Guantánamo Diary

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  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.

  About the Authors

  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 August 5, 2002, to the U.S. 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. The U.S. government has never charged him with a crime. He remains imprisoned in Guantánamo.

  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, most recently, of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say about America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program. He lives in New York.

  ALSO BY LARRY SIEMS

  The Torture Report: What the Documents Say about America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program

  Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends

  * 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.”

  * It becomes clear, from an unredacted date a few pages into the manuscript, that the action begins late in the evening on July 19, 2002. MOS manuscript, 10. A Council of Europe investigation has confirmed that a CIA-leased Gulfstream jet with the tail number N379P departed Amman, Jordan, at 11:15 p.m. that night for Kabul, Afghanistan. An addendum to that 2006 report listing the flight records is available at http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2006/20060614_Ejdoc162006PartII-Appendix.pdf.

  EDITOR’S NOTE ON THE FOOTNOTES: None of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s attorneys holding security clearances has reviewed the footnotes in this book, contributed to them in any way, or confirmed or denied my speculations contained in them. Nor has anyone else with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed the footnotes, contributed to them in any way, or confirmed or denied my speculations contained in them.

  * Abu Hafs, whose name appears here and elsewhere in the manuscript unredacted, is MOS’s cousin and former brother-in-law. His full name is Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, and he is also known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. Abu Hafs married the sister of MOS’s former wife. He was a prominent member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, the group’s main advisory body, in the 1990s and up until the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. It has been widely reported that Abu Hafs opposed those attacks; the 9/11 Commission recorded that “Abu Hafs the Mauritanian reportedly even wrote Bin Ladin a message basing opposition to the attacks on the Qur’an.” Abu Hafs left Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and spent the next decade under house arrest in Iran. In April 2012 he was extradited to Mauritania, where he was held briefly and then released. He is now a free man. The relevant section of the 9/11 Commission report is available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch7.pdf.

  * Context suggests the guard may be female. Throughout the manuscript, it appears that the pronouns she and her are consistently redacted, and he and his appear unredacted.

  * Again, redacted pronouns suggest the interpreter is female.

  * At his December 15, 2005, Administrative Review Board (ARB) hearing, MOS described a U.S. interrogator in Bagram who was Japanese American and whom Bagram prisoners referred to as “William the Torturer.” ARB transcript, 23. The lead interrogator here could be that interrogator. MOS’s 2005 ARB hearing transcript
is available at http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/csrt_arb/ARB_Transcript_Set_8_20751-21016.pdf, p. 23 transcript, p. 206 in link.

  † Context suggests the second interrogator addressed MOS in German.

  * Context suggests the apology is directed to the interpreter.

  * At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS indicated that an interrogator nicknamed “William the Torturer” made him kneel for “very long hours” to aggravate his sciatic nerve pain and later threatened him. ARB transcript, 23.

  * This appears to be the German-speaking interrogator who assisted in the earlier interrogation.

  * Department of Justice. This is not true, of course. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is located on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and is run by a U.S. military joint task force under the command of the U.S. Southern Command.

  * This could refer to agents of the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Press accounts indicate that MOS was interrogated by both German and Canadian intelligence agents in Guantánamo; later in the manuscript, in the scene where he meets with what appear to be BND interrogators in GTMO, MOS specifically references such a prohibition on external interrogations. See footnote here; see also http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/from-germany-to-guantanamo-the-career-of-prisoner-no-760-a-583193-3.html; and http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2008/07/27/csis_grilled_trio_in_cuba.html.

  * The interrogator’s remark about military interrogators and MOS’s reference to an interagency competition for control of his interrogation suggest that the interrogator may be from one of the civilian agencies, likely the FBI. The protracted interagency conflict between the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency over the military’s interrogation methods has been widely documented and reported, most notably in a May 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General titled A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq (hereafter cited as DOJ IG). The report, which is available at http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0805/final.pdf, includes substantial sections devoted specifically to MOS’s interrogation.

  * It is clear from an unredacted date later in this chapter, as well as from official in-processing records, that MOS arrived in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, which would make this scene the morning of August 4, 2002.

  * In-processing height and weight records indicate that thirty-five detainees arrived in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. The records of that group are available at http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/measurements/ISN_680-ISN_838.pdf. An official list of all Guantánamo detainees is available at http://www.defense.gov/news/may2006/d20060515%20list.pdf.

  * In this passage, MOS describes a five-hour flight, a change of airplanes, and then a much longer flight. A 2008 investigation by the British human rights organization Reprieve found that transfers of prisoners from Bagram to Guantánamo typically involved a stop at the U.S. air base in Incirlik, Turkey, and the Rendition Project has found that a C-17 military transport plane, flight number RCH233Y, flew from Incirlik to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, carrying thirty-five prisoners. See http://www.libertysecurity.org/IMG/pdf_08.01.28FINALPrisonersIllegallyRenderedtoGuantanamoBay.pdf; and http://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/pdf/PDF%20154%20[Flight%20data.%20Portuguese%20flight%20logs%20to%20GTMO,%20collected%20by%20Ana%20Gomes].pdf.

