The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  By this time, my health situation was way better than in Jordan, but I was still underweight, vulnerable, and sick most of the time, and as days went by, my situation decidedly worsened. Sometimes when the escorting team led me past the wall mirror I would get terrorized when I saw my face. It was a very pitiful sight. Although the diet kept getting better and better in the camp, I couldn’t profit from it.

  “Why don’t you eat?” the guards always asked.

  “I am not hungry,” I used to reply. Then one day my interrogator SPC Amy just happened to witness one time when I got my lunch served.

  “May I check your meal?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What the hell do you they serve you? That is garbage!” said Amy.

  “No, it’s okay. I don’t like speaking about food,” I said. And I really don’t.

  “Look it may be OK for you, but it’s not OK by my standards. We’ve got to change your diet,” she said. And nothing short of a miracle, SPC Amy managed in a relatively short time to organize an adequate diet, which decidedly improved my health situation.

  Amy also turned out to be a religious person when measured at American standards. I was very excited to have somebody I could learn from.

  “Amy, can you get me a Bible?”

  “I’ll see if I can,” she said, and indeed, Amy brought me her own Bible, a Special Edition.

  “According to your religion, what is the way to heaven?” I asked her.

  “You take Christ as your Savior, and believe that he died for your sins.”

  “I do believe Christ was one of the greatest prophets, but I don’t believe that he died for my sins. It doesn’t make sense to me. I should save my tail on my own, by doing the right things,” I replied.

  “That is not enough to be saved.”

  “So where am I going after death?” I wondered.

  “According to my religion, you go to hell.” I laughed wholeheartedly. I told Amy, “That is very sad. I pray every day and ask God for forgiveness. Honestly, I worship God much more than you do. As a matter of fact, as you see, I am not very successful in this worldly life, so my only hope is in the afterlife.”

  Amy was both angry and ashamed—angry because I laughed at her statement, and ashamed because she couldn’t find a way to save me. “I am not gonna lie to you: that’s what my religion says,” she said.

  “No, I really don’t have any problem with that. You can cook your soup as you please. I am not angry that you sent me to hell.”

  “What about the Islamic belief? Do I go to heaven?”

  “That’s a completely different story. In Islam, in order to go to heaven, you have to accept Mohamed, the natural successor of Christ, and be a good Muslim. And since you reject Mohamed you don’t go to heaven,” I honestly answered.

  Amy was relieved because I also sent her to hell. “So, let’s both of us go to hell and meet over there!” Amy said.

  “I’m not willing to go to hell. Although I am an admitted sinner, I ask God for forgiveness.” Whenever we had time, we discussed religion and took out the Bible and the Koran to show each other what the Books say.

  “Would you marry a Muslim?”

  “Never,” she replied.

  I smiled. “I personally wouldn’t have a problem marrying a Christian woman as long as she doesn’t have anything against my religion.”

  “Are you trying to convert me?” Amy asked emotionally.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I will never, never, never be a Muslim.”

  I laughed. “Why are you so offended about? You’re sort of trying to convert me, and I don’t feel offended, since that’s what you believe in.”

  I continued. “Would you marry a Catholic, Amy?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “But I don’t understand. It says in the Bible that you cannot marry after a divorce. So you are a potential sinner.” Amy was completely offended when I showed her the verses in the Bible.

  “Don’t even go there, and if you don’t mind, let’s change the topic.” I was shocked, and smiled a dry smile.

  “Oh, OK! I’m sorry about talking about that.” We stopped discussing religion for the day and took a break for the next few days, and then we resumed the dialogue.

  “Amy, I really don’t understand the Trinity doctrine. The more I look into it, the more I get confused.”

  “We have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three things that represent the Being God.”

  “Hold on! Break it down for me. God is the father of Christ, isn’t he?”

  “Yes!”

  “Biological Father?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why do you call him Father? I mean if you’re saying that God is our father in the sense that he takes care of us, I have no problem with that,” I commented.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” she said.

  “So there is no point in calling Jesus ‘the Son of God.’”

  “But he said so in the Bible,” she said.

  “But Amy, I don’t believe in the 100 percent accuracy of the Bible.”

  “Anyway, Jesus is God,” she said.

  “Oh, is Jesus God, or Son of God?”

  “Both!”

  “You don’t make any sense, Amy, do you?”

  “Look, I really don’t understand the Trinity. I have to research and ask an expert.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But how can you believe in something you don’t understand?” I continued.

  “I understand but I cannot explain it,” Amy replied.

  “Let’s move on and hit another topic.” I suggested. “According to your religion I seem to be doomed anyway. But what about the bushmen in Africa who never got the chance to know Jesus Christ?” I asked.

  “They are not saved.”

  “But what did they do wrong?”

  “I don’t agree that they should suffer, but that’s what my religion says.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “But how about Islam?” Amy asked.

  “In the Koran it says that God doesn’t punish unless he sends a messenger to teach the people.”

