Guantánamo Diary (15 page)

It had been long time since I had seen my country last—since August 1993, in fact. I was coming back, but this time as a terrorism suspect who was going to be hidden in some secret hole. I wanted to cry out loud to my people, “Here I am! I am not a criminal! I’m innocent! I am just the guy you knew, I’m no different!” But my voice was oppressed, just like in a nightmare.
I couldn’t really recognize anything, the city plan had changed so radically.

I finally realized the plane was not going to crash, and I was not going to have the chance to talk to my people. It’s amazing how hard it can be for someone to accept his miserable situation. The key to surviving any given situation is to realize that you are in it. Whether I wanted it or not, I was going to be delivered to the very people I didn’t want to see.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked the Inspector.

“Sure!”

“I’d like you to inform my family that I’m in the country.”

“OK. Do you have the phone number?”

“Yes, I do.” The inspector, against my expectation, indeed called my family and told them about my reality. Moreover, the Senegalese made an official press declaration stating that they turned me over to my country. Both the Mauritanians and Americans were pissed off about that.

“What did you tell the Inspector?” the Mauritanian DSE, the Directeur de la Sûrete de l’État, asked me later.
^*

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying. You told him to call your family.” It didn’t really take David Copperfield to figure out that the telephone call was intercepted.

The handover was quick. We landed near the back door of the airport, where two men were waiting, the Mauritanian Inspector and another freakin’ big black guy, most likely brought to take care of business—just in case!

“Where is the Airport Police Chief?” the Inspector wondered, looking at his black colleague. I knew the Airport Police
Chief: he had once been in Germany, and I gave him shelter and helped him buy a Mercedes-Benz. I hoped he would show up, so he could see me and put in a good word for me. But he never showed. Nor would he have put in a good word for me: Mauritanian Intelligence is by far the highest law enforcement authority. But I felt like I was drowning, and I would have grabbed any straw I encountered.

“You will be escorted to the hotel to spend the rest of the night,” said the Inspector to his guests.

“How are you?” he said ungenuinely, looking at me.

“I’m fine.”

“Is that all he has?” he asked.

“Yes that’s it.” I was watching all my belongings on earth being passed around as if I’d already died.

“Let’s go!” the inspector said to me. The black guy, who never took his eyes off me, carried the luggage and pushed me before him toward a dirty small room at the secret gate of the airport. In the room, the black dude unfolded his dirty black 100 year-old turban.

“Mask your face thoroughly with this turban,” said the Inspector. Typically Mauritanian: the Bedouin spirit still dominates. The inspector should have foreseen that he would need a Turban to wrap my head, but in Mauritania organization is almost non-existent; everything is left to whim and chance. It was tricky, but I hadn’t forgotten yet how to fold a turban around my head. It is something people from the desert must learn. The turban smelled of piled-up sweat. It was just disgusting to have it around your mouth and nose. But I obediently complied with the orders and held my breath.

“Don’t look around,” the inspector said when the three of us stepped out of the room toward the parked Secret Police car, a
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
. I sat in the passenger’s seat, the inspector
drove, and the black guy sat in the back seat, without saying a word. It was about sunset, but you couldn’t tell exactly because the cloud of sand was covering the horizon. The streets were empty. I illegally looked around whenever the chance arose, but I could hardly recognize anything.

The trip was short, about ten minutes to the Security Police building. We stepped out of the car and entered the building, where another guard was waiting on us,
■■■■■■■■■■■■■
. The environment was an ideal place for mosquitoes, human beings are the strangers in that place: filthy toilet, dirty floor and walls, holes connecting all the rooms, ants, spiders, flies.

“Search him thoroughly,” the inspector told
■■■■■■■■
.

