Guantánamo Diary (42 page)

“I am sorry! I am only interested in sending and receiving mail, and I am grateful that you’re helping me to do so.”
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brought a very high level ICRC
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from Switzerland who has been working on my case;
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tried to get me talking, but to no avail.

“We understand your worries. All we’re worried about is your well-being, and we respect your decision.”

Although sessions with the ICRC are supposedly private, I was interrogated about the conversations I had during that first session, and I truthfully told the interrogators what we had said. Later on I told the ICRC about this practice, and after that nobody asked me what happened in our sessions. We detainees knew that the meetings with ICRC were monitored; some
detainees had been confronted with statements they made to the ICRC and there was no way for the
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to know them unless the meeting was monitored. Many detainees refused to talk to the ICRC, and suspected them to be interrogators disguised in ICRC clothes. I even know some interrogators who presented themselves as private journalists. But to me that was very naïve: for a detainee to mistake an interrogator for a journalist he would have to be an idiot, and there are better methods to get an idiot talking. Such mischievous practices led to tensions between detainees and the ICRC. Some ICRC people were even cursed and spit on.

Around this same time, I was asked to talk to a real journalist
.
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time had been a hard time for everybody; he was a very violent person, and he decidedly hurt the already damaged image of the U.S. government.
^*
Now many people in the government were trying to polish the reputation it had earned from its mischief toward detainees. “You know many people are lying about this place and claiming that detainees get tortured. We’d like you to talk to a moderate journalist from
The Wall Street Journal
and refute the wrong things we’re suspected of.”

“Well, I got tortured, and I am going to tell the journalist the truth, the naked truth, without exaggeration or understatement. I’m not polishing anybody’s reputation,” I said. After that the interview was completely canceled, which was good because I didn’t want to talk to anybody anyway.

Gradually I was introduced to the “secret” new boss. I don’t exactly know why the team kept him secret from me and tried to make me believe the
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was still in charge, but most likely they thought that I would be less cooperative
when somebody other than
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took over. But they were wrong: I was interested more than anybody in the Intel community in bringing my case into the light.
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had been counseled to work on my case from behind the scenes, which he did for a certain time, and then he came and introduced himself. I don’t know his real name, but he introduced himself as a
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is
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rather humble. He tried everything in the realm of his power to make my life in custody as easy as possible.

I asked him to end my segregation and let me see other detainees, and he successfully organized several meetings between me and
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, mainly to eat together and play chess.
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was not my first choice, but it was not up to me who I could meet, and in any case, I was just dying to see some other detainee I could relate to.

In early summer
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they moved
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next to my hut, and we were allowed to see each other during recreation.
^*
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is on the older side, about
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old.
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did not seem to have passed detention’s shock sanely; He suffered from paranoia, amnesia, depression, and other mental problems. Some interrogators claimed that he was playing a game, but to me he was completely out of his mind. I really didn’t know what to believe, but I didn’t care too much; I was dying to have company, and he was sort of company.

There is a drawback to detainees being together, though, especially if you know the detainee only from the camp: We detainees tend to be skeptical about each other. But I was very relaxed in that regard because I really didn’t have anything to hide.

“Did they tell you to gather Intels from me?” he asked me once. I wasn’t shocked, because I assumed the same about him. “
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, relax and just assume that I am only here to spy on you. Just keep your mouth shut and don’t speak about anything you’re not comfortable speaking about,” I told him.

“You have no secrets?” he wondered.

“No, I don’t, and I allow you to provide anything you may learn about me,” I said.

I do remember the first day in August when
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surged through the door smiling and greeted me, “Salamu Alaikum.”

“Waalaikum As-Salam! Tetkallami Arabi?” I answered her greeting, asking if
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spoke Arabic.
^*

“I don’t.” In fact
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had already used all the Arabic
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knew, namely the Greeting, Peace be upon you.
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and I started to talk as if we had known each other for years.
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studied Biology and joined
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recently as an enlisted person, most likely to pay her college tuition. Many Americans do; college education in the U.S. is sinfully high.

“I am going to help you start your garden,”
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said. A long time before, I had asked the interrogators to get me some seeds in order to experiment around, and maybe succeed in growing something in the aggressive soil of GTMO. “I have experience in gardening,”
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continued. And indeed
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seemed to have experience:
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helped me to grow sunflowers, basil, sage, parsley, cilantro, and things of that nature. But as helpful as
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was, I kept giving
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a hard time about one single bad experience
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made me do.

“I have a problem with crickets that keep destroying my garden,” I complained.

“Take some soap and put it in water and keep spraying it lightly on the plants every day,”
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suggested. And I blindly followed
■■■
advice. However, I noticed that my plants were growing unhappy and sort of sick. So I decided to spray only the half of the plants with the diluted soap and watch the results. It didn’t take long to see the soap was responsible for the bad effects, and so I completely stopped the story of soap.

After that I kept telling
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, “I know what you studied: You studied how to kill plants with diluted soap!”

“Shut up! You just didn’t do it right.”

“Whatever.”

