All these thoughts were sliding through my head, and distracted me from hearing the nonsense conversations. After about forty minutes, I couldn’t really tell, Captain Collins instructed the Arabic team to take over. The two guys grabbed me roughly, and since I couldn’t walk on my own, they dragged me on the tips of my toes to the boat. I must have been very near the water, because the trip to the boat was short. I don’t know, they either they put me in another boat or in a different seat. This seat was both hard and straight.
“Move!”
“I can’t move!”
“Move, Fucker!” They gave this order knowing that I was too hurt to be able to move. After all I was bleeding from my mouth, my ankles, my wrists, and maybe my nose, I couldn’t tell for sure. But the team wanted to keep the factor of fear and terror maintained.
“Sit!” said the Egyptian guy, who did most of the talking while both were pulling me down until I hit the metal. The Egyptian sat on my right side, and the Jordanian on my left.
“What’s your fucking name?” asked the Egyptian.
“M-O-O-H-H-M-M-EE-D-D-O-O-O-U!” I answered. Technically I couldn’t speak because of the swollen lips and hurting mouth. You could tell I was completely scared. Usually I wouldn’t talk if somebody starts to hurt me. In Jordan, when the interrogator smashed me in the face, I refused to talk, ignoring all his threats. This was a milestone in my interrogation history. You can tell I was hurt like never before; it wasn’t me anymore, and I would never be the same as before. A thick line was drawn between my past and my future with the first hit Mr. X delivered to me.
“He is like a kid!” said the Egyptian accurately, addressing his Jordanian colleague. I felt warm between them both, though not for long. With the cooperation of the Americans, a long torture trip was being prepared.
I couldn’t sit straight in the chair. They put me in a kind of thick jacket which fastened me to the seat. It was a good feeling. However, there was a destroying drawback to it: my chest was so tightened that I couldn’t breathe properly. Plus, the air circulation was worse than the first trip. I didn’t know why, exactly, but something was definitely going wrong.
“I c. . . . a . . . a . . . n’t br . . . e . . . a . . . the!”
“Suck the air!” said the Egyptian wryly. I was literally suffocating inside the bag around my head. All my pleas and my begging for some free air ended in a cul-de-sac.
I heard indistinct conversations in English, I think it was Mr. X and his colleague, and probably Captain Collins. Whoever it was, they were supplying the Arab team with torture materials during the three-or four-hour trip. The order went as follows: They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice cubes from my neck to my ankles, and whenever the ice melted, they put in new, hard ice cubes. Moreover, every once in a while, one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face. The ice served both for the pain and for wiping out the bruises I had from that afternoon. Everything seemed to be perfectly prepared. People from cold regions might not understand the extent of the pain when ice cubes get stuck on your body. Historically, kings during medieval and pre-medieval times used this method to let the victim slowly die. The other method, of hitting the victim while blindfolded in inconsistent intervals, was used by the Nazis during World War II. There is nothing more terrorizing than making somebody expect a smash every single heartbeat.
“I am from Hasi Matruh, where are you from?” said the Egyptian, addressing his Jordanian colleague. He was speaking as if nothing was happening. You could tell he was used to torturing people.
“I am from the south” answered the Jordanian. I tried to keep my prayers in my heart. I could hardly remember a prayer, but I did know I needed the Lord’s help, as I always do, and in that direction went my prayers. Whenever I was conscious, I drowned in my thoughts. I finally had gotten used to the routine, ice cubes until melted, smashing. But what would it be like if I landed in Egypt after about twenty-five hours of torture? What would the interrogation there look like? Mamdouh Habib, an Australian detainee who was born in Egypt, once described his unlucky trip from Pakistan to Egypt to me; so far everything I was experiencing, like the ice cubes and smashing, was consistent with Mamdouh’s story. So I expected electric shocks in the pool. How much power can my body, especially my heart, handle? I know something about electricity and its devastating, irreversible damage: I saw Mamdouh collapsing in the blocks a couple of times every week with blood gushing out of his nose until it soaked his clothes. Mamdouh Habib was a Martial art trainer and athletically built.33
I was constructing the whole interrogation over and over, their questions, my answers. But what if they don’t believe me? No, they would believe me, because they understand the recipe of terrorism more than the Americans, and have more experience. The cultural barrier between the Christian and the Muslim world still irritates the approach of Americans to the whole issue considerably; Americans tend to widen the circle of involvement to catch the largest possible numbers of Muslims. They always speak about the Big Conspiracy against the U.S. I personally had been interrogated about people who just practiced the basics of the religion and sympathized with Islamic movements; I was asked to provide every detail about Islamic movements, no matter how moderate. That’s amazing in a country like the U.S., where Christian terrorist organizations such as Nazis and White Supremacists have the freedom to express themselves and recruit people openly and nobody can bother them. But as a Muslim, if you sympathize with the political views of an Islamic organization you’re in big trouble. Even attending the same mosque as a suspect is big trouble. I mean this fact is clear for everybody who understands the ABCs of American policy toward so-called Islamic Terrorism.
