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 2003 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.
The PR was a young white Air Force captain in his midthirties. He was quiet, almost disinterested, and straight to the point. His demeanor spoke volumes about the kind of process that awaited me—he obviously didn’t think it was going anywhere. Most of the meeting concentrated on establishing the fact that he wasn’t on my side. The PR was supposed to be acting as my lawyer, in effect, but he explained that the board could pick and choose the information they would share even with him about my case. And then he informed me that he could share anything I might tell him in private with the board if he thought it had important intelligence value. Meanwhile, Amy seemed to be the one with a plan. She was encouraging me to admit to anything the board would throw at me, suggesting that this would make my life easier.
But for some reason I rebelled against the idea that I should throw in the towel. I found that somewhere, deep down, the hope of getting my freedom back had never left me. I could see the process was only for show, but I thought even if my PR and interrogator weren’t as zealous as one might hope, the officers on the bench might still listen and surprise everyone. I just couldn’t believe that a democratic government with more than two hundred years of experience in upholding the rule of law could really rig trials, with everyone on board.
I asked to confer with Amy. The captain thought I was an idiot. How could I seek advice from someone who wanted me locked up as long as possible, an interrogator whose job depended on keeping me in custody? But I wanted to put her on the spot; after all, she knew by then that I hadn’t done anything against her country. I asked her to repeat for me the kinds of things that I should say at the hearing.
“I’m
