Anwar Mohamed
28 October 1998
Anwar Mohamed
IN THE WORDS OF ANWAR MOHAMED
WE ARE AMERICA
So he said, ‘Let me tell you something. Have you heard about a law called ‘Emergency Law?’ So I said, ‘Yes, I read about it in the newspaper.’ He said, ‘So if you are an American Citizen, that does not mean anything to us. We could do whatever we want with you! And let me tell you something, WE ARE AMERICA, so whatever we want, we’ll do it. Do you understand that?’
ISOLATION
They left me in there isolated eighteen days. Oppressive. There is no adjective that can fit the description. There are no words to explain what I went through. There in that cell, the smell. There is a bit of water in a little gallon. I was so thirsty. I told them, give me a cup. I start knocking on the door. There he comes and he opens the little window and he said, ‘What, what do you want.’ I told him, ‘I need a cup so I could drink water.’ They wouldn’t give me and I didn’t want to waste the water that I had inside the cell. It was so hard. Unbelievable, I was so thirsty. So, the second day when they brought food in the morning, they put food in a plastic bag so I used that plastic bag as a cup to drink water. And I had to put all of my head inside the bag so that I could drink the water. I started to stink after twelve days without a shower. My nails were so long that I used to use them as a toothbrush so I could clean my teeth. In the middle of the night, they come to scare you, and tell you to stand against the wall, lift up your mattress, and then they leave. How can I forget about all that? Everyday in there was like a whole year. And then another day went by and another day went by. I didn’t know for how long I would be in there.
ASKED TO SIGN PAPERS IN HEBREW
They took me to the interrogation room. I entered and there were two guys. They said ‘Come on in. You’re going to tell your story. Come on, we’re very busy. You have to tell us what you have. And he has a piece of paper and pen and he wants to write. I told him ‘What story? You’ve been keeping me there for eighteen days. I didn’t do anything. And why are you detaining me in here?’ So he said, ‘Listen, if you’re not going to talk we could send you to jail for three months and we could put you in jail without a court order.’ I told him, ‘What do you a mean “court order” I’ve just been in court. And they said in eight days they’re going to set me free.’ He said ‘Well, this order, we don’t need a court decision in order to do that.’ So I said, ‘Why are you doing all of this? What did I do?’ They said, ‘OK you’re not gonna talk then we’re gonna do that. You’ll be going to jail.’ I said ‘You are so oppressive and I could expect anything from you.’
They took me out and I was surrounded by some of their people. They spoke Hebrew. I just could hear that they were shouting and shouting and shouting. And then they took me outside to those little rooms where you could sit down with your lawyer and there were two policemen with their uniforms and they came and they talked to me. They said they brought me a bunch of papers in Hebrew and they said ‘Come and sign those papers.’ And I said, ‘I’m not signing anything.’ And they said, ‘You have to sign it.’ And I said, ‘I’m not going to sign it. What do those papers talk about?’ They said, ‘Oh no, those papers only talk about how you’re now under our authority. You’ve finished from the interrogation place and you are going to jail and we don’t want to have problems or trouble with you.
I told them ‘Why am I going to jail? I have just been in court and they said that in eight days they’re going to set me free.’ He said, apparently he had an envelope with my picture on it and he said, ‘Look, you see this?’ And everything was written in Hebrew. I could just see my picture in it and they said. “Well, this is an order and you’re going to jail for three months.” I could read the date and it was until February. I didn’t know that that’s a game they play.
After that they took me to an isolated cell. It had a little window open and there was another one opposite from it. They put me in there and I looked from the window and there is the guy they sent when I was in the cell. His name was Bessam Jeshbi, the one who works for them. There he is once again. He said, ‘Oh thank God, I was under torture and I’d been in there for so long and under pain.
And he told me ‘Don’t worry now you are fine, now you are going to jail so the torture will stop. So, you have to feel OK.’ I told him ‘So, what is this place?’ He said ‘Don’t worry that’s jail, they’re going to take you to jail now.’ And he said, ‘You have to expect the worst.’ I told him ‘They did it to me.’ He said, ‘Yeah, sometimes you have to expect the worst. Sometimes they give you three months when they can’t prove anything against you. He started asking all these questions. I told him ‘I’m innocent, Damn it. I shouldn’t be in here.” He said, ‘Well, with these people you have to expect the worst.’
THE PRINCE OF JAIL
I sat down and started talking to him, about how I am an American citizen. And I told him my story. One of the guys, he said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to say anything until the Prince of jail comes.
So, suddenly, there he is. He had a beard, Mr. Prince of jail. They have a sheet so they could cover the place where you sit down when you talk with him. And they run the water in the bathroom so the other guys won’t hear what you’re talking about. So he came to me and told me ‘My name is Abu Hamza.’ He told me he’s from a little town next to Silwad, which is where I was born. And he told me he’s from Hamas and he is the one in charge of the security of Hamas inside jail…
…Something was very strange about this guy, that he had a watch and it was such a weird watch. It looked like it had microphones in it and that it was connected with the interrogation room and that the interrogators could listen to all the conversations in that room. He kept trying to hide it all the time. That was something that took my attention while I was in there.
