’t cooperate, you’re gonna spend the rest of your life on this island.”

  “You’re very smart. We don’t want to keep you in jail. We would rather capture the big fish and release the small fish, such as yourself.”

  “You haven’t driven a plane into a building; your involvement can be forgiven with just a five-minute talk. The U.S. is the greatest country in the world; we would rather forgive than punish.”

  “Many detainees have talked about you being the bad person. I personally don’t believe them; however, I would like to hear your side of the story, so I can defend you appropriately.”

  “I have nothing against Islam, I even have many Muslim friends.”

  “I have helped many detainees to get out of this place; just by writing a positive report stating that you told the whole truth . . . . .”

  And so on, in an endless recitation that all the interrogators recited when they met with their detainees. Most detainees couldn’t help laughing when they had to hear this Groundhog Day nonsense; in fact, it was the only entertainment we got in the interrogation booth. When his interrogator told him, “I know you are innocent,” one of my fellow detainees laughed hard and responded, “I’d rather be a criminal and sitting home with my kids.” I believe anything loses its influence the more we repeat it. If you hear an expression like, “You are the worst criminal on the face the earth” for the first time, you’ll most likely get the hell scared out of you. But the fear diminishes the more times you hear it, and at some point it will have no effect at all. It may even sound like a daily compliment.

  And yet let’s look at it from the interrogator’s perspective. They were literally taught to hate us detainees. “Those people are the most evil creatures on earth . . . Do not help the enemy . . . Keep in mind they are enemies . . . Look out, the Arabs are the worst, especially the Saudis and the Yemenis. They’re hard-core, they’re savages. . . . Watch out, don’t approach or talk to them unless you secure everything . . .” In GTMO, interrogators are taught more about the potential behavior of detainees than about their actual intelligence value, and so the U.S. interrogators consistently succeeded in missing the most trivial information about their own detainees. I’m not speaking about second hand information; I’m speaking about my own experience.

  “KSM spoke about you!” SSG Mary said to me once.

  “KSM doesn’t know me, how could he possibly have spoken about me? Just read my file again.”1

  “I am sure that he did. I’m gonna show you!” SSG Mary said. But she never did because she was wrong. I had heard of such and worse examples depicting the ignorance of interrogators about their detainees. The government would hold back basic information from its interrogators for tactical reasons, and then tell them, “The detainee you are assigned to is deeply involved in terrorism and has vital information about coming and already performed attacks; your job is to get everything he knows.” In fact, I hardly met a detainee who was involved in a crime against the United States.

  So you have interrogators who are prepared, schooled, trained, and pitted to meet their worst enemies. And you have detainees who typically were captured and turned over to U.S forces without any proper judicial process. After that, they experienced heavy mistreatment and found themselves incarcerated in another hemisphere, in GTMO Bay, by a country that claims to safeguard human rights all over the world—but a country that many Muslims suspect is conspiring with other evil forces to wipe the Islamic religion off the face of the earth. All in all, the environment is not likely to be a place of love and reconciliation. The hatred here is heavily watered.

  But believe it or not, I have seen guards crying because they had to leave their duties in GTMO.

  “I am your friend, I don’t care what anybody says,” said one guard to me before he left.

  “I was taught bad things about you, but my judgment tells me something else. I like you very much, and I like speaking with you. You are a great person,” said another.

  “I hope you get released,” said SSG Mary genuinely.

  “You guys are my brothers, all of you,” another whispered to me.

  “I love you!” said a white female corpsman once to my neighbor, a funny young guy I personally enjoyed talking to. He was shocked.

  “What . . . Here no love . . . I am Mouslim!” I just laughed about that “forbidden” love.

  But I couldn’t help crying myself one day when I saw a German-descendent female guard crying because she got just a little bit hurt. The funny thing was I hid my feelings because I didn’t want them to be misinterpreted by my brethren, or understood as a weakness or a betrayal. At one point I hated myself and confused the hell out of myself. I started to ask myself questions about the humane emotions I was having toward my enemies. How could you cry for somebody who caused you so much pain and destroyed your life? How could you possibly like somebody who ignorantly hates your religion? How could you put up with these evil people who keep hurting your brothers? How could you like somebody who works day and night to pull shit on you? I was in a worse situation than a slave: at least a slave is not always shackled in chains, has some limited freedom, and doesn’t have to listen to some interrogator’s bullshit every day.

  I often compared myself with a slave. Slaves were taken forcibly from Africa, and so was I. Slaves were sold a couple of times on their way to their final destination, and so was I. Slaves suddenly were assigned to somebody they didn’t choose, and so was I. And when I looked at the history of slaves, I noticed that slaves sometimes ended up an integral part of the master’s house.

