Guantánamo Diary (31 page)

“Oh, ALLAH help me..… Oh Allah have mercy on me”
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kept mimicking my prayers, “ALLAH, ALLAH.… There is no Allah. He let you down!” I smiled at how ignorant
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was, talking about the Lord like that. But the Lord is very patient, and doesn’t need to rush to punishment, because there is no escaping him.

Detainees knew the policy in the camp: if the MI believes that you’re hiding crucial information, they torture you in Camp
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, they kidnap you to a secret place and nobody knows what they’re doing with you. During my time in
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Camp two individuals were kidnapped and disappeared for good, namely
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. I started to get the feeling that I was going to be kidnapped because I really got stuck with my interrogators, and so I started to gather Intels.

“The camp out there is the worst one,” said a young MP.

“They don’t get food?” I wondered.

“Something like that,” he replied.

Between 10 and 11 p.m.,
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handed me over to
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gave orders to the guards to move me to his specially prepared room.
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It was freezing cold and full of pictures showing the glories of the U.S.: weapons arsenals,
planes, and pictures of George Bush. “Don’t pray! You’ll insult my country if you pray during my National anthem. We’re the greatest country in the free world, and we have the smartest president in the world,” he said. For the whole night I had to listen to the U.S. anthem. I hate anthems anyway. All I can remember was the beginning, “Oh say can you see…” over and over. I was happy that no ice-cold water was poured over me. I tried at the beginning to steal some prayers, but
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was watching closely by means of
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. “Stop the fuck praying, you’re insulting my country!” I was really tired and worn out, and I was anything but looking for trouble, and so I decided to pray in my heart. I was shaking all night long.

Between 4 and 5 a.m.,
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released me, just to be taken a couple of hours later
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to start the same routine over. But the hardest step is the first step; the hardest days were the first days, and with every day going by I grew stronger. Meanwhile I was the main subject of talk in the camp. Although many other detainees were suffering similar fates, I was “Criminal Number One,” and I was being treated that way. Sometimes when I was in the Rec yard, detainees shouted, “Be patient. Remember Allah tests the people he loves the most.” Comments like that were my only solace beside my faith in the Lord.

Nothing really interesting changed in my routine: cold room, standing up for hours, interrogators repeating the same threats about me being kidnapped and locked up forever.
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made me write tons of pages about my life, but I never satisfied him. One night he undressed me with the help of
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a male guard. Expecting the cold room, I had put shorts on over my pants to reduce the cold that was penetrating through my bones, but he was extremely mad, which led him to make a
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guard undress me. I never felt so violated. I stood up all the night in the ice-cold room praying, ignoring all his barking and ordering me to stop praying. I couldn’t have cared less about whatever he was going to do.
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crawled from behind the scene.
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told me a couple of times before
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visit about a very high level government person who was going to visit me and talk to me about my family. I didn’t take the information negatively; I thought he was going to bring me some messages from my family. But I was wrong, it was about hurting my family.
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was escalating the situation with me relentlessly.

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came around 11 a.m., escorted by
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and the new
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. He was brief and direct. “My name is
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. I work for
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. My government is desperate to get information out of you. Do you understand?”
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“Yes.”

“Can you read English?”

“Yes.”

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handed me a letter that he had obviously forged. The letter was from DoD, and it said, basically, “Ould Slahi is involved in the Millennium attack and recruited three of the September 11 hijackers. Since Slahi has refused to cooperate, the U.S. government is going to arrest his mother and put her in a special facility.”

I read the letter. “Is that not harsh and unfair?” I said.

“I am not here to maintain justice. I’m here to stop people from crashing planes into buildings in my country.”

“Then go and stop them. I’ve done nothing to your country,” I said.

“You have two options: either being a defendant or a witness.”

“I want neither.”

“You have no choice, or your life is going to change decidedly,” he said.

“Just do it, the sooner, the better!” I said.
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put the forged letter back in his bag, closed it angrily, and left the room.
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would lead the team working on my case until August or September 2004. He always tried to make me believe that his real name was
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, but what he didn’t know was that I knew his name even before I met him:
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.
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After that meeting
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, he was just seeking the required formalities to kidnap me from the camp to an unknown place. “Your being here required many signatures. We’ve been trying for some time to get you here,” one of my guards would tell me later.
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was also putting together a complete team which would execute the Abduction. All of this was carried out in secrecy; participants knew only as much as they needed to. I know for instance that
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didn’t know about the details of the plan.

On Monday August 25, 2003, around 4 p.m.
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reserved me for interrogation
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.
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By then I had spent the weekend on
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, which was entirely emptied of any other detainees, in order to keep me isolated from the rest of the community. But I saw it as a positive thing: the cell was warmer and I could see daylight, while in
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I was locked in a frozen box.

“Now I have overall control. I can do anything I want with you; I can even move you to Camp
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.

“I know why you moved me to
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Block,” I said. “It’s because you don’t want me to see anybody.”
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didn’t comment;
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just smiled. It was more of a friendly talk. Around 5:30 p.m.,
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brought me my cold MRE. I had gotten used to my cold portions; I didn’t savor them, but I had been suffering weight loss like never before, and I knew in order to survive I had to eat.