The Arabo-American party was over, and the Arabs turned me over once more to the same U.S. team. They dragged me out of the boat and threw me, I would say, in the same truck as the one that afternoon. We were obviously riding on a dirt road.
“Do not move!” said Mr. X, but I didn’t recognize any words anymore. I don’t think that anybody beat me, but I was not conscious. When the truck stopped, Mr. X and his strong associate towed me from the truck, and dragged me over some steps. The cool air of the room hit me, and boom, they threw me face down on the metal floor of my new home.
“Do not move, I told you not to fuck with me, Motherfucker!” said Mr. X, his voice trailing off. He was obviously tired. He left right away with a promise of more actions, and so did the Arab team.
A short time after my arrival, I felt somebody taking the heavy headgear with the earmuffs and goggles off my head. Removing these things was both painful and relieving, painful because they had started to penetrate my skin and stick, leaving scars, and relieving because I started to breathe normally and the pressure around my head went away. When the blindfold was taken off I saw a masked male who seemed to be both a medical professional and part of the torture team. He wore an Army uniform but I couldn’t see his rank. His way of speaking suggested he was in his early thirties. I figured he was a Doctor, but why the heck is he hiding behind a mask, and why is he U.S. Army, when the Navy is in charge of the medical care of detainees?
“If you fuckin’ move, I’m gonna hurt you!” I was wondering how could I possibly move, and what possible damage I could do. I was in chains, and every inch in my body was hurting. That is not a Doctor, that is a human butcher!
When the young man checked on me, he realized he needed more stuff. He left and soon came back with some medical gear. I glimpsed his watch: it was about 1:30 a.m., which meant about eight hours since I was kidnapped from Delta Camp. The Doctor started to wash the blood off my face with a soaked bandage. After that, he put me on a mattress—the only item in the stark cell—with the help of the guards.
“Do not move,” said the guard who was standing over me. The Doctor wrapped many elastic belts around my chest and ribs. After that, they made me sit. “If you try to bite me, I’m gonna fuckin’ hurt you!” said the Doctor while stuffing me with a whole bunch of tablets.
I didn’t respond; they were moving me around like an object. Sometime later they took off the chains, and later still one of the guards threw a thin, small, worn-out blanket onto me through the bin hole, and that was everything I would have in the room. No soap, no toothbrush, no iso mat, no Koran, nothing.
I tried to sleep, but I was kidding myself; my body was conspiring against me. It took some time until the medications started to work, then I trailed off, and only woke up when one of the guards hit my cell violently with his boot.
“Get up, piece of shit!” The Doctor once more gave me a bunch of medication and checked on my ribs. “Done with the motherfucker,” he said, showing me his back as he headed toward the door. I was so shocked seeing a Doctor act like that, because I knew that at least 50 percent of medical treatment is psychological. I was like, This is an evil place, since my only solace is this bastard Doctor.34
I soon was knocked out. To be honest I can report very little about the next couple of weeks because I was not in the right state of mind. I was lying on my bed the whole time, and I was not able to realize my surroundings. I tried to find out the Kibla, the direction of Mecca, but there was no clue.
1 At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS told the panel, “Then the FBI at GTMO Bay during the time era of General Miller, they released a list of the highest priority detainees here at GTMO. It was a list of 15 people and I was, guess which number, number ONE. Then they sent a special FBI team and the leader was [redacted] and I worked with him especially for my case. . . . I thought he was just making fun of me when he said I was number ONE in the camp, but he was not lying; he was telling the truth, as future events would prove. He stayed with me until May 22, 2003.” ARB transcript, 24.
2 People were indeed “working behind the scene.” Though the FBI was still leading MOS’s interrogation, the DOJ IG found that through the spring of 2003, “Military Intelligence personnel observed many of Slahi’s interviews by Poulson and Santiago from an observation booth,” and that MI agents were complaining about the FBI’s rapport-building approach. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that military interrogators started circulating a draft “Special Interrogation Plan” for MOS in January 2003. DOJ IG, 298, SASC, 135.
3 On March 6, 2002, CNN aired a story titled “Al Qaeda Online for Terrorism.” As MOS indicates here, the story suggested that he was “running a seemingly innocuous website” where al-Qaeda was secretly exchanging messages through the website’s guestbook. The allegation that MOS ran a website that facilitated al-Qaeda communications does not appear in any of the summaries of evidence against MOS from Guantánamo. See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0203/06/lt.15.html.
4 David Hicks, an Australian citizen, was detained in Afghanistan in December 2001 and held in Guantánamo until April 2007. Bisher al-Rawi, a resident of the United Kingdom at the time he was detained in Banjul, Gambia, in November 2002, was transferred to Guantánamo in March 2003. He was released and transferred to the United Kingdom in March 2007.
