The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  “No, I will not write you,” I said.

  “OK.” Mary said. “Are you alright?” she asked.

  “I’m not, but you may surely leave.” “I am not leaving until you assure me everything’s alright,” Mary said.

  “I said what I had to say. Have a good trip. May Allah guide you. I’ll be just fine.”

  “I am sure you will. It will take at most a week and you’ll forget me.” I didn’t speak after that. Instead I went back and lay myself down. Mary stayed a couple of minutes repeating the same thing, “I am not leaving until you assure me everything is alright.”

  After Mary left, I never saw her again or tried to get in contact with her. And so the chapter of SSG Mary’s time with me was sealed.

  “I heard yesterday’s goodbye was very emotional. I never thought of you this way. Would you describe yourself as a criminal?” SFC Shally said the next day.

  I prudently answered, “To an extent.” I didn’t want to fall in any possible trap, even though I felt that he was honestly and innocently asking the question, now that he realized that his evil theories about me were null. “All the evil questions are gone,” SFC Shally said.

  “I won’t miss them,” I said.

  SFC Shally had come to give me a haircut. It was about time! One of the measures of my punishment was to deprive me of any hygienic shaves, toothbrushing, or haircuts, so today was a big day. They brought a masked barber; the guy was scary looking, but he did the job. SFC Shally also brought me a book he promised me a long time ago, Fermat’s Last Theorem, which I really enjoyed—so much so that I hungrily read it more than twice. The book is written by a British journalist and speaks about the famous De Fermat theorem that says the equation An + Bn = Cn has no solution when n is greater than two. For more than three hundred years, mathematicians from all around the world were boxing against this harmless-looking theorem without succeeding in tackling it, until a British mathematician in 1993 came up with a very complicated proof, which was surely not the one De Fermat meant when he wrote, “I have a neat proof but I have no space on my paper.”

  I got a haircut, and later on a decent shower. SFC Shally was not a very talkative person when it came to social interactions; he asked me just one question about computers.

  “Are you going to cooperate with the new sergeant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or anybody who’s going to work with her?”

  “Yes.”

  The guards’ names were their idea; they wanted to be baptized with the names of characters in the Star Wars movies. “From now on we are the Jedi and that’s what you call us. Your name is Pillow,” “Master Jedi” said. I eventually learned from the books that the Jedi are sort of Good Guys who fight against the Forces of Evil. So for the time being I was forced to represent the Forces of Evil, and the guards the Good Guys.

  “‘Master Yoda,’ that’s what you call me,” another guard said. I also called him names in secret, like “Interrogator Junior,” because he saw himself as a little above the level of a guard and a little under the level of an interrogator. He developed his own rules for dealing with me, including punishments and rewards. He was in his early forties, married with children, small but athletically built. He spent some time working in the Middle East, in Lebanon, and then ended up doing “special missions” for the U.S. Marines. “I’ve been working to break terrorists like you,” he told me.

  “Your job is done. I am broken,” I answered.

  “Don’t ask me anything. If you want to ask for something, ask your interrogator.”

  “I got you,” I said. It sounds confusing or even contradictory, but although Yoda was a rough guy, he was humane. That is to say his bark was worse than his bite. Yoda understood what many guards don’t understand: if you talk and tell your interrogators what they want to hear, you should be relieved. Many of the other nitwits kept doubling the pressure on me, just for the sake of it.

  Master Yoda was in charge of all the other guards. “My job is to make you see the light,” said Yoda, addressing me for the first time when he was watching me eating my meal. Guards were not allowed to talk to me or to each other, and I couldn’t talk to them. But Yoda was not a by-the-book guy. He thought more than any other guard, and his goal was to make his country victorious: the means didn’t matter.

  “Yes sir,” I answered, without even understanding what he meant. I thought about the literal sense of the light I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I believed he wanted to get me cooperating so I could see the daylight. But Yoda meant the figurative sense. Yoda always yelled at me and scared me, but he never hit me. He illegally interrogated me several times, which is why I called him names in my mind like Interrogator Junior. Master Yoda wanted me to confess to many wild theories he heard the interrogators talking about. Furthermore, he wanted to gather knowledge about terrorism and extremism. I think his dream in life was to become an interrogator. What a hell of a dream!

  Yoda is an admitted Republican, and hates the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton. He doesn’t believe that the U.S. should interfere in other countries’ business, and instead should focus more on internal issues—but if any country or group attacks the U.S., it should be destroyed ruthlessly.

  “Fair enough,” I said. I just wanted him to stop talking. He is the kind of guy who never stops when he gets started. Gosh, he gave me an earache! When Yoda first started talking to me I refused to answer, because all I was allowed to say was, “Yes, sir, No Sir, Need Medics, Need Interrogators.” But he wanted a conversation with me.

  “You are my enemy,” Yoda said.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “So let’s talk as enemy to enemy,” he said. He opened my cell and offered me a chair. Yoda did the talking for the most part. He was talking about how great the U.S. is, and how powerful; “America is this, American is that, We Americans are so and so . . .” I was just wondering and nodding slightly. Every once in a while I confirmed that I was paying attention, “Yes, sir . . . Really? . . . Oh, I didn’t know . . . You’re right . . . I know . . .” During our conversations, he sneakily tried to make me admit to things I hadn’t really done.

