During those years, compelled largely by Freedom of Information Act litigation spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. government released thousands of secret documents that described the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Many of those documents hinted at Mohamedou’s ordeal, first in the hands of the CIA, and then in the hands of the U.S. military in Guantánamo, where a “Special Projects Team” subjected him to one of the most stubborn, deliberate, and cruel interrogations in the record. A few of those documents contained something else as well: tantalizing samples of Mohamedou’s voice.
One of these was in his own handwriting, in English. In a short note dated March 3, 2005, he wrote, “Hello. I, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, detained in GTMO under ISN #760, herewith apply for a writ of habeas corpus.” The note concluded simply, “I have done no crimes against the U.S., nor did the U.S. charge me with crimes, thus I am filing for my immediate release. For further details about my case, I’ll be happy for any future hearings.”
Another handwritten document, also in English, was a letter to his attorney Sylvia Royce dated November 9, 2006, in which he joked, “You asked me to write you everything I told my interrogators. 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.” He went on:
Yet I provided you everything (almost) in my book, which the government denies you the access to. I was going to go deeper in details, but I figured it was futile.
To make a long story short, you may divide my time in two big steps.
(1)Pre-torture (I mean that I couldn’t resist): I told them the truth about me having done nothing against your country. It lasted until May 22, 2003.
(2)Post-torture era: where my brake broke loose. I yessed every accusation my interrogators made. I even wrote the infamous confession about me planning to hit the CN Tower in Toronto, based on SSG advice. I just wanted to get the monkeys off my back. I don’t care how long I stay in jail. My belief comforts me.2
The documents also included a pair of transcripts of Mohamedou’s sworn testimony before detainee review boards in Guantánamo. The first—and the first sample of his voice anywhere in the documents—is from his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) hearing; the date is December 8, 2004, just months after his so-called “special interrogation” ended. It includes this exchange:
Q:Can I get your response to the very first allegation that you are a member of the Taliban or al Qaida?
A:The Taliban, I have nothing to do with them whatsoever. Al Qaida, I was a member in Afghanistan in 91 and 92. After I left Afghanistan, I broke all my relations with al Qaida.
Q:And you’ve never provided them money, or any type of support since then? A: Nothing whatsoever.
Q:Ever recruited for them?
A:No, not at all; no trying to recruit for them.
Q:You said that you were pressured to admit you were involved in the Millennium plot, right?
A:Yes.
Q:To whom did you make that confession?
A:To the Americans.
Q:And what do you mean by pressure?
A:Your honor, I don’t wish to talk about this nature of the pressure if I don’t have to.
Q:Tribunal President: You don’t have to; we just want to make sure that you were not tortured or coerced into saying something that wasn’t true. That is the reason he is asking the question.
A:You just take from me I am not involved in such a horrible attack; yes I admit to being a member of al Qaida, but I am not willing to talk about this. The smart people came to me and analyzed this, and got the truth. It’s good for me to tell the truth, and the information was verified. I said I didn’t have anything to do with this. I took and passed the polygraph, and they said I didn’t have to speak of this anymore. They said please don’t speak of this topic anymore, and they haven’t opened it up to this topic for a year now.
Q:So no U.S. authorities abused you in any way?
A:I’m not willing to answer this question; I don’t have to, if you don’t force me to.3
The other transcript comes from the 2005 Administrative Review Board hearing where he announced he had written this book. A year had passed since the CSRT hearing, a year when he was finally allowed to meet with attorneys, and when he somehow found the distance and the stamina to write down his experience. This time he speaks freely of his odyssey, not in fear or in anger, but in a voice inflected with irony and wit. “He was very silly,” Mohamedou says of one of his interrogator’s threats, “because he said he was going to bring in black people. I don’t have any problem with black people, half of my country is black people!” Another interrogator in Guantánamo known as Mr. X was covered head to toe “like in Saudi Arabia, how the women are covered,” and wearing “gloves, O.J. Simpson gloves on his hands.” Mohamedou’s answers are richly detailed, for deliberate effect and for an earnest purpose. “Please,” he tells the board, “I want you guys to understand my story okay, because it really doesn’t matter if they release me or not, I just want my story understood.”4
We do not have a complete record of Mohamedou’s effort to tell his story to the review board at that hearing. Just as he begins to describe what he experienced in Guantánamo during the summer of 2003, “the recording equipment began to malfunction,” notes a boldface interruption in the transcript. For the lost section, in which “the detainee discussed how he was tortured while here at GTMO by several individuals,” the document offers instead “the board’s recollection of that 1000 click malfunction”:
The Detainee began by discussing the alleged abuse he received from a female interrogator known to him as . The Detainee attempted to explain to the Board actions but he became distraught and visibly upset. He explained that he was sexually harassed and although he does like women he did not like what had done to him. The Presiding Officer noticed the Detainee was upset and told him he was not required to tell the story. The Detainee was very appreciative and elected not to elaborate on the alleged abuse from .