  I have been through several phases during my captivity. The first phase was the worst: I almost lost my mind fighting to get back to my family and the life I was used to. My torture was in my rest; as soon as closed my eyes, I found myself complaining to them about what has happened to me.

  “Am I with you for real, or is it a mere dream?”

  “No, you’re really at home!”

  “Please hold me, don’t let me go back!” But the reality always hit me as soon as I woke up to the dark bleak cell, looking around just long enough to fall asleep and experience it all again. It was several weeks before I realized that I’m in jail and not going home anytime soon. As harsh as it was, this step was necessary to make me realize my situation and work objectively to avoid the worst, instead of wasting my time with my mind playing games on me. Many people don’t pass this step; they lose their minds. I saw many detainees who ended up going crazy.

  Phase two is when you realize for real that you’re in jail and you possess nothing but all the time in the world to think about your life—although in GTMO detainees also have to worry about daily interrogations. You realize you have control over nothing, you don’t decide when you eat, when you sleep, when you take a shower, when you wake up, when you see the doctor, when you see the interrogator. You have no privacy; you cannot even squeeze a drop of urine without being watched. In the beginning it is a horrible thing to lose all those privileges in the blink of an eye, but believe me, people get used to it. I personally did.

  Phase three is discovering your new home and family.

  Your family comprises the guards and your interrogators. True, you didn’t choose this family, nor did you grow up with it, but it’s
a family all the same, whether you like it or not, with all the advantages and disadvantages. I personally love my family and wouldn’t trade it for the world, but I have developed a family in jail that I also care about. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off. But I am so happy if a bad member has to leave.2

  “I’m going to leave soon,” SSG Mary said a couple of days before she left.

  “Really? Why?”

  “It’s about time. But the other sergeant is going to stay with you. That was not exactly comforting, but it would have been futile to argue: the transfer of MI agents is not a subject of discussion. “We’re gonna watch a movie together before I leave,” SSG Mary added.

  “Oh, good!” I said. I hadn’t digested the news yet.

  SSG Mary most likely studied psychology, and came from the west coast, maybe California. She once told me that after joining the U.S. Army in her early twenties, she was deployed to Bosnia in the late 1990s. I think that Mary comes from a rather poor family. The U.S. Army provides a great deal of opportunity for people from the lower classes, and most of the military people I’ve seen are from the lower class. She looked at Richard Zuley and his ideas very highly, but she had a rather shaky relation ship with the rest of the team. She has a very strong personality. At the same time, she likes her job, and might have been forced to step over the red line of her principles sometimes. “I know what we are doing is not healthy for our country,” she used to tell me.

  SSG Mary was my first real encounter with an American female soldier. “Sergeant, you are so foul-mouthed! I feel ashamed for you,” I wondered once. She smiled.

  “It’s because I’ve been most of the time around guys.” At first I had a problem starting a conversation with a foul-mouthed female, but later I learned that there was no way to speak colloquial English without F—ing this and F—ing that. English accepts more curses than any other language, and I soon learned to curse with the commoners. Sometimes guards would ask me to translate certain words into Arabic, German, or French, but the translation spun around in my head and I could not spit it out; it just sounded so gross. On the other hand, when I curse in English I really have no bad feeling whatsoever, because that’s the way I learned the language from day one. I had a problem when it comes to blasphemy, but everything else was tolerable. The curses are just so much more harmless when everybody uses them recklessly.

  SSG Mary was one of my main teachers of the dictionary of curse words, alongside Yoda and the rest of the guards. SSG Mary had been through some bad relationships; she had been cheated on and some bad things like that.

  “Did you cry when you knew?” I asked her.

  “No, I didn’t want to give my boyfriend the satisfaction he was important to me. I have a problem when it comes to crying.”

  “I see.” But I personally don’t see the problem: I cry whenever if I feel like it and it makes me stronger to admit my weakness.

  SSG Mary was misused by SFC Shally and his colleague and boss Richard Zuley and some other behind-the-scenes guys. I know that I am looking for excuses to acquit SSG Mary; she was old enough to know that what she was doing was wrong, and she could have both saved her job and had the other higher-ranking officers fired. She certainly contributed to the pressure to which I had been subjected. But I do also know that SSG Mary doesn’t believe in torture.

  I used to make fun of the signs they put up for the interrogators and the guards to raise their morale, “Honor bound to defend freedom.” I once cited that big sign to SSG Mary.

  “I hate that sign,” she said.

  “How could you possibly be defending freedom, if you’re taking it away?” I would say.

  The bosses had noticed the close relationship developing between SSG Mary and me, and so they separated her from me when I was kidnapped. The last words I heard were, “You’re hurting him! Who gave you the orders?” her shouts fading away as Mr. X and Big Boss dragged me out of the room in Gold Building. And when they decided to give me a chance at a halfway humane interrogation, SSG Mary appeared in the picture again. But this time she was somewhat unfriendly to me, and used any opportunity to make my statements look stupid. I couldn’t understand her behavior. Was it in my favor, or was she just pissed off at everybody? I’m not going to judge anybody; I’m leaving that part to Allah. I am just providing the facts as I have seen and experienced them, and I don’t leave anything out to make somebody look good or bad. I understand that nobody is perfect, and everybody does both good and bad things. The only question is, How much of each?

  “Do you hate my government?” SSG Mary asked me once while sifting through a map.

  “No, I hate nobody.”

  “I would hate the U.S. if I were you!” she said. “You know, nobody really knows what we’re doing here. Only a few people in the government know about it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The President reads the files of some detainees. He reads your case.”

  “Really?”

  SSG Mary enjoyed rewarding rather than punishing detainees. I can say without a doubt that she didn’t enjoy harassing me, although she tried to keep her “professional” face; on the other hand, she very much enjoyed giving some stuff back. SSG Mary was even the one who came with most of the ideas related to literature that I was given to read.

  “This book is from Captain Collins,” Mary said one day, handing me a thick novel that was called something like Life in the Forest.3 It was historical fiction, written by a British writer, and it covered a great deal of the medieval European history and the Norman invasion. I received the book gratefully and read it hungrily, at least three times. Later on, she brought me several Star Wars books. Whenever I finished one, she traded it for a new one.

  “Oh, thank you very much!”

  “Did you like the Star Wars?”

  “I sure do!” In truth, I didn’t really like Star Wars books and their language, but I had to settle for any books they gave to me. In prison you have nothing but all the time in the world to think about your life and the goal thereof. I think prison is one of the oldest and greatest schools in the world: you learn about God and you learn patience. A few years in prison are equivalent to decades of experience outside it. Of course there is the devastating side of the prison, especially for innocent prisoners who, besides dealing with the daily hardship of prison, have to deal with the psychological damages that result from confinement without a crime. Many innocent people in prison contemplate suicide.

  Just imagine yourself going to bed, putting all your worries aside, enjoying your favorite magazine to put you to sleep, you’ve put the kids to bed, your family is already sleeping. You are not afraid of being dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night to a place you’ve never seen before, deprived of sleep, and terrorized all the time. Now imagine that you have no say at all in your life—when you sleep, when you wake up, when you eat, and sometimes when you go to the toilet. Imagine that your whole world comprises, at most, a 6 by 8 foot cell. If you imagine all of that, you still won’t understand what prison really means unless you experience it yourself.

  SSG Mary showed up as promised a few days later with a laptop and two movies, and told me. “You can decide which one you’d like to watch!” I picked the movie Black Hawk Down; I don’t remember the other choice.

  The movie was both bloody and sad. I paid more attention to the emotions of Mary and the guards than to the movie itself. SSG Mary was rather calm; every once in a while she paused the movie to explain the historical background of certain scenes to me. The guards almost went crazy emotionally because they saw many Americans getting shot to death. But they missed that the number of U.S. casualties is negligible compared to the Somalis who were attacked in their own homes. I was just wondering at how narrow-minded human beings can be. When people look at one thing from one perspective, they certainly fail to get the whole picture, and that is the main reason for the majority of misunderstandings
that sometimes lead to bloody confrontations.

  After we finished watching the movie, Mary packed her computer and got ready to leave.

  “Eh, by the way, you didn’t tell me when you’re going to leave!”

  “I am done, you won’t see me anymore!” I froze as if my feet were stuck on the floor. Mary didn’t tell me that she was leaving that soon; I thought maybe in a month, three weeks, something like that—but today? In my world that was impossible. Imagine if death were devouring some friend of yours and you just were helplessly watching him fading away.

  “Oh, really, that soon? I’m surprised! You didn’t tell me. Good-bye,” I said. “I wish everything good for you.”

  “I have to follow my orders, but I leave you in good hands.” And off she went. I reluctantly went back to my cell and silently burst in tears, as if I’d lost a family member, and not somebody whose job was to hurt me and extract information in an end-justifies-the-means way. I both hated and felt sorry for myself for what was happening to me.

  “May I see my interrogator please?” I asked the guards, hoping they could catch Mary before they reached the main gate.

  “We’ll try,” said Yoda. I retreated back in my cell, but soon Mary showed up at the door of my cell.

  “That is not fair. You know that I suffered torture and am not ready for another round.”

  “You haven’t been tortured. You must trust my government. As long as you’re telling the truth, nothing bad is gonna happen to you!” Of course she meant The Truth as it’s officially defined. But I didn’t want to argue with her about anything.

  “I just don’t want to start everything over with new interrogators,” I said.

  “It’s not gonna happen,” Mary said. “Besides, you can write me. I promise I’ll answer every email of yours,” she continued.