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had introduced
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to me, and
from then on
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took my case in hand entirely. For some reason the
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thought that I would disrespect
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, and were skeptical as to whether
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was the right choice. But they had no reason to worry:
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treated me as if I were
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brother, and I as if
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were my sister. Of course some might say that all that interrogators’ stuff is a trick to lure detainees to provide them information; they can be friendly, sociable, humane, generous, and sensitive but still they are evil and ungenuine about everything. I mean, there is a good reason to doubt the integrity of interrogators, if only due to the nature of the interrogators’ job. The ultimate goal of an interrogator is to get Intel from his target, the nastier the better. But interrogators are human beings, with feelings and emotions; I have been uninterruptedly interrogated since January 2000, and I have seen all kinds of interrogators, good, bad, and in between. Besides, here in GTMO Bay everything is different. In GTMO, the U.S. government assigns a team of interrogators who stick with you almost on a daily basis for some time, after which they leave and get replaced with a new team, in a never ending routine. So whether you like it or not, you have to live with your interrogators and try to make the best out of your life. Furthermore, I deal with everybody according to what he shows me, and not what he could be hiding. With this motto I approach everybody, including my interrogators.

Since I have not had a formal education in the English language, I needed and still do a lot of help honing my language skills.
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worked hard on that, especially on my pronunciation and spelling. When it comes to spelling, English is a terrible language: I don’t know any other language that writes
Colonel
and pronounces it
Kernel
. Even natives of the language
have a tremendous problem with the inconsistency of the sounds and the corresponding letter combinations.

On top of that, prepositions in English don’t make any sense; you just have to memorize them. I remember I kept saying “I am afraid from…,” and
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jumping and correcting me: “afraid
of.
” I am sure I was driving
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crazy. My problem is that I had been picking the language from the “wrong” people—namely, U.S. Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly. So I needed somebody to take away the incorrect language from me and replace it with the correct one. Maybe you
can
teach an old dog new tricks, and that is exactly what
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duly tried to do with me. I think
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was successful, even though I gave
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a hard time sometimes.
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once forgot that
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was around me and said something like, “Amana use the bathroom,” and I went, “Oh, is ‘Amana’ one of the words I missed?”

“Don’t even go there!”
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would say.

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taught me the way Americans speak English. “But British people say so and so,” I would say.

“You’re not British,”
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would say.

“I am just saying that there are different ways to pronounce it,” I would answer. But
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failed to give me the Grammar Rules to follow, which is the only way I can really learn. Being a native speaker,
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has a feel for the language, which I don’t. Besides
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mother-tongue,
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also spoke Russian and proposed to teach me; I was eager but
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didn’t have enough time, and with time I lost the passion. A person as lazy as me won’t learn a new language unless he has to.
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was dying to learn Arabic but
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didn’t have time for that either.
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job kept
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busy day and night.

By this time, my health situation was way better than in Jordan, but I was still underweight, vulnerable, and sick most
of the time, and as days went by, my situation decidedly worsened. Sometimes when the escorting team led me past the wall mirror I would get terrorized when I saw my face. It was a very pitiful sight. Although the diet kept getting better and better in the camp, I couldn’t profit from it.

“Why don’t you eat?” the guards always asked.

“I am not hungry,” I used to reply. Then one day my interrogator
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just happened to witness one time when I got my lunch served.

“May I check your meal?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What the hell do they serve you? That is garbage!” said
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.

“No, it’s okay. I don’t like speaking about food,” I said. And I really don’t.

“Look it may be OK for you, but it’s not OK by my standards. We’ve got to change your diet,”
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said. And nothing short of a miracle,
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managed in a relatively short time to organize an adequate diet, which decidedly improved my health situation.

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also turned out to be a religious person when measured at American standards. I was very excited to have somebody I could learn from.

“
■■■■■■■■
, can you get me a Bible?”

“I’ll see if I can,”
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said, and indeed,
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brought me
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own Bible, a Special Edition.

“According to your religion, what is the way to heaven?” I asked
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.

“You take Christ as your Savior, and believe that he died for your sins.”

“I do believe Christ was one of the greatest prophets, but I don’t believe that he died for my sins. It doesn’t make sense to
me. I should save my tail on my own, by doing the right things,” I replied.

“That is not enough to be saved.”

“So where am I going after death?” I wondered.

“According to my religion, you go to hell.” I laughed wholeheartedly. I told
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, “That is very sad. I pray every day and ask God for forgiveness. Honestly, I worship God much more than you do. As a matter of fact, as you see, I am not very successful in this worldly life, so my only hope is in the afterlife.”

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was both angry and ashamed—angry because I laughed at
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statement, and ashamed because
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couldn’t find a way to save me. “I am not gonna lie to you: that’s what my religion says,”
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said.

“No, I really don’t have any problem with that. You can cook your soup as you please. I am not angry that you sent me to hell.”

“What about the Islamic belief? Do I go to heaven?”

“That’s a completely different story. In Islam, in order to go to heaven, you have to accept Mohamed, the natural successor of Christ, and be a good Muslim. And since you reject Mohamed you don’t go to Heaven,” I honestly answered.