  “What was your role in September 11?”

  “I didn’t participate in September 11.”

  “Bullshit!” he screamed madly. I realized it would be no good for my life to look innocent, at least for the time being. So I said, “I was working for al Qaeda in Radio Telecom.”

  He seemed to be happier with a lie. “What was your rank?” he kept digging.

  “I would be a Lieutenant.”

  “I know you’ve been in the U.S.,” he tricked me. This is a big one and I couldn’t possibly lie about it. I could vaguely swallow having done a lot of things in Afghanistan, because Americans cannot confirm or disconfirm it. But the Americans could check right away whether or not I had been in their own country.

  “I really haven’t been in the U.S.,” I answered, though I was ready to change my answer when I had no options.

  “You’ve been in Detroit,” he sardonically smiled.

  I smiled back. “I really haven’t.” Though Yoda didn’t believe me, he didn’t push the matter further; he was interested in a long-term dialogue with me. In return for my confessions he gave me extra food and stopped yelling at me. Meanwhile, in order to maintain the terror, the other guards kept yelling at me and banging the metal door to my cell. Every time they did, my heart started to pound, though the more they did such things, the less effect it had.

  “Why are you shaking?” Yoda asked me once when he took me out for conversation. I both hated and liked when he was on duty: I hated him interrogating me, but I liked him giving me more food and new uniforms.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “I am not gonna hurt you.”

  “OK.” It took some time until I accepted talking to Yoda. He started to give me lessons and made me practice them the hard way. The lessons were proverbs and made up of phrases he wanted me to memorize and practic
e in my life. I still do remember the following lessons: 1) Think before you act. 2) Do not mistake kindness for weakness. 3) Keep the questions always in mind when you are asked about somebody. Whenever Yoda judged me to have broken one of the lessons, he took me out of my cell and strew my belongings all over the place, and then Yoda asked me to put everything back in no time. I always failed to organize my stuff, but he would make me do it several times, after which I miraculously put all my stuff back in time.

  My relationship with Yoda developed positively with every day that went by, and so with the rest of the guards, too, because they regarded him highly.

  “Fuck it! If I look at Pillow I don’t think he is a terrorist, I think he’s an old friend of mine, and I enjoy playing games with him,” he said to the other guards. I relaxed somewhat and gained some self-confidence. Now the guards discovered the humorous guy in me, and used their time with me for entertainment. They started to make me repair their DVD players and PC’s, and in return I was allowed to watch a movie. Yoda didn’t exactly have the most recent PC model, and when Yoda’s colleague asked me whether I had seen Yoda’s PC, I answered, “You mean that museum piece?”

  Yoda’s colleague laughed hard. “Better hope he doesn’t hear what you said.”

  “Don’t tell him!”

  We slowly but surely became a society and started to gossip about the interrogators and call them names. In the meantime, Mary’s replacement taught me the rules of chess. Before prison, I didn’t know the difference between a pawn and the rear end of a knight, nor was I really a big gamer. But I found in chess a very interesting game, especially the fact that a prisoner has total control over his pieces, which gives him some confidence back. When I started playing, I played very aggressively in order to let out my frustration, which was really not very good chess playing; she was my first mentor, and she beat me in my first game ever. But the next game was mine, and so were all the other games that followed. Chess is a game of strategy, art, and mathematics. It takes deep thinking, and there is no luck involved. You get rewarded or punished for your actions.

  After consulting with her boss Captain Collins, she brought me a chessboard so I could play against myself. When the guards noticed my chessboard, they all wanted to play me, and when they started to play me, they always won. The strongest among the guards was Yoda. He taught me how to control the center. Moreover, the interrogator brought me some literature, which helped decidedly in honing my skills. After that the guards had no chance to defeat me.

  “That is not the way I taught you to play chess,” Yoda commented angrily when I won a game.

  “What should I do?”

  “You should build a strategy, and organize your attack! That’s why the fucking Arabs never succeed.”

  “Why don’t you just play the board?” I wondered.

  “Chess is not just a game,” he said.

  “Just imagine you’re playing against a computer!”

  “Do I look like a computer to you?”

  “No.” The next game I tried to build a strategy in order to let him win.

  “Now you understand how chess must be played,” he commented. I knew Master Yoda had issues dealing with defeat, and so I didn’t enjoy playing him because I didn’t feel comfortable practicing my newly acquired knowledge. He believes there are two kinds of people: white Americans and the rest of the world. White Americans are smart and better than anybody. I always tried to explain things to him by saying, for instance, “If I were you,” or “If you were me,” but he got angry and said, “Don’t you ever dare to compare me with you, or compare any American with you!” I was shocked, but I did as he said. After all, I didn’t have to compare myself with anybody. Yoda hated the rest of the world, especially the Arabs, Jews, French, Cubans, and others. The only other country he mentioned positively was England.

  After one game of chess with him, he flipped the board. “Fuck your Nigger chess, this is Jewish chess,” he said.

  “Do you have something against Black people?” I asked.

