Delivered Into Enemy Hands - Human Rights Watch

there.” The only other prisoner he heard during his time there was a Yemeni man who was
trying to talk to other prisoners. He said he thought the man was Yemeni because of his
accent, but he did not know his name. As punishment for trying to communicate with other
prisoners they played extremely loud music in the Yemeni man’s cell. It was so loud that
Mehdi could hear it over the loud constant sound of turbines. He said he was too afraid to
ever try to communicate with other prisoners there. One time he knocked on the cell next to
him and someone knocked back but he was too afraid to try and speak with him.
In his cell, there was a bottle of water, a rubber spoon like the ones used to feed children,
a small bucket with a chemical for a toilet, and a thin blanket. There was no mattress. The
floor was made of painted concrete. The cell had two doors: a full door that was visible
from the exterior and an interior door with a gate. There were two holes: a small one
allowed people outside to see and talk to him, and a second one that his guards used to
pass food to him. 247 He said there was virtually no ventilation in the cell—no natural air,
just air conditioning and one small hole. The vapors coming from the bucket, combined
with the lack of ventilation, made it very hard to breathe and caused his eyes to burn.
About one month into his time there, the air conditioning was turned up so that it was very
cold all the time, which seriously aggravated his rheumatism.
Mehdi said he was interrogated daily, sometimes twice a day, and often while naked in
front of female interrogators. He said that for the entire first month he was questioned
while naked every day by a woman. He believes this was the same woman who had
interrogated him in Pakistan. He said,
“She would scream and yell and was so angry. She would throw chairs,
push away tables. She would say, ‘Ok, we will start all over again.’”
In total, about 10 different people, including four women, asked him questions. Unlike the
guards, the interrogators wore civilian clothes, though some of them at times wore green
camouflage military trousers and regular T-shirts. He described them as very fit, as if they
had received professional physical training. Some questioned him over a day, others a
week, and some a month.
247 It is not clear on which of the two doors this was.
87 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2012