He has known hell on earth. In 2001, immediately after 9/11, Mansoor Adayfi, a young Yemeni man, was kidnapped by an Afghan war lord in Afghanistan – where he had moved for an assignment as a research assistant – and sold to U.S. forces for a bounty. Americans first transferred him to a black site, then to Guantanamo. From 2001 to 2016 he knew only brutality and torture.
In 2016, he was finally released from Guantanamo without any charges and deported to Serbia, a country to which he has no relationship. He says he is grateful to Serbia for accepting him, hence allowing him to leave Guantanamo, but his life is far from easy. He cannot find a job in Serbia. He is alone, with no family or community there. He currently works from Serbia for Cage, an organisation that advocates for victims of the War on Terror.
We recently met him in Oslo, where he was invited to discuss his experience. Wearing a bright orange t-shirt – the same colour as his jumpsuit in Guantanamo – and his serial number as a detainee: 441, Mansoor Adayfi was beaming. It was the first time since 2001 that he had been allowed to travel abroad. During our conversation, he repeatedly stressed his gratitude to the Norwegian people, government and institutions for giving him a visa to travel to Norway. “I feel like someone has trusted me, someone sees me as a human being”. He showed us the book he has authored with Antonio Aiello, “Don’t Forget Us Here” and when we observe to him that the U.S. stole the best years of his life, which no one can give back, he replies: “My best years are yet to come”. Il Fatto Quotidiano sat down for an interview with Mansoor Adayfi on Guantanamo and Ron DeSantis.
You were a teenager, 18 years old, when you were kidnapped by an Afghan war lord and sold to U.S. forces for a bounty. What do you remember about that experience?
“I was only 18 years old when I was sold to the CIA. As soon as the Americans came, they put handcuffs on me, then they put a hood on my head, and I started fighting with them. I don’t accept that. They took me, they put me in chains, put me in a truck, into a helicopter, flew me to a black site. It was a military base”.
Bagram?
“No, I don’t think so. There were a lot of helicopters, a lot of trucks, a lot of activity. I was kept under the ground, basically, totally naked, and they put me in a room. I was sitting on the floor, and as soon as they removed the hood from my head I saw a row of soldiers aiming their rifles, with lasers over my head, like five, six of them, each of them holding their rifles and aiming at me. I looked at them – everything had been so fast, and my mind couldn’t process what was going on. They had two dogs barking so loud at me. I didn’t care about that, because as a security guard in Yemen, we were trained on how to deal with dogs”.
You were a security guard in Yemen?
“Yes! And you can’t work as a security guard in diplomatic facilities unless you have a special clearance, and I had that in Yemen, from Yemen intelligence. And I told the Americans: ‘do you think a terrorist would guard your asses there?’ I told them ‘Your American ambassador, she used to come to play tennis, in the Sheraton hotel where I was sometimes the supervisor of the security guards. Why do you think I’m a terrorist?’ They knew that. Then the interrogation started in the black site. A first question, someone with an American accent, said ‘do you know why I am here?’ And I said ‘no’. I was beaten and bleeding, but I was kind of like ‘what is going on here? Why you are doing this?’ I was yelling at them”.
What was the first torture you experienced?
“You experience the way they humiliate you, the way they search you. As soon as they grabbed me they threw me to the ground, hitting my head, stripping my clothing, and did an anal search. That’s when I was most – I resisted, I fought with them, and I got a lot of beating. I got beat so badly, because when someone starts doing that to me, I will never accept it, I will fight. Because that is my dignity, that is who I am. So who are you? what are you doing there? I could hear talking in English, I couldn’t see because he was in a hood.”
Did you understand English at that time?
“A little, I had basic English I studied in school, but also as a security guard we took a course”.
Who asked you to be a guard in the diplomatic facility?
“A private company. But you can’t go to work in those diplomatic facilities unless you have clearance from the Yemeni government. They have to know you, they have to trust you”.
And for which nationalities?
“Dutch and German”.
So clearly they had done extensive background checks on you to be a security guard in a Western diplomatic facility.
“Yes. When the CIA started interrogating me, yelling: ‘Do you know why I’m here?’ I said: ‘No’. ‘Do you know what you did?’ I said: ‘No’. ‘We know who you are, Mr. Adil’. ‘Mr. Adil?! No! I am Mansoor’. ‘No, we know who you are, you’re a money launderer, you travelled to Malaysia, you were involved in bombing the embassies, you are one of the generals’ . ‘No, no, no, I am Mansoor’. ‘We know who you are. You are highly trained in counter-interrogation’. I was like: ‘oh.’ I started laughing, and I got a lot of beating. ‘We are going to make you want to die. Death will be mercy to you’. I was dragged underground, I was hanged. ‘Ok, we’ll talk later.’ Then in the next months, torture”.
What kind of torture?
“Beating, sleep deprivation, waterboarding”.
How many sessions of waterboarding?
“The way they did it to me was they used to put my head in a bucket of water, sometimes they would tie a plastic bag around my neck and fill it with water. Many times. They used electricity in every place. So I admitted to everything, but the problem was: I didn’t have the details. ‘Have you done this?’ ‘Yes, I have done everything’. But the problem was the details. They wanted details now: ‘so tell us about your journey to Malaysia’. I had never been to Malaysia, that is the truth (laughs). I just needed it to stop. I was a young boy. But also I had my kind of pride, moments like: I will resist. Then moments like: no, you can’t.
So one day there was a false execution. It was cold, winter, I was naked. They brought a barrel, and they told me ‘this is your grave.’ They put me in shackles, chains, and they just threw me inside that barrel. It was worse than a box, a barrel. They put me inside, they closed it, then I heard shotguns: ta-ta-ta-ta. I was waiting for the pain of the bullets. ‘I am going to die now, this is it, they are going to kill me.’
You live death, which is worse than death itself, because your heart is beating so fast, your brain is preparing your body to die, you feel like: this moment, this moment. But when you die, your body, your brain, your soul is ready to depart. But if you are not dying, you live it, and it is worse than dying itself. And they started rolling the barrel, over and over. Sometimes they would fill it with water. So whenever they said ‘execution’ – they would torture you to the point you say now they are going to kill you. I was hanged all the time, naked all the time, no sleep”.
And that was the CIA?
“Everything, CIA, FBI, NSA, military intelligence, even other countries, other nationalities, like French, other interrogators, not just Americans”.
Did you ever come across Italian interrogators?
“I don’t know. You can’t tell because they all talk to you in English. You know, their job wasn’t to prove, their job was to entrap you, to prove you are a terrorist. There is no reasoning with them, regardless. If you appeal to their humanity, everything you say, everything you do, they told me ‘you are highly trained in counter-interrogation techniques’, and that now they would use counter-counter-interrogation techniques. In Guantanamo it was different.
There were two kind of planes that arrived in Guantanamo. The small one brought people, the big one – we called it the beast – when it arrived, we knew they were going to take some people and disappear. So when the big plane arrived, no one would move, no one would talk, and they would call us by number. So when they called my number, I was dragged, beaten all the way with rifles.
Have you seen how they handle sheep for slaughter? Same thing, I was handled like that: they cut off my clothes, and started shaving my body, playing with my genitals, and female guards would come with their asses there. It’s just like, they make fun of you. I saw a man in front of me who was crying, because it was so humiliating. And I said: ‘don’t fucking cry! Why are you crying?’ And they split my lips. Because I told him ‘you are fucking mad, why are you crying?’ I always fought back, always. I couldn’t accept what they did. For me, if I kept silent I would hurt myself, so I would rather get hurt by them. For them I was like a leader.
After they shaved everything, they put me in an orange jumpsuit for the first time, I was chained. Then they put a hood on me, they put duct tape over my mouth, because I wanted to pray. I tried to stand, with the duct tape they taped me to the stretcher. I was bleeding a lot, but still doing this stuff. It’s just my personality. I wouldn’t accept it. We are tribal people, people from different tribes. It’s not that I think I’m better than anyone, no. That’s just our nature. So they dragged me to the airplane after that, they threw me to the floor”.
To go to Guantanamo?
“Yes, and the beating starts, every 15 minutes, I got a lot of beating, all the way. I remember urinating in the airplane during the [flight to Guantanamo], because it was 40 hours. I couldn’t hold it, I just did it. And in the airplane [I got] beaten all the way, we were chained, we were standing like this [ on the floor of the plane], nothing to support us. All the way”.
How do you resist extreme pain?
“Sometimes you resist to resist. You feel the pain, what makes us human is that we feel pain, imagine if there was no way to feel pain, how could we feel other’s pain? It’s my nature: trying to prevent the pain, not to give up is part of our survival, our instinct to try to do as much as you can do. Sometimes trying to resist is to keep silent, other times silence is a form of oppression, if you keep silent to your oppressor. Sometimes resisting is to fight back: I am not letting you abuse my body”.
When you were in Guantanamo, were there any guards with a minimum of compassion, who were horrified at your treatment?
“Guantanamo was created outside our humanity, outside the law, outside the justice system. Before the guards, soldiers were brought to Guantanamo, they were told they were going to meet the worst of the worst people, who if they get any chance would kill them. So I guess when they came they were terrified. The military is about control; commanders have to make sure their soldiers follow orders, that they don’t think, just follow orders. When guards come to work with us, they become part of our life and we become part of theirs. So what they had been told were just words, ideas, but when you live with people for months, talking to them, interacting with them, they become part of your life and you become part of theirs. And of course as a human being, you can tell who is bad and who is not.
