Guantánamo Diary (22 page)

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
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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 was
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. 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
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for real.
^*
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
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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?”
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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
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.

“I ain’t lying,” the guy responded in Arabic, although
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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
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. 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,
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,” said
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.

“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
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,” he concluded.

“No!”

“But you responded when I called you
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,” 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
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,” I correctly
answered.
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means “God’s servant” in Arabic.
^*
But I actually knew how
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came up with that name. When I arrived in Montreal, Canada on November 26, 1999, my friend
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introduced me to his roommate
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by my given name. Later on I met another
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who I’d happened to see when I visited the year before. He called me
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and I responded because I found it impolite to correct him. Since then
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called me
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, and I found it cool. I wasn’t trying to deceive
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; after all,
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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
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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
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.

“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,
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knew that this part of the plan was broken, and so he took off my blindfold right away and led me inside the interrogation room.

It was a small room, about 10 x 8 feet, with an old table and
three weathered chairs.
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was in his
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. His assistant
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was a
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. He was obviously the type who is ready to do the dirty side of any job. He also looked
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. 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 fifty 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 being’s 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.

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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.
^†

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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
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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
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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.

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was sitting on
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left and recording my answers. “Do you drink tea?”
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asked me.

“Yes, I like tea.”
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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
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asked
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. I had been asked about
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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.
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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
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. 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
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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 10 pages. For the first time I had some relatively good sleep that night.

Some time in the next couple of days
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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!”
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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.