  “Nigger is not black, Nigger means stupid,” he argued. We had many discussions like that. At the time we had only one Black guard who had no say, and when he worked with Yoda, they never interacted. Yoda resented him. He had a very strong personality, dominant, authoritarian, patriarchal, and arrogant.

  “My wife calls me asshole,” he proudly told me. Yoda listened mostly to Rock-n-Roll music and some type of country. His favorite songs were “Die Terrorist Die,” “The Taliban Song,” and “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.” He used to bring his laptop and play videos of military songs for me. I was amazed at how beautifully directed and filmed those propaganda videos could be.

  The guards also illegally brought their laptops and asked me to draw pictures of their faces as I imagined them. Until now, my whole time in Echo Special the guards hid behind masks they chose and shared; there was Uncle Sam, George W. Bush, and a wild, cat-like face. It was an easy job: I knew if I made them look ugly and they got upset, I would feel the consequences. Yoda was happy, because I picked a model that looked like Tom Cruise, and just made a few changes here and there.

  I never had the chance to see his face because he left before the new rules letting the guards show their faces were put in place. But that was OK with me; I really wasn’t interested in seeing anybody’s face at that point. In the beginning, he was rough with me: he used to pull me hard and make me run in the shackles, screaming loudly “Move!”

  “You know who you are?” he asked me.

  “Yes, Sir!”

  “You are a terrorist!”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  “So let’s do some math: if you killed five thousand people by your association with al Qaeda, we should kill you five thousand times. But no, because we are Americans we feed you and are ready to give you money if you give us information.”

  “That’s right, Sir!” But after the polygraph test, Captain Collins ordered the guards to be friendly with me, Yoda’s friends started to treat me like a human being. I enjoyed discussing things with him because his English was decent, although he was always “right” in his position.

  “Our job is to accommodate you!” he used to tell me sarcastically. “You need a house maid.” Since guards copy each other, Master Luke tended to copy Master Yoda.

  Master Yoda’s partner was the Inspector: he liked to inspect my room and make sure everything was put where it belongs, the sheet was wrapped around the edge of the mattress in a 45° angle, and things like that. He also constantly inspected the shower and if he found a tiny hair left in it, he and Yoda made me clean everything again. It didn’t matter how often I cleaned; everything had to be perfect.

  Master Yoda’s partner was especially interested in how I could keep a calendar in my head and know the days and nights in spite of the techniques the guards used to mess up my head. They once tried to make me believe Christmas was Thanksgiving, but I didn’t buy it.

  “It doesn’t really matter, but I do believe it’s Christmas,” I told them.

  “We want you to explain to us what mistakes we made so we can avoid them when we get our next detainee.” I explained as much as necessary, but I am sure they will make plenty of mistakes with the next detainee because nobody is perfect.

  Yoda’s partner explained to me how my recipe could get worse. “You haven’t seen nothing.”

  “And I assure you I am not eager to see more,” I would say. He was probably right, though he missed the fact that none of the guards had witnessed everything that happened to me. The only guard who participated in the transport party was Big Boss, and he used every opportunity to hit me in the new place. You could tell he found no problem in beating me, since he did it with the blessing of the highest authority in GTMO.

  Yoda’s partner was the only guard who didn’t sleep during his watch. He would drive me crazy pacing around all the time, and liked to surprise me in the middle of the night by banging the metal door to my cell and making me take a shower and cl
ean everything perfectly. I should not feel rested in my cell for more than an hour: that is one of the most important methods in breaking somebody in detention, because you must hate your life, your guards, your cell, your interrogators, and even yourself. And that is exactly what Yoda’s partner did until my interrogation team and Yoda ordered otherwise.

  Big Boss was a white man in his twenties, very tall, lazy, non-athletic looking.

  “Mr. X is my best friend,” he told me once.

  “How do you know Mr. X?” He didn’t answer me, he just smiled, but he kept mentioning Mr. X and how he had abused me. I always changed the subject because I didn’t want the other guards to know that beating me was something normal. I was glad my guards didn’t know everything that happened to me; I didn’t need the gang to be encouraged to do crimes.

  Big Boss was the most violent guard. In Echo Special’s Building Three the guards performed regular assaults on me in order to maintain the terror. They came in a big masked team, screaming and giving contradictory orders so I wouldn’t know what to do. They would drag me out of my cell and throw my belongings all over the place.

  “Get up . . . Face the wall . . . You’ve been resting lately too much . . . You have a Pillow . . . Ha Ha! . . . Look inside his cell . . . The piece of shit might be hiding something . . . We found two kernels of rice hidden beneath his mattress . . . You have twenty seconds to put everything where it belongs!” The game was over when they made me sweat. I knew the guards didn’t have the order to beat me, but this guard used every opportunity to hit me and claw me deeply. I don’t think that he is the smartest guy, but he was well trained in how to beat somebody without leaving irreparable injuries. “Hitting in the ribs is painful and doesn’t leave permanent scars, especially when treated right away with ice cubes” one of the guards told me. Big Boss was both violent and loud, but thank God, he was very lazy; he only barked at the beginning of the shift and after a short time he disappeared from the stage to watch a movie or go to sleep.