  Amy introduced me to her friend SSG Charles, who was one of those guys who you like the first time you meet. SSG Charles was a small, skinny white man in his late twenties or early thirties. He was more religious and less tolerant than Amy; he was a Baptist, he told me. He didn’t like any questioning of his beliefs, even from Amy. But he was a happy person and genuinely enjoyed hanging out with me. He wasn’t my interrogator; he was working with Tariq and came to me because he liked talking to me. He is more of a lover than a hater. SSG Charles and Amy are good friends, and he was fighting for the betterment of our condition.

  Amy introduced him to me as a friend and someone to help her quench my thirst for information about Christianity. Although I enjoyed getting to know Charles, he didn’t help me understanding the Trinity. He confused me even more, and my lot with him was no better: he, too, sent me to hell. SSG Charles ended up arguing with Amy because they had some difference in their beliefs, although both were Protestant. I realized that they could not help me understand, and so I dismissed the topic for good, and we started to talk about other issues.

  It’s very funny how false the picture is that western people have about Arabs: savage, violent, insensitive, and cold-hearted. I can tell you with confidence that Arabs are peaceful, sensitive, civilized, and big lovers, among other qualities.

  “Amy, you guys claim that we are violent, but if you listen to the Arabic music or read Arabic poetry, it is all about love. On the other hand, American music is about violence and hatred, for the most part.” During my time with Amy, many poems went across the table. I haven’t kept any copies; she has all the poems. Amy also gave me a small divan of her own poems. She is very surrealistic, and I am terrible when it comes to surrealism. I hardly understood any of her poems.

  One of my poems took off from the German poet Kurt Schwitters’s masterpiece “An Anna B
lume.” I once told her about the poem, which I learned in Germany and which one of my cousins translated into Arabic. She brought me the English version that Schwitters made, that reads,

  Oh thou, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love thine!

  Thou thee

  thee thine, I thine,

  thou mine, we?

  That (by the way) is beside the point!

  Who art thou, uncounted woman, Thou art, art thou?

  People say, thou werst,

  Let them say, they don’t know what they are talking about.

  And then goes on,

  PRIZE QUESTION: 1. Eve Blossom is red,

  2. Eve Blossom has wheels

  3. What colour are the wheels?

  Blue is the colour of your yellow hair

  Red is the whirl of your green wheels

  I was so frustrated that the English version did not do it justice that I asked her for the German version, and when I read it to her, she enjoyed it even with the few German words she knew. So I wrote my own poem to Anna Blume in that same random style, and gave it to her. She liked it so much that she nicknamed herself Anna Blume.8

  All this time I kept refusing to talk about the way I had been treated, which Amy and her boss understood and respected. I didn’t want to talk, first, because I was afraid of retaliation, and second, because I was skeptical about the readiness of the government to deal with things appropriately, and third, because the Islamic religion suggests that it is better to bring your complaints to God rather than disclosing them to human beings. But Amy kept patiently trying to persuade me; furthermore, she explained to me that she must report any misbehavior by her colleagues to her superiors.

  After thoroughly contemplating the options, I decided to talk to SPC Amy. When she heard my account, she brought Colonel Forest, who interrogated me about the issue after having sent the guards away. Colonel Forest prudently wanted to avoid any possible leak and spread of the story. I have no idea what happened after that, but I think there is sort of an internal DOD investigation, because I was asked some questions about my story in a later time.9

  “You are a very courageous guy!” Amy used to tell me in relation with my story.

  “I don’t think so! I just enjoy peace. But I certainly know that people who torture helpless detainees are cowards .” I always tried to dismiss the subject and talk about something else. But SPC Amy and her boss spent hours asking me about the mistreatment and those who were involved in it. Both were interested in the behavior of the FBI. Amy didn’t approve of the FBI or of lawyers coming from the outside, and it seemed to me that she would love to have something on the FBI. But I told them that the FBI never tortured me. I told them the story as best I could, but I was very scared of possible backlash, because I knew that those who were involved in torture were for all intents and purposes still in charge.

  Not long after that, Amy took a leave for three weeks. “I’m going to Montreal with a male friend of mine. Tell me about Montreal.” I provided her with everything I remembered about Montreal, which wasn’t much.

  When SPC Amy came back, she hardly changed out of her travel clothes before she came to see me; she was genuinely excited to see me again, and so was I. Amy said that she enjoyed her time in Canada and that everything was alright, but she was probably happier to be in GTMO. She was tired from the trip, so she stayed only for a short time to check on me, and off she went.

  I went back to my cell and wrote Amy the following letter. “Hi, Amy, I know you were in Canada with your boyfriend and I understand you were just looking for a good time outside of Guantánamo. I am just a detainee whose bad luck brought him before you; I didn’t choose to know you or deal with you. I’m trying to make the best of a bad situation and I confess to you, it’s proving challenging to me. I am not looking for anything from you; I am focusing all my energy on keeping my sanity. I have no idea why you think I care about what you do outside this prison. I haven’t asked you about your trip, but I don’t appreciate somebody lying to me and taking me for an idiot. I really don’t know what you were thinking when you made up that story to mislead me. I don’t deserve to be treated like that. I chose to write and not talk to you, just to give you the opportunity to think about everything, instead of making you come up with inaccurate answers. Furthermore, you don’t have to give me any answer or comment. Just destroy this letter and consider it non-existent. Yours truly Salahi.”

