The guards sat me in a chair next to the empty table and left me alone. The tester was watching me from the next room to see how I behaved. When he decided to end his self-imprisonment behind the mirror he entered the room, accompanied by an interpreter whose Arabic was very weak. It was entertaining to watch the exchange between them as the interpreter struggled to keep up with his sermon.
He started with stories of his great achievements, naming many high-profile people suspected of heinous acts of violence whom he had saved and sent home. The stories in the Thousand and One Nights paled in comparison to his imagination. He walked me through the technological part briefly, mostly to scare me and convince me to tell him the truth, as Abu Zubaydah and others supposedly had when he tested them. He ran a belt around my abdomen and another one around my rib cage to measure the pattern of my breathing. He placed a cuff around my upper arm to measure the changes in my blood pressure, and wrapped a sensor around the tip of my index finger, explaining that if I lied I would sweat and thus drive down the temperature on my finger. Then he hit the real meat, conducting a comprehensive and thorough interrogation. 26
He laid out pictures of some of the suspected 9/11 hijackers and planners and asked me whether I knew or ever met them. I couldn’t understand his logic, because he kept showing me more than one picture at a time and asking questions about them, as if they were joined and did everything together. Why didn’t he take them one by one? I told the tester that I never met or talked to any one of them, even though I remembered seeing Ramzi bin al-Shibh once. But I couldn’t remember where, so I decided to skip that information because I was too scared, especially because I could see the FBI and the tester clearly suspected him of being a 9/11 co-conspirator.
The tester told me the results of the test were “inconclusive.” He seemed to notice his mistake of not separating the guys and asking about them individually, but his attempts to convince me to take the test one more time fell on deaf ears. I was tired like never before, and I told him that I didn’t really need freedom that badly. The whole process was tedious and long, “comme un jour sans pain,” as the French say, except it really was a day without bread. I was sent back to my cell, sure they were now planning on me staying for the long haul.
After a couple of days, I was taken to interrogation.
“How are you?” said John. It had been a long time since I’d seen him.
“Good!”
John and his colleague talked about the polygraph and tried to get me to agree to take it again, but I refused. I really couldn’t see what good it would do. They also tried to gather intels from me about other detainees. The Joint Task Force was starting to turn up the heat against the detainees. Treatment in the interrogation rooms was getting worse and worse, and visits from the so-called IRF team to pick up “non-compliant detainees” were commonplace. One time, the whole unit was deployed to search detainees at the same time. It was in the dead of night when I was pulled out of my cell and searched by the guards, with the TV camera on me and contractors watching the whole show. I wasn’t the only one; the whole block of forty-eight detainees was searched. The relationship between the Joint Detention Group and the detainees was becoming very tense, and there was nothing much detainees could do to change their situation: the deck was stacked against us, and JDG held all the cards.27
In Major General Dunlavey’s era, there were many issues, most of which were initiated by the desperation of the detainees. Endless interrogation. Disrespect of the Holy Koran by some of the guards. Torturing detainees by making them spend the night in a cold room (though this method was not practiced nearly as much as it would be in General Geoffrey Miller’s time). So we decided to go on a hunger strike; many detainees took part, including me. But I could only strike for four days, after which I was a ghost.28
“Don’t break, you’re gonna weaken the group,” said my Saudi neighbor.
“I told you guys I’m gonna hunger strike, not that I’m gonna commit suicide. I’m gonna break,” I replied.
The situation grew even worse when General Miller took over. He was a hardworking man, the kind of man to be picked for the dirtiest job, when many others had failed. General Miller was a very radical hater. He completely changed the detention policies in GTMO in all aspects. He used to tour the blocks nonstop, giving guards and interrogators instructions for what to do with us. I personally don’t know what he told them, but as someone on the receiving end of his orders, I definitely felt the pain.
General Miller was responsible for a kind of class society he created in the camp. Blocks were defined by their levels, and there were five levels. The best was Level One, for so-called highly compliant detainees. Level Four was for isolation as a disciplinary measure, and Level Five was reserved for people who were considered of high intelligence value. Detainees of this level are completely under the mercy of their interrogators, which was very convenient for the interrogators. The system was designed to keep us on edge all the time: One day in paradise, and the next in hell.
In the beginning, when we were informed about the new system, it was a given to me that I was Level One. But to my dismay, I was put with the pariah block, the supposed worst of the worst. I was like, what the heck is going on, I’ve never been in trouble with the guards, and I am answering my interrogators and cooperating with them. But I missed that cooperation meant telling your interrogators whatever they want to hear.
I was put once more in Oscar Block toward the end of 2002.
An escort team appeared in front of my cell.
“760 reservation!” they said.
“OK, just give me a second!” I put my clothes on and washed my face. My heart started to pound. I hated interrogation; I had gotten tired of being terrified all the time, living in constant fear day-in and day-out for the last thirteen months.
“Allah be with you! Keep your head on! They work for Satan!” yelled my fellow detainees to keep me together, as we always did when somebody got pulled for interrogation. I hated the sounds of the heavy metal chains; I could hardly carry them when they were given to me. People were always getting taken from the block, and every time I heard the chains I thought it would be me. You never know what’s going to happen in the interrogation; people sometimes never came back to the block, they just disappeared. It happened to a Moroccan fellow detainee, and it would happen to me, as you’re going to learn, God willing.
When I entered the room in Brown Building, it was crowded with another new FBI-led team. William introduced me to an FBI agent named Robert and someone from the New York Police Department he called Tom; with them was a military intelligence officer and a young Moroccan man who they explained was a French, not an Arabic, interpreter.29
“Hi!”
“Hi!” they said, almost in unison.
“I’ve chosen Robert and Tom based on their experience and maturity,” William said. “ They’ll be assessing your case from now on. There are a couple of things that need to be completed in your case. For instance, you didn’t tell us everything about Raouf Hannachi. He’s a very important guy.”30
“First, I told you what I know about Raouf Hannachi, even though I don’t need to be providing you information about anybody. We’re talking here about me. Second, in order to continue my cooperation with you, I need you to answer me one question: WHY AM I HERE? If you don’t give me the answer, you can consider me a non-existent detainee.” Later on I learned from my great lawyers Nancy Hollander, Sylvia Royce, and Theresa Duncan that the magic formulation of my request is a Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus. Obviously that phrase makes no sense to the average, mortal man like me. The average person would just say, “Why the hell are you locking me up?” I’m not a lawyer, but common sense dictates that after three years of interrogating me and depriving me of my liberty, the government at least owes me an explanation why it’s doing so. What exactly is my crime?
“It makes no sense: It’s like somebody who quits a 10-mile trip after traveling nine miles,” said