Guantánamo Diary (45 page)

That we are able to read this book at all is thanks to the efforts of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s pro-bono lawyers, who fought for more than six years to have the manuscript cleared for public release. They did this quietly and respectfully, but also tenaciously, believing—and ultimately proving—that the truth is not incompatible with security. Time will only underscore what an accomplishment this has been, and how much readers everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to Nancy Hollander and Theresa M. Duncan, his lead attorneys; to their private co-counsel Linda Moreno, Sylvia Royce, and Jonathan Hafetz; and to their co-counsel Hina Shamsi, Brett Kaufman, Jonathan Manes, and Melissa Goodman of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union and Art Spitzer of the ACLU of the National Capital Area.

I owe my own profound thanks to Nancy Hollander and the rest of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s legal team, and above all to Mohamedou Ould Slahi himself, for offering me the opportunity to help bring these words to print. Every day I have spent reading, thinking about, and working with Mohamedou’s manuscript has illuminated in some new way what a gift their trust and confidence has been.

Publishing material that remains subject to severe censorship restrictions is not for the faint of heart, and so I am especially grateful to all those who have championed the publication of Mohamedou’s work: to Will Dobson and
Slate
for the chance
to present excerpts from the manuscript and the space to put those excerpts in context; to Rachel Vogel, my literary agent, to Geoff Shandler, Michael Sand, and Allie Sommer at Little, Brown, and to Jamie Byng and Katy Follain at Canongate for their vision and patient navigation of a variety of publication challenges; and to everyone at Little, Brown/Hachette, Canongate, and all the foreign language publishers of
The Guantánamo Diary
for making it possible for this once-suppressed but irrepressible work to be read around the world.

Anyone who has written about what has happened in Guantánamo owes a debt to the ACLU’s National Security Project, whose Freedom of Information Act litigation unearthed the trove of secret documents that stands as the stark historical record of the United States’ abusive post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. I am grateful for that record, without which the cross-referencing, corroboration, and annotation of Mohamedou’s account would not have been possible, and even more grateful for the opportunities the ACLU has given me over the last five years to explore, absorb, and write about that indispensible record.

I am indebted to many who shared their time, insights, experiences, and ideas with me as I was working with this manuscript. I cannot mention them all, but I cannot fail to mention Hahdih Ould Slahi, for helping me understand Mohamedou’s experience from his family’s perspective, and Jameel Jaffer, Hina Shamsi, Lara Tobin, and Eli Davis Siems, for their constant support, thoughtful counsel, and careful readings of edited versions of this book.

Finally, I am forever indebted to Mohamedou Ould Slahi, for the courage to write his manuscript, for the integrity, wit, and humanity of his writing, and for the faith he has shown in all of us, the reading public, in committing his experiences to print. May he at least, and at last, receive the same honest judgment he has afforded us.

1
Transcript, Administrative Review Board Hearing for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, December 15, 2005, 18. The ARB transcript is available at http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/csrt_arb/ARB_Transcript_Set_8_20751-21016.pdf, 184–216.

EDITOR’S NOTE ON THE INTRODUCTION: None of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s attorneys holding security clearances has reviewed this introduction, contributed to it in any way, or confirmed or denied anything in it. Nor has anyone else with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed this introduction, contributed to it in any way, or confirmed or denied anything in it.

2
Letter to attorney Sylvia Royce, November 9, 2006, http://online.wsj.com//files/01/19/41/f011941/public/resources/documents/couch-slahiletter-03312007.pdf.

3
Transcript, Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, December 8, 2004, 7–8. The CSRT transcript is available at http://online.wsj.com//files/01/19/41/f011941/public/resources/documents/couch-slahihearing-03312007.pdf.

4
ARB transcript, 14, 18–19, 25–26.

5
ARB transcript, 26–27.

6
Department of Defense News Briefing, Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers, January 11, 2002, http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2031.

7
Department of Defense Press Release, April 3, 2006, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15573.

8
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.

9
CSRT transcript, 3–4.

10
ARB transcript, 15–16.

11
Memorandum Order,
Mohammedou Ould Salahi v. Barack H. Obama
, No. 1:05-cv-00569-JR, 13–14. The Memorandum Order is available at https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-9-Slahi-Order.pdf.

