Guantánamo Diary. Mohamedou Ould Slahi

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      “I don’t understand,” I replied. The doctor repeated the nurse’s question, but I still didn’t understand. He spoke too quickly.

      “Never mind!” the doctor said. One of my guards gestured to me, putting one of his hands over the other. Only then did I understand the doctor’s question.

      “In my country!”

      “Where are you from?”

      “Mauritania,” I replied as the guards were dragging me to the next step. Medics are not supposed to interrogate detainees, but they do anyway. Personally I enjoy conversations with everybody and I couldn’t care less about them breaking the rules.

      It was cool and crowded inside the hospital. I was solaced by the fact that I saw detainees who were in the same situation as me, especially after they wrapped us in the orange uniform. Interrogators were disguised among the Medics to gather information.

      “Do you speak Russian?” an old civilian, an Intel wreck of the cold war, asked me. He interrogated me a couple of times later on, and told me that he once worked with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Mujahideen leader in Afghanistan during the war with the Soviets who supposedly used to turn over Russian detainees to the U.S. “I interrogated them. They’re now U.S. citizens, and among my best friends,” he told me. He claimed to be responsible for a section of the GTMO Task Force. Interrogators like him were sneaking around, trying to converse “innocently” with the detainees. However, interrogators have a hard time mixing in with other people. They’re simply very clumsy.

      The escort led me to a room with many detainees and interrogators at work. “What’s your name? Where are you from? Are you married?”

      “Yes!”

      “What’s the name of your wife?” I forgot the name of my wife and several members of my family as well because of the persistent state of depression I had been in now for the last nine months. Since I knew that nobody was going to buy such a thing, I went, “Zeinebou,” just a name that came to my mind.

      “What languages do you speak?”

      “Arabic, French, German.”

      “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” asked a male interrogator in uniform who was helping his black female colleague typing in laptop.

      “Bist du so-and-so?” I asked, using a German name I had been given in Afghanistan. The guy’s nametag said Graham, and so he was shocked when I mentioned his name. The black woman stared at him in confusion.

      “Who told you about me?”

      “Michael, from Bagram!” I said, explaining that in Bagram Michael told me about him, in case I needed a German translator in GTMO.

      “We’ll keep the conversation in English, but very simple,” he said. Michael’s CIA colleague avoided me for the rest of his time in GTMO.

      I was listening to the interrogation of a Tunisian fellow detainee.

      “Did you train in Afghanistan?”

      “No.”

      “You know if you lie, we’re gonna get the information from Tunisia!”

      “I am not lying!”

      The medical check resumed. A black female corpsman took a thousand and one tubes of blood off me. I thought I was going to pass out or even die. A blood pressure check showed 110 over 50, which is very low. The doctor immediately put me on small red tablets to increase my blood pressure. Pictures were taken. I hated the fact that my privacy was being disrespected in every way. I was totally under the mercy of somebody I didn’t trust and who might be ruthless. Many detainees would smile for the camera. I personally never smiled, and I don’t think that on that day, August 5th, 2002, any detainee did.

      After the endless processing, the escort team took me out of the clinic. “Keep your head down!” It was already dark outside but I couldn’t tell what time it was. The weather was nice. “Sit down.” I sat outside for about thirty minutes before the escort team picked me up and put me in a room and locked me to the floor. I didn’t notice the lock, nor had I ever been subject to it before. I thought the room was to be my future home.

      The room was bare but for a couple of chairs and a desk. There was no sign of life. “Where are the other detainees?” I said to myself. I grew impatient and decided to go outside the room and try to find other fellow detainees, but as soon as I tried to stand up the chains pulled me down hard. Only then did I know that something was wrong with my assumptions. As it turned out, I was in the interrogation booth in Brown Building, a building with history.

      All of a sudden three men entered the room: the older guy who spoke to me earlier in the clinic, an FBI agent who introduced himself as William, and a young Moroccan man who served as an interpreter.¹¹

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

      “Je m’appelle . . . . . . ,” I answered, and that was the end of William’s French. 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.

      William led the interrogation, and the Moroccan man was a good translator. The other guy didn’t get the chance to ask questions, he just took notes. William 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. He 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, William 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 William’s assurances, and encouraged in my cooperation. As it turned out, he 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 Oscar Block, a block designed for isolation.¹² 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 Oscar Block.

      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 that dark Oscar Block. 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 СКАЧАТЬ