Guantánamo Diary (24 page)

The guards were picked mostly from the Bedouin tribes that are known for their historical loyalty to the King, and paid miserable wages, about $430 a month, give or take. Although this wage is among the best in Jordan, a guard can’t start a family without another support of his own. But when a guard serves for fifteen years, he has the option of retiring with half of his current wage or continuing with that money plus his usual wage. The guards are part of Jordan’s Elite Special Forces, and enjoy all kinds of training overseas. There are no females in the Special Forces.

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were responsible for moving detainees from one cell to another, to interrogations, to the shower, or to see their parents during the visits that took place on Fridays. I was so frustrated when I had to watch everybody seeing his family, while week after week I was deprived of that right. Lower ranking guards were responsible for the watch, and
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for the grocery that took place every Saturday. The responsible
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would go cell to cell with a list, writing down what each detainee wished to buy. You could buy juice, milk, candy, underwear, a towel, and that was about it; if you had enough money you would get what you ordered, and if not then not. I had about $87 on me when I was sent to Jordan, which seemed to have been enough for my modest groceries. One time, when the
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was going around with his list, I spotted my name and my accusation: “Participation in Terrorist attacks.”

Every other day the guards offered you a five-minute recreation time. I hardly ever took advantage of it; the fact that I had to be shackled and blindfolded was just not worth it. Every once in a while detainees got their hair cut, and every Sunday the guards gave us cleaning materials to mop our cells, and they mopped the floor. The jail was not dirty.

The prison was run by three individuals: the director of the prison
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his two assistants,
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. They played a role similar to the one
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in GTMO Bay. They are supposedly independent from the Intel community, but in practice both work together and collect Intels, each with its own methods. The director was a very big guy who dressed proudly in his Bedouin-civilian suits. He passed by every morning and asked every single detainee, “How are you doing? Need anything?” He always woke me up asking me the same question.

During my entire eight months in the Jordanian prison I asked him once for a water bottle, which he brought me. I wanted to put the ice-cold water I got from the faucet on the heater in order to warm it up so I could take care of my own hygiene. I do think that it was a good thing for him to check
on detainees. However, the chances were really zero that detainees were going to fix any problems with the help of a director who also was actively taking part in torture. The Director made sure that everybody got three meals a day, breakfast around 7 a.m., lunch around 1 p.m., mostly chicken and rice, and dinner, a light meal with tea.

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were continually patrolling through the corridor and checking on everybody, including whether the guards were following the rules.
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was responsible for what they call External Operations, such as capture and house searches.

Then there were the interrogators. Jordanian Interrogators have been working side-by-side with the Americans since the beginning of the operation baptized the “Global War Against Terrorism,” interrogating people both inside and outside Jordan. They have agents in Afghanistan, where they profit from their average Middle Eastern looks. In the beginning the Jordanians were seen as a potential associate for doing the dirty work; the fact that Jordanians widely use torture as a means to facilitate interrogation seemed to impress the American authorities. But there was a problem: the Jordanians don’t take anybody and torture him; they must have reason to practice heavy physical torture. As Americans grew hardened in their sins, they started to take the dirty job in their own hands. Nonetheless, being arrested in a Jordanian Jail is an irreparable torture already.

I had three interrogators in Jordan.
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. He has been leading the interrogators team in Jordan, and interrogating detainees himself in GTMO, and most likely in other secret places in Afghanistan
and elsewhere, on behalf of the U.S. government. He seems to be widely-known in Jordan, as I learned from a Jordanian detainee in GTMO.
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seemed to be pretty well experienced: he saw my file once and decided it wasn’t worth wasting his “precious” time on me, and so he never bothered to see me again.

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.
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“You know,
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, your only problem is your time in Canada. If you really haven’t done nothing in Canada, you don’t belong in jail,” concluded
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after several sessions.

He was a specialist on Afghanistan; he himself had attended the training camps there as an undercover agent during the war against communism. When I was training in Al Farouq in ’91, he was working undercover as a student in Khalden.
^†
He questioned me thoroughly about my whole trip to Afghanistan and showed satisfaction with my answers. That was very much his whole job. In the winter of 2001 he was sent, maybe undercover, to Afghanistan and Turkey to help the U.S. capture Mujahideen, and I saw him when he came back in the summer of 2002 with a whole bunch of pictures. Part of his
mission was to gather Intels about me from other detainees in Afghanistan, but he didn’t seem to have come up with anything.
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showed me the pictures. I didn’t recognize anybody, and felt bad for myself. Why did they show me more than 100 pictures, and I knew none of them? It didn’t make sense. Usually, interrogators ask about people that are connected to you. So I decided to recognize at least one picture.

“This is Gamal Abdel Nasser,” I said.

“You are making fun of me, aren’t you?” said
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angrily.

“No, no, I just thought it looks like him.”
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is a former Egyptian president who died before I was born.
^*

“These people are from the same gang as you are,”
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said.

“Maybe. But I don’t know them,” I said. He didn’t say much after that;
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just spoke about his adventure in Afghanistan. “You’re courageous,” I remarked, to give him fuel for more talk.

“You know, the Americans are using smart weapons that follow their target based on temperature changes. Many brothers have been captured,”
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recounted under the thick cloud of his cigarette smoke. I never saw
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after that session.

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; I know his real first name.
^†

Boom!
He slapped me across the face, and pushed my face against the wall. I was sobbing, maybe more because of frustration than pain.