I started to eat my meal.
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was going in and out, but there was nothing suspicious about that,
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had always been that way. I barely finished my meal, when all of a sudden
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and I heard a commotion, guards cursing loudly (“I told you motherfucker…!”), people banging the floor violently with heavy boots, dogs barking, doors closing loudly. I froze in my seat.
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went speechless. We were staring at each other, not knowing what was going on. My heart was pounding because I knew a detainee was going to be hurt. Yes, and that detainee was me.

Suddenly a commando team consisting of three soldiers and a German shepherd broke into our interrogation room. Everything happened quicker than you could think about it.
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punched me violently, which made me fall face down on the floor.

“Motherfucker, I told you, you’re gone!” said
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.
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His partner kept punching me everywhere, mainly on my face and my ribs. He, too, was masked from head to toe; he punched me the whole time without saying a word, because he didn’t want to be recognized. The third man was not masked; he stayed at the door holding the dog’s collar, ready to release it on me.

“Who told you to do that? You’re hurting the detainee!” screamed
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, who was no less terrified than I was.
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was the leader of the assailing guards, and he was executing
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orders. As to me, I couldn’t digest the situation. My first thought was, They mistook me for somebody else. My second thought was to try to recognize my environment by looking around while one of the guards was squeezing my face against the floor. I saw the dog fighting to get loose. I saw
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standing up, looking helplessly at the guards working on me.

“Blindfold the Motherfucker, if he tries to look—”

One of them hit me hard across the face, and quickly put the
goggles on my eyes, ear muffs on my ears, and a small bag over my head. I couldn’t tell who did what. They tightened the chains around my ankles and my wrists; afterwards, I started to bleed. All I could hear was
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cursing, “F-this and F-that!” I didn’t say a word, I was overwhelmingly surprised, I thought they were going to execute me.

Thanks to the beating I wasn’t able to stand, so
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and the other guard dragged me out with my toes tracing the way and threw me in a truck, which immediately took off. The beating party would go on for the next three or four hours before they turned me over to another team that was going to use different torture techniques.

“Stop praying, Motherfucker, you’re killing people,”
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said, and punched me hard on my mouth. My mouth and nose started to bleed, and my lips grew so big that I technically could not speak anymore. The colleague of
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turned out to be one of my guards,
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.
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and
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each took a side and started to punch me and smash me against the metal of the truck. One of the guys hit me so hard that my breath stopped and I was choking; I felt like I was breathing through my ribs. I almost suffocated without their knowledge. I was having a hard time breathing due to the head cover anyway, plus they hit me so many times on my ribs that I stopped breathing for a moment.

Did I pass out? Maybe not; all I know is that I kept noticing
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several times spraying Ammonia in my nose. The funny thing was that Mr.
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was at the same time my “lifesaver,” as were all the guards I would be dealing with for the next year, or most of them. All of them were allowed to give me medication and first aid.

After ten to fifteen minutes, the truck stopped at the beach, and my escorting team dragged me out of the truck and put
me in a high-speed boat.
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never gave me a break; they kept hitting me and
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in order to make them stab me.
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“You’re killing people,” said
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. I believe he was thinking out loud: he knew his was the most cowardly crime in the world, torturing a helpless detainee who completely went to submission and turned himself in. What a brave operation!
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was trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing.

Inside the boat,
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made me drink salt water, I believe it was directly from the ocean. It was so nasty I threw up. They would put any object in my mouth and shout, “Swallow, Motherfucker!,” but I decided inside not to swallow the organ-damaging salt water, which choked me when they kept pouring it in my mouth. “Swallow, you idiot!” I contemplated quickly, and decided for the nasty, damaging water rather than death.

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and
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escorted me for about three hours in the high-speed boat. The goal of such a trip was, first, to torture the detainee and claim that “the detainee hurt himself during transport,” and second, to make the detainee believe he was being transferred to some far, faraway secret prison. We detainees knew all of that; we had detainees reporting they had been flown around for four hours and found themselves in the same jail where they started. I knew from the beginning that I was going to be transferred to
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about a five-minute ride.
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had a very bad reputation: just hearing the name gave me nausea.
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I knew the whole long trip
I was going to take was meant to terrorize me. But what difference does it make? I cared less about the place, and more about the people who were detaining me. No matter where I got transferred, I would still be a detainee of the U.S. Armed Forces; and as for rendition to a third country, I thought I was through with that because I was already sent to Jordan for eight months. The politics of the DoD toward me was to take care of me on their own; “September 11 didn’t happen in Jordan; we don’t expect other countries to pry Intels off detainees as we do,”
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said once. The Americans obviously were not satisfied with the results achieved by their “torture allies.”

But I think when torture comes into play, things get out of
control. Torture doesn’t guarantee that the detainee cooperates. In order to stop torture, the detainee has to please his assailant, even with untruthful, and sometimes misleading, Intels; sorting information out is time-consuming. And experience shows that torture doesn’t stop or even reduce terrorist attacks: Egypt, Algeria, Turkey are good examples. On the other hand, discussion has brought tremendously good results. After the unsuccessful attack on the Egyptian president in Addis Ababa, the government reached a cease-fire with Al Gawaa al-Islamiyah, and the latter opted later on for a political fight. Nevertheless, the Americans had learned a lot from their torture-practicing allies, and they were working closely together.