5 A 1956 CIA study titled “Communist Control Techniques: An Analysis of the Methods Used by Communist State Police in the Arrest, Interrogation, and Indoctrination of Persons Regarded as ‘Enemies of the State’” had this to say about the effects of sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation as coercive interrogation methods: “The officer in charge has other simple and highly effective ways of applying pressure. Two of the most effective of these are fatigue and lack of sleep. The constant light in the cell and the necessity of maintaining a rigid position in bed compound the effects of anxiety and nightmares in producing sleep disturbances. If these are not enough, it is easy to have the guards awaken the prisoners at intervals. This is especially effective if the prisoner is always awakened as soon as he drops off to sleep. The guards can also shorten the hours available for sleep, or deny sleep altogether. Continued loss of sleep produces clouding of consciousness and a loss of alertness, both of which impair the victim’s ability to sustain isolation. It also produces profound fatigue.
“Another simple and effective type of pressure is that of maintaining the temperature of the cell at a level which is either too hot or too cold for comfort. Continuous heat, at a level at which constant sweating is necessary in order to maintain body temperature, is enervating and fatigue producing. Sustained cold is uncomfortable and poorly tolerated. . . .
“The Communists do not look upon these methods as ‘torture.’ Undoubtedly, they use the methods which they do in order to conform, in a typical legalistic manner to overt Communist principles which demand that ‘no force or torture be used in extracting information from prisoners.’ But these methods do, of course, constitute torture and physical coercion. All of them lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes.”
Sleep deprivation has been used specifically in the service of conditioning prisoners to make false confessions. A study by the U.S. Air Force sociologist Albert Biderman of the means by which North Korean interrogators were able to coerce captured U.S. airmen into falsely confessing to war crimes found that sleep deprivation, as a form of induced debilitation, “weakens mental and physical ability to resist.” See http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/mindcontrol/comcont.pdf; and http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/documents/19570900.pdf.
6 The Toronto Star reported that CSIS agents interviewed detainees with ties to Canada in Guantánamo, including MOS, in February 2003. See Michelle Shephard, “CSIS Grilled Trio in Guantánamo,” http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2008/07/27/csis_grilled_trio_in_cuba.html.
7 In 2010 the Supreme Court of Canada found that the interrogations of Omar Khadr’s by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) agents in Guantánamo in February and September 2003 and March 2004 violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Supreme Court held, “The deprivation of [Khadr]’s right to liberty and security of the person is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.” The Supreme Court’s opinion is available at http://scc-csc.lexum.com/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/7842/index.do.
8 MOS told the Administrative Review Board that his last interview with FBI interrogators took place on May 22, 2003; the DOJ IG report confirms that “in late May 2003 the FBI agents who were involved with Slahi left GTMO, and the military assumed control over Slahi’s interrogation.” ARB transcript, 25; DOJ IG, 122.
A few days after the military took over MOS’s interrogation, an FBI agent circulated a report documenting FBI concerns about the military’s interrogation methods in Guantánamo. According to the DOJ IG report, a month later, on July 1, 2003, the FBI’s assistant general counsel, Spike Bowman, sent an e-mail to senior FBI officials, “alerting them that the military had been using techniques of ‘aggressive interrogation,’ including ‘physically striking the detainees, stripping them and pouring cold water on them and leaving them exposed (one got hypothermia) and similar measures.’ Bowman opined that: ‘Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don’t know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these Enemy Prisoners of War (EPW). That they are not so designated cannot be license to do something that you cannot do to an EPW or criminal prisoner.’ Bowman expressed concern that the FBI would be ‘tarred by the same brush’ and sought input on whether the FBI should refer the matter to the DoD Inspector General, stating that ‘[w]ere I still on active duty, there is no question in my mind that it would be a duty to do so.’” ARB transcript, 25; DOJ IG, 122, 121.
9 The second female interrogator was only posing as an FBI agent. The DOJ Inspector General found that “the person who identified herself as �
��Samantha’ was actually an Army Sergeant.” According to the IG, “On several occasions in early June 2003 an Army Sergeant on the DIA Special Projects Team at GTMO identified herself to Slahi as FBI SSA ‘Samantha Martin’ in an effort to persuade Slahi to cooperate with interrogators.” DOJ IG, 296, 125.
10 Abdul Rahman Shalabi was released and transferred to Saudi Arabia on September 22, 2015. Mohammed al-Qahtani remains in Guantánamo. His “Special Projects” interrogation has been documented extensively in the Senate Armed Services Committee and Department of Justice Inspector General reports, and in March 2006 Time published the interrogation log of a forty-nine-day stretch of that interrogation. The log is available at http://content.time.com/time/2006/log/log.pdf.
11 Military interrogators in Guantánamo were under the command of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), which was led at this time by General Geoffrey Miller. Their interrogation methods were sanctioned first by the “Counter Resistance Techniques” memorandum that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed on December 22, 2002; then by a March 13, 2003, legal opinion written by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel; and finally by another authorization memo that Rumsfeld signed on April 16, 2003. The Senate Armed Services Committee found that General Miller sought official Pentagon approval for, and Rumsfeld personally signed off on, MOS’s “Special Interrogation Plan.” SASC, 135–38.
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