Guantánamo Diary

by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

  * This behavior may be the basis for the nickname “I’m-Watching-You,” which appears unredacted later in this chapter.

  * In fact, it would be almost a year before MOS’s family learned where he was—and only because a brother in Germany saw an article in Der Spiegel in October 2002 that reported that MOS was in Guantánamo. See “From Germany to Guantanamo: The Career of Prisoner No. 760,” Der Spiegel, October 29, 2008.

  * See footnote here.

  * MOS arrived in Jordan on Thursday, November 29, so it would now be the evening of Saturday, December 1, 2001.

  * It appears that the interrogator addressed MOS as “Abdullah,” which means “servant of God.”

  * Context suggests that both the interrogator and his assistant appear to have Palestinian backgrounds.

  † MOS’s 2005 ARB testimony indicates that he had three interrogators during his secret detention in Amman; he profiles the three interrogators in more depth later in this chapter. This one appears to be the senior interrogator who only interrogates him once. ARB transcript, 21.

  * This again could be Ahmed Ressam, about whom MOS has by this time been repeatedly questioned. At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS testified, “Then they sent me to Jordan.… The Jordanians were investigating my part in the Millennium plot. They told me, they are especially concerned about the Millennium plot.” ARB transcript, 20.

  * The ICRC is the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has a mandate under the Geneva Conventions to visit prisoners of war, civilians interned during conflicts, and others detained in situations of violence around the world. An internationally acknowledged purpose of these visits is to ensure humane treatment and deter and prevent abuse.

  * In this section of the manuscript, which MOS heads “My Detainee Neighbors,” he is clearly profiling some of his fellow prisoners in Jordan. This redaction, which is preceded by the number 2, appears to introduce a second “neighbor,” and the next two redactions seem to introduce two more.

  * These might be the second and third of the Jordanian interrogators MOS mentioned at his 2005 ARB hearing and briefly profiles later in this chapter. ARB transcript, 21.

  * The name “Mehdi” appears unredacted twice in this passage. This is likely Karim Mehdi. Born in Morocco, Mehdi lived in Germany and appears, from Judge Robertson’s habeas opinion, to have traveled with MOS to Afghanistan in 1992. Mehdi was arrested in Paris in 2003 and sentenced to nine years in prison for plotting a bombing on Reunion Island. See https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-9-Slahi-Order.pdf; http://articles.latimes.com/print/2003/jun/07/world/fg-terror7; and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6088540.stm.

  * Preceded with a “2” in a passage subtitled “Interrogators,” this redaction likely introduces the second Jordanian interrogator.

  † Court documents indicate that MOS trained at the al-Farouq training camp near Khost, Afghanistan, for six months in late 1990 and early 1991. At the time, both the al-Farouq and Khalden camps were training al-Qaeda fighters for the conflict with the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. As the appellate court reviewing MOS’s habeas case wrote, “When Salahi took his oath of allegiance in March 1991, al-Qaida and the United States shared a common objective: they both sought to topple Afghanistan’s Communist government.” See http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2010-4-9-Slahi-Order.pdf; and http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-dc-circuit/1543844.html.

  * Nasser, Egypt’s second president, died in 1970. The redaction here seems especially absurd.

  † Numbered “3,” this redaction seems to introduce the third Jordanian interrogator, who appears to have been MOS’s primary interrogator in Jordan. At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS said that his main interrogator in Jordan was “young” and “a very bright guy.” He testified that this particular interrogator “struck me twice in the face on different occasions and pushed me against concrete many times because I refused to talk to him,” and “threatened me with a lot of torture and… took me to the one room where they torture and there was this guy who was beaten so much he was crying, crying like a child.” ARB transcript, 21.

  * Press reports document an assassination attempt like the one described here, aimed at General Ali Bourjaq, head of Jordan’s antiterrorism unit, on February 20, 2002, in Amman. See, e.g., http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/576/re72.htm.

  * At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS told the panel, “Then the FBI at GTMO Bay during the time era of General Miller, they released a list of the highest priority detainees here at GTMO. It was a list of 15 people and I was, guess which number, number ONE. Then they sent a special FBI team and the leader was [redacted] and I worked with him especially for my case.… I thought he was just making fun of me when he said I was number ONE in the camp, but he was not lying; he was telling the truth, as future events would prove. He stayed with me until May 22, 2003.” ARB transcript, 24.

  * People were indeed “working behind the scene.” Though the FBI was still leading MOS’s interrogation, the DOJ IG found that through the spring of 2003, “Military Intelligence personnel observed many of Slahi’s interviews by Poulson and Santiago from an observation booth,” and that MI agents were complaining about the FBI’s rapport-building approach. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that military interrogators started circulating a draft “Special Interrogation Plan” for MOS in January 2003. DOJ IG, 298; SASC, 135.

  * This may be the agent the DOJ’s Inspector General calls Santiago. The IG reported that MOS “identified Santiago as a ‘nice guy,’ ” and recorded that MOS reported to investigators that “Santiago told Slahi he would be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan if the charges against him were proved.” DOJ IG, 296.

  † The passage likely refers to Ramzi bin al-Shibh. MOS explained at his ARB hearing, and indicates elsewhere in the manuscript as well, that he learned about bin al-Shibh’s treatment in CIA black sites from detainees who were captured alongside bin al-Shibh and held with him in secret sites before being transferred to Guantánamo. MOS told the ARB panel that “a Yemeni guy who was captured with Ramiz [sic]” told him, “Ramiz was tortured. We would hear his cries every night, we would hear his moans every night.” ARB transcript, 25; see also MOS manuscript, 83, 294.

  * This appears to refer to a story CNN aired on March 6, 2002, the transcript of which is titled “Al Qaeda Online for Terrorism.” As MOS indicates here, the story suggested that he was “running a seemingly innocuous website” where al-Qaeda was secretly exchanging messages through the website’s guestbook. The allegation that MOS ran a website that facilitated al-Qaeda communications does not appear in any of the summaries of evidence against MOS from Guantánamo. See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0203/06/lt.15.html.

  * “Mauritania” appears unredacted a few sentences later; the agent is apparently one of the FBI agents who questioned MOS in Nouakchott in February 2000.

  * Possibly Ramzi bin al-Shibh; see footnote here.

  * It appears that this interrogator has been, or claims to have been, questioning Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the CIA black sites. At his ARB hearing, naming bin al-Shibh, MOS described what could be the same exchange with an interrogator this way: “Okay, then his interrogator [redacted] from the FBI asked him to speculate who I was as a person. He said I think he is an operative of Usama bin Laden and without him I would have never been involved in September 11th. That was a big accusation. The interrogator could have lied because they lie all the time, but that is what they said.” ARB transcript, 23–24.

  * A 1956 CIA study titled “Communist Control Techniques: An Analysis of the Methods Used by Communist State Police in the Arrest, Interrogation, and Indoctrination of Persons Regarded as ‘Enemies of the State’ ” had this to say about the effects of sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation as coercive interrogation methods: “The officer in charge has other simple and highly effective ways of applying pressure. Two of the most effective of these are fatigue and lack of sleep. The constant light in the cell and the necessity of maintaining a rigid position in bed compound th
e effects of anxiety and nightmares in producing sleep disturbances. If these are not enough, it is easy to have the guards awaken the prisoners at intervals. This is especially effective if the prisoner is always awakened as soon as he drops off to sleep. The guards can also shorten the hours available for sleep, or deny sleep altogether. Continued loss of sleep produces clouding of consciousness and a loss of alertness, both of which impair the victim’s ability to sustain isolation. It also produces profound fatigue.

  “Another simple and effective type of pressure is that of maintaining the temperature of the cell at a level which is either too hot or too cold for comfort. Continuous heat, at a level at which constant sweating is necessary in order to maintain body temperature, is enervating and fatigue producing. Sustained cold is uncomfortable and poorly tolerated.…

  “The Communists do not look upon these methods as ‘torture.’ Undoubtedly, they use the methods which they do in order to conform, in a typical legalistic manner to overt Communist principles which demand that ‘no force or torture be used in extracting information from prisoners.’ But these methods do, of course, constitute torture and physical coercion. All of them lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes.”

  Sleep deprivation has been used specifically in the service of conditioning prisoners to make false confessions. A study by the U.S. Air Force sociologist Albert Biderman of the means by which North Korean interrogators were able to coerce captured U.S. airmen into falsely confessing to war crimes found that sleep deprivation, as a form of induced debilitation, “weakens mental and physical ability to resist.” See http://www.theblackvault.com/documents/mindcontrol/comcont.pdf; and http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/documents/19570900.pdf.

  * These might be agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The Toronto Star has reported that CSIS agents interviewed detainees with ties to Canada in Guantánamo, including MOS, in February 2003. See Michelle Shephard, “CSIS Grilled Trio in Guantánamo,” http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2008/07/27/csis_grilled_trio_in_cuba.html.

  * The teenager is very likely Omar Khadr. In 2010 the Supreme Court of Canada found that Khadr’s interrogations by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) agents in Guantánamo in February and September 2003 and March 2004 violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Supreme Court held, “The deprivation of [Khadr]’s right to liberty and security of the person is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.” The Supreme Court’s opinion is available at http://scc-csc.lexum.com/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/7842/index.do.

