The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  After giving my trash back I went back to sleep. As soon as I closed my eyes I saw my family in a dream, rescuing me from the Jordanians. In the dream I kept telling my family that it was just a dream, but they would tell me, “No, it’s for real, you’re home.” How devastating, when I woke up and found myself in the dimly lit cell! This dream terrorized me for days. “I told you it’s a dream, please hold me and don’t let me go,” I would say. But there was no holding me. My reality was that I was secretly detained in a Jordanian jail and my family could not even possibly know where I was. Thank God after a while that dream disappeared, though every once in a while I would still wake up crying intensely after hugging my beloved youngest sister.

  The first night is the worst; if you make it through that you’re more than likely going to make it through the rest. It was Ramadan, and so we got two meals served, one at sunset and the second before the first light. The cook woke me up and served me my early meal. Suhoor is what we call this meal; it marks the beginning of our fasting, which lasts until sunset. At home, it’s more than just a meal. The atmosphere matters. My older sister wakes everybody and we sit together eating and sipping the warm tea and enjoying each other’s company. “I promise I will never complain about your food, Mom,” I was thinking to myself.

  I still hadn’t adjusted to Jordanian time. I wasn’t allowed to know the time or date, but later when I made friends among the guards they used to tell me what time it was. This morning I had to guess. It was around 4:30 a.m., which meant around 1:30 a.m. back home. I wondered what my family was doing. Do they know where I am?2 Will God show them my place? Will I ever see them again? Only Allah knows! The chances looked very low. I didn’t eat a lot, and in fact the meal was not that big; a pita bread, buttermilk, and small pieces of cucumber. But I ate more than I did the night before. I kept reading the Koran in the dim light; I wasn’t able to recite because my brain was not working properly. When I thought it must be dawn I prayed, and as soon as I finished the Muezzin started to sing the Azan, his heavenly, fainting, sleepy, hoarse voice awakening in me all kind of emotions. How could all those praying believers possibly accept that one of their own is buried in the Darkness of the Dar Al Tawqif wa Tahqiq.

  There are actually two Azans, one to wake people to eat the last meal, and the other to stop eating and go to pray. It sounds the same; the only difference is that in the last one the Muezzin says, “Prayer is better than sleeping.” I redid my prayers once more and went to bed to choose between being terrorized while awake or asleep. I kept switching between both, as if I were drunk.

  That second day passed without big events. My appetite didn’t change. One of the guards gave me a book to read. I didn’t like it because it was about philosophical differences between all kinds of religions. I really needed a book that would give me comfort. I wished we had a little more peace in the world. I was between sleeping and waking at around 11 p.m. that evening when the guards shouted “Tahgig!” “Interrogation!” and opened the door of my cell.

  “Hurry up!” I froze and my feet numbed, but my heart pumped so hard that I jumped off my bed and complied with the order of the guard. The escort guards handcuffed me behind my back and pushed me toward the unknown. Since I was blindfolded I could think about my destination undisturbed, though the pace of the escorting guard was faster than my anticipation. I felt the warmth of the room I entered. When you’re afraid you need warmth.

  The guard took off both the handcuffs and the blindfold. I saw a big blue machine like the ones in airports for scanning luggage, and some other object to measure height and weight. How relieved I was! They were just going about taking the traditional prisoner data like fingerprints, height, and weight. Although I knew there was no getting around the interrogation session, I both wanted to get through it as soon as possible and was so afraid of that session. I don’t know how to explain it, it might not make sense, I’m just trying to explain my feelings then the best way I can.

  Another day passed. The routine was no different than the days before, though I gathered one vital piece of information: the number of my cell. After the Iftar fast-breaking meal, the guards would start calling a number, a door would open loudly, and you could hear the footsteps of the taken-away detainees. I figured they were being taken away for interrogation. I imagined I heard the guards shouting my cell number about a hundred times, and after each I went to the toilet and performed a ritual wash. I was just so paranoid. Finally, around 10 p.m. on Saturday, a guard shouted “Tahgig!” for real.3 I quickly went to the bathroom. Not that I needed to, I really hadn’t drunk anything and I had already urinated about half a gallon, but the urge was there. What was I going to urinate, blood?

