Guantánamo Diary. Mohamedou Ould Slahi

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 hypotension 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 Mallah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who fed us with the latest news and rumors from camp, and the Jordanian Abu Huzaifa, who had been transferred to Oscar Block due to his “behavior.”¹⁶

      Abu Huzaifa 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 Ibrahim, the Sudanese who suffered hypothermia during the flight to Guantánamo.

      Ibrahim had been working as an Arabic teacher for a Kuwaiti relief organization, helping to educate Afghani refugees. He was captured with four other colleagues of his in his domicile in Peshawar 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.

      On September 4, 2002, I was transferred to Delta Block, and so the interrogators ended the isolation and put me in with general population. On the one hand, it was hard for me to leave the friends I’d just made, and on the other hand I was excited about going to a dead normal Block, and being a dead average detainee. I was tired of being a “special” detainee, riding all over the world against my will.

      I arrived in Delta Block before sunset. For the first time in more than nine months, I was put in a cell where I could see the plain. And for the first time I was able to talk to my fellow detainees while seeing them. I was put in cell number 5, between two Saudis from the South. Both were very friendly and entertaining. They had both been captured by the Pakistanis and sold to the U.S. When the prisoners tried to free themselves from the Pakistani Army, which was working on behalf of the U.S., one of them, an Algerian, grabbed the AK47 of a Pakistani guard and shot him. In the melee, the other captured detainees asserted control of the transport bus; the guards fled, and the detainees fled too—just as far as where another army, a U.S. division, was awaiting them, and they were captured again. The bus escape attempt caused many casualties and injuries. I saw an Algerian detainee who was completely disabled due to the amount of bullets he had taken.

      I had a good time in Delta Block at the beginning, but things started to get ugly when some interrogators started to practice torture methods on some detainees, though shyly. As far as I heard and saw, the only method practiced at first was the cold room, all night. I know a young Saudi man who was taken to interrogation every night and put back in his cell in the morning. I don’t know the details of what exactly happened to him because he was very quiet, but my neighbors told me that he refused to talk to his interrogators . One of my neighbors also told me that he was also put in the cold room two nights in a row because he refused to cooperate.

      Most of the detainees by then were refusing to cooperate after they felt they had provided everything relevant to their cases. People were desperate and growing tired of being interrogated all the time, without hope of an end. I personally was relatively new and wanted to take my chances: maybe my fellow detainees were wrong! But I ended up bumping into the same brick wall as anybody else. Detainees grew worried about their situation and the absence of a due process of law, and things started to get worse with the use of painful methods to extract information from detainees.

      Around mid-September, 2002, not long after my transfer to Delta Block, a new team with two agents with rhyming names, John and Don, pulled me to interrogation and introduced themselves as the team that was going to assess me for the next two months.

      “How long am I going to be interrogated?”

      “As long as the government has questions for you!”

      “How long is that?”

      “I can only tell you that you will not spend more than five years here,” said John. The team was communicating with me through an Arabic interpreter who looked like he was in his late forties.

      “I’m not ready to be asked the same questions again and again!”

      “No, we have some new questions.” But as it turned out they were asking me the very same questions I had been asked for the last three years. Even so, I was reluctantly cooperating. I honestly didn’t see any advantages in cooperating, I just wanted to see how far things were going to go.

      Around the same time another interrogator, a CIA agent who called himself Peter, pulled me to interrogation. He was a very tall, skinny white man in his early forties. He had an organized goatee, and spoke perfect Arabic with a distinct Tunisian accent . Peter possessed the kind of confidence and authority his job required. He was straightforward with me, and even shared with me what the U.S. government was saying about other detainees and about me. He was talking, and talking, and talking some more: he was interested in getting me to work for him, as he had tried with other North African Arabs.¹⁷

      “Next Thursday, I’ve arranged a meeting with the Germans. Are you going to talk to them?”

      “Yes, I am.” That was the first lie I detected, because the FBI’s William had told me, “No foreign government is going to talk to you here, only us Americans!” In fact, I heard about many detainees meeting with non-American interrogators, such as the Uighur detainees from China. Agents from Chinese intelligence services came to GTMO and were helping the U.S. to extract information from the Uighur detainees. These foreign interrogators threatened some of their interviewees with torture when they got back home.

      “I hope I see you in another place,” said the Chinese interrogator to one of the Uighur detainees. “If we see each other in Turkistan, you’re gonna talk a lot!”¹⁸

      But I was not afraid of talking to anyone. I had done no crimes against anybody. I even wanted to talk to prove my innocence, since the American motto was “GTMO detainees are guilty until proven innocent.” I knew what was awaiting me when it came to foreign interrogators, and I wanted to get things out off my chest.

      The day came and the guards pulled me and took me to a building called Orange Trailer, where detainees usually met CIA and foreign intelligence agents. Two German gentlemen were sitting on the other side of the table, and I was looking at them, locked on the floor. The older man was quieter than the younger one, who played the bad guy role during the interrogation. СКАЧАТЬ