  * MOS may be referring here to his German-speaking interrogator in Afghanistan.

  * The FBI led MOS’s interrogations for his first several months in Guantánamo, waging a well-documented struggle to keep him out of the hands of military interrogators. “The FBI sought to interview Slahi immediately after he arrived at GTMO,” the DOJ Inspector General reported. “FBI and task force agents interviewed Slahi over the next few months, utilizing rapport building techniques.” At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS described an “FBI guy” who interrogated him shortly after his arrival and told him, “We don’t beat people, we don’t torture, it’s not allowed.” That would appear to be the lead interrogator in this scene—and perhaps also the “older gentleman” who appears in a subsequent session. DOJ IG, 122; ARB transcript, 23.

  * The March 3, 2003, Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures instructed that arriving prisoners be processed and held for four weeks in a maximum security isolation block “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process” and “to [foster] dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.” The document is available at http://www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/gitmo-sop.pdf (hereafter cited as SOP).

  * The number has already appeared unredacted, and the Department of Defense has officially acknowledged that MOS’s ISN is 760. See, e.g., the publicly released DOD detainees list available at http://www.defense.gov/news/may2006/d20060515%20list.pdf.

  † MOS may be referring here to Mohammed al-Amin (ISN 706), who was born in Mauritania but moved to Saudi Arabia for religious studies, and Ibrahim Fauzee (ISN 730), who is from the Maldives. Both arrived in GTMO with MOS on August 5, 2002; both have since been released. See http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/706-mohammad-lameen-sidi-mohammad; and http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/730-ibrahim-fauzee.

  * The word is likely “Reservation.” It appears unredacted elsewhere throughout the manuscript. See, e.g., MOS manuscript, 69, 112, 122.

  † Around this time, FBI-led interrogation teams often included members of the military’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) and military intelligence agents. The DOJ Inspector General’s report records that “in May 2002, the military and the FBI adopted the ‘Tiger Team’ concept for interrogating detainees. According to the first GTMO case agent, these teams consisted of an FBI agent, an analyst, a contract linguist, two CITF investigators, and a military intelligence interrogator.” The IG found that “the FBI withdrew from participation in the Tiger Teams in the fall of 2002 after disagreements arose between the FBI and military intelligence over interrogation tactics. Several FBI agents told the OIG that while they continued to have a good relationship with CITF, their relationship with the military intelligence entities greatly deteriorated over the course of time, primarily due to the FBI’s opposition to the military intelligence approach to interrogating detainees.” DOJ IG, 34.

  * As the DOJ IG report makes clear, the FBI maintained overall control of the interrogation of MOS throughout 2002 and early 2003. DOJ IG, 122.

  * Context here suggests that the same Camp Delta block where arriving detainees were held for the first month also served as a punishment block for detainees from the general population.

  * By “plain,” I think MOS may mean the Cuban landscape surrounding the camp. It appears from the manuscript that MOS was held in two or three different blocks in Camp Delta over the next several months, including one block that housed detainees from European and North African countries. MOS manuscript, 62. MOS indicated at his ARB hearing that he was being held in Camp Two’s Mike Block as of June 2003. ARB transcript, 26.

  * Because this occurred within the period during which the FBI had overall control of MOS’s interrogation, this would likely be another FBI-led interrogation team; see footnote here.

  * This interrogator might be from the CIA. In 2013, the Associated Press reported that between 2002 and 2005, CIA agents in GTMO sought to recruit detainees to serve as informants and double agents for the United States. The CIA also helped facilitate interrogations by foreign intelligence agents in Guantánamo. Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “Penny Lane, GITMO’s Other Secret CIA Facility,” Associated Press, November 26, 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/penny-lane-gitmos-other-secret-cia-facility.

  * Likely the “older gentleman” or one of his other FBI interrogators.

  † The quotations appear to be directed to two different detainees. The unredacted “Turkistan” in this passage suggests that MOS may be referring to the interrogations of ethnic Uighur detainees by Chinese
intelligence agents in GTMO. These interrogations, which were reportedly preceded by periods of sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation, were first revealed in the May 2008 DOJ Inspector General’s report, A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the interrogations took place over a day and a half in September 2002. See http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/16/72000/uighur-detainees-us-helped-chinese.html.

  * The visitors are likely German. In 2008, Der Spiegel reported that in September 2002, two members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and one member of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, interviewed MOS for ninety minutes in Guantánamo. MOS appears to refer to two of those visitors, one older and one younger. 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.