  “Hurry up, we don’t have time,” said the guard who stood at the opened heavy metal door. Later on, I learned that 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. was the prime time for interrogations, with the heaviest traffic of detainees being moved to and from the interrogation rooms. The sergeant handcuffed and blindfolded me, and pushed me off. We took the lift and went one floor down, took a couple of turns, and entered a new area; a door opened and I went down a step. The odor of cigarette smoke hit me. It was the interrogation area, where they smoke relentlessly, like an old train. It’s disgusting when the smoke keeps adding up and dominates the odor of a house.

  The area was remarkably quiet. The escorting guard dropped me against a wall and retreated.

  “What people did you send to Chechnya?” an interrogator named Abu Raad shouted at a detainee in English.

  “I ain’t sent nobody,” responded the detainee in broken Arabic, with an obvious Turkish accent. I right away knew the setup: This interrogation was meant for me.

  “Liar,” shouted Abu Raad.

  “I ain’t lying,” the guy responded in Arabic, although Abu Raad kept speaking his loose English.

  “I don’t care if you have a German or American passport, you’re going to tell me the truth,” said Abu Raad. The setup fit perfectly, and was meant to terrorize me even more. And even though I knew right away it was a setup, it worked.

  “Hi, Abdallah,” said Abu Raad.

  “Hi,” I responded, feeling his breath right in front of my face. I was so terrorized that I hadn’t realized what he was saying.

  “So your name is Abdallah,” he concluded.

  “No!”

  “But you responded when I called you Abdallah,” he argued. I found it idiotic to tell him that I was so terrorized that I didn’t realize what name he called me.

  “If you look at it, we all are Abdallah,” I correctly answered. Abdallah means “God’s servant” in Arabic. But I actually knew how Abu Raad came up with that name. When I arrived in Montreal, Canada, on November 26, 1999, my friend Hasni introduced me to his roommate Mourad by my given name. Later on I met another Tunisian who I’d happened to see when I visited the year before. He called me Abdallah by mistake, and I responded because I found it impolite to correct him. Since then Mourad had called me Abdallah, and I found it cool. I wasn’t trying to deceive Mourad or anyone; after all, Mourad had keys to our common mailbox and always collected my official mail, which obviously bore my given name.

  That was the story of the name. Obviously the Americans tasked the Jordanians with investigating why I took the name Abdallah in Canada, but the Jordanians understand the recipe far more than Americans, and so they completely ignored this part of the interrogation.

  “Do you know where you are?” asked Abu Raad.

  “In Jordan,” I responded. He was obviously shocked. I shouldn’t have been informed about my destination, but the Mauritanian interrogator must have been so angry that he didn’t exactly follow the orders of the Americans. The initial plan was to send me from Mauritania to Jordan blindfolded and not inform me about my destination, in order to plant as much fear and terror in my heart as possible to break me. But as soon as I answered the question, Abu Raad knew that this part of the plan was broken, and so he took off my blindfold right away and led me inside the interroga
tion room.

  It was a small room, about 10 x 8 feet, with an old table and three weathered chairs. Abu Raad was in his late thirties or early forties, Palestinian, with a belly that had already started to give in to gravity. His assistant, Officer Rami, was a younger, taller, and probably smarter version of Abu Raad. He was obviously the type who is ready to do the dirty side of any job. He also looked Palestinian. I scanned both back and forth and wondered about these guys. The whole problem of terrorism was caused by the aggression of Israel against Palestinian civilians, and the fact that the U.S. is backing the Israeli government in its mischiefs. When the Israelis took over Palestine under the fire of the British Artillery, the invasion resulted in a mass migration of the locals. Many of them ended up in neighboring countries, and Jordan received the lion’s share; more than 50 percent of Jordanians are of Palestinian origin. To me, these interrogators just didn’t fit in the vests they were wearing: it didn’t make sense that Palestinians would work for Americans to defeat the people who are supposedly helping them. I knew that these two interrogators standing before me didn’t represent any moral values, and didn’t care about human beings’ lives. I found myself between two supposedly fighting parties, both of which considered me an enemy; the historical enemies were allied to roast me. It was really absurd and funny at the same time.

