Guantánamo Diary

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  The Detainee gave detailed information regarding the alleged abuse from ■■■■■■■■■■■ and ■■■■■■■■■■. The Detainee stated that ■■■■■■■■■■ and ■■■■■■■■■■ entered a room with their faces covered and began beating him. They beat him so badly that ■■■■■■■■■■ became upset. ■■■■■■■■■■ did not like the treatment the Detainee was receiving and started to sympathize with him. According to the Detainee, ■■■■■■■■ was crying and telling ■■■■■■■■■■ and ■■■■■■■■■ to stop beating him. The Detainee wanted to show the Board his scars and location of injuries, but the board declined the viewing. The Board agrees that this is a fair recap of the distorted portion of the tape.5

  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.”6 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.”7 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:

  Slahi boarded a plane for Germany on a Friday in the late summer of 1988. He was the first family member to attend a university—abroad, no less—and the first to travel on an airplane. Distraught by the departure of her favorite son, his mother’s goodbye was so tearful that Mohamedou briefly hesitated before getting on his flight. In the end, the others convinced him to go. “He was supposed to save us financially,” his brother [Y]ahdih says today.8

  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:

  Right after the break down of [the] Communists, the Mujahiden themselves started to wage Jihad against themselves, to see who would be in power; the different factions began to fight against each other. I decided to go back because I didn’t want to fight against other Muslims, and found no reason why; nor today did I see a reason to fight to see who could be president or vice-president. My goal was solely to fight against the aggressors, mainly the Communists, who forbid my brethren to practice their religion.

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

  Ma’am, I was knowledgeable I was fighting with al Qaida, but then al Qaida didn’t wage Jihad against America. They told us to fight with our brothers against the Communists. In the mid-90’s they wanted to wage Jihad against America, but I personally had nothing to do with that. I didn’t join them in this idea; that’s their problem. I am completely out of the line between al Qaida and the U.S. They have to solve this problem themselves; I am completely independent of this problem.9

  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 D
ay, 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.

  I was scared to hell. They asked me do I know Ahmed Ressam, I said, “No,” and then they asked do you know this guy and I said, “No, No.” I was so scared I was shaking.… I was not used to this, it was the first time I had been interrogated and I just wanted to stay out of trouble and make sure I told the truth. But they were watching me in a very ugly way. It is okay to be watched, but it is not okay to see the people who are watching you. It was very clumsy, but they wanted to give the message that we are watching you.

  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:

  [She] called me and she was crying and she said, “Either you get me to Canada or you come to Mauritania.” I said, “Hey, take it easy.” I didn’t like this life in Canada, I couldn’t enjoy my freedom and being watched is not very good. I hated Canada and I said the work is very hard here. I took off on Friday, 21 January 2000; I took a flight from Montreal to Brussels, then to Dakar.10

  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:

  Jan 2000 Flew from Canada to Senegal, where brothers met him to take him to Mauritania; he and brothers were seized by ■■■■■■■■■ authorities, and were questioned about the Millennium plot. An American came and took pictures; then, someone he presumed was American flew him to Mauritania, where he was questioned further by Mauritanian authorities about the Millennium plot.

  Feb 2000 Interrogated by ■■■ re Millennium plot

  2/14/2000 ■■■■■■■■■■■■ released him, concluding there was no basis to believe he was involved in the Millennium plot.

  “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:

  9/29/2001 Arrested in Mauritania; authorities told him ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ arrest because Salahi was allegedly involved in Millennium plot.

  10/12/2001 While he was detained, agents performed a search at his house, seizing tapes and documents.

  10/15/2001 Released by ■■■■■■■■■■■ authorities. 11

  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:

  I thought now I will have a problem with my employer because my employer would not take me back because I am suspected of terrorism, and they said they would take care of this. In front of me while I was sitting [there] the highest intelligence guy in Mauritania called my employer and said that I was a good person, we have no problem with [him] and we arrested him for a reason. We had to question him and we have questioned him and he is good to go, so you can take him back.12

  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 famil
y 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:

  At noon on a Friday in June 2008, the Slahi family convenes at the offices of the International Red Cross (IRC) in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott. His mother, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces and aunts are all dressed in the flowing robes they would normally wear to a family party. They have come here to talk to Mohamedou, their lost son, by telephone. The Joint Task Force in Guantanamo has granted its approval, with the IRC acting as go-between. Thick carpets cover the stone floor and light-colored curtains billow at the windows of the IRC office.

  “My son, my son, how are you feeling?” his mother asks. “I am so happy to hear you.” She breaks into tears, as she hears his voice for the first time in more than six years. Mohamedou’s older brother speaks with him for 40 minutes. Slahi tells his brother that he is doing well. He wants to know who has married whom, how his siblings are doing and who has had children. “That was my brother, the brother I know. He has not changed,” Hamoud Ould Slahi says after the conversation.13

  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.