  * MOS told the Administrative Review Board that his last interview with FBI interrogators took place on May 22, 2003; the DOJ IG report confirms that “in late May 2003 the FBI agents who were involved with Slahi left GTMO, and the military assumed control over Slahi’s interrogation.” ARB transcript, 25; DOJ IG, 122.

  A few days after the military took over MOS’s interrogation, an FBI agent circulated a report documenting FBI concerns about the military’s interrogation methods in Guantánamo. According to the DOJ IG report, a month later, on July 1, 2003, the FBI’s assistant general counsel, Spike Bowman, sent an e-mail to senior FBI officials, “alerting them that the military had been using techniques of ‘aggressive interrogation,’ including ‘physically striking the detainees, stripping them and pouring cold water on them and leaving them exposed (one got hypothermia) and similar measures.’ Bowman opined that: ‘Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don’t know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these Enemy Prisoners of War (EPW). That they are not so designated cannot be license to do something that you cannot do to an EPW or criminal prisoner.’ Bowman expressed concern that the FBI would be ‘tarred by the same brush’ and sought input on whether the FBI should refer the matter to the DOD Inspector General, stating that ‘[w]ere I still on active duty, there is no question in my mind that it would be a duty to do so.’ ” ARB transcript, 25; DOJ IG, 122, 121.

  * MOS described this new DOD team at his ARB hearing, saying it was led by “a female interrogator” who was “a very beautiful lady and decent lady” whom he identified, apparently mistakenly, as an FBI agent. In fact, she may merely have been posing as an FBI agent. The DOJ Inspector General found that “the person who identified herself as ‘Samantha’ was actually an Army Sergeant.” According to the IG, “On several occasions in early June 2003 an Army Sergeant on the DIA Special Projects Team at GTMO identified herself to Slahi as FBI SSA ‘Samantha Martin’ in an effort to persuade Slahi to cooperate with interrogators.” At his ARB hearing, MOS said the team included “another weird guy, I think he was CIA or something but he was very young.” ARB transcript, 25; DOJ IG, 296, 125.

  * At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS described a member of the military interrogation team who was as an army first sergeant, and said, “I don’t hate him but he was a very hateful guy.” MOS appears to have given the ARB panel this interrogator’s real name. I believe this may be the same interrogator he refers to as “I-AM-THE-MAN” in this scene and also by the nickname Mr. Tough Guy, which appears unredacted here. In all there appear to be four interrogators who play major roles in MOS’s Special Projects Team. ARB transcript, 25.

  † We do not know whom MOS specifically names here. It is a matter of record, however, that military interrogators in Guantánamo were under the command of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), which was led at this time by General Geoffrey Miller. Their interrogation methods were sanctioned first by the “Counter Resistance Techniques” memorandum that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed on December 22, 2002; then by a March 13, 2003, legal opinion written by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel; and finally by another authorization memo that Rumsfeld signed on April 16, 2003. The Senate Armed Services Committee found that General Miller sought official Pentagon approval for, and Rumsfeld personally signed off on, MOS’s “Special Interrogation Plan.” SASC, 135–38.

  * The Schmidt-Furlow report, the DOJ IG report, the Senate Armed Services Committee report, and several other sources all document the sexual humiliation and sexual assault of Guantánamo prisoners, often carried out by female military interrogators. After the release of the Schmidt-Furlow report in 2005, a New York Times op-ed titled “The Women of GTMO” decried the “exploitation and debasement of women in the military,” noting that the report “contained page after page of appalling descriptions of the use of women soldiers as sexual foils in interrogations.” See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15fri1.html.

  * It is now likely around mid-June 2003. MOS told the Administrative Review Board, “Around June 18th, 2003, I was taken from Mike Block and put in India Block for total isolation.” Former detainees who were held for a time in India Block describe windowless solitary confinement cells that were often kept at frigid temperatures. See, e.g., James Meek, “People the Law Forgot,” Guardian, December 2, 2003. The second detainee being held in India Block when MOS arrives seems to be identified in the next paragraph as Yemeni. ARB transcript, 26; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/03/guantanamo.usa1.

  * An October 9, 2003 JTF-GTMO Memorandum for the Record recounts a contentious meeting between a visiting delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Guantánamo commander General Geoffrey Miller. During the meeting, General Miller “informed [ICRC team leader Vincent] Cassard that ISN 760, 558, and 990 were off limits during this visit due to military necessity.” MOS is ISN 760. The minutes of the ICRC meeting are available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/Gitmo
Memo10-09-03.pdf.

  † It seems likely from the context here that the interrogator is referring to Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

  * MOS seems to be contrasting the approaches of two of his interrogators, possibly the female interrogator identified in government documents by the name of Samantha and the interrogator he called “I-AM-THE-MAN.”