The Mauritanian
Page 1
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 5 August 2002, to the US 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. He was cleared and released on 16 October 2016, and repatriated to his native country of Mauritania. No charges were filed against him during or after this ordeal.
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 of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say about America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program. He lives in New York.
The film tie-in edition published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain as Guantánamo Diary in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books
canongate.co.uk
Diary, restored diary and introduction to the restored edition
copyright © Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 2015, 2017
Notes and introduction to the original edition
copyright © Larry Siems, 2015, 2017
The right Mohamedou Ould Slahi to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the United States by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, Inc, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
First Back Bay trade paperback edition, December 2015
Restored edition, October 2017
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 417 1
eISBN 978 1 83885 519 2
To my late mother, Maryem Mint El Wadia
Contents
A Timeline of Detention
Note on the Text and Annotations of the Restored Edition
The End of the Story, and an Introduction to the New Edition by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
One Jordan–Afghanistan–GTMO
July 2002–February 2003
BEFORE
Two Senegal–Mauritania
January 21, 2000–February 19, 2000
Three Mauritania
September 29, 2001–November 28, 2001
Four Jordan
November 29, 2001–July 19, 2002
GTMO
Five GTMO
February 2003–August 2003
Six GTMO
September 2003–December 2003
Seven GTMO
2004–2005
Author’s Note
Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition
Editor’s Acknowledgments to the First Edition
A Timeline of Detention
January 2000 After spending twelve years studying, living, and working overseas, primarily in Germany and briefly in Canada, Mohamedou Ould Slahi decides to return to his home country of Mauritania. En route, he is detained twice at the behest of the United States—first by Senegalese police and then by Mauritanian authorities—and questioned by American FBI agents in connection with the so-called Millennium Plot to bomb LAX. Concluding that there is no basis to believe he was involved in the plot, authorities release him on February 19, 2000.
2000–fall 2001 Mohamedou lives with his family and works as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott, Mauritania.
September 29, 2001 Mohamedou is detained and held for two weeks by Mauritanian authorities and again questioned by FBI agents about the Millennium Plot. He is again released, with Mauritanian authorities publicly affirming his innocence.
November 20, 2001 Mauritanian police come to Mohamedou’s home and ask him to accompany them for further questioning. He voluntarily complies, driving his own car to the police station.
November 28, 2001 A CIA rendition plane transports Mohamedou from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan, where he is interrogated for seven and a half months by Jordanian intelligence services.
July 19, 2002 Another CIA rendition plane retrieves Mohamedou from Amman; he is stripped, blindfolded, diapered, shackled, and flown to the U.S. military’s Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The events recounted in Guantánamo Diary begin with this scene.
August 4, 2002 After two weeks of interrogation in Bagram, Mohamedou is bundled onto a military transport with thirty-four other prisoners and flown to Guantánamo. The group arrives and is processed into the facility on August 5, 2002.
2003–2004 U.S. military interrogators subject Mohamedou to a “special interrogation plan” that is personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mohamedou’s torture includes months of extreme isolation; a litany of physical, psychological, and sexual humiliations; death threats; threats to his family; and a mock kidnapping and rendition.
March 3, 2005 Mohamedou handwrites his petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
Summer 2005 Mohamedou handwrites the 466 pages that would become this book in his segregation cell in Guantánamo.
June 12, 2008 The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5–4 in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantánamo detainees have a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus.
August–December 2009 U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson hears Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition.
March 22, 2010 Judge Robertson grants Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition and orders his release.
March 26, 2010 The Obama administration files a notice of appeal.
November 5, 2010 The DC Circuit Court of Appeals sends Mohamedou’s habeas corpus case back to U.S. district court for rehearing. It languishes there for years.
January 20, 2015 Guantánamo Diary is published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and seven other countries. Publishers in nineteen more countries will release translations of the book in the next two years.
June 2, 2016 Mohamedou appears before a Periodic Review Board in Guantánamo.
July 14, 2016 The Periodic Review Board concludes Mohamedou’s imprisonment in Guantánamo “is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”
October 16, 2016 Mohamedou is released from Guantánamo. As he was on the flight to Guantánamo fourteen years before, he is shackled and wears a blindfold and earmuffs on the U.S. military transport throughout the flight.
October 17, 2016 The military transport lands at the airport in Nouakchott, Mauritania, around 2 p.m. A few hours later, Mohamedou is reunited with his family.
