Guantánamo Diary. Mohamedou Ould Slahi

I enjoyed him being my guard. He gave me more time on the bathroom, and he even looked away when I used the barrel.

      I asked him about my situation. “You’re not a criminal, because they put the criminals in the other side,” he told me, gesturing with his hand. I thought about those “criminals” and pictured a bunch of young Muslims, and how hard their situation could be. I felt bad. As it turned out, later on I was transferred to these “criminals,” and became a “high priority criminal.” I was kind of ashamed when the same guard saw me later with the “criminals,” after he had told me that I was going to be released at most after three days. He acted normally, but he didn’t have that much freedom to talk to me about religion there because of his numerous colleagues. Other detainees told me that he was not bad toward them, either.

      The second or the third night an agent named William pulled me out of my cell himself and led me to an interrogation, where the same female Arabic interpreter already had taken a seat. William was a Japanese American who worked with the CIA, as his colleague later informed me; his specialty was in brutalizing detainees who were considered important, but not valuable enough to get them tickets to the secret CIA prisons. You could tell he was the right man for the job: he was the kind of man who wouldn’t mind doing the dirty work. The detainees back in Bagram used to call him William the Torturer; he reportedly was responsible for torturing even innocent individuals the government released.³

      William didn’t need to shackle me because I was in shackles 24 hours a day. I slept, ate, used the bathroom while completely shackled, hand to feet. He opened a file in his hand and started by means of the female Arabic interpreter. He was asking me general questions about my life and my background. When he asked me, “What languages do you speak?” he didn’t believe me; he laughed along with the interpreter, saying, “Haha, you speak German? Wait, we’re gonna check.”

      Suddenly a tall white man wearing shorts and an oversized badge around his neck entered the room. He introduced himself as Michael, which he pronounced in the German way, MeeShaEel. There was no mistaking it, he was the one in charge. He scanned the room quickly, saying something to his colleagues I didn’t understand, then switched languages immediately.

      “Sprichst du Deutsch?” he blurted.

      “Ja Wohl,” I replied. Michael was not completely fluent, but his German was fairly acceptable, given that he was born and lived his whole life in the United States. He later told me that he studied German as a foreign language to further his CIA career and connect better to his German roots. He confirmed to his colleague that my German was “better than his.”

      Both looked at me with some respect after that, though the respect was not enough to save me from William’s wrath. William asked me where I learned to speak German, and said that he was going to interrogate me again later.

      Michael faced me and said, “Wahrheit macht frei, the truth sets you free.”

      When I heard him say that, I knew the truth wouldn’t set me free, because “Arbeit” didn’t set the Jews free. Hitler’s propaganda machinery used to lure Jewish detainees with the slogan, “Arbeit macht frei,” Work sets you free. But work set nobody free.

      Michael took a note in his small notebook and left the room. William sent me back to my room and apologized to the female interpreter.

      “I am sorry for keeping you awake for so long,”

      “No problem!” she replied.

      After several days in isolation I was transferred to the general population, but I could only look at them because I was put in the narrow barbed-wire corridor between the cells. I felt like I was out of jail, though, and I cried and thanked God. After eight months of total isolation, I saw fellow detainees more or less in my situation. “Bad” detainees like me were shackled 24 hours a day and put in the corridor, where every passing guard or detainee stepped on them. The place was so narrow that the barbed wire kept pinching me for the next ten days. I saw Omar Deghayes being force-fed; he was on a forty-five day hunger strike. The guards were yelling at him, and he was bouncing a dry piece of bread between his hands. All the detainees looked so worn out, as if they had been buried and after several days resurrected, but Omar was a completely different story: he was bones without meat. It reminded me of the pictures you see in documentaries about WWII prisoners.⁴

      Detainees were not allowed to talk to each other, but we enjoyed looking at each other. The punishment for talking was hanging the detainee by the hands with his feet barely touching the ground. I saw an Afghani detainee who passed out a couple of times while hanging from his hands. The medics “fixed” him and hung him back up. Other detainees were luckier: they were hung for a certain time and then released. Most of the detainees tried to talk while they were hanging, which made the guards double their punishment. There was a very old Afghani fellow who reportedly was arrested to turn over his son. The guy was mentally sick; he couldn’t stop talking because he didn’t know where he was, nor why. I don’t think he understood his environment, but the guards kept dutifully hanging him. It was so pitiful. One day one of the guards threw him on his face, and he was crying like a baby.

      We were put in about six or seven big barbed-wire cells named after operations performed against the U.S: Nairobi, U.S.S. Cole, Dar-Es-Salam, and so on. In each cell there was a detainee called English, who benevolently served as an interpreter to translate the orders to his co-detainees. Our English was a gentleman from Sudan named Abu Mohamed. His English was very basic, and so he asked me secretly whether I spoke English. “No,” I replied—but as it turned out I was a Shakespeare compared to him. My brethren thought that I was denying them my services, but I just didn’t know how bad the situation was.

      Now I was sitting in front of bunch of dead regular U.S. citizens. My first impression, when I saw them chewing without a break, was, What’s wrong with these guys, do they have to eat so much? Most of the guards were tall, and overweight. Some of them were friendly and some very hostile. Whenever I realized that a guard was mean I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face:

      “You speak English?” he asked.

      “No English,” I replied.

      “We don’t like you to speak English. We want you to die slowly,” he said.

      “No English,” I kept replying. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction that his message arrived. People with hatred always have something to get off their chests, but I wasn’t ready to be that drain.

      Prayer in groups wasn’t allowed. Everybody prayed on his own, and so did I. Detainees had no clues about prayer time. We would just imitate: when a detainee started to pray, we assumed it was time and followed. The Koran was available to detainees who asked for one. I don’t remember asking myself, because the handling by the guards was just disrespectful; they threw it to each other like a water bottle when they passed the holy book through. I didn’t want to be a reason for humiliating God’s word. Moreover, thank God, I know the Koran by heart. As far as I recall, one of the detainees secretly passed me a copy that nobody was using in the cell.

      After a couple of days, William the Torturer pulled me to interrogate me. The same female acted as an interpreter.

      “Tell me your story,” William asked.

      “My name is, I graduated in 1988, I got a scholarship to Germany. . . .” I replied in very boring detail, none of which seemed to interest or impress William. He grew tired and started to yawn. I knew exactly what he wanted to hear, but I couldn’t help him.

      He interrupted me. “My country highly values the truth. Now I’m gonna ask you some questions, and if you answer truthfully, you’re gonna be released and sent safely to your family. But if you fail, you’re gonna be imprisoned indefinitely. A small note in my agenda book is enough to destroy your life. What terrorist organizations are you part of?”

      “None,” I replied.

      “You’re not a man, and you don’t deserve respect. Kneel, cross your hands, and put them behind your neck.”

      I