  I read the letter to the guards before I handed the sealed envelope to Amy and asked her not to read it in my presence.

  “Wha’ the? How the hell do you know that Amy was with her boyfriend?” the guard on duty asked me.

  “Something in my heart that never lies to me!”

  “You don’t make any sense. Besides, why the fuck should you care?”

  “If you cannot tell whether a woman had some intimacy with a man, you ain’t no man,” I said. “I don’t care, but I don’t appreciate when Amy or anyone else uses my manhood and plays games on me, especially in my situation. Amy might think I am vulnerable but I am strong.”

  “You’re right! That’s fucked up.”

  Amy came the next day and confessed everything to me.

  “I am sorry! I just figured we had a close relationship, and I thought it would hurt you if you knew I went on vacation with my doctor boyfriend and was enjoying Montreal while you’re stuck in here,” she said sadly.

  “First I thank you very much for being forthcoming. I’m just confused! Do you think I’m looking forward to a relationship with you? I’m not! For Pete’s sake, you are a Christian woman who is engaged in a war against my religion and my people! Besides, I am stuck until who knows when inside this prison.”

  Amy always tried after that to tell me that she didn’t think that she would continue with my interrogation team; she was afraid I wouldn’t cooperate with her or Colonel Forest anymore. But I didn’t make any comment about the issue. All I did was I handcrafted a bracelet and sent it to him as I did for her and for all those who I liked and who had helped me in many issues.

  “We are desperate to get information from you,” said Richard Zuley when he first met with me.

  It was true: when I arrived in the camp in August 2002, the majority of detainees were refusing to cooperate with their interrogators.

  “Look, I told you my story over and over a million times. Now either you send me to court or let me be,” they were saying.

  “But we have discrepancies in your story,” the interrogators would say, as a gentle way of saying, “You’re lying.”

  Like me, every detainee I know thought when he arrived in Cuba it would be a typical interrogation, and after interrogation he would be charged and sent to court, and the court would decide whether he is guilty or not. If he was found not guilty, or if the U.S. government pressed no charges, he would be sent home. It made sense to everybody: the interrogators told us this is how it would go, and we said, “Let’s do it.” But it turned out either the interrogators deliberately lied to encourage detainees to cooperate with them, or the government lied to the interrogators about the procedure as a tactic to coerce information from the detainees.

  Weeks went by, months went by, and the interrogators’ thirst for information didn’t seem close to being satisfied. The more information a detainee provided, the more interrogators complicated the case and asked more questions. All detainees had, at some point, one thing in common: they were tired of uninterrupted interrogation. As a newcomer, I first was part of a small minority that was still cooperating, but I soon joined the other group. “Just tell me why you arrested me, and I’ll answer every question you have,” I would say.

  Most of the interrogators were coming back day after day empty-handed. “No information collected from source,” was what the interrogators reported every week. And exactly as Richard Zuley said, the JTF command was desperate to get the detainees talking. So the JTF built a mini “special team” inside the bigger organization. This Task Force, which included th
e U.S. Army, the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Navy, and civilians, had the job of coercing information from detainees. The operation was clouded with top secrecy.

  Mr. X was a very distinguished character in this JTF special interrogators group. Although Mr. X was a smart person, they gave him the dirtiest job on the Island, and shockingly brainwashed him into believing he was doing the right thing. Mr. X was always wrapped in a uniform that covered him from head to toe, because he was aware that he was committing war crimes against helpless detainees. Mr. X was The Night Owl, The Devil Worshipper, Loud Music Man, the Anti-Religion Guy, the interrogator par excellence. Every one of those nicknames had a reason.

  Mr. X used to keep detainees who were not allowed to sleep “entertained.” He deprived me of sleep for about two months, during which he tried to break my mental resistance, to no avail. To keep me awake, he drove the temperature of the room crazily down, made me write all kinds of things about my life, kept giving me water, and sometimes made me stand the whole night. Once he stripped me naked with the help of a female guard in order to humiliate me. Another night, he put me in a frozen room full of propaganda pictures of the U.S., including a picture of George W. Bush, and made me listen to the national anthem over and over.

  Mr. X was serving several detainees at the same time; I could hear many doors slamming, loud music, and detainees coming and leaving, the sound of their heavy metal chains giving them away. He used to put detainees in a dark room with pictures that were supposed to represent devils. He made detainees listen to the music of hatred and madness, and to the song “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” over and over for the whole night in the dark room. He was very open about his hatred toward Islam, and he categorically forbade any Islamic practices, including prayers and mumbling the Koran.

  Even with all that, around the end of August 2003, the special team realized that I was not going to cooperate with them as they wished, and so the next level of torture was approved. Mr. X, my guard Big Boss, and another guy with a German shepherd pried open the door of the interrogation room where SSG Mary and I were sitting. It was in Gold Building. Mr. X and his colleague kept hitting me, mostly on my ribs and my face, and made me drink salt water for about three hours before giving me over to an Arabic team with an Egyptian and a Jordanian interrogator. Those interrogators continued to beat me while covering me in ice cubes, one, to torture me, and two, to make the new, fresh bruises disappear.