The Mauritanian Read online

  Now, for the “Gold Meeting,” my interpreter was a small brown Arab-American in his early thirties, with short, receding black hair.

  “Are you from West Africa?” he asked in Arabic as I was led into a room and shackled to the floor. My ankle chains provided a musical backdrop to our conversation, echoing throughout Gold Building. What do other people think about us being shackled? I always wondered in these situations. Do they find it normal to interact with a restrained human being? Do they feel bad for us? Do they feel safer?

  “Yes, Mauritania,” I answered in Arabic, smiling.

  “Do you understand when I speak?” The room was packed with people I didn’t know, mostly high-ranking military officers, and he seemed eager to show how essential he was to the proceedings.

  My escort team pushed the desk close enough that I could lean on it and hide my shackled feet underneath, giving the impression of a relaxed, free man. A recent picture of me adorned the door.

  We waited. Like everywhere on earth, the big boss did not need to show up on time. Finally the voice of a service member, shouting as if an assault was under way, roused the room to its feet.

  “Colonel Gabavics, JDG Commander, on site.” The door opened and there he stood, in the flesh. It was the first and last time this man would speak to me.

  “You will be transferred to your country in one week. Do you have any questions?” Because I could hardly imagine life outside Guantánamo after so many years of incarceration, I had no idea what questions to ask. I made a request instead. I told the colonel that I wished to bring my manuscripts with me—I wrote four in addition to Guantánamo Diary during my imprisonment—and some other writing and paintings I had made in classes I took in GTMO. I said I would also like to take several chessboards, books, and other presents I had received from his predecessors and from some of my guards and interrogators, gifts that had great sentimental value. I named those who had given me these presents, hoping he would honor my request for the sake of his friends.

  “I’ll talk to the people in charge,” he said. “If it’s okay, we will send them with you.” I thanked him, smiling, wanting the meeting to end on that good note and not to screw things up by saying things I wasn’t supposed to say.

  The colonel disappeared as quickly as he came. The escort team took me to the room across the hall, where I found two women in uniform. A skinny brunette Army sergeant sat in front of an old Dell desktop that was running Windows 7. She kept smiling, even though her computer was a classic recipe for frustration; she typed everything at least twice, and the PC kept passing out on her. On her right sat a woman who seemed to be her boss, at least by rank, a short blond Navy lieutenant with a neat ponytail. She was friendly, too, and even asked my escort team to remove all my shackles.

  There followed a photo shoot that had me posing five different ways: face the camera, face right, face left, and forty-five degrees to both sides. I had to give my fingerprints in about a dozen ways on an electronic pad. They recorded my voice as I read a page written in English: “My name is fill in the blank. I’m from fill in the blank. I love my country,” and the like. That was as literary as it got. I must have been nervous, because I passed this voice recognition test only on the second try. Through it all, the sergeant struggled to save my biometric data into the old computer.

  My escorts restrained me again and took me to another room, this one with an FBI team.

  “If you promise to behave, I’ll let them take off your restraints,” a Turkish-American agent said with an honest smile. The FBI team fingerprinted me, using the old method of sticking my fingers in ink and pressing them on a paper. It was a long, tedious process, which gave me time to try out my Turkish with the agent. As we talked, his finger slipped and made its own print on the paper. He freaked out, grabbed a fresh paper, and we started again.

  “I hope this will be the last time you ever have to do this,” he said, laughing and handing me some sandy soap to clean my fingers. There were four other standard-issue FBI agents in the room, two middle-aged women and two other men. The whole team was having a good time with me.

  “You don’t need to hope,” I assured him. “You can bet your last penny.”

  I was taken to my new home, the transfer camp. I had seen this camp a million times: it was right next to the Camp Echo isolation hut, where I lived for twelve years. If I believed in conspiracy theories, I would have said that the government purposely put the transfer camp right next to my cell for all those years to make me suffer even more. So many detainees were transferred out during those years, and I would be the last one to bid them farewell. We would speak to each other through the fence that separates the two camps. It was comforting to see innocent men finally being freed, and I was happy for every detainee who passed through the transfer camp, but it stung to watch them leave. Now that detainee was me, and I couldn’t help but feel guilty. It hurt to think of leaving other innocent detainees behind, their fates in the hand of a system that has failed so badly in matters of justice.

  “We missed you, 760,” one of my old regular Camp Echo guards greeted me as I was unstrapped from the seat of the transport van. As we walked through the camp, a small, blond female sergeant with a southern accent went over the new rules.

  “You can go anywhere you like in the camp, but you’re not supposed to cross that red line. Honestly, I don’t care if you do, but don’t hang out long, because if they see you on the camera, we could get in trouble,” she told me as she led me to my new home. “We push the food cart all the way to the white line,” she went on, going over procedures I would be hearing for the last time. In one of the strange tricks of Guantánamo, the sergeant and I walked and conversed like old friends, completely overlooking the fact that I was shackled.