“You are not a man! I am going to make you lick the dirty floor and tell me your story, beginning from the point when you got out of your mother’s vagina,” he continued. “You haven’t seen nothing yet.” He was correct, although he was the biggest liar I ever met. He lied so much that he contradicted himself because he would forget what he had said the last time about a specific topic. In order to give himself credibility, he kept swearing and taking the Lord’s name in vain. I always wondered whether he thought I believed his garbage, though I always acted as if I did; he would have been angry if I called him a liar. He arrested big al Qaeda guys who talked about me being the bad guy, and he released them a thousand and one times from the prison when they told the truth. The funny thing was that he always forgot that he arrested and released them already.

“I arrested your cousin Abu Hafs and he told me the whole truth. As a matter of fact, he said ‘Don’t you put your hands on me, and I’m gonna tell you the truth,’ and I didn’t, and he did. He told me bad things about you. After that I bid him farewell and secretly sent him to Mauritania, where he was going to be interrogated for a couple of weeks and released. But you’re different. You keep holding back Intels. I am going to send you to the secret political prison in the middle of the desert. Nobody is gonna give a shit about you.” I had to keep listening to this same garbage over and over; the only thing he changed was the dates of arrest and release. In his dreams, he also arrested
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, and other individuals
who had supposedly been providing information about me. Good for him; as long as he didn’t beat me or attack me verbally I was cool, and would just listen carefully to his Thousand-and-One-Arabian-Nights tales.

“I’ve just arrived from the U.S., where I interrogated
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,” he obviously lied.

“Well, that’s good, because he must have told you that he doesn’t know me.”

“No, he said he does.”

“Well, that’s none of your business, right? According to you, I’ve done crimes against the U.S., so just send me to the U.S. or tell me what have I done against your country,” I remarked sharply. I was growing tired of the futile conversation with him, and of trying to convince him that I had nothing to do with the Millennium Plot.

“I am not working for the Americans. Some of your friends are trying to hurt my country, and I’m asking you indirect questions as an interrogation technique,”
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lied.

“Which friends of mine are trying to hurt your country?” I wondered.

“I cannot tell you!”

“Since I haven’t tried to hurt your country, there’s no blaming me. I am not my friends. Go and arrest them and release me.” But if you are trying to make sense of things, the interrogation room is not for you. Whenever
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told me he had arrested somebody, I knew that the guy was still free.

Although he used physical violence against me only twice, he kept terrorizing me with other methods that were maybe worse than physical pain. He put a poor detainee next to my interrogation room, and his colleague started to beat him with a hard object until he burst out crying like a baby. How cheap! That was painful. I started to shake, my face got red, my saliva
got as bitter as green persimmon, my tongue as heavy as metal. Those are the symptoms I always suffer when I get extremely scared, and the constant fear didn’t seem to harden me. My depression reached its peak.

“Do you hear what’s happening next door?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to suffer the same?” I almost said yes. It was so hard for me to helplessly listen to somebody suffering. It’s not easy to make a grown-up cry like a baby.

“Why? I am talking to you!” I said, showing a fake composure. After all, the brother next door was also talking to his interrogator.
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sardonically smiled and continued to smoke his cigarette as if nothing were happening. That night I was very cooperative and quiet; the logical and argumentative human being in me disappeared all of a sudden.
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knew what he was doing, and he had apparently been doing it for a long time.

He would make me pass through the torture row so I would hear the cries and moans and the shouting of the torturers. I was blessed because the guards kept me blindfolded so I couldn’t see the detainees. I was not supposed to see them, nor was I interested in seeing a brother, or actually anybody, suffering. The Prophet Mohamed (Peace be upon him) said, “God tortures whoever tortures human beings,” and as far as I understand it, the person’s religion doesn’t matter.

“I am going to send you to the Shark Pool,”
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threatened me, when I refused to talk to him after he hit me.

“You don’t know me. I swear by Almighty God I’ll never talk to you. Go ahead and torture me. It will take my death to make me talk, and for your information I’m sorry for every bit of cooperation I have offered in the past,” I said.

“First of all, your cooperation was achieved by force. You
didn’t have a choice. Nor will you in the future: I am going to make you talk,”
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said.

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started to push me against the wall and hit me on the sides of my face, but I didn’t feel any pain. I don’t think he hit me with his whole strength; the guy looks like a bull, and one real blow from him would have cost me 32 teeth. As he was hitting me, he started to ask me questions. I don’t remember the questions, but I do remember my answers. There was only one answer.

“
Ana Bari’a
, I am innocent.” I drove him crazy, but there was no making me talk.

“I have no time right now, but you’re gonna suffer heavily tomorrow, son of a‥…” he said, and immediately left the room.

The escort took me back to my cell. It was around midnight; I sat on my prayer mat and started reading the Koran and praying until very late. I could hardly concentrate on what I was reading. I kept thinking, What will it be like in the Shark Pool? I had heard of an electrified pool, I knew they used one in Egypt, but “Shark Pool” sounded terrible.

But the rendezvous came and went without me being taken to the torture place, one day, two day, three days! Nothing happened to me, except for no food, not because they didn’t give it to me but because I had no appetite, as always when I get depressed. I learned later from the Jordanian detainee in GTMO who spent fifty days in the same prison that there is no such thing as the Shark Pool, but that they do have other painful methods of torture, like hanging detainees from their hands and feet and beating them for hours, and depriving them from sleep for days until they lose their minds.