Guantánamo Diary (23 page)

“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,
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. 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.
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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
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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.”

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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
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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.”
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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.

I tried so many times to contact my family but to no avail, and then I washed my hands of the evils and I prayed to God to take care of my family and make them know where I was. In time, I noticed that I was not the only hidden package: between one and three other detainees were subject to the cellar operation at any one time, and the numbers kept changing as time went by. My whole time in Jordan, I was always in isolation, of course. But I could tell whether there were detainees in the neighboring cells, based on the movements of the food chariot, the guards, and the movement of detainees.

For a while my neighbors were two courageous boys. Although talking was forbidden, those two boys were always shouting, “God’s help is coming soon. Remember, God is on our side, and Satan is on theirs!” No matter what the guards did to them, they kept solacing the other detainees and reminding them of God’s
inevitable relief. You could tell from the accent that they were Jordanians, which made sense, since the locals are more likely to be protected by their families than foreigners. Nonetheless, I have no doubt those boys suffered for what they did.

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I was the only constant in my neighborhood; the cells next to me kept changing owners.
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At one point, my next-door neighbor happened to be a young Lebanese nitwit who kept crying and refusing to eat. His story, according to the guards, went like this: He came to Jordan from Lebanon to have some fun. When he bumped into a routine police patrol in downtown Amman, they found an AKM-47 in his trunk and arrested him. Now, having a gun on you in Lebanon is not a big deal, but in Jordan it is forbidden to carry weapons. Taken to jail, the young Lebanese suspect was losing his mind. He kept crying and refusing his food for at least two weeks until his release. Oh, what a relief for me, when they released him! I felt so bad for him. I am sure he learned his lesson, and will think twice about having a weapon in his trunk the next time he comes to Jordan.

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. He had been sentenced to one year, and at the end of the year he went crazy. He kept shouting, “I need to see my interrogator!” When I asked the guards why he was doing this, they answered, “Because his sentence is over, but they won’t let him go.” Sometimes he would start to sing loudly, and sometimes he shouted at the guards, asking for a cigarette. I don’t blame him: unless you have nerves of steel, chances are you’ll lose your mind in Jordanian custody.

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kept coughing the whole time. “He is very old,” a guard told me.

“Why did they arrest him?” I wondered.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” the guard answered. The older man was always asking for more food and smokes. After a couple of weeks, he was released. I was happy for everybody released from that crazy facility.

It is just amazing that the FBI trusts the Jordanians more than the other American intelligence agencies. When I turned myself in in the fall of 2001, the FBI confiscated my hard disk, and when they sent me to Jordan, they sent the contents of my hard disk to Jordan, too. The DoD has been trying for years to get that disk. It doesn’t make sense that the FBI would cooperate more with foreign organizations than the domestic ones, but I do believe that the Intel industry is like any other industry: you buy the best product for the best price, regardless of the country of origin. Do the Jordanians offer the best product in this case? I’m not sure, but they understand the recipe of terrorism more than Americans. Reportedly without the Jordanians in the field, the Americans would never have achieved what they have. However, the Americans over-estimate the capability of the Jordanians by sending them people from all over the world, as if the Jordanians were some super Intel Agency.

“I am going to show you some pictures, you tell me about them,” said
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. Lately, he and
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Jordanian were appointed to interrogate me;
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was the leader. In Jordan, they have a technique in which two interrogators or more interrogate you separately about the same thing, in order
to make sure that you don’t change your statements. They rarely sat together and interrogated me.
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“Alright!” I said.
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started showing me pictures, and as soon as I saw the first one I knew it was from my computer, or more accurately the computer of the company I had been working for. My heart started to pound, and I felt my saliva getting extremely bitter. My face started to turn as red as an apple. My tongue got heavy and twisted. Not because I had done any crimes with my computer; there was really nothing on the hard drive but my business emails and other related data. I remember having over 1500 email messages, and a whole bunch of pictures. But there is more to it when somebody’s freedom is violated.

The PC belonged to a company that trusted me, and the fact that a foreign country such as the U.S. was searching the disk and confiscating material was a big burden for the company. The PC held the financial secrets of a company, which the company wouldn’t be willing to share with the rest of the world. Moreover, I worked for a family company and the family hardly drew a line between their company and their private lives, which meant that the computer also contained private familial data the family wouldn’t share with the world. On top of that, in the office the PC was a shared station, and anybody in the company could and did use it, so there are a lot of data I didn’t know of, though I was 100% sure there was no crime behind it, knowing my colleagues and their dedication to their work and life. I personally had emails with my friends in Germany, some of them aren’t even Muslims. But I was more worried about my emails with the Muslim friends, especially any of the ones who had
ever financially or spiritually helped the oppressed people in Bosnia or Afghanistan, because their messages would be interpreted evilly. Just put yourself in my shoes and imagine somebody storming your house and trying to mess with your whole private life! Would you welcome such an assault?