These six guys were in there and they gathered around me and put a plastic bag around my head. And they had a broomstick and they pushed it against my neck and they started to strangle me. Then they just let it go and they said, ‘Well now you better listen to us. The prince of jail is not happy with you. And you have to tell us what you got. And if we tell you to write something you will do it. If not, we will kill you in here. Do you understand that?’
‘YOUR WORDS AGAINST THEIR WORDS’
I mentioned that to the American Consulate in the second visit. I told him ‘They tried to kill me in that place. Why was the American embassy not doing anything about it? I almost got killed in there. I’m an American citizen. I need help.’ I told him ‘Why don’t you guys do something about it? They tried to kill me. They were going to kill me inside that place.’ He said, he can’t do anything about it because it’ll be ‘your words against their words’.
FORCED CONFESSIONS
He told me ‘You write that that you hit a Jewish rabbi with your car while you were outside Israel.’ I said ‘I didn’t do such a thing.’ He said ‘No, you have to write. Then you will look big in front of us. I said ‘Oh my God, what’s wrong with these people?’ And then he told me ‘Write that you were a superpower in the intifada and that you always throw stones. And you threw a molotov and stuff like that.’ I said ‘I have never done that. So, I’m not going to write it.’
‘I JUST WANTED TO DIE’
Well, they took me back to the cell. My body was shaking constantly. Every single nerve in my body was shaking. I just wanted to die. And while they were leading me with the sack on top of my head in my chain, the persecutor gave me a kick to my back and he started cursing me because I only got fifteen days. He wanted more time for me. I swear to God that’s what happened with those people. I was sweating. I had a fever. I’m losing weight. I could see that. I could feel that. I’m losing muscles. Fatigue. It was very hard on me to breathe. He kicked me again.
THE CHAIR
While they were tying me to the chair, I felt such a pain in my hand. I told him, ‘ Listen, my hands is hurting.’ He says ‘That’s good. Then it hurts, so you could talk.’ And he said, ‘I’m going put you there for days and nights until you speak.’ And he just keeps on shouting. I felt my elbow was broken. Other interrogators started coming inside the room. I told them, ‘I am an American citizen. You can’t treat me this way. I am a human being. Why you are treating me this way? What did I do?’ And they start using the f-word and ‘f-American’ and start laughing and making fun of me. And one of them starts pushing where I was hit on my elbow, starts pushing it hard and I could feel the pain in my head. It was such a painful thing.
‘ARE YOU GONNA TALK’
They left me in that room, tied up against that chair. I could see people shouting, screaming from the torture. Such a terrible thing. And the voices were coming from the next room. And he came back after I don’t know, one or two days. I was still on that chair. My body was shaking, cold. I could feel the coldness in my bones. And of course they leave the AC on. It’s a way of torture. The pain, the hunger, it came back. And he said, ‘Are you gonna talk.’ And I didn’t answer him.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM
They took me outside. They tied me against the little chair. The small chair is supposed to be harder. And they put loud music, big speakers right in front of my face. It was right in front of my face. He told me, ‘A lot of other guys won’t understand what the music talks about, but you will.’ And it was American music, Rock and Roll and other kinds of music- very loud. They left me for hours and this music, ‘Boom, boom, boom…’ And they just turn the same songs again and again. My ears were going to explode. There was an explosion in my head.
JUST COME BACK AFTER A FEW DAYS AND PICK UP MY BODY
I was getting crazy in that place. I told him (the American Consul), please just tell them to put me in a better facility. If you don’t want to get me out, put me in a better facility. He said the longest they could keep me in there was about a hundred days. I told him I have been here for almost forty days and you expect me to go on for sixty more days. He said that is the most they could have you in here. I told him, listen you could just come back after a few days and pick up my body. He’s seen me the way that I look. He has seen everything. I told him that I need help.
‘AND IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO YOU, CALL US’
So, they took me outside. And when I saw my luggage I said, ‘Oh, there must be someth;Okay, you will leave.’ So, when they took the sack off, they said, ‘Get out of here, don’t make any trouble for us.’ That was it. No apology, nothing. After forty days, thank God, I could get out of there.
When I was leaving. I called the American Consulate and I asked them, ‘I want to speak to the consul, Mr. Abdel Noor’, so I spoke with him and I asked him, ‘Is there anything you could help me with? I would like to be escorted to the airport or you could send someone from the consulate that could be with me while I am leaving the country.’ And they said, ‘No, don’t worry, they are not going to do anything to you, and the only thing they could do, they could interrogate you one more time for fifteen minutes to two hours, the maximum they have. And if anything happens to you, call us.’ It was like, yeah right, are they going to let me make a phone call like the first time when they detained me. So I said, ‘Thanks a lot.
OUR ALLIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
We’re nothing; they just destroyed my life for nothing and sat there. Is that justice? And all of this happened to me by a friendly government, our allies in the Middle East. Is that how the allies treat each other? Or is it true what they say, they do whatever they want? I have a lot of questions. I hope one day I will find an answer for it. I hope I will.