12
ARB transcript, 19.

13
Goetz et al., “From Germany to Guantanamo.”

14
“Keep the Cell Door Shut: Appeal a Judge’s Outrageous Ruling to Free 9/11 Thug,” Editorial,
New York Daily News
, March 23, 2010, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/cell-door-shut-appeal-judge-outrageous-ruling-free-9-11-thug-article-1.172231.

15
Memorandum Order, 4.

16
The Reminiscences of V. Stuart Couch, March 1–2, 2012, Columbia Center for Oral History Collection (hereafter cited as CCOHC), 94, 117, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/ccoh_assets/ccoh_10100507_transcript.pdf.

17
CIA Office of the Inspector General, “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities, September 2001–October 2003,” May 7, 2004, 96. The CIA OIG report is available at http://media.luxmedia.com/aclu/IG_Report.pdf.

18
Bob Drogin, “No Leaders of Al Qaeda Found at Guantanamo,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 18, 2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/aug/18/nation/na-gitmo18.

19
ARB transcript, 23–24.

20
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
The 9/11 Commission Report
165–166. The 9/11 Commission report is available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf.

21
CCOHC interview with V. Stuart Couch, 90.

22
Memorandum Order, 19.

23
Jess Bravin, “The Conscience of the Colonel,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 31, 2007, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB117529704337355155.

24
U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” November 20, 2008, 140–41. The committee’s report is available at http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Detainee-Report-Final_April-22-2009.pdf.

25
Transcript of interview with Lt. Col. Stuart Couch for
Torturing Democracy
, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/interviews/stuart_couch.html.

26
Bravin, “The Conscience of the Colonel.”

27
CCOHC interview with V. Stuart Couch, 95.

28
Colonel Morris Davis, interview by Larry Siems,
Slate
, May 1, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/04/mohamedou_ould_slahi_s_guant_namo_memoirs_an_interview_with_colonel_morris.html.

29
Order,
Salahi v. Obama
, 625 F.3d 745, 746 (D.C. Cir. 2010). The decision is available at http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-dc-circuit/1543844.html.

30
Ibid., 750, 753.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi
was born in a small town in Mauritania in 1970. He won a scholarship to attend college in Germany and worked there for several years as an engineer. He returned to Mauritania in 2000. The following year, at the behest of the United States, he was detained by Mauritanian authorities and rendered to a prison in Jordan; later he was rendered again, first to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and finally, on August 5, 2002, to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was subjected to severe torture. In 2010, a federal judge ordered him immediately released, but the government appealed that decision. The U.S. government has never charged him with a crime. He remains imprisoned in Guantánamo.

Larry Siems
is a writer and human rights activist and for many years directed the Freedom to Write Program at PEN American Center. He is the author, most recently, of
The Torture Report: What the Documents Say about America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program
. He lives in New York.

The Torture Report: What the Documents Say about America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program

Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends

*
The AUMF, or Authorization for Use of Military Force, is the September 14, 2001, law under which Guantánamo operates. It authorizes the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

*
It becomes clear, from an unredacted date a few pages into the manuscript, that the action begins late in the evening on July 19, 2002. MOS manuscript, 10. A Council of Europe investigation has confirmed that a CIA-leased Gulfstream jet with the tail number N379P departed Amman, Jordan, at 11:15 p.m. that night 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.

*
Abu Hafs, whose name appears here and elsewhere in the manuscript unredacted, 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.

*
Context suggests the guard may be female. Throughout the manuscript, it appears that the pronouns
she
and
her
are consistently redacted, and
he
and
his
appear unredacted.

*
Again, redacted pronouns suggest the interpreter is female.

*
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. The lead interrogator here could be that interrogator. MOS’s 2005 ARB hearing transcript is available at http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/csrt_arb/ARB_Transcript_Set_8_20751-21016.pdf, p. 23 transcript, p. 206 in link.

†
Context suggests the second interrogator addressed MOS in German.

*
Context suggests the apology is directed to the interpreter.

*
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.