Newsmaker: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The Guantanamo Bay prisoner has spent the past 13 years held without trial or charge, but a diary of his ordeal, published this week, sheds light on the world’s most infamous jail.

Kagan McLeod for The National

The story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi should have been an uplifting tale of a poor but exceptionally bright boy from Mauritania, Africa, who overcame his humble beginnings to forge a better life for himself and his family.

Instead, it’s the story of a man who has spent the past 13 years in captivity at ­Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of involvement in the Millennium Plot to bomb Los Angeles airport and five other targets in 2000.

Slahi, 44, has never been tried, let alone faced any charge, yet he remains alone in a cell, despite an American court declaring his detention illegal and ordering his release in 2010.

In summer 2005, in that same cell, Slahi hand-wrote a 122,000-word account of his ordeal. After years of legal wrangling and more than 2,500 redactions by the American government, that account was published this week.

Guantanamo Diary offers a chilling insight into the methods used by the US and its allies.

Between 2003 and 2004, Slahi endured a year of “special interrogation”, which amounted to “extreme isolation, a litany of physical, psychological and sexual humiliations, death threats, threats to … family and a mock kidnapping and rendition”.

At one point, he says, he was forbidden from performing ritual prayers for a year; during Ramadan 2003, he was force-fed and prevented from fasting.

His worst moment came when he was bundled, blindfolded, into a boat at Guantanamo and taken for a three-hour ride which he was convinced would end in his death. US, Egyptian and Jordanian interrogators, he says, filled his clothes with ice cubes and struck him repeatedly about the head and body.

“There is nothing more terrorising than making somebody expect a smash every single heartbeat,” he later wrote.

The word “fear” appears 30 times in the book, but there’s no mention of “despair”. The book also tells the extraordinary, moving story of a man who, despite all he has endured, has managed to retain not only his sanity and hope but also his sense of humour – perfecting English and absorbing US popular culture from his guards in the process.

In November 2006, when one of the pro-bono lawyers he had finally been granted asked him to relate everything he had told his interrogators, he replied: “How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been lasting the last seven years?”

That, he said, was “like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated”.

Slahi’s life, and his ordeal, might have passed unnoticed but for the determination of his American legal team, which fought for six years to have his account published, and the efforts of his co-author, Larry Siems.

Thanks to Siems, a writer and human-rights activist who helped to shepherd the book into print, the world may now know Slahi’s extraordinary life story.

He was born in a small town in Mauritania in December 1970, the ninth of 12 children. His father was a nomadic camel trader who died not long after Slahi had finished primary school.

It was not a propitious start, but his father left him two valuable gifts. The first was a devotion to Islam – Slahi memorised the Quran before he was a teenager.

In 2006, after five years of captivity and torture, he told one of his lawyers: “I don’t care how long I stay in jail. My belief comforts me.”

His father’s second gift was a determination that his son should make the most of his obvious natural abilities. At high school, Slahi excelled at maths, a talent that would prove to be his passport to the wider world.

Like most of his contemporaries, he had a passion for football, and a particular fascination with the German national team. According to an article published in Der Spiegel in 2008, it was this that led him to apply for a scholarship to study at Duisburg university in western Germany.

In the summer of 1988, he boarded a flight for Germany, and became “the first family member to attend a university – abroad, no less – and the first to travel on an airplane”.

But then Slahi made a fateful decision that would derail his life.

While studying for a degree in electrical engineering, Siems records, “he interrupted his studies to participate in a cause that was drawing young men from around the world”.

In 1990, Slahi travelled to Afghanistan to join the insurgency against the communists, training for six months in the eastern city of Khost and swearing allegiance to Al Qaeda.

Back then, there were no restrictions or prohibitions on such activities. As the court reviewing his petition for habeas corpus noted in 2010, when he took his oath in March 1991, Al Qaeda and the US “shared a common objective … to topple Afghanistan’s communist government”.

When the communists fell, Slahi says he quickly became disillusioned by the internal power struggles between the mujaheddin, and “because I didn’t want to fight against other Muslims”, he returned to Germany.

And that, as he told his Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing at Guantanamo in December 2004, was that. By the mid-1990s Al Qaeda had turned its sights on America, “but I personally had nothing to do with that”.

Completing his degree, throughout the 1990s, Slahi and his wife, who joined him from Mauritania, lived and worked in Duisburg. During that time, Siems notes, “he remained friends or kept in touch with companions from the Afghanistan adventure, some of whom maintained Al Qaeda ties”. In the post-9/11 world of telecoms monitoring, it would prove his undoing.

Unable to obtain long-term residency in Germany, Slahi applied to emigrate to Canada and, in November 1999, moved to Montreal. Just a month later, an Al Qaeda operative was arrested as he drove a car laden with explosives into the US, bound for Los Angeles airport.

Slahi insists he didn’t know the man, but he was picked up and interrogated by the Canadian police.

Shortly afterwards, abandoning hope of finding a job in Canada, he boarded a plane home to Mauritania. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, his departure in January 2000, so soon after the thwarted Millennium Plot, raised red flags.

As an interrogator in Guantanamo later told him, he ticked all the boxes on the terrorist checklist: “You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline.”

On his way home, at the request of the US, Slahi was twice detained, first in Senegal and then again in Mauritania, and questioned by FBI agents, before being released.

He found a job as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, but remained free only for the next 19 months.

In September 2001, he was again picked up by Mauritanian police and questioned by the FBI. Again, he was freed. But two months later, in November 2001, he was detained again, and this time there would be no going home. Instead, he was subjected to extraordinary rendition.

The CIA flew him to Jordan, which had been the intended target of four of the foiled Millennium Plot attacks. In Amman, he was interrogated for seven-and-a-half months, before being handed back to the CIA.

On July 19, 2002, he was “stripped, blindfolded, diapered, shackled” and flown from Amman to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he was interrogated for two weeks.

Then, on August 4, Slahi and 34 other detainees were flown to Guantanamo. Despite a US court granting his petition for habeas corpus in March 2010, he remains there to this day, along with 127 others.

It was February 2004, 815 days since he had been taken, when Slahi was allowed his first letter from his mother, which she had sent in July the previous year. She has since died, without seeing her son again, and the book is partly dedicated to her.

Guantanamo Diary ends with a brief author's note, written by Siems, which speaks volumes about Slahi's character – and, perhaps, about the capacity of human nature for generosity.

In a recent conversation with his lawyers, Slahi said that “he holds no grudge against any of the people he mentions in this book … and that he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after having learnt so much from each other.”

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