The Mauritanian

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  “I am gonna show you the evidence bit by bit,” said Robert one day. “There is a big al Qaeda guy who told us that you are involved.”33

  “I guess you shouldn’t ask me questions then, since you have a witness. Just take me to court and roast me,” I said. “What have I done, according to your witness?”

  “He said you are a part of the conspiracy.” I grew tired of the words Big Conspiracy against the U.S. Robert could not give me anything to grab onto, no matter how much I argued with him.

  As to Tom from the NYPD, he was not an argumentative guy; “If the government believes that you’re involved in bad things, they’re gonna send you to Iraq or back to Afghanistan,” he said.34

  “So if you guys torture me, I’m gonna tell you everything you want to hear?”

  “No, look: if a mom asks her kid whether he’s done something wrong, he might lie. But if she hits him, he’s gonna admit it,” replied Tom. I had no answer to this analogy. Anyway, the “big al Qaeda” guy who testified against me turned out to be Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Ramzi was said to have said that I helped him to go to Chechnya with two other guys who were among the hijackers, which I hadn’t done. Though I had seen him once or twice in Germany, I didn’t even know his name. Even if I had helped them to go to Chechnya, that would be no crime at all, but I just hadn’t.

  By then I knew about the horrible torture that Ramzi bin al-Shibh had suffered after his arrest in Karachi. Eyewitnesses who were captured with him in Karachi said, “We thought he was dead. We heard his cries and moans day and night until he was separated from us.” We had even heard even rumors in the camp that he died under torture. Overseas torture was obviously a common practice and professionally executed; I heard so many testimonies from detainees who didn’t know each other that they couldn’t be lies. And as you shall see, I was subject to torture in this base of GTMO, like many other fellow detainees. May Allah reward all of us.

  “I don’t believe in torture,” said Robert. I didn’t share with him my knowledge about Ramzi having been tortured. But because the government has sent detainees including me, Mamdouh Habib, and Mohamed Saad Iqbal overseas to facilitate our interrogation by torture, that meant that the government believes in torture; what Robert believes in doesn’t have much weight when it comes to the harsh justice of the U.S. during war.35

  As for Tom, he was interested in getting information as quickly as possible using classic police methods. He offered me McDonald’s one day, but I refused because I didn’t want to owe him anything. “The Army are fighting to take you to a very bad place, and we don’t want that to happen!” he warned me.

  “Just let them take me there; I’ll get used to it. You keep me in jail whether or not I cooperate, so why should I cooperate?” I said this still not knowing that Americans use torture to facilitate interrogations. I was very tired from being taken to interrogation every day. My back was just conspiring against me. I even sought Medical help.

  “You’re not allowed to sit for such a long time,” said the female Navy physiotherapist.

  “Please tell my interrogators that, because they make me sit for long hours almost every day.”

  “I’ll write a note, but I’m not sure whether it will have an effect,” she replied.

  It didn’t. Instead, in February 2003, Tom washed his hands of me.36

  “I am going to leave, but if you’re ready to talk about your telephone conversations, request me, I’ll come back,” he said.

  “I assure you, I am not going to talk about anything unless you answer my question: Why am I here?”

  1 A Council of Europe investigation confirms that a CIA-leased Gulf-stream jet with the tail number N379P departed Amman, Jordan, at 11:15 p.m. on July 19, 2002, for Kabul, Afghanistan. An addendum to that 2006 report listing the flight records is available at http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2006/20060614_Ejdoc162006PartII-Appendix.pdf.

  EDITOR’S NOTE ON THE FOOTNOTES: None of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s attorneys holding security clearances has reviewed the footnotes in this book, contributed to them in any way, or confirmed or denied my speculations contained in them. Nor has anyone else with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed the footnotes, contributed to them in any way, or confirmed or denied my speculations contained in them.

  2 Abu Hafs is MOS’s cousin and former brother-in-law. His full name is Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, and he is also known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. Abu Hafs married the sister of MOS’s former wife. He was a prominent member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, the group’s main advisory body, in the 1990s and up until the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. It has been widely reported that Abu Hafs opposed those attacks; the 9/11 Commission recorded that “Abu Hafs the Mauritanian reportedly even wrote Bin Ladin a message basing opposition to the attacks on the Qur’an.” Abu Hafs left Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and spent the next decade under house arrest in Iran. In April 2012 he was extradited to Mauritania, where he was held briefly and then released. He is now a free man. The relevant section of the 9/11 Commission report is available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch7.pdf.

  3 At his December 15, 2005, Administrative Review Board (ARB) hearing, MOS described a U.S. interrogator in Bagram who was Japanese American and whom Bagram prisoners referred to as “William the Torturer.” ARB transcript, 23. MOS’s 2005 ARB hearing transcript is available at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/guantanamo/detainees/760-mohamedou-ould-slahi/documents/2.

