The Mauritanian
Page 42
For now, that power still controls Mohamedou’s story. It is present in these pages in the form of more than 2,600 black-box redactions. These redactions do not just hide important elements of the action. They also blur Mohamedou’s guiding principles and his basic purpose, undercutting the candor with which he addresses his own case, and obscuring his efforts to distinguish his characters as individuals, some culpable, some admirable, most a complex and shifting combination of both.
And it is present above all in his continuing, poorly explained imprisonment. Thirteen years ago, Mohamedou left his home in Nouakchott, Mauritania, and drove to the headquarters of his national police for questioning. He has not returned. For our collective sense of story and of justice, we must have a clearer understanding of why this has not happened yet, and what will happen next.
Guantánamo lives on unanswered questions. But now that we have Guantánamo Diary, how can we not at least resolve the questions in Mohamedou’s case?
When we do, I believe there will be a homecoming. When that happens, the redactions will be filled in, the text will be reedited and amended and updated as Mohamedou himself would have it, and we will all be free to see Guantánamo Diary for what it ultimately is: an account of one man’s odyssey through an increasingly borderless and anxious world, a world where the forces shaping lives are ever more distant and clandestine, where destinies are determined by powers with seemingly infinite reach, a world that threatens to dehumanize but fails to dehumanize—in short, an epic for our times.
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/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/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.
* 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.”
Editor’s Acknowledgments to
the First Edition
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 a
ll the foreign language publishers of 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’s 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 indispensable 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 Yahdih 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.