The cell, better the box, was cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time.
For the next seventy days I wouldn't know the sweetness of sleeping. Interrogation 24-hours
a day, I was living literally in terror.
There's no reason for Mohamedou to be in Guantanamo.
Mohamedou has never been charged with a crime.
He's been in Guantanamo now for 14 years.
It's not that they haven't found the evidence against him, there isn't any evidence against him.
Mohamedou started writing in 2005. He had prepared 90 pages in a notebook that the guards
had given him. That was the beginning of this manuscript.
For a number of years his attorneys conduct litigation and negotiations to get that manuscript declassified.
Mohamedou is somewhat of a modern renaissance man. He is from the country of Mauritania.
He's from a very poor family but he won a scholarship to study in Germany as a very
young man.
Mohamedou had joined al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, like many young men he had gone to
Afghanistan as a student to join the fight against the Communist government of Afghanistan
and to join the fight he had to train at an al-Qaeda camp and he had trained and he had
sworn loyalty to them.
But, as he's said repeatedly, he broke all ties after the Communist government collapsed
and the various Mujahideen factions started shooting each other, Mohamedou essentially
said: "I'm out".
Mohamedou was at his mother's house in November of 2001 and he gets a call from the police
to come and be interviewed and he literally, I'm sure, told his mother: "I'll be right back."
And he disappeared and his family has never seen him again to this day.
There were four of them when I stepped outside the door with my mum and my aunt.
Both kept their eyes staring at me.
It is the taste of helplessness when you see your beloved fading away like a dream and
you cannot help him.
He realised he wasn't going home when he got on an airplane, was stripped of his clothes.
In August of 2002 he landed in Cuba, in Guantanamo. His family, of course, had no idea what had
happened to him.
And it was only when Yahdi, Mohamedou's younger brother, who lives in Germany, picked up Der
Spiegel and saw an article in October of 2002 that Mohamedou was in Guantanamo, did the family
know where he had been held.
We were all speechless. How can a government lie to us for so long and play such dirty
games with us? We were all completely disheartened.
They were trying to frighten him so that he would tell them what they wanted to hear.
They would come to him, essentially, and say: "Well, we know what you did, we just need
you to tell us."
We know you were involved in 9/11. We know you know these people.
And they were on this kind of endless phishing expedition.
And there was no truth to tell them but that's what they kept saying.
I'm going to do everything I'm allowed to to break you. You'll never see your family again.
My answer was always: "Do what you've got to do, I have done nothing."
And as soon as I spit my words, he went wildly crazy as if he wanted to devour me alive.
Mohamedou was subjected to a whole list of torture techniques that had been approved
by the Secretary of Defense.
They told him they had taken my mother from Mauritania and put her in a single cell in
Guantanamo and if he didn't give the officials the information they expected she would be severely tortured.
Significantly, they included what in Guantanamo was known as the "frequent flyer programme".
And they called it that because they wouldn't let people sleep and they proceeded to torture him.
Blindfold the motherfucker if he tries to look. One of them hit me hard across the face
and quickly put the goggles on my eyes, ear muffs on my ears and a small bag over my head.
They tightened the chains around my ankles and my wrists. Afterwards, I started to bleed.
I thought they were going to execute me.
Just as Mohamedou had this remarkable journey, his manuscript has a fairly remarkable journey.
He writes it in 2005.
We would get the book in bits and pieces.
He started the book as a diary and over the years the book became more detailed.
Every utterance of a Gunatanamo prisoner is deemed classified from the moment of its creation.
What you have to do is send it back to what's called a priveleged team and they read it
and decide what can be made unclassified.
What I got in the summer of 2012 was the version of the manuscript that was cleared for public
release that had had these, you know, layers of censorship grafted onto it. You know, the
physical impression of a page full of redactions is a brick wall.
The amazing thing about Mohamedou and his writing is that he has an incredibly strong, clear voice.
They brought me a chess board so could play against myself. When the guards noticed my
chess board they all wanted to play me and when they started to play me, they always won.
The strongest among the guards taught me how to control the centre. After that the guards
had no chance to defeat me.
He just hopes that some day he'll be released. He's in what I would consider a horrible legal
limbo and it's just tragic. He needs to go home.
If he gets out, he could come live with me. I'd be happy to have Mohamedou in my house.
He's just such a good, warm caring human being and somehow that strength keeps him going.
What's remarkable about Mohamedou's book is that we have a voice that's come out of this
void and that it's such a remarkable, humane and I think, ultimately, forgiving voice.
It's a wonder.
Sadly this has taken so long but have never, and will never lose hope. Never.
A Mauritanian folk tale tells us about a rooster-phobe who would almost lose his mind whenever he
encountered a rooster.
"Why are you so afraid of the rooster?" the psychiatrist asked him.
"The rooster thinks I'm corn."
"You're not corn! You're a very big man. Nobody can mistake you for a tiny ear of corn," the
psychiatrist said.
"I know that, doctor, but the rooster doesn't."
For years I have been trying to convince the US government
that I am not corn.