Guantánamo Diary (10 page)

“Comment vous vous appelez?” asked
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in a thick accent.

“Je m’appelle……” I answered, and that was the end of
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. Interrogators always tend to bring the factor of surprise as a technique.

I glimpsed one of the guy’s watches. It was nearly 1 a.m. I was in a state where my system had gotten messed up; I was wide awake in spite of more than forty-eight hours of sleeplessness. The interrogators wanted to use that weakness to facilitate the interrogation. I was offered nothing such as water or food.

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led the interrogation, and
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was a good translator. The other guy didn’t get the chance to ask questions, he just took notes.
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didn’t really come up with a miracle: all he did was ask me some questions I had been asked uninterruptedly for the past three years.
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spoke a very clear English, and I almost didn’t need the translator. He seemed to be smart and experienced. When the night grew late,
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thanked me for my cooperation.

“I believe that you are very open,” he said. “The next time we’ll untie your hands and bring you something to eat. We will not torture you, nor will we extradite you to another country.” I was happy with
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assurances, and encouraged in my cooperation. As it turned out,
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was either misleading me or he was unknowledgeable about the plans of his government.

The three men left the room and sent the escort team to me,
which led me to my cell. It was in
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Block, a block designed for isolation.
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I was the only detainee who had been picked for interrogation from our entire group of thirty-four detainees. There was no sign of life inside the block, which made me think that I was the only one around. When the guard dropped me in the frozen-cold box I almost panicked behind the heavy metal door. I tried to convince myself, It’s only a temporary place, in the morning they’re going to transfer me to the community. This place cannot be for more than the rest of the night! In fact, I spent one whole month in
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.

It was around 2 a.m. when the guard handed me an MRE. I tried to eat what I could, but I had no appetite. When I checked my stuff I saw a brand new Koran, which made me happy. I kissed the Koran and soon fell asleep. I slept deeper than I ever had.

The shoutings of my fellow detainees woke me up in the early morning. Life was suddenly blown into
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. When I arrived earlier that morning, I never thought that human beings could be possibly stored in a bunch of cold boxes; I thought I was the only one, but I was wrong, my fellow detainees were only knocked out due to the harsh punishment trip they had behind them. While the guards were
serving the food, we were introducing us to ourselves. We couldn’t see each other due to the design of the block but we could hear each other.

“Salam Alaikum!”

“Waalaikum Salam.”

“Who are you?

“I am from Mauritania… Palestine… Syria… Saudi Arabia…!”

“How was the trip?”

“I almost froze to death,” shouted one guy.

“I slept the whole trip,” replied
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.

“Why did they put the patch beneath my ear?” said a third.

“Who was in front of me in the truck?” I asked. “He kept moving, which made the guards beat me all the way from the airport to the camp.”

“Me, too,” another detainee answered.

We called each other with the ISN numbers we were assigned in Bagram. My number was
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.
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In the cell on my left was
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from
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. He is about
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. Though Mauritanian, he had never really been in the country; I could tell because of his
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accent. On my right was the guy from the
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. He spoke poor Arabic, and claimed to have been captured in Karachi, where he attends the University. In front of my cell they put the Sudanese, next to each other.
^†

Breakfast was modest: one boiled egg, a hard piece of bread, and something else I don’t know the name of. It was my first hot meal since I left Jordan. Oh, the tea was soothing! I like tea better than any food, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been drinking it. Tea is a crucial part of the diet of people from warmer regions; it sounds contradictory but it is true.

People were shouting all over the place in indistinct conversations. It was just a good feeling when everybody started to recount his story. Many detainees suffered, some more and some less. I didn’t consider myself the worst, nor the luckiest. Some people were captured with their friends and their friends disappeared from the face of the earth; they most likely were sent to other allied countries to facilitate their interrogation by torture, such as the
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. I considered the arrival to Cuba a blessing, and so I told the brothers, “Since you guys are not involved in crimes, you need to fear nothing. I personally am going to cooperate, since nobody is going to torture me. I don’t want any of you to suffer what I suffered in Jordan. In Jordan, they hardly appreciate your cooperation.”

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
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Block. When we later got transferred to a different block, many fellow detainees cried for being separated from their new friends. I cried, too.

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escort team showed up at my cell.

“
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!” said one of the MPs, holding the long chains in his hands.
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is the code word for being taken to interrogation.
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Although I didn’t understand where I was going, I prudently followed their orders until they delivered me to the interrogator. His name was
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wearing a U.S. Army uniform. He is an
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, a man with all the paradoxes you may imagine. He spoke Arabic decently, with a
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accent; you could tell he grew up among
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friends.
^†

I was terrified when I stepped into the room in
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building because of the CamelBak on
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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
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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
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to me, “I chose
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because he speaks your language. We’re going to ask you detailed questions about you
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. 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
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to work.

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was a friendly guy. He was
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in the U.S. Army who believed himself to be lucky in life.
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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,
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felt very sorry!

“Those countries don’t respect human rights. They even torture people,” he said. I was comforted: if
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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
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finished his interrogation, he sent me back and promised to come back should new questions arise. During the session with
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, 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
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in an interrogation again. The
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resumed his work a couple of days later, only the
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was now reinforced with
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,
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.
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was another friendly guy. He and
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worked very well together. For some reason,
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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
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had the upper hand.
^*

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
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.

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
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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 hypertension 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
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fed us with the latest news and rumors from camp.
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had been transferred to our Block due to his “behavior.”
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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
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had been working as an
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. He was captured with four other colleagues of his in his domicile in
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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.