1. The Journey
After that encounter with Binalshibh, Slahi moved to Montreal, where he applied to take courses at the École Polytechnique de Montréal and led prayers during the holy month of Ramadan at the Al Sunna mosque. One of the men who had previously attended the mosque was Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian national who had been living in Canada on a fake passport and would later be caught with a car full of explosives traveling from Canada to Washington State in December 1999. In the wake of Ressam's arrest for being part of what became known as the "Millennium Plot" to blow up the LA airport, Canadian intelligence services placed Slahi under surveillance but never found sufficient grounds to take any further action. Slahi ultimately decided to leave Canada and return to Mauritania because life under surveillance, he would later testify, was "not a good life.""Wherever I went I had people right behind me at the market watching my butt. I said, 'What the heck?'"
Slahi was brought in for questioning and let go several times until November 20, when, after holding him in custody for a week, the US arranged to send Slahi to Jordan. This was a then little-known process called extraordinary rendition, also referred to as "torture by proxy," in which a captive is sent to a foreign prison facility in the interest of bypassing domestic laws that restrict US interrogators."Man, what happened to me there is beyond description," Slahi told a review panel years later when describing his time in Jordan. Slahi says he was beaten, starved, and threatened with torture unless he confessed to being involved in the Millennium Plot. Then, on July 19, 2002, a CIA rendition team in Jordan stripped and blindfolded Slahi, dressed him in a diaper, and shackled him before loading him onto a CIA-owned Gulfstream jet. That plane, which was routinely used to covertly shuttle detainees throughout an archipelago of military bases and "black sites" around the globe, would become known in human rights circles as the "torture taxi." In Slahi's case, the jet flew him from Jordan to Bagram Airfield, in Afghanistan, where he was interrogated for two weeks before being taken to Guantánamo Bay. There, on August 5, 2002, he became detainee 760 at Camp Delta.Slahi says he was beaten, starved, and threatened with torture unless he confessed to being involved in the Millennium Plot.
2. The Destination
As bad as that July was for Slahi, August would be worse. A military interrogator posing as a naval officer named "Captain Collins," who claimed to have been sent by the White House, presented Slahi with a phony document on official-looking letterhead stating that US authorities had detained Slahi's mother. "Collins"—who was actually Richard Zuley, a former police officer who was recently accused by a Guardian investigation of torturing suspects in Chicago and detainees at Guantánamo—told Slahi that his mother would be sent to Guantánamo and that her safety could not be guaranteed in the "the previously all-male prison environment."On August 2, 2003, interrogators sent Slahi a "messenger" who said that his colleagues "are sick of hearing the same lies over and over and are seriously considering washing their hands of him."Beatings and physical pain are not the worst thing in the world," the messenger told Slahi. "After all, being beaten for a while, humans tend to disconnect the mind from the body and make it through."
According to Slahi's diary, the intelligence he spewed was bogus. "I felt bad for everybody I hurt with my false testimonies," he writes. "During this period, I wrote more than a thousand pages about my friends with false information. I had to wear the suit the U.S. Intel tailored for me, and that is exactly what I did."Years later, when his lawyers asked him to detail everything he'd told his interrogators, an incredulous Slahi responded, in writing, "Are you out of your mind! How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been lasting the last 7 years? That's like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated.""During this period, I wrote more than a thousand pages about my friends with false information. I had to wear the suit the U.S. Intel tailored for me, and that is exactly what I did."
In an interview with Democracy Now!, Couch said the incident gave him an immediate flashback to his own SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—training in the early days of his military career."My immediate concern was if this is how the evidence is being collected in some of our cases, it's going to be inadmissible, because it's going to be at least coercive and at worst torture," he said.Couch would soon be told that the practice was approved, and that "the rules were different" in Guantánamo. He became concerned that proving Slahi's guilt would be difficult if all the evidence against him had been obtained through dubious techniques. But when he asked around about the circumstances under which Slahi had been interrogated, he was stonewalled by intelligence officials. It wasn't until March 2004 that he began to uncover the details of Slahi's treatment, via unofficial backchannels.Couch read about Mr. X and Captain Collins, the sleep deprivation, mock executions, and sexual humiliation. When he obtained a copy of the emails between the JTF-GTMO interrogator and the psychologist in which they discussed how Slahi was experiencing hallucinations, Couch concluded that the hallucinations were not a byproduct of Slahi's treatment but an intended outcome.Couch would soon be told that the practice was approved, and that "the rules were different" in Guantánamo.
