“Salam Alaikum!”
“Waalaikum Salam.”
“Who are you?
“I am from Mauritania . . . Palestine . . . Syria . . . Saudi Arabia . . .!”
“How was the trip?”
“I almost froze to death,” shouted one guy.
“I slept the whole trip,” replied Ibrahim.
“Why did they put the patch beneath my ear?” said a third.
“Who was in front of me in the truck?” I asked. “He kept moving, which made the guards beat me all the way from the airport to the camp.”
“Me, too,” another detainee answered.
We called each other with the ISN numbers we were assigned in Bagram. My number was 760. In the cell on my left was 706, Mohammed al-Amin from Mauritania. He was about twenty years old, and had been captured in Pakistan and sold to the Americans. Though Mauritanian, he had never really been in the country; I could tell because of his Saudi accent. On my right was the guy from the Maldives, whose number was 730. He spoke poor Arabic, and claimed to have been captured in Karachi, where he attends the University. In front of my cell they put the Sudanese, next to each other.13
Breakfast was modest: one boiled egg, a hard piece of bread, and something else I don’t know the name of. It was my first hot meal since I left Jordan. Oh, the tea was soothing! I like tea better than any food, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been drinking it. Tea is a crucial part of the diet of people from warmer regions; it sounds contradictory but it is true.
People were shouting all over the place in indistinct conversations. It was just a good feeling when everybody started to recount his story. Many detainees suffered, some more and some less. I didn’t consider myself the worst, nor the luckiest. Some people were captured with their friends and their friends disappeared from the face of the earth; they most likely were sent to other allied countries to facilitate their interrogation by torture, such as the detainees who were sent to Egypt and Jordan. I considered the arrival to Cuba a blessing, and so I told the brothers, “Since you guys are not involved in crimes, you need to fear nothing. I personally am going to cooperate, since nobody is going to torture me. I don’t want any of you to suffer what I suffered in Jordan. In Jordan, they hardly appreciate your cooperation.”
I wrongly believed that the worst was over, and so I cared less about the time it would take the Americans to figure out that I was not the guy they are looking for. I trusted the American justice system too much, and shared that trust with the detainees from European countries. We all had an idea about how the democratic system works. Other detainees, for instance those from the Middle East, didn’t believe it for a second and trust the American system. Their argument lay on the growing hostility of extremist Americans against Muslims and the Arabs. With every day going by, the optimists lost ground. The interrogation methods worsened considerably as time went by, and as you shall see, those responsible for GTMO broke all the principles upon which the U.S. was built and compromised every great principle such as Ben Franklin’s “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
All of us wanted to make up for months of forced silence, we wanted to get every anger and agony off our chests, and we listened to each other’s amazing stories for the next thirty days to come, which was our time in Oscar Block. When we later got transferred to a different block, many fellow detainees cried for being separated from their new friends. I cried, too.
The interrogation escort team showed up at my cell.
“Reservation!” said one of the MPs, holding the long chains in his hands. Reservation is the code word for being taken to interrogation. Although I didn’t understand where I was going, I prudently followed their orders until they delivered me to the interrogator. His name was Hamza, or at least that was what he was called, and he was wearing a U.S. Army uniform. He was an intelligence officer in the Kentucky National Guard, a man with all the paradoxes you may imagine. He spoke Arabic decently, with a Jordanian accent; you could tell he grew up among Arabic-speaking friends.14
I was terrified when I stepped into the room in Brown Building because of the CamelBak on Hamza’s back, from which he was sipping. I never saw a thing like that before. I thought it was a kind of tool to hook on me as a part of my interrogation. I really don’t know why I was scared, but the fact that I never saw Hamza nor his CamelBak, nor did I expect an Army guy, all these factors contributed to my fear.
The older gentleman who interrogated me the night before entered the room with some candies and introduced Hamza to me, “I chose Hamza because he speaks your language. We’re going to ask you detailed questions about you r cousin Abu Hafs. As to me, I am going to leave soon, but my replacement will take care of you. See you later.” He stepped out of the room leaving me and Hamza to work.
Hamza was a friendly guy. He was a reserve officer in the U.S. Army who believed himself to be lucky in life. Hamza wanted me to repeat to him my whole story, which I’ve been repeating for the last three years over and over. I got used to interrogators asking me the same things. Before the interrogator even moved his lips I knew his questions, and as soon as he or she started to talk, I turned my “tape” on. But when I came to the part about Jordan, he felt very sorry!
“Those countries don’t respect human rights. They even torture people,” he said. I was comforted: if Hamza criticized cruel interrogation methods, it meant that the Americans wouldn’t do something like that. Yes, they were not exactly following the law in Bagram, but that was in Afghanistan, and now we are in a U.S. controlled territory.
After Hamza finished his interrogation, he sent me back and promised to come back should new questions arise. During the session with Hamza, I asked him to use the bathroom. “No. 1 or No. 2?” he asked. It was the first time I heard the human private business coded in numbers. In the countries I’ve been in, it isn’t customary to ask people about their intention in the bathroom, nor do they have a code.
I never saw Hamza in an interrogation again. The FBI’s William resumed his work a couple of days later, only the FBI team was now reinforced by José, a Hispanic American who spoke unaccented English and fluent Spanish. José was another friendly guy. He and William worked very well together. For some reason, the FBI was interested in taking my case in hand. Although a military interrogator came with the team a couple of times and asked some questions, you could tell that William had the upper hand.15
The team worked on my case for over a month, on almost a daily basis. They asked me all kind of questions, and we spoke about other political topics beside the interrogation. Nobody ever threatened me or tried to torture me, and from my side I was cooperating with the team very well. “Our job is to take your statements and send them to the analysts in D.C. Even if you lie to us, we can’t really tell right away until more information comes in,” said William.
The team could see very clearly how sick I was; the prints of Jordan and Bagram were more than obvious. I looked like a ghost.
“You’re getting better,” said the Army guy when he saw me three weeks after my arrival in GTMO. On my second or third day in GTMO I had collapsed in my cell. I was just driven to my extremes; the MREs didn’t appeal to me. The Medics took me out of my cell and I tried to walk the way to the hospital, but as soon as I left Oscar Block I collapsed once more, which made the Medics carry me to the clinic. I threw up so much that I was completely dehydrated. I received first aid and got an IV. The IV was terrible; they must have put some medication in it that I have an allergy to. My mouth dried up completely and my tongue became so heavy that I couldn’t ask for help. I gestured with my hands to the corpsmen to stop dripping the fluid into my body, which they did.
Later