The Detainee gave detailed information regarding the alleged abuse from and . The Detainee stated that and entered a room with their faces covered and began beating him. They beat him so badly that became upset. did not like the treatment the Detainee was receiving and started to sympathize with him. According to the Detainee, was crying and telling and to stop beating him. The Detainee wanted to show the Board his scars and location of injuries, but the board declined the viewing. The Board agrees that this is a fair recap of the distorted portion of the tape.5
We only have these transcripts because in the spring of 2006, a federal judge presiding over a FOIA lawsuit filed by the Associated Press ordered them released. That lawsuit also finally compelled the Pentagon, four years after Guantánamo opened, to publish an official list of the men it was holding in the facility. For the first time, the prisoners had names, and the names had voices. In the transcripts of their secret hearings, many of the prisoners told stories that undercut claims that the Cuban detention camp housed “the worst of the worst,” men so dangerous, as the military’s presiding general famously declared as the first prisoners were landing at the camp in 2002, they would “gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.”6 Several, like Mohamedou, broached the subject of their treatment in U.S. custody.
The Pentagon doubled down. “Detainees held at Guantánamo are terrorist trainers, bomb-makers, would-be suicide bombers, and other dangerous people,” a military spokesman again asserted when the transcripts became public. “And we know that they’re trained to lie to try to gain sympathy for their condition and to bring pressure against the U.S. government.”7 A year later, when the military released the records of Guantánamo’s 2006 Administrative Review Board hearings, Mohamedou’s transcript was missing completely. That transcript is still classified.
Mohamedou’s manuscript was finally cleared for public release, and
a member of his legal team was able to hand it to me on a disk labeled “Slahi Manuscript—Unclassified Version,” in the summer of 2012. By then, Mohamedou had been in Guantánamo for a decade. A federal judge had granted his habeas corpus petition two years before and ordered him released, but the U.S government had appealed, and the appeals court sent his petition back down to the federal district court for rehearing. That case is still pending.
Mohamedou remains to this day in the same segregation cell where he wrote his Guantánamo diary. I have, I believe, read everything that has been made public about his case, and I do not understand why he was ever in Guantánamo in the first place.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born on December 31, 1970, in Rosso, then a small town, now a small city, on the Senegal River on Mauritania’s southern border. He had eight older siblings; three more would follow. The family moved to the capital, Nouakchott, as Mohamedou was finishing primary school, and his father, a nomadic camel trader, died not long after. The timing, and Mohamedou’s obvious talents, must have shaped his sense of his role in the family. His father had taught him to read the Koran, which he had memorized by the time he was a teenager, and he did well in high school, with a particular aptitude for math. A 2008 feature in Der Spiegel describes a popular kid with a passion for soccer, and especially for the German national team—a passion that led him to apply for, and win, a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Society to study in Germany. It was an enormous leap for the entire family, as the magazine reported:
Slahi boarded a plane for Germany on a Friday in the late summer of 1988. He was the first family member to attend a university—abroad, no less—and the first to travel on an airplane. Distraught by the departure of her favorite son, his mother’s goodbye was so tearful that Mohamedou briefly hesitated before getting on his flight. In the end, the others convinced him to go. “He was supposed to save us financially,” his brother [Y]ahdih says today.8
In Germany, Mohamedou pursued a degree in electrical engineering, with an eye toward a career in telecom and computers, but he interrupted his studies to participate in a cause that was drawing young men from around the world: the insurgency against the communist-led government in Afghanistan. There were no restrictions or prohibitions on such activities in those days, and young men like Mohamedou made the trip openly; it was a cause that the West, and the United States in particular, actively supported. To join the fight required training, so in early 1991 Mohamedou attended the al-Farouq training camp near Khost for seven weeks and swore a loyalty oath to al-Qaeda, the camp’s operators. He received light arms and mortar training, the guns mostly Soviet-made, the mortar shells, he recalled in his 2004 Combatant Status Review hearing, made in the U.S.A.
Mohamedou returned to his studies after the training, but in early 1992, with the communist government on the verge of collapsing, he went back to Afghanistan. He joined a unit commanded by Jalaluddin Haqqani that was laying siege to the city of Gardez, which fell with little resistance three weeks after Mohamedou arrived. Kabul fell soon thereafter, and as Mohamedou explained at the CSRT hearing, the cause quickly turned murky:
Right after the break down of [the] Communists, the Mujahiden themselves started to wage Jihad against themselves, to see who would be in power; the different factions began to fight against each other. I decided to go back because I didn’t want to fight against other Muslims, and found no reason why; nor today did I see a reason to fight to see who could be president or vice-president. My goal was solely to fight against the aggressors, mainly the Communists, who forbid my brethren to practice their religion.
That, Mohamedou has always insisted, marked the end of his commitment to al-Qaeda. As he told the presiding officer at his CSRT:
Ma’am, I was knowledgeable I was fighting with al Qaida, but then al Qaida didn’t wage Jihad against America. They told us to fight with our brothers against the Communists. In the mid-90’s they wanted to wage Jihad against America, but I personally had nothing to do with that. I didn’t join them in this idea; that’s their problem. I am completely out of the line between al Qaida and the U.S. They have to solve this problem themselves; I am completely independent of this problem.9
Back in Germany, Mohamedou settled into the life he and his family in Nouakchott had planned. He completed his degree in electrical engineering at the University of Duisburg, his young Mauritanian wife joined him, and the couple lived and worked in Duisburg for most of the 1990s. During that time, though, he remained friends or kept in touch with companions from the Afghanistan adventure, some of whom maintained al-Qaeda ties. He also had his own direct association with a prominent al-Qaeda member, Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, also known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, who was a member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council and one of Osama bin Laden’s senior theological advisers. Abu Hafs is a distant cousin of Mohamedou, and also a brother-in-law through his marriage to Mohamedou’s wife’s sister. The two were in occasional phone contact while Mohamedou was in Germany—a call from Abu Hafs, using bin Laden’s satellite phone, caught the ears of German intelligence in 1999—and twice Mohamedou helped Abu Hafs transfer $4,000 to his family in Mauritania around the Ramadan holidays.
In 1998, Mohamedou and his wife traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj. That same year, unable to secure permanent residency in Germany, Mohamedou followed a college friend’s recommendation and applied for landed immigrant status in Canada, and in November 1999 he moved to Montreal. He lived for a time with his former classmate and then at Montreal’s large al Sunnah mosque, where, as a hafiz, or someone who has memorized the Koran, he was invited to lead Ramadan prayers when the imam was traveling. Less than a month after he arrived in Montreal, an Algerian immigrant and al-Qaeda member named Ahmed Ressam was arrested entering the United States with a car laden with explosives and a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day, as part of what became known as the Millennium Plot. Ressam had been based in Montreal. He left the city before Mohamedou arrived, but he had attended the al Sunnah mosque and had connections with several of what Mohamedou, at his CSRT hearing, called his classmate’s “bad friends.”
Ressam’s arrest sparked a major investigation of the Muslim immigrant community in Montreal, and the al Sunnah mosque community in particular, and for the first time in his life, Mohamedou was questioned about possible terrorist connections. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police “came and interrogated me,” he testified at his 2005 Administrative Review Board hearing.
I was scared to hell. They asked me do I know Ahmed Ressam, I said, “No,” and then they asked do you know this guy and I said, “No, No.” I was so scared I was shaking. . . . I was not used to this, it was the first time I had been interrogated and I just wanted to stay out of trouble and make sure I told the truth. But they were watching me in a very ugly way. It is okay to be watched, but it is not okay to see the people who are watching you. It was very clumsy, but they wanted to give the message that we are watching you.
Back in Mauritania, Mohamedou’s family was alarmed. “‘What are you doing in Canada?’” he recalled them asking. “I said nothing but look[ing] for a job. And my family decided I needed to get back to Mauritania because this guy must be in a very bad environment and we want to save him.” His now ex-wife telephoned on behalf of the family to report that his mother was sick. As he described to the Review Board:
[She] called me and she was crying and she said, “Either you get me to Canada or you come to Mauritania.” I said, “Hey, take it easy.” I didn’t like this life in Canada, I couldn’t enjoy my freedom and being watched is not very good. I hated Canada and I said the work is very hard here. I took off on Friday, 21 January 2000; I took a flight from Montreal to Brussels, then to Dakar.10
With that flight, the odyssey that will become Mohamedou’s Guantánamo Diary begins.
It begins here because from this moment forward, a single force determines Mohamedou’s fate: the United States. Geographically, what he calls his “endless world tour” of dete
ntion and interrogation will cover twenty thousand miles over the next eighteen months, starting with what is supposed to be a home-coming and ending with him marooned four thousand miles from home on a Caribbean island. He will be held and interrogated in four countries along the way, often with the participation of Americans, and always at the behest of the United States.
Here is how the first of these detentions is described in a timeline that U.S. District Judge James Robertson included in his declassified 2010 order granting Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition:
Jan 2000Flew from Canada to Senegal, where brothers met him to take him to Mauritania; he and brothers were seized by authorities, and were questioned about the Millennium plot. An American came and took pictures; then, someone he presumed was American flew him to Mauritania, where he was questioned further by Mauritanian authorities about the Millennium plot.
Feb 2000Interrogated by re Millennium plot
2/14/2000 released him, concluding there was no basis to believe he was involved in the Millennium plot.
“The Mauritanians said, ‘We don’t need you, go away. We have no interest in you,’” Mohamedou recalled, describing that release at his ARB hearing. “I asked them what about the Americans? They said, ‘The Americans keep saying you are a link but they don’t give us any proof so what should we do?’”
But as Judge Robertson chronicled in his timeline, the Mauritanian government summoned Mohamedou again at the United States’ request shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks:
9/29/2001Arrested in Mauritania; authorities told him arrest because Salahi was allegedly involved in Millennium plot.
10/12/2001While he was detained, agents performed a search at his house, seizing tapes and documents.
10/15/2001Released by authorities.11
Between those two Mauritanian arrests, both of which included interrogations by FBI agents, Mohamedou was living a remarkably ordinary and, by his country’s standards, successful life, doing computer and electronics work, first for a medical supply company that also provided Internet services, and then for a similarly diversified family-owned import business. But now he was nervous. Although he was free and “went back to his life,” as he explained to the ARB:
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