Note on the Text and Annotations of the Restored Edition
At the end of my Notes on the Text, Redactions, and Annotations for the first published edition of Guantánamo Diary, I wrote,
So many of the editing challenges associated with bringing this remarkable work to print result directly from the fact that the U.S. government continues to hold the work’s author, with no satisfactory explanation to date, under a censorship regime that prevents him from participating in the editorial process. I look forward to the day when Mohamedou Ould Slahi is free and we can read this work in its entirety, as he would have it published.
This is that day, and that edition.
On October 16, 2016, 5,445 days after he drove himself to Mauritania’s national police for questioning and w
as forcibly disappeared, Mohamedou was released from Guantánamo and returned to his home city of Nouakchott, Mauritania. Within hours we were video chatting—the first time we had ever spoken—and within a few weeks we were meeting face-to-face in the baggage claim area of the Nouakchott airport.
Since then, in one of the most unexpected and extraordinary pleasures of my life, we have been in contact almost every day, by e-mail, WhatsApp, Skype, and text. Much of that time has been spent working on this new edition of Guantánamo Diary, which realizes the aspiration I expressed in my Notes to the first edition, and which fulfills what Mohamedou has described from the moment of his release, with straightforward clarity, as a responsibility to his readers: to free the text from the restraints of U.S. government censorship.
As Mohamedou explains in his Introduction to this new edition, we came to see this process as one of restoration and reparation, as of an ancient building or damaged painting.
Had we been allowed access to the still classified original uncensored manuscript, this might have seemed a simple matter of “filling in” the redactions with the deleted text. But even that would have required some editing beyond the redactions, since sometimes the redactions froze in place phrases and text that might otherwise have been edited, and sometimes my sense of the phrasing or the content beneath the redactions was incorrect.
As it was, we carried out this process of reparation in phases, working from short redactions of nouns and pronouns to longer descriptive passages and ultimately to the three multipage erasures in the original edition, two that described polygraph examinations and one that contained a poem Mohamedou had written. It was impossible to replicate the exact text that appeared in these longer passages a decade after they were written. Instead, our commitment was to reconstruct the scenes that the censored text obscured as faithfully and accurately as possible, with Mohamedou re-creating these scenes in text and then the two of us revising and editing these passages together. Our aim was always to stay as closely as possible within the textual spaces and narrative structure of the first edition. In one case, however, this process necessitated moving a block of text that originally appeared near the beginning of chapter 5 to the end of the first chapter to correct the chronology of interrogation sessions.
In this new edition, the lightly shaded text indicates areas of restoration and reparation, for anyone wishing to compare this version with the first published edition.
Not so indicated, but easily discernible in a side-by-side comparison with the first published edition, are several revisions to my footnotes. As first published, these annotations served two purposes: first and foremost, to refer readers to government documents and other publicly available information that corroborate Mohamedou’s narrative; and second, to offer occasional speculations, based on my own close reading of the text and these corroborating materials, on what might be hidden beneath the redactions. Happily there is no longer any need for these speculations, and so several of my original footnotes have been eliminated. The footnotes that remain, and a few new ones that have been added, now refer entirely to the resources available to readers interested in exploring the extensive documentary record of Mohamedou’s ordeal.
Five years after I was first handed a disk with the censored version of Mohamedou’s handwritten manuscript, I still struggle to fathom the scope and intensity of that ordeal, and what it says about my country’s commitment to the core human rights values of due process and freedom of expression. But every day I have lived with that manuscript, and now, to my great fortune, with the living presence of its author, I have understood Guantánamo Diary as a profound gesture of reconstruction and of hope.
One evening during my visit to Nouakchott a few weeks after his release, Mohamedou stood at the back gate of his family’s weathered home on the edge of the Sahara reenacting the events of the evening of November 20, 2001, when he said goodbye to his mother and aunt, assured them he would be home in a few hours, and climbed into his car and started toward the police station. By sheer, unnerving accident, we realized as we were standing there that it was fifteen years to the hour since his fateful odyssey began. Time telescoped; I saw him both at the beginning and the end of his journey, and I recognized, in the slightest slump of his shoulders, its enormous weight.
I have felt that weight many times since, as we worked our way through this new edition. Mohamedou is home now, and with this edition, his long quest to tell this story is complete. Speaking not as an editor but as an American citizen, I see other reparations work that remains to be done. But Mohamedou has done his part. The rest is up to us.
The End of the Story, and an Introduction to the New Edition
by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
1.
Every time we had a hurricane warning in Guantánamo Bay, I had the same daydream. I imagined the prison camp wiped away and all of us, detainees and captors alike, fighting side by side to survive. In some versions I saved many lives, in others I was saved, but somehow we all managed to escape, unharmed and free.
This is what I was imagining on October 7, 2016, when Hurricane Matthew was building in the Caribbean. The forecast was predicting a direct hit on Guantánamo, so the camp command decided to move all the detainees, about seventy of us, to Camp 6, the safest facility in GTMO. I was told that my belongings might not survive the hurricane, so I took my family pictures, my Koran, and two DVDs of the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The NCO in charge, a sympathetic Hispanic sergeant first class in his forties, arranged for another detainee to lend me his portable DVD player, but the machine died within minutes.
Outside my cell, an argument broke out between one of the detainees and the guards over the temperature in the block, an argument we all knew was futile, but the detainee had started and now couldn’t stop.
“You Americans, even if I treat you as human beings, you don’t respect me,” he was yelling.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the guards were yelling back. I did my best to tune them out, and I spent the night listening for the sound of the heavy wind battering the cell, daydreaming another dramatic escape.
The structure was so strong that I never even heard the storm. But in the morning the camp was buzzing with rumors about detainees who were going to leave. One rumor said that there was a comprehensive plan that I was going be resettled along with Abdul Latif Nasir, a Moroccan detainee, and Soufiane Barhoumi from Algeria. We had all heard so many rumors over the years that turned out to be just that, rumors, that we knew not to celebrate; this would prove to be another.
For me, though, the real news came that afternoon. The bearer was our brand-new officer in charge. She had just taken over and I had not even met her yet, but now this army captain was sticking her head through my bin hole and giving me the broadest smile I’d seen in many years.
“Do you know that you’re going to leave soon?” she said. It was the best introduction to a new OIC ever: I’m taking over, and you’re going home.
I was moved to a different cellblock. I met with representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross, who officially informed me that I was to be transferred. The U.S. government dreads the mention of detainees being freed, so it uses its own vocabulary of “transfer” and “resettlement,” as if we were cargo or refugees. Yazan, a Jordanian representative I knew from previous ICRC delegations, asked if I would accept resettlement to my home country of Mauritania. I told him I would take any transfer I was offered, quoting the title of a Chris Cagle country song: “Anywhere but Here.” The next day, my attorneys Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan called me from the United States to confirm the news. Only then I could say to myself, Now it’s official: I’m leaving this prison after so many years of pain and humiliation.
“You have the Gold Meeting tomorrow,” the new OIC told me when I got back to my cell after the call. Her smile still hadn’t faded.
The “Gold Meeting” takes place in Gold Building, a structure that was built for interroga
tion. At first, the interrogations there were not so bad by Guantánamo standards. We answered all kinds of questions from FBI, CIA, and military intelligence officers, as well as investigators who came from around the world at the invitation of their American colleagues. But the building was given a face-lift in 2003 and then was used along with the so-called Brown and Yellow buildings for torture sessions. It was in this same Gold Building that I spent many sleepless and cold nights that year, shivering in my shackles, eating countless tasteless MREs, and listening to “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light” in an endless, repeating loop. Now the bushes around the building were growing out of control, and the old Delta Three camp next door looked like a graveyard. Romeo block, where I spent my last days before I was dragged into a boat in a fake kidnapping, existed only in bits and pieces. Everything was old and rusted and dirty. It looked like a scene after one of my hurricane daydreams.
Inside Gold Building, though, nothing had changed. Its rooms were now assigned for FBI and Army Forensics, for phone calls to lawyers, and for meetings with the ICRC. But they were still set up the same way, with their one-way mirrors and the adjacent control rooms where a bunch of idle Joint Task Force (JTF) personnel would sit chewing on their cold cheese-burgers, watching me, and asking themselves how I’d ended up in this place. Even the smell was the same: at the first hint of it, I was hearing the sound my heavy chains made the day I was dragged down the corridor to a room where I would meet Sergeant Mary, one of the main interrogators on my so-called Special Projects team.
One night in August 2003, I sat shackled in one of those rooms listening to a phone conversation one of my interpreters was having. She was calling her family back in the United States, and she had forgotten to close the door behind her. English seemed like her first language, but she was speaking to her family in Arabic, with a soft Lebanese or Syrian accent. To hear her casually sharing mundane stories about life in GTMO, very relaxed, completely oblivious to the man suffering next to her, was surreal, but it was just what I needed on that cold, unfriendly evening. I wished her soothing, musical conversation wouldn’t end: she was my surrogate, doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself. I saw in her a physical and spiritual conduit to my own family, and I told myself that if her family was doing well, my family must be doing well, too. That I was mitigating my loneliness by listening to someone else’s intimate, personal conversation posed a moral dilemma for me: I needed to survive, but I also wanted to keep my dignity and respect the dignity of others. To this day I am sorry for eavesdropping, and I can only hope she would forgive my unintentional transgression.