  4 Omar Deghayes was released and returned to the United Kingdom, his country of residence, on December 18, 2007.

  5 At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS indicated that an interrogator nicknamed “William the Torturer” made him kneel for “very long hours” to aggravate his sciatic nerve pain and later threatened him. ARB transcript, 23.

  6 Department of Justice. This is not true, of course. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is located on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and is run by a U.S. military joint task force under the command of the U.S. Southern Command.

  7 Press accounts indicate that MOS was eventually interrogated by both German and Canadian intelligence agents in Guantánamo; later in the manuscript, in the scene where he meets with what appear to be BND interrogators in GTMO, MOS specifically references such a prohibition on external interrogations. See footnote on page 49; see also http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/from-germany-to-guantanamo-the-career-of-prisoner-no-760-a-583193-3.html; and http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2008/07/27/csis_grilled_trio_in_cuba.html.

  8 In-processing height and weight records indicate that thirty-five detainees arrived in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. The records of that group are available at http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/reports/heights-and-weights-files/ISN_680-ISN_838.pdf. An official list of Guantánamo detainees that the Pentagon released in May 2006 is available at http://archive.defense.gov/news/May2006/d20060515%20List.pdf.

  9 Ibrahim Mahdi Achmed Zeidan was released from Guantánamo on November 7, 2007.

  10 A 2008 investigation by the British human rights organization Reprieve found that transfers of prisoners from Bagram to Guantánamo typically involved a stop at the U.S. air base in Incirlik, Turkey, and the Rendition Project has found that a C-17 military transport plane, flight number RCH233Y, flew from Incirlik to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, carrying thirty-five prisoners. See http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimony-of-other-physicians/journey_of_death.pdf; and http://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/pdf/PDF%20154%20[Flight%20data.%20Portuguese%20flight%20logs%20to%20GTMO,%20collected%20by%20Ana%20Gomes].pdf.

  11 The FBI led MOS’s interrogations for his first several months in Guantánamo, waging a well-documented struggle to keep him out of the hands of military interrogators. The protracted interagency conflict between the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency over the military’s interrogation methods has been widely documented and reported, most notably in a May 2008 report
by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General titled A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (hereafter cited as DOJ IG). The report, which is available at http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0805/final.pdf, includes substantial sections devoted specifically to MOS’s interrogation. “The FBI sought to interview Slahi immediately after he arrived at GTMO,” the DOJ Inspector General reported in one of those sections. “FBI and task force agents interviewed Slahi over the next few months, utilizing rapport building techniques.” At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS described an “FBI guy” who interrogated him shortly after his arrival and told him, “We don’t beat people, we don’t torture people, it’s not allowed.” DOJ IG, 122, ARB transcript 23.

  12 The March 3, 2003, Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures instructed that arriving prisoners be processed and held for four weeks in a maximum security isolation block “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process” and “to [foster] dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.” The document is available at http://www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/gitmo-sop.pdf (hereafter cited as SOP).

  13 Mohammed al-Amin was born in Mauritania but moved to Saudi Arabia for religious studies. He was released and transferred to Mauritania on September 26, 2007. Ibrahim Fauzee, who is from the Maldives, was released on March 11, 2005.

  14 Around this time, FBI-led interrogation teams often included members of the military’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) and military intelligence agents. The DOJ Inspector General’s report records that “in May 2002, the military and the FBI adopted the ‘Tiger Team’ concept for interrogating detainees. According to the first GTMO case agent, these teams consisted of an FBI agent, an analyst, a contract linguist, two CITF investigators, and a military intelligence interrogator.” The IG found that “the FBI withdrew from participation in the Tiger Teams in the fall of 2002 after disagreements arose between the FBI and military intelligence over interrogation tactics. Several FBI agents told the OIG that while they continued to have a good relationship with CITF, their relationship with the military intelligence entities greatly deteriorated over the course of time, primarily due to the FBI’s opposition to the military intelligence approach to interrogating detainees.” DOJ IG, 34.

  15 As the DOJ IG report makes clear, the FBI maintained overall control of the interrogation of MOS throughout 2002 and early 2003. DOJ IG, 122.

  16 Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. After the invasion he was seized by Pakistani authorities and turned over to the U.S. He was held in Guantanámo until his release in 2005. Abu Huzaifa, known formally as Ahmed Hassan Jamil Suleyman, was released from Guantanámo on December 2, 2007.

  17 In 2013, the Associated Press reported that between 2002 and 2005, CIA agents in GTMO sought to recruit detainees to serve as informants and double agents for the United States. The CIA also helped facilitate interrogations by foreign intelligence agents in Guantánamo. Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “Penny Lane, GITMO’s Other Secret CIA Facility,” Associated Press, November 26, 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/penny-lane-gitmos-other-secret-cia-facility.

  18 The interrogations of ethnic Uighur detainees by Chinese intelligence agents in GTMO, which were reportedly preceded by periods of sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation, were first revealed in the May 2008 DOJ Inspector General’s report, A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the interrogations took place over a day and a half in September 2002. See http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/16/72000/uighur-detainees-us-helped-chinese.html.

  19 In 2008, Der Spiegel reported that in September 2002, two members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and one member of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, interviewed MOS for ninety minutes in Guantánamo. John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach, Britta Sandberg, and Holger Stark, “From Germany to Guantanamo: The Career of Prisoner No. 760,” Der Spiegel, October 9, 2008, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/from-germany-to-guantanamo-the-career-of-prisoner-no-760-a-583193.html.

  20 “Salahi” is a variant spelling of MOS’s last name that is generally used in court documents in the United States.

  21 Karim Mehdi was born in Morocco and lived in Germany, and traveled with MOS to Afghanistan in 1992. Mehdi was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on June 3, 2003. Christian Ganczarski, a Polish-born German citizen, was arrested at the same airport the following day. Mehdi was tried and sentenced to nine years in prison for plotting a bombing on Reunion Island, and Ganczarski was tried and sentenced to eighteen years in prison in connection with the bombing of a tourist bus in Tunisia in April 2002. Both are discussed in Judge James Robertson’s habeas corpus opinion. See https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-9-Slahi-Order.pdf. See also http://articles.latimes.com/print/2003/jun/07/world/fg-terror7; and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6088540.stm.

  22 Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured in a shoot-out in a suburb of Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002. At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS told the panel, “September 11th, 2002, America arrested a man by the name of Ramzi Bin al Shibh, who is said to be the key guy in the September 11th attacks. It was exactly one year after 9/11, and since his capture my life has changed drastically.” ARB transcript, 23.

  23 Mustafa Ait Idir won his habeas corpus petition in U.S. federal court and was released from Guantánamo on December 16, 2008.

  24 At his 2005 ARB hearing, as he is describing his FBI interrogations through the winter of 2002, MOS said, “Then I took a polygraph and [Ramzi bin al-Shibh] refused to take a polygraph for many reasons. It turns out he is very contradictory and he lies. They said that to me themselves. They said my credibility is high because I took the polygraph.” After his capture on September 11, 2002, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was held and interrogated at several CIA black sites. News reports suggest that bin al-Shibh was interrogated in a CIA-run facility near Rabat, Morocco, in late September and through the fall of 2002, and in 2010 the U.S. government acknowledged it possessed videotapes of bin al-Shibh’s 2002 interrogation in Morocco. See, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/18tapes.html; and http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/wdc/binalshibh/content.swf.

  25 Jabir Jubran Al Fayfi was released from Guantánamo and repatriated to Saudi Arabia in December 2006.

  26 Abu Zubaydah is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, the first man to be detained in a secret CIA prison and subjected to its so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Abu Zubaydah was wounded and captured in a shootout in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, and transferred to a secret CIA interrogation facility in Thailand. There, FBI agents and CIA personnel clashed over how Abu Zubaydah was to be interrogated. The CIA prevailed, winning Bush administration approval to subject him to ten abusive interrogation techniques including confinement in small boxes and waterboarding. In December 2002, the CIA closed the secret facility in Thailand and transferred Abu Zubaydah to another black site in Poland. He was held there and in other secret prisons until he was transferred, along with thirteen other so-called high value detainees who had been held and interrogated in CIA black sites, to Guantánamo on September 6, 2006. A full, if partially redacted, account of Abu Zubaydah’s torture in CIA custody is provided in the Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2014 Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, available at https://fas.org/irp/congress/2014_rpt/ssci-rdi.pdf. He remains in Guantánamo.

  27 In November 2002, two military Joint Task Forces, JTF 160, which ran the prison operations of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and JTF-170, which handled interrogation operations, were merged to form Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), under the command of Gene
ral Geoffrey Miller. The Joint Detention Group (JDG) is the component of the JTF-GTMO responsible for guarding prisoners and maintaining camp security. Guantánamo’s Initial Response Force (IRF) teams are described in the 2003 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures as five-man units equipped with riot gear and “specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction.” SOP 24.2.

  28 Later in the manuscript, MOS writes that he participated in a hunger strike in September 2002, and news reports document a hunger strike in late September and October of that year (see, e.g., http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/multimedia/guantanamo-hungerstriketimeline.html, quoting an FBI document attributing that protest to anger over treatment by guards and the ongoing detention without trial or legal process). That hunger strike occurred toward the end of the tenure of Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, who was the commander of JTF-170, the intelligence operations in Guantánamo, from February through October 2002. He was succeeded by Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, who became commander of JTF-GTMO, which encompassed all Guantánamo operations, in November 2002.The Senate Armed Services Committee has documented at length the trend toward more abusive interrogations in October and November 2002, which included the development of the military’s first “Special Interrogation Plan” for Mohammed al-Qahtani. On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo authorizing interrogation methods including nudity, forced standing and stress positions, and twenty-hour interrogations. U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, “Inquiry in the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” November 20, 2008, http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Detainee-Report-Final_April-22-2009.pdf (hereafter cited as SASC).