Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Larry Siems

■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ . When I arrived earlier that morning, I never thought that human beings could be possibly stored in a bunch of cold boxes; I thought I was the only one, but I was wrong, my fellow detainees were only knocked out due to the harsh punishment trip they had behind them. While the guards wereserving the food, we were introducing us to ourselves. We couldn’t see each other due to the design of the block but we could hear each other.
    “Salam Alaikum!”
    “Waalaikum Salam.”
    “Who are you?
    “I am from Mauritania… Palestine… Syria… Saudi Arabia…!”
    “How was the trip?”
    “I almost froze to death,” shouted one guy.
    “I slept the whole trip,” replied ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ .
    “Why did they put the patch beneath my ear?” said a third.
    “Who was in front of me in the truck?” I asked. “He kept moving, which made the guards beat me all the way from the airport to the camp.”
    “Me, too,” another detainee answered.
    We called each other with the ISN numbers we were assigned in Bagram. My number was ■■■■ . * In the cell on my left was ■■■■■■■■■■■ from ■■■■■■■■■■■■ . He is about ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ . Though Mauritanian, he had never really been in the country; I could tell because of his ■■■■■■■ accent. On my right was the guy from the ■■■■■■■■■■■ . He spoke poor Arabic, and claimed to have been captured in Karachi, where he attends the University. In front of my cell they put the Sudanese, next to each other. †
    Breakfast was modest: one boiled egg, a hard piece of bread, and something else I don’t know the name of. It was my first hot meal since I left Jordan. Oh, the tea was soothing! I like tea better than any food, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been drinking it. Tea is a crucial part of the diet of people from warmer regions; it sounds contradictory but it is true.
    People were shouting all over the place in indistinct conversations. It was just a good feeling when everybody started to recount his story. Many detainees suffered, some more and some less. I didn’t consider myself the worst, nor the luckiest. Some people were captured with their friends and their friends disappeared from the face of the earth; they most likely were sent to other allied countries to facilitate their interrogation by torture, such as the ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ . I considered the arrival to Cuba a blessing, and so I told the 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. In Jordan, they hardly appreciate your cooperation.”
    I wrongly believed that the worst was over, and so I cared less about the time it would take the Americans to figure out that I was not the guy they are looking for. I trusted the American justice system too much, and shared that trust with the detainees from European countries. We all had an idea about how the democratic system works. Other detainees, for instance those from the Middle East, didn’t believe it for a second and trust the American system. Their argument lay on the growinghostility of extremist Americans against Muslims and the Arabs. With every day going by, the optimists lost ground. The interrogation methods worsened considerably as time went by, and as you shall see, those responsible for GTMO broke all the principles upon which the U.S. was built and compromised every great principle such as Ben Franklin’s “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve