A Voice from Guantanamo

When we think of the men held captive by the Americans at Guantanamo we probably conjure up images of men in orange jump suits with long beards but that's about it.  Although most of them have been held for years, the public hasn't heard their voices or learned much of their treatment in captivity.

Slate.com is changing all that by publishing a 3-part memoir from a 466-page manuscript handwritten by prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi.   In his years of captivity the captive has taught himself English.  He's still there even though nobody, not the authorities in his homeland of Mauritania, not the rendition interrogators in Jordan, not the interrogators and torturers in Guantanamo can come up with any evidence other than statements he made under torture.

In 2010 a U.S. District Court judge ordered Slahi freed.  He remains in captivity in Guantanamo.   Here are some excerpts from the first part of his memoir in Slate.

The punishment for talking was hanging the detainee by his hands with the feet barely touching the ground. I saw an Afghan fellow 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 released. Most of the detainees tried to talk while hanging, which makes 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 could not stop talking because he didn’t know where he was, nor why. 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.

...Whenever I realized that a guard [was hostile], 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 have always something to get off their chests, but I wasn’t ready to be that drain.

... I considered the arrival to Cuba a blessing, and so I told my brothers, “Since you guys are not involved in crimes you need to fear nothing. I personally am going to cooperate, since nobody is going to torture me. I don’t want any of you to suffer what I suffered in Jordan.” I wrongly believed that the worst was over, and cared less about the time it would take the Americans to figure out I am not the guy they are looking for. I trusted the American justice system too much, and shared that trust with people from European countries. We all have an idea about how the democratic system works.

For a while Slahi was interrogated by FBI agents but eventually they left and at that point he fell into the hands of torturers.