  Because of the hurricane, many of the mesh sniper screens on the windows had been removed from the Camp Echo huts, and the contractors—mostly so-called Third Country Nationals, who make very low wages and struggle to maintain the facilities—had not finished putting them back up. From my cell, I saw a whole world that had been surrounding me for many years, so close but so elusive: the maze of interrogation rooms; Camp Legal, where detainees meet their lawyers; the hut where the translators and teachers watched TV, waiting for their next encounter with detainees; and the two buildings where detainees come to call and Skype with their families. In a parking lot nearby, people parked their big American vans and climbed out of them, looking bored and sick of their tedious jobs. Through the fence that separates my old Camp Echo Special hut from the transfer camp, I could see that my garden was gone, except for the untended grass and the few trees whose resilience is matched by those of us detainees who had managed to remain in one piece.

  For the next several days, JTF staff kept pouring in to brief me about what was happening with my transfer. The news was coming thick and fast, from guards, from the OIC, the NCO in charge, from an officer from the Behavior Health Unit, and from the senior medical officer. Everyone brought good news. I was told that my items were packed and had been sent to the transport people and that they would be loaded onto the plane with me. An Air Force captain from the BHU said that she had been planning to see me the following Monday, but she now doubted I would still be here. The senior medical officer, a Navy captain, came in person to hand me malaria medication, a sure sign that my departure was imminent. In between these visits, I spent most of my time talking with the guards about what kinds of electronic gadgets I would need to acquire when I got out, and the best ways to watch all the movies I had been forbidden to watch in GTMO. They taught me about streaming sites like Netflix and Putlocker, and even about illegal downloading.

  And then the day came: Sunday, October 16, 2016. All day, people in uniform kept coming and going, most saying little, if anything at all. It was surreal—as if the whole base now had only one detainee to worry about. My new favorite OIC showed up again and again with her broad smile. My night shift didn’t show up at all.

  “Where’s th
e other shift?” I asked one of the guards, a guy who had been tutoring me on how to deal with the new technologies that were waiting to overwhelm me.

  “I would love it if they let me be the one leading you out of here, and the last one to say goodbye to you,” he said. The specialist’s prayer was answered; he would put the shackles on me for the last time.

  He grew less talkative as the afternoon wore on. Everyone seemed solemn, and a complete and utter silence descended when the smiling captain came to me and said, “You have two hours left. We’re going to lock you down.”

  “Now it’s for real,” I told myself. I went inside the cell and heard one of my guards trying to lock the door manually, a very familiar sound. Whenever civilians like teachers or contractors would come from outside the camp, we would be locked like this inside our cells. I took a shower and shaved. I dressed in the new detainee uniform I had been given. My old clothes, like all my belongings in the cell, had to be left behind. I tried to watch TV, then read a book, but I could do neither. I just kept pacing inside my room, praying and singing quietly. It was the longest two hours of my entire life.

  “Are you ready?” the captain finally said as she looked through my bin hole.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you stick your hands outside the bin hole?” one of the guards asked.

  I offered my hands, and the guards put the shackles on my wrists, gently yet firmly, asking whether the cuffs were too tight. I shook my head. After my hands were restrained, the guards opened the door to finish my upper body and my legs. I was shocked to see how many people could fit in that small place. I saw people in uniform everywhere I looked, including the overeager translator from my meeting with the colonel. But this time he watched and said nothing. The only place I’d ever seen such solemnity was when I attended funerals. I hardly spoke, just nodding when someone asked a question.

  The female captain was guiding the guards, telling them what to do next.

  “Take him to the red line.”

  The red line was about sixty steps away from my door. I felt as though I could hear people’s hearts beating as clearly as the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.” My escort team seemed nervous, and they went too far. The captain had to shout at them, “Do not cross the red line. Step back. Step back.” The guards obeyed, leading me backward and stopping just in front of the line.

  A huge gate opened, and a new escort team emerged. They quietly took control of me from my guards. They did not do the usual inspection of my restraints; they did not say anything as they led me outside the gate.

  Another group was gathered there, including the senior medical officer and a very tall white man in uniform who was wearing a backpack and whose rank I couldn’t see. It was dark outside, but I could see that he was holding a printout with a recent picture of me. He placed the picture beside my face, looked back and forth, and shouted, “Identity confirmed.” The whole team looked as if they’d just arrived from a long trip. They all seemed sleepy, even the small black woman who’d been pointing her video camera at me from the moment I left my cell. A skinny blondish specialist would join her in the bus that transported us to the airport, and they would take turns on the camera all the way to Nouakchott.

  “Do you have any complaints?” the senior medical officer asked.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  A slight smile broke across his face, and he almost shouted, “760, I declare you fit to fly.”

  We passed through two more gates. We boarded a bus that drove onto a ferry, and the bus danced like a dervish in a trance as the ferry crossed the bay. We pulled out onto the airstrip and up to the back door of a cargo plane big enough to drive a truck inside. The engines were roaring, and everyone had to shout to convey the simplest message. I was led up a long cargo ramp. As soon as we stepped inside the plane I was earmuffed and blindfolded, just as I had been when I was taken from Bagram Air Base to Guantánamo Bay. This time, though, there was no beating, harassment, or degradation. I was strapped into a hard seat that was set nearly at a right angle and that did not recline. I didn’t dare to complain for fear someone would change his mind and take me back to the camp. I lost track of time during the flight, fighting against the pain that began in my back, spread to my ears and head, and soon overwhelmed me from all directions.

  The plane landed with a heavy thump, and I felt someone peeling off my blindfold and my earmuffs. The first thing I saw was a digital clock on the wall of the plane in front of me—a little past 14:00, it read—and a bunch of half-asleep recruits who looked like they had not had their best night. I felt gentle hands playing with my shackles, starting from the middle and working up and down.

  “Did we arrive? I asked tentatively, barely in a whisper.

  “Yes,” a guard beside me said.

  “Is this the local time?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no mistaking the Mauritanian weather. It was a good day, not too hot—just the right, warm welcome I needed. I was escorted, unshackled, down the ramp and onto the tarmac, where several Mauritanian government officials and an American official waited. We exchanged casual greetings, and my U.S. service member escorts went directly to stand in formation near their countryman. After a few pleasantries, the American started toward his car.

  “Who’s that?” I asked one of the Mauritanians.

  “The U.S. ambassador,” he said.

  “Can I say hello to him?” I asked.

  He dispatched a man standing near him. The ambassador came back to me and we shook hands.

  “Welcome home,” he said.

  2.

  As a child, I always wanted to write and teach. My role models were my teachers. When I came home from school, I would gather the kids from my neighborhood who either couldn’t afford school or whose parents didn’t see it as necessary, and offer them classes for free, re-creating the lessons I had received earlier in the day. I used walls as my blackboard, and charcoal when I ran out of the chalk I scavenged from school. My mother didn’t like the whole setup, and the general unruliness of the kids who were my students did not help in winning her approval.

  I also developed a minor compulsion for writing. I would write things down anywhere and everywhere, random things I sometimes wouldn’t even remember writing. More than once I was embarrassed when friends found my intimate ideas scribbled in my notebooks and even in the margins of my school-books. This compulsion, it turned out, didn’t even require a pen: it got so I would trace my thoughts with my finger on my thigh or in the air by my side. In Guantánamo, this drove my interrogators crazy; they did everything to stop me from writing with my finger on my body. Little did they know that most of the time I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it. I wanted to comply, but I just couldn’t. Their solution was to chain my hands tightly at my sides, making it impossible for me to write on my legs. But my finger kept moving anyway. Even if you succeed in shutting me up, I go on writing.

  When I landed in GTMO, I was angry. As soon as I was told I could borrow a pen to write letters to my family, I decided to steal some of the paper and started to write my story in Arabic, mainly for myself. The pen was challenging, a highly bendable piece of plastic, more like a flimsy ink filler than a pen. Writing with it was like trying to get a straight answer out of a corrupt politician. I had to shake it over and over to keep the ink flowing, so it was both writing and a workout at the same time. I was supposed to give the pen back when I finished, but I managed to keep it hidden in my cell. I wrote letters to my family as well, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out they would never be mailed. They were just another part of the feverish intelligence-gathering campaign in the camp. I didn’t mind though. I happily obliged, drafting letters that I addressed in my mind to JTF staff members, in care of the Slahi family.

  It was on Mike Block in Camp Delta that I first started writing my diaries, in Arabic, in the spring of 2003. I kept the pages hidden inside a library book, but they were confiscated when I was moved in June 20
03 to total isolation in India Block. And it wasn’t just my diaries. I had also been writing out English lessons for myself, copying down things I heard from my English-speaking co-detainees and that I read in books, along with Arabic poems I remembered and little interesting bits of general knowledge. These, too, were taken. For about five months, I was allowed no paper or pen at all, and then only when Mr. X gave me his pen to write “my story” for him, or to write false confessions for my interrogators. By the time the beginning pages of my diary and my other notes were finally returned to me, I had lived through many new chapters of abuse, but I could not pick up the thread. What I had been trying to write about my captivity was not meant for the intelligence community, but rather as a kind of self-advocacy addressed to readers outside of Guantánamo. Now I knew for sure that anything I wrote would only reach my interrogators, and what happens in GTMO stays in GTMO, absolutely. Even with my chains off, my hands remained shackled to my sides.

  In 2004, three years after Guantánamo opened, the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided a question whose answer should have been obvious from the start: that GTMO prisoners must have some way to challenge the government’s claims that they are dangerous terrorists. The government’s first solution was to create the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), where prisoners could finally contest their designation as “enemy combatants.” I had never been an enemy of, or fought against, the United States, and I liked my chances when I first heard I would have a CSRT hearing. But that little rush of optimism faded when the serviceman who was to be my “personal representative” for the hearing came to see me in an empty building in Echo Special, accompanied by the woman who was my lead interrogator in the final pages of this book, a military intelligence noncommissioned officer who called herself Amy.