  Abu Raad and his cohorts played a vital role in the Americans’ War against Terrorism. He was charged with interrogating the kidnapped individuals the U.S. delivered to Jordan and assigning them to the different members of his team. He also personally came to GTMO to interrogate individuals on behalf of the U.S.

  Abu Raad opened a medium-sized binder; it turned out to be a file on me that the U.S. had turned over to the Jordanians. He started to ask me questions that were not related to each other. It was the first time I ever experienced this technique, the goal of which is to quickly bring the liar into contradiction. But Abu Raad obviously was not briefed enough about my case and the history of my interrogation: it wouldn’t have mattered whether I was lying or telling the truth, because I had been questioned so many times about the exact same things by different agencies from different countries. Should I have lied, I would have been able to lie again and again and again, because I had had enough time to straighten my lies. But I hadn’t lied to him—nor did he doubt my truthfulness.

  First he showed me the picture of the Turkish detainee he had been interrogating earlier, and said “If you tell me about this guy, I am going to close your case and send you home.” Of course he was lying.

  I looked at the photo and honestly answered, “No, I don’t know him.” I am sure the guy was asked the same question about me, and he must have answered the same because there was no way that he knew me.

  Officer Rami was sitting on Abu Raad’s left and recording my answers. “Do you drink tea?” Abu Raad asked me.

  “Yes, I like tea.” Abu Raad ordered the tea guy to bring me a cup, and I got a big, hot cup of tea. When the caffeine started to mix with my blood I got hyper and felt so comforted. Those interrogators know what they are doing.

  “Do you know Ahmed Ressam?” asked Abu Raad. I had been asked about Ahmed Ressam a thousand and one times, and I tried everything I could to convince interrogators that I don’t know that guy: if you don’t know somebody, you just don’t know him, and there is no changing it. Even if they torture you, they will not get any usable information. But for some reason the Americans didn’t believe that I didn’t know him, and they wanted the Jordanians to make me admit it.

  “No, I don’t know him,” I answered.

  “I swear to Allah you know him,” he shouted.

  “Don’t swear,” I said, although I knew that taking the Lord’s name in vain is like sipping coffee for him. Abu Raad kept swearing. “Do you think I am lying to you?”

  “No, I think you forgot.” That was too nicely put, but the fact that the Americans didn’t provide the Jordanians with any substantial evidence tied the hands of the Jordanians mightily. Yes, Jordanians practice torture on a daily basis, but they need a reasonable suspicion to do so. They don’t just jump on anybody and start to torture him. “I am going to give you pen and paper, and I want you to write me your resumé and the names of all of your friends,” he said, closing the session and asking the guard to take me back to my cell.

  The worst was over; at least I thought so. The escorting guards were almost friendly when they handcuffed and blindfolded me. There is one common thing among prison guards, whether they are American, Mauritanian, or Jordanian: they all reflect the attitude of the interrogators. If the interrogators are happy the guards are happy, and if not, then not.

  The escorting guards felt some freedom to talk to me. “Where are you from?”

  “Mauritania.”

  “What are you doing in Jordan?”

  “My country turned me over.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “Your country is fucked up.” In the Jordanian Prison, as in Mauritania and GTMO, it was extremely forbidden for the guards to interact with detainees. But hardly anybody followed the rules.

  “You are starving, man, why don’t you eat?” one of the escorting guards asked me. He was right. The shape of my bones was clear, and anybody could tell how serious my situation was.

  “I am only going to eat if I get back home. I’m not interested in prison food. I’m interested in my mom’s food,” I answered.

  “God willing, you’re going to get out, but for the time being you got to eat.” I don’t want to make him look good, his type of job already defines his personality, but he felt that his country was not just. I needed any comforting word, and so far he had done a good job with me. Other guards joined us in the corridor and asked him where I’m from.