Slahi, it seemed, was to languish in legal limbo indefinitely, until June 2008, when the US Supreme court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that the provisions in the Military Commissions Act that nullified habeas corpus petitions were unconstitutional. The 5–4 ruling meant that Guantánamo detainees had a right to habeas proceedings.In late August 2009, US District Court Judge James Robertson held hearings on Slahi's habeas corpus petition. Three and a half months later, a full eight years after being apprehended in his home country, Slahi finally got what one might as well call his day in court, though he testified via a video feed from Guantánamo and his testimony remains classified."The government's problem is that its proof that [Slahi] gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution." –Judge James Robertson
Though Robertson ordered Slahi's release, the Obama administration—under extreme pressure from hawkish members of Congress who cited the 9/11 Commission's outdated and debunked portrayal of Slahi as a key architect of the terrorist attack—immediately appealed the US District Court's decision.Slahi's limited amount of luck soon ran out. In deciding whether the US government had sufficiently demonstrated that Slahi was a "part of" al Qaeda at the time of his arrest, Judge Robertson relied on a formula that membership in a group comes down to "whether the individual functions or participates within or under the command structure of the organization—i.e., whether he receives and executes orders or directions."The government's problem is that its proof that [Slahi] gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution. Nevertheless, the government wants to hold Salahi indefinitely, because of its concern that he might renew his oath to al Qaeda and become a terrorist on his release.
[…]
But a habeas court may not permit a man to be held indefinitely upon suspicion, or because of the government's prediction that he may do unlawful acts in the future—any more than a habeas court may rely on its prediction that a man will not be dangerous in the future and order his release if he was lawfully detained in the first place.
3. The Best Seller
Throughout the memoir, Slahi draws inspiration from small acts of kindness amid the systemic brutality. "When I got to know [REDACTED] more and heard him speaking I wondered, How could a man as smart as he was possibly accept such a degrading job, which surely is going to haunt him the rest of his life?" Slahi writes of one young guard. "Maybe he had few choices, because many people in the Army come from poor families, and that's why the Army sometimes gives them the dirtiest jobs." (Slahi ultimately concludes that the guard probably carries out his inhumane orders because he has his own well-being to consider.)At its most compelling, Guantánamo Diary examines the human condition with a thoughtfulness worthy of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Other passages suggest an eye for the finer details of American culture, race relations, and the US government that is reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville. That Slahi manages any of this from the sleep-deprived, psychologically damaged confines of a dark hole in GTMO makes Guantánamo Diary all the more profound."One of the things about Guantánamo is that it is so isolating for the people who are imprisoned there that just getting the story out had meaning in and of itself." –Theresa Duncan
As Slahi's case plods through the US justice system, his lawyers see two other possible paths to Slahi's release. A Periodic Review Board may clear him if it finds that Slahi poses no threat to the United States. The second, and more expedient, path would be for the US government to stop contesting the habeas case that granted him immediate release, an outcome that would be an extraordinary reversal at this point.The Mauritanian government has repeatedly said it would welcome Slahi back, but for his part, Slahi has told his brother Yahdih, a German citizen living in the city of Düsseldorf, that he would like to be sent to America. "I can't believe this, but it is true," Yahdih told me over the phone. "He likes the culture from USA, and he likes the English language."Yahdih clarified, however, that Mohamedou would be willing to go anywhere that is not Guantánamo. "We just hope this catastrophe will end," said Jemal, who has since taken the advice of his uncle and is learning English and studying math."I can't believe this, but it is true," Yahdih told me over the phone. "He likes the culture from USA, and he likes the English language."
Slahi's mother, Elwadia, died in 2013, with her prayers to see her son again, at least in this world, unanswered. Yet like Slahi himself, the family and their supporters have a confounding admiration for Americans and the American legal process."We love American lawyers. They give their time and money to defend someone they don't know," Jemal said. "They are people who respect human rights and represent the best of the American people. We have so much respect for them."Perhaps the most striking aspect of Guantánamo Diary is the extent to which Slahi's belief in the inherent goodness of the American people, and his faith in the fairness of the US justice system, stands in contrast to policymakers like Senator Tom Cotton, who, in a highly contentious Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this month, said that every last Guantánamo inmate " can rot in hell." Or Cotton's fellow Republican senators Kelly Ayotte, John McCain, Richard Burr, and Lindsey Graham, who recently proposed new legislation to suspend transfers and block the closing of Guantánamo."I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see Justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people," Slahi writes before dating the final pages of Guantánamo Diary."I know there is a small extremist minority that believes everybody in this Cuban prison is evil, and that we are treated better than we deserve. But this opinion has no basis but ignorance. I am amazed that somebody can build such an incriminating opinion about people he or she doesn't even know."Peter Tinti is an independent journalist who has written for Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter."I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see Justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people."