Guantánamo Diary (3 page)

That, Mohamedou has always insisted, marked the end of his commitment to al-Qaeda. As he told the presiding officer at his CSRT:

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.

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:

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 detention and interrogation will cover twenty thousand miles over the next eighteen months, starting with what is supposed to be a homecoming 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:

“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:

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:

His boss did take him back, and just over a month later, Mohamedou’s work would take him to the Mauritanian Presidential Palace, where he spent a day preparing a bid to upgrade President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s telephone and computer systems. When he got home, the national police appeared again, telling him he was needed once more for questioning. He asked them to wait while he showered. He dressed, grabbed
his keys—he went voluntarily, driving his own car to police headquarters—and told his mother not to worry, he would be home soon. This time, though, he disappeared.

For almost a year, his family was led to believe he was in Mauritanian custody. His oldest brother, Hamoud, regularly visited the security prison to deliver clean clothes and money for Mohamedou’s meals. A week after Mohamedou turned himself in, however, a CIA rendition flight had spirited him to Jordan; months later, the United States had retrieved him from Amman and delivered him to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and, a few weeks after that, to Guantánamo. All this time, his family was paying for his upkeep in the Nouakchott prison; all this time, the prison officials pocketed the money, saying nothing. Finally, on October 28, 2002, Mohamedou’s youngest brother, Yahdih, who had assumed Mohamedou’s position as the family’s European breadwinner, picked up that week’s edition of
Der Spiegel
and read that his brother had by then “been sitting for months in a wire cage in the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo.”

Yahdih was furious—not, he remembers, at the United States but at the local authorities who had been assuring the family they had Mohamedou and he was safe. “Those police are bad people, they’re thieves!” he kept yelling when he called his family with the news. “Don’t say that!” they panicked, hanging up. He called them back and started in again. They hung up again.

Yahdih still lives in Düsseldorf. He and I met last year over a series of meals in a Moroccan restaurant on Ellerstraße, a center for the city’s North African community. Yahdih introduced me to several of his friends, mainly young Moroccans, many of them, like Yahdih, now German citizens. Among themselves they spoke Arabic, French, and German; with me, like Yahdih, they gamely tried English, laughing at one another’s mistakes. Yahdih told a classic immigrant’s joke, in Arabic for his friends and
then translating for me, about an aspiring hotel worker’s English test. “What do you say if you want to call someone over to you?” the applicant is quizzed. “Please come here,” he answers. “What if you want him to leave?” The applicant pauses, then brightens. “I go outside and tell him, ‘Please come here!’ ”

In Düsseldorf, Yahdih and I spent an entire meal sorting and labeling photographs of siblings, sisters- and brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, many living in the family’s multigenerational household in Nouakchott. During his 2004 CSRT hearing, Mohamedou explained his disinterest in al-Qaeda after he returned to Germany by saying, “I had a big family to feed, I had 100 mouths to feed.” It was an exaggeration, but only by half, maybe. Now Yahdih bears a large share of that responsibility. Because activism can be a risky business in Mauritania, he has also assumed the family lead in advocating for Mohamedou’s release. During our last meal together, we watched YouTube videos of a demonstration he helped organize in Nouakchott last year outside the Presidential Palace. The featured speaker, he pointed out, was a parliament minister.

A few days before I visited Yahdih, Mohamedou had been allowed one of his twice-yearly calls with his family. The calls are arranged under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and connect Mohamedou with the family household in Nouakchott and with Yahdih in Germany. Yahdih told me he had recently written to the Red Cross to ask if the number of calls could be increased to three a year.

The first of these calls took place in 2008, six and a half years after Mohamedou disappeared. A reporter for
Der Spiegel
witnessed the scene:

From what Yahdih tells me, the conversations remain more or less the same five years later, though two things have changed. The calls are now Skype calls, so they can see one another. And they are now missing Mohamedou’s and Yahdih’s mother. She died on March 27, 2013.

The lead editorial in the
New York Daily News
on March 23, 2010, was titled “Keep the Cell Door Shut: Appeal a Judge’s Outrageous Ruling to Free 9/11 Thug.” The editorial began:

That ruling was Judge James Robertson’s then still-classified memorandum order granting Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition—the petition Mohamedou handwrote in his Camp Echo cell five years before. Without access to that order or to the legal filings or court hearing that resulted in the order, the newspaper’s editorial board nevertheless conjectured that a judge was letting “a terrorist with the blood of 3,000 on his hands” go free, adding contortedly, “he possibly being a man whose guilt was certain but unprovable beyond a reasonable doubt thanks to squeamishness over evidence acquired under rough treatment.” Expressing confidence that Mohamedou was “squeezed appropriately hard after 9/11” and that his treatment made the country safer, the editors urged the Obama administration to appeal the order, adding, “What was the rush to release? The judge could have waited, should have waited, for the country to understand why this had to happen before exercising his legal authority.”
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