January
20, 2015
Last week,
several Republican senators, including John McCain, called on President Obama
to stop releasing detainees from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Their
argument was that after the terror attacks in Paris, the 122 prisoners still in
Guantánamo should be made to stay right where they are, where they can do the
West no harm.
On Tuesday,
one of those detainees, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was sent to Guantánamo in
2002 and remains there to this day, is poised to offer a powerful rejoinder.
Three years into his detention -- years during which he was isolated, tortured,
beaten, sexually abused and humiliated -- Slahi wrote a 466-page, 122,000-word
account of what had happened to him up to that point.
His manuscript
was immediately classified, and it took years of litigation and negotiation by
Slahi's pro bono lawyers to force the military to declassify a redacted version.
Even with the redactions, ''Guantánamo Diary'' is an extraordinary document --
''A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka,'' as John le Carré aptly
describes it in a back cover blurb -- that every American should read.
A native of
Mauritania, Slahi, 44, is fluent in several languages -- he learned English
while in Guantánamo -- and lived in Canada and Germany as well as the Muslim
world. He came under suspicion because an Al Qaeda member, who had been based
in Montreal -- where Slahi had also lived -- was arrested and charged with
plotting to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport in 1999. Slahi was
questioned about this plot several times, but he was always released. After
9/11, Slahi was detained again for questioning. That time, he was turned over
to the American authorities, in whose captivity he has been ever since.
What was he
accused of? Slahi asked this question of his captors often and was never given
a straight answer. This, of course, is part of the problem with Guantánamo, a
prison where being formally charged with a crime is a luxury, not a
requirement. His efforts to tell the truth -- that he had no involvement in any
acts of terrorism -- only angered his interrogators. ''Looks like a dog, walks
like a dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog, must be a dog,'' one
interrogator used to say. That was the best his captors could do to explain why
he was there. Yet the military was so sure he was a key Al Qaeda player that he
was subjected to ''special interrogation'' techniques that had been signed off
by the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, himself.
''Special
interrogation techniques,'' of course, is a euphemism for torture. The sections
of the book that describe his torture make for harrowing reading. Slahi was so
sleep-deprived that he eventually started to hallucinate. Chained to the
ground, he was forced to ''stand'' in positions that were extremely painful.
Interrogators went at him in shifts -- 24 hours a day. Sometimes during
interrogations, female interrogators rubbed their breasts over his body and
fondled him.
It is hard to
read about his torture without feeling a sense of shame.
Does Slahi
crack? Of course: to get the torture to stop, he finally lied, telling his
interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear, just as torture victims have
done since the Inquisition. ''Torture doesn't guarantee that the detainee
cooperates,'' writes Slahi. ''In order to stop torture, the detainee has to
please his assailant, even with untruthful, and sometime misleading
[intelligence].'' McCain, who was tortured in Vietnam, knows this; last month,
he made a powerful speech in which he condemned America's use of torture,
saying, ''the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our
enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human
rights.'' That is also why it is so disheartening that McCain has allied
himself with those who want to keep Guantánamo open.
In 2010, a
federal district judge ruled in favor of Slahi's habeas corpus petition because
the evidence against him was so thin. The government appealed, and the order
remains in limbo.
I asked Nancy
Hollander, one of Slahi's lawyers, to describe her client. ''He is funny,
smart, compassionate and thoughtful,'' she said. All of these qualities come
through in his memoir, which is surprisingly without rancor. ''I have only
written what I experienced, what I saw, and what I learned firsthand,'' he
writes toward the end of his book. ''I have tried not to exaggerate, nor to
understate. I have tried to be as fair as possible, to the U.S. government, to
my brothers, and to myself.'' One of the wonders of the book is that he does
come across as fair to all, even his torturers.
But the quote
that sticks with me most is something that one of his guards told him,
something that could stand as a fitting epitaph for Guantánamo itself: ''I know
I can go to hell for what I did to you.''