“Give me everything you have,”
■■■■■■■■
respectfully asked me, wanting to avoid searching me. I gave
■■■■■■■■■
everything I had except for my pocket Koran. The inspector must have realized I would have one, for
■■■■■■■■
came back and said, “Do you have a Koran?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Give it to me! I told you to give me everything.” By now the guard was growing afraid of being sent back again, so he searched me gently, but he didn’t find anything but my pocket Koran. I was so sad, tired, and terrorized that I couldn’t sit up straight. Instead I put my jacket on my face and fell on the inch-thick, worn-out 100-year-old mattress, the only object that existed in that room. I wanted to sleep, lose my mind, and not wake up until every bad thing was over. How much pain can I take? I asked myself. Can my family intervene and save me? Do they use electricity? I had read stories about people who were tortured to death. How could they bear it? I’d read about Muslim heroes who faced the death penalty, head up. How did they do it? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I
felt so small before all the big names I knew, and that I was scared to death.

Although the mosquitoes were tearing me apart, I fell asleep. Every once in a while I woke up and asked myself, Why don’t they interrogate me right now, and do with me whatever they want, and everything will be over? I hate waiting on torture; an Arabic proverb says, “Waiting on torture is worse than torture.” I can only confirm this proverb. I managed to perform my prayers, how I don’t know.

Sometime around midnight I woke up to people moving around, opening and closing doors in an extraordinary manner. When the guard opened the door to my room, I glimpsed the face of a Mauritanian friend who happened to be with me a long time ago when I visited Afghanistan in 1992 during the struggle against communism. He looked sad and weathered, and must have gone through painful torture, I thought. I almost lost my mind, knowing for sure I was going to suffer at least as much as he had, given his close relationship with the Mauritanian president and the power of his family—qualities I don’t have. I thought, The guy surely must have spoken about me, and that is the reason why they brought him here.

“Get up!” said the guards. “Put on your turban.” I put on the dirty turban, gathered my last strength, and followed the guards to the interrogation room like a sheep being driven to its last destination, the slaughterhouse.

When I was driven past the guy I had seen earlier, I realized he was just a screwed-up guard who failed to keep his uniform the way it should be. He was sleepy and drowsy: they must have
called him in the midst of his sleep, and he hadn’t yet washed his face. It was not the friend I thought it was; anxiety, terror, and fear were dominating my mind. Lord have mercy! I was somewhat relieved. Did I commit a crime? No. Did my friend commit a crime? No. Did we conspire to committing a crime? No. The only thing we had done together was make a trip to Afghanistan in February 1992 to help the people fighting against communism. And as far as I was concerned that was not a crime, at least in Mauritania.

So why was I so scared? Because crime is something relative; it’s something the government defines and re-defines whenever it pleases. The majority of people don’t know, really, where the line is that separates breaking the law from not breaking it. If you get arrested, the situation worsens, because most people trust the government to have a good reason for the arrest. On top of that, if I personally had to suffer, I didn’t want anybody to suffer with me. I thought they arrested my friend in connection with the Millennium Plot, if only because he had been in Afghanistan once.

I entered the interrogation room, which was the office of the DSE. The room was large and well-furnished: leather couch, two love-seats, coffee table, closet, one big desk, one leather chair, a couple of other chairs for unimportant guests, and, as always, the picture of the president conveying the weakness of the law and the strength of the government. I wished they had turned me over to the U.S.: at least there are things I could refer to there, such as the law. Of course, in the U.S. the government and politics are gaining more and more ground lately at the cost of the law. The government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy. Still, it might take some time until the U.S. government overthrows the law completely, like in the third world
and the communist regimes. But really that is none of my concern, and thank God my government doesn’t possess the technology to track Bedouins in the vast desert.

There were three guys in the interrogation room: the DSE, his assistant, and his recorder. The DSE asked them to bring my stuff in. They thoroughly searched everything I had; no stone remained unturned. They didn’t speak to me, they only spoke with each other, mostly in whispers, just to annoy the hell out of me. At the end of the search, they sorted out my papers and put aside the ones they thought interesting. Later on, they asked me about every single word in those papers.

“I am going to interrogate you. I just want to tell you as a forewarning that you better tell me the whole truth,” the DSE said firmly, making a big effort to take a break from smoking his pipe, which he never took off his lips.

“I sure will,” I answered.

“Take him back,” the DSE dryly ordered the guards.

“Listen, I want you to tell me about your whole life, and how you joined the Islamic movement,” said the DSE when the guards dragged my skeleton away from the mosquitoes and back into the interrogation room.