  They opened the door to my stark, dark cell. I felt as though a big burden was taken off my back. “It’s only a matter of days, and then they’ll send me back home. The DSE was right,” I thought. The Jordanians were as confused about the case the U.S. had given them as I was. The U.S. government obviously hadn’t given any substantial material to help the Jordanians to do their dirty job. The painful fear started to diminish, and I started to feel like eating.

  Sneaky I’m-Watching-You appeared at the bin hole of my cell and gave me thirty numbered pieces of paper. The coordination between the interrogators and guards was perfect. I immediately wrote both assignments. I was tasked by Abu Raad with writing the names of all my friends, but that was ridiculous: I had so many acquaintances that it would be impossible to include them in less than a big book. So I completed a list of my closest friends and a traditional resumé, using about ten pages. For the first time I had some relatively good sleep that night.

  Some time in the next couple of days I’m-Watching-You picked up the written materials and the empty papers as well. He counted the papers thoroughly.

  “Is that all you have to write?”

  “Yes, Sir!” I’m-Watching-You had been working day and night, and all he was doing was checking on detainees through the bin holes. Most of the time I didn’t notice him. Once he caught me having a good time with a guard and he took me and interrogated me about what we were talking about. As to the guard, he disappeared and I never saw him again.

  “Put your stuff together,” a guard said, waking me in the morning. I grabbed my blanket, my Koran, and the one library book I had. I was so happy because I thought I was being sent home.

  The guard made me hold my stuff and blindfolded me. They didn’t send me home; instead I found myself locked in the cellar, in a communal cell close to the prison kitchen. The cell there was not clean. It seemed to have been abandoned for a long time. I still wanted to believe in good intentions, and I thought this was the transfer cell for detainees before their release. I was so tired and the cell was so cold that I went to sleep.

  Around 4:30 p.m. Iftar was served, and I slowly came to life. I noticed an old paper on the door with the rules of the
prison. The guards had clumsily forgotten to tear it off. I wasn’t supposed to read the rules, but since nobody is perfect, I had the chance to discover something. The rules stated, among other things, (1) You are only allowed to smoke if you are cooperating; (2) Talking to the guards is forbidden; (3) the ICRC visits the prison every 14 days; (4) Do not talk to the ICRC about your political case.4 I was happy, because I would at least be able to send letters to my family, but I missed a vital point: I had been taken temporarily to the cellar to hide me from the ICRC in a Cat-and-Mouse game that lasted eight months, my entire stay in Jordan.

  Every fourteen days, the guards would consistently move me from my cell to the cellar, where I would spend a couple of days before they brought me back to my cell. When I discovered the trick, I explicitly asked my interrogator Rami and his boss Abu Raad to see the ICRC.

  “There is no ICRC here. This is a Military prison,” he lied.

  “I have seen the clauses of the Rules, and you’re hiding me in the cellar every 14 days to prevent me from meeting the Red Cross.”

  Officer Rami looked at me firmly. “I am protecting you! And you are not going to see the ICRC.” I knew then that there was no changing their minds, and Rami himself couldn’t even decide the issue. It was way above him. The conspiracy between Mauritania, the U.S., and Jordan to commit the crime was perfect. If my involvement in terrorism were cemented, I would be executed and the party would be over, and who was to know what had happened?

  “I’d like to see the Mauritanian Ambassador,” I asked the interrogator.

  “Impossible.”

  “OK, what about Mauritanian Intel?” I asked.

  “What do you want with them?”

  “I would like to ask them about the reason for my incarceration in Jordan. At least you know that I have done nothing against your country.”

  “Look, your country is a good friend of ours, and they turned you over to us. We can do anything we like with you, kill you, arrest you indefinitely, or release you if you admit to your crime.” Officer Rami both lied and told the truth. Arab countries are not friends. On the contrary, they hate each other. They never cooperate; all they do is conspire against each other. To Mauritania, Jordan is worthless, and vice-versa. However, in my case the U.S. compelled them both to work together.