They brought Air Force, Marines, Navy, Army, Coast Guard. The Air Force spent three months and they said ‘we are not working here, we are not following orders, because torturing prisoners, abusing them, we won’t do that.’ So they left. After that, the guards were prevented from talking to anyone, it was just follow the rules or get punished. Guantanamo left no one untouched. They were also tortured in a way. When someone orders you to torture someone, that tortures you”.
You came across Ron DeSantis, what do you remember about him?
“Ron DeSantis was in Guantanamo; he came in 2006. 2006 was one of the worst years. After we went on a massive hunger strike, protesting the torture and abuse in the camp – I was one of the main organizers – the camp commander came. The senior medical told the camp commander: we have five cases, and in 72 hours we will have the first case of death. The new team arrived in Guantanamo in 2006, new medical staff, new camp staff. Ron DeSantis was the legal adviser, and he came to talk to us. He came to me and he said: why are you on a hunger strike? I explained to them what happened in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and the torture and the abuses and the crimes, and human rights, and said that we would like to be tried if we have committed any crime. He had a notebook and he was writing. ‘I am here to ensure you guys are treated humanely’ and blah blah blah. But it was a lie.
When they decided to break the hunger strike, they brought force-feeding chairs, thick tubes, and a new medical team arrived. The head of the medical team was an Army general, and he said ‘my job here is to break the hunger strike, so sir: eat!”
We told him ‘look, we do not give a shit about you, don’t give a shit about who you are,’ so the first day they moved us to solitary confinement, the second day they tied us to the force-feeding chair and they started force-feeding us five times a day.
Force feeding had been done before, but it was done professionally. This time it was done brutally. They put thick tubes through our nose, feeding us five times a day. They left us in the force feeding chairs all night, tied. They put laxatives in the nutrition bags so that we would shit ourselves. We were left like that, because you couldn’t hold it. And when they took us to our cells, they would give us a shower, with a hose, it was humiliating. They put us in solitary confinement, extreme cold, so we couldn’t last. They beat us, shouting.
One of the times, when they were torturing me, Ron DeSantis was behind watching, wearing sunglasses, military uniform, looking at me like this with the medical team, with the nutrition team. I was vomiting, because when you go on hunger strike, your stomach becomes really small. He was like talking, and smiling and laughing while I was screaming and yelling, crying, blood coming out. I felt like my soul was leaving my body, when I started vomiting. It was coming out like a fountain, so I just threw up at them, [on their] clothes, glasses. He took off his glasses. The second time when they came, they stood far away and they were given like shields”.
After 14 years in Guantanamo, you were released and deported to Serbia, a country you have no relation to, and you don’t speak the Serbian language. What is your life like now?
“I was forcibly released to Serbia, I had no choice. I was told: you have to be there. No language, no family, no community. I’m trying to live, but there are still a lot of challenges and difficulties, though things are getting a little better. Still uncertainty, because the way the media presents me to the public as a terrorist, even says things like: nobody wants to associate with you”.
There is no way to get out of Guantanamo unless the six biggest intelligence agencies clear you and say that you are not a threat to the United States and its allies. Why are you still perceived as a terrorist?
“First of all, they know we haven’t committed a crime, they haven’t charged us. And we challenged them, I asked them: you accuse us that we want to destroy America and the American justice system. I’m asking you to try me before your justice system, if you don’t trust your justice system, how can I trust you?”
You can’t have a job in Serbia, right?
“It’s kind of hard as a former Guantanamo detainee. I have tried with 3-4 companies. Their legal advisers said no”.
What do you think it is going to happen if Ron DeSantis becomes the next president of the United States?
“First of all, I would like to say one word to my habibi [Arabic word for “my dear”] RonDe Santis. I am here to help you. Please help me to help yourself. You are not qualified to be the president of the United States, because you don’t have what it takes to assume that position. That position is the most powerful position in the world. That man watched people in prison tortured and abused. He is actually one of the leading people who want to keep Guantanamo open. I think the whole world agreed that Guantanamo is wrong, and someone wants to keep it open? What does that indicate? It indicates that that man has no morals, no values, no ethics, that man doesn’t abide by any law. He is a lawyer; he should be the first one calling for the closure of Guantanamo. He should be the first one to follow the American constitution and American law”.
All of his eight great grand-parents are Italians. Would you come to Italy to describe your experience with Ron DeSantis?
“Italian people are nice people, they should call on Ron DeSantis to behave”