If you get arrested for the first time, chances are that you’re not going to be forthcoming, and that’s OK; even though you know you haven’t done any crimes, it seems sensible. You’re very confused, and you’d like to make yourself appear as innocent as possible. You assume you are arrested more or less on a reasonable suspicion, and you don’t want to cement that suspicion. Moreover, questioning involves a lot of stuff nobody wants to talk about, like your friends and your private life. Especially when the suspicions are about things like terrorism, the government is very rude. In the interrogation you always avoid talking about your friends and your private, intimate life. And finally,
you are so frustrated because of your arrest, and you really don’t owe your interrogators anything. On the contrary, they owe you to show you the true cause of your detention, and it should be entirely up to you to comment then or to leave them be. If this cause is enough to hold you, you can seek professional representation; if not, well you shouldn’t be arrested in the first place. That’s how the civilized world works, and everything else is dictatorship. Dictatorship is governed by chaos.

To be honest with you, I acted like any average person: I tried to make myself look as innocent as a baby. I tried to protect the identities of every single person I knew, unless he or she was too well-known to the Police. The interrogations continued in this manner, but when they opened the Canadian file, things soured decidedly.

The U.S. government saw in my arrest and my rendition to Mauritania a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity to unveil the plan of Ahmed Ressam, who back then was refusing to cooperate with the U.S. authorities. Furthermore, the U.S. wanted to learn in detail about my friends in both Canada and Germany, and even outside those countries. After all my cousin and brother
■■■■■■■■■■■■■
was already wanted with a reward of U.S. $5,000,000.
^*
The U.S. also wanted to learn more about the whole Jihadi issue in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.
Expertise for free. For the aforementioned, and for other reasons I don’t know, the U.S. drove my case as far as it could be driven. They labeled me “Mastermind of the Millennium Plot.” They asked all countries to provide any tiny bit of information they possessed about me, especially Canada and Germany. And since I am already a “bad” guy, force must be applied to roast me.

To the dismay of the U.S. government, things were not really as they seemed, nor did the government achieve what it wanted. No matter how smart somebody plans, God’s plan always works. I felt like 2Pac’s “Me Against the World.” And here’s why.

All the Canadians could come up with was, “We have seen him with x and y, and they’re bad people.” “We’ve seen him in this and that mosque.” “We have intercepted his telephone conversations, but there’s nothing really!” The Americans asked the Canadians to provide them the transcripts of my conversations, but after they edited them. Of course it doesn’t make sense to selectively take different passages from a whole conversation and try to make sense of them. I think the Canadians should have done one of two things: either refused to provide the Americans any private conversation that took place in their country, or provided them the whole conversation in its original form, not even translated.

Instead, out of the words the Canadians chose to share with their U.S. colleagues, U.S. interrogators magically stuck with two words for more than four years: Tea and Sugar.

“What do you mean by tea and sugar?”

“I mean tea and sugar.” I cannot tell you how many times the U.S. asked me, and made other people ask me, this question. Another Mauritanian folktale recounts about a man who was born blind and who had one chance to get a glimpse of the
world. All he saw was a rat. After that, whenever anybody tried to explain anything to the guy, he always asked, “Compare it with the rat: Is it bigger? smaller?”

Canadian intelligence wished I were a criminal, so they could make up for their failure when
■■■■■■■■■■■■■
slipped from their country to the U.S. carrying explosives.
^*
The U.S. blamed Canada for being a preparation ground for terrorist attacks against the U.S., and that’s why Canadians Intel freaked out. They really completely lost their composure, trying everything to calm the rage of their big brother, the U.S. They began watching the people they believed to be bad, including me. I remember after
■■■■■■■■■■■■■
plot, the Canadians tried to implant two cameras, one in my room, one in my roommate’s. I used to be a very heavy sleeper. I heard voices but I couldn’t tell what it was—or let’s say I was too lazy to wake up and check on them. My roommate
■■■■■■■■■■
was different; he woke up and followed the noise. He laid low and watched until the tiny hole was through. The guy in the other room blew through the hole, and when he checked with his eye, he made eye contact with
■■■■■■■■■■
.