I started to answer him to the best of my knowledge, especially about my own pictures. He put the pictures I could identify on one side, and the rest on another side. I explained to him that the PC had been used by several colleagues, one of whom scanned all kinds of different pictures for the clients of the Internet café, including all kinds of private family pictures. I was so mad at myself, my government, the U.S., and the Jordanians because I saw how many people’s private lives were being violated. I was also confronted in a later session with a couple emails I interchanged with
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. The funny thing was that Mehdi sent an email before I got arrested, and the Mauritanian government interrogated me about it and I explained to them with definite evidence that there was no evil in it.
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As soon as I got back to my office I wrote
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the following email: “Dear Brother! Please stop sending emails, because the Intel are intercepting our emails and giving me a hard time.” I openly didn’t want any trouble, and so wanted to close any door that would lead in that direction.

“Why did you write
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this email?” asked
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.

I explained the message to him.

“No, it’s because you are afraid that the government would learn about your mischiefs with your friend,” he commented sillily.

“Well, this message was addressed to both Mehdi and the government. I know my emails are intercepted by the government, and I always assumed that the government got a copy of my email traffic,” I said.

“You were using a code when you wrote
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,” he said.

“Well, I am sure you have dealt with coded messages in your career, or you have specialists who help you. Go to them first, before you make up your mind.”

“No, I want you to explain the code to me.”

“There is no code, what you understand is what I meant.” But I had another issue with the Jordanian interrogators: my original emails were in German, and the Americans translated them into English and sent them to the Jordanians, who in their turn translated the English versions into Arabic. Under these circumstances, the original text suffered and the space for evil interpretations widened with every translation.

And there was no end to evil interpretations. In the summer 2001 I was tasked by my company to technologically assist the visit of the Mauritanian President to the city of Tidjikja. The family that employed me is from Tidjikja, so it made sense that their interest lay in the well-being of the city. We installed a small media consulting center that operated over the Internet to transmit the visit of the President in real time. The company took many pictures where my colleagues and I appeared close to the president. In the closest one, the President stood behind my neck wondering at me “magically playing with the computer.”

“I can tell, you were plotting to kill the President,” said
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.

I couldn’t help laughing. “So why didn’t I kill him?”

“I don’t know. You tell me,”
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said.

“Look! If I tried to kill my president in my country, it’s none of your business, nor that of the Americans. Just turn me over to my country and let them deal with me.” I was both angry and hopeful, angry because the U.S. wanted to pin any crime on me, no matter what, and hopeful because they were going to turn me over to my country to suffer the death penalty. The Americans couldn’t possibly have dreamt of a better option. But the Jordanians were fishing on behalf of the Americans, and whenever you notice your interrogator fishing, you can be sure that he is bankrupt.

Though he was as evil as he could be,
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was sort of a reasonable interrogator, and so he never asked me again about the plot on my President, nor about the pictures in my hard disk. And yet I regretted that I didn’t act on the suspicion and make myself look guilty in order to get myself extradited back to Mauritania. It was a crazy and desperate idea, and I don’t think that the Mauritanians would have played along because they knew for a fact I hadn’t plotted against the president. But when my situation worsened in the Jordanian prison, I thought about confessing that I had an operation going on in Mauritania, and had hidden explosives. The idea was that I would try to be sent back to Mauritania.

“Don’t do that! Just be patient and remember that Allah is watching,” one of my guards told me when I asked him for advice. By then I had made a lot of friends among the guards; they brought me the news and taught me about Jordanian culture, the torture methods in the prison, and who’s who among the interrogators.

It was categorically forbidden for the guards to interact with
the detainees, but they always broke these rules. They recounted the latest jokes to me and offered me cigarettes, which I turned down because I don’t smoke. They told me about the other detainees and their cases and also about their own private lives, marriage, children, and the social life in Jordan. I learned almost everything about life in Amman from speaking with them. They also brought me the best books from the library—even the Bible, which I requested because I wanted to study the book that must more or less have shaped the lives of the Americans. In Jordan they have a pretty respectable collection, though some of it is meant as propaganda for the King. The best part about the books was that detainees used them to pass messages back and forth, solacing each other by writing good things inside the book. I didn’t know any detainees, but the first thing I always did was to sift through a book looking for messages. I memorized all of them.