Guantánamo Diary (2 page)

by Larry Siems

In the summer and early fall of 2005, Mohamedou Ould Slahi handwrote a 466-page, 122,000-word draft of this book in his single-cell segregation hut in Camp Echo, Guantánamo.

He wrote it in installments, starting not long after he was finally allowed to meet with Nancy Hollander and Sylvia Royce, two attorneys from his pro bono legal team. Under the strict protocols of Guantánamo’s sweeping censorship regime, every page he wrote was considered classified from the moment of its creation, and each new section was surrendered to the United States government for review.

On December 15, 2005, three months after he signed and dated the manuscript’s last page, Mohamedou interrupted his testimony during an Administrative Review Board hearing in Guantánamo to tell the presiding officers:

But Mohamedou’s manuscript was not released. It was stamped “SECRET,” a classification level for information that could cause serious damage to national security if it becomes public, and “NOFORN,” meaning it can’t be shared with any foreign nationals or intelligence services. It was deposited in a
secure facility near Washington, DC, accessible only to those with a full security clearance and an official “need to know.” For more than six years, Mohamedou’s attorneys carried out litigation and negotiations to have the manuscript cleared for public release.

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:

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:

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.”
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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”:

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.”
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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.”
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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:

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: