If there is anyone who thinks that the United States of America is a democracy that promotes and protects individual rights, freedoms, and the rule of law, at home and abroad, this difficult book will thoroughly shatter their delusions. Although Slahi wrote this memoir in 2005, it covers a period in his life well before that and remained unavailable as a classified secret document until his pro bono ACLU lawyers succeeded in getting an extensively redacted version made available with a Freedom of Information suit in 2012. And the Mauritanian devout Muslim writer remained in custody in Guantanamo until 2016, after the book was published. During much of his 14 year incarceration and torture, he was never given a chance for a legal defence, and he has never been charged with any criminal offence. Nevertheless he was considered to be the most valuable inmate in Guantanamo by the U.S. military brass, with accusatory media stories on CNN about his involvement in the Millennium Plot hatched in Canada to blow up LAX, and a recruiter and planner for the 9/11 attacks.
A lot of background information, ably supplied by Larry Seims in an introduction, notes and footnotes is necessary to understand this diary. In 2010, a U.S. judge ruled in Slahi’s favour in his habeas corpus application, but the generals simply and illegally ignored this ruling, retaining him for a further six years. Rather than decry the military thumbing their noses at the rule of law, the U. S. media castigated the judge’s ruling, having found him guilty in the court of public opinion, most notably in The New York Post. And CNN falsely stated as fact that he ran a website that was used to mastermind the 9/11 attacks.
Slahi is a Mauritanian native who travelled extensively for work, as a qualified electrical engineer. During the Afghani war to overthrow the communist insurgent government there, he joined Al Qaeda mujahideen fighters against the Soviets, his only real connection with a terrorist organization, one that then had the backing of the U.S. He spent 12 years working in Germany, and was interrogated extensively in Senegal and Mauritania in early 2000, at the insistence of the CIA, apparently for no reason other than having attended mosques in Montreal and Mauritania where radical Islamists were also seen. When he voluntarily showed up for further interrogation by Mauritanian police in November of that year, he was detained and turned over to the CIA, flown to a secret prison in Jordan for eight months of torture, then on to Bagram AirForce base in Iraq, and eventually to Guantanamo. The treatment he details along the way could not be dreamed up by any but the most sadistic inhuman people imaginable, but was approved by the Pentagon and Donald Rumsfeld. He was hidden from the visitors of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Camp Echo in Guantanamo lest the outside world see his extreme malnutrition and many bruises from beatings.
Besides being illegal and inhumane, the torture was remarkably ineffective. There was constant infighting between the military, the CIA and the FBI. The FBI shared computer files on him with the Jordanians, but not with U.S. military intelligence nor the CIA. The redactions in the published book are inconsistent and silly, with, for example, the gender of the interrogators being blacked out only if they were obviously female.
The confessions eventually extracted from Slahi included clear falsehoods. In Jordan, to avoid being sent to Guantanamo, he thought of lying about a plot to kill Mauritania’s dictator president, hoping to be sent back to Mauritania rather than being handed over to the U.S. military. After starting to hallucinate from the tortures in Guantanamo including weeks of sleep deprivation, and with prompting, he agreed with the interrogators that he had plotted to blow up the CN Tower. The interrogators were thrilled that they had finally broken him to confess to a crime, but as Slahi relates “you cannot just admit to something you haven’t done; you have to deliver the details, which you can’t when you haven’t done anything.” He later admits that he had never heard of the CN tower.
Canada does not escape criticism with respect to human rights violations in this memoir, although its role is minor; but just as with Omar Khadr, Canadian prosecutors were involved in Slahi’s case, interrogated him in Guantanamo, and probably in Jordan without revealing their identity and were complicit, if not directly involved in his torture.
I am not suggesting that preventing terrorist attacks is easy, or that some degree of subterfuge, deception, and coercion is not necessary in the interrogation of suspects. But when the people charged with protecting our freedoms become the terrorists, kidnapping and torturing their opponents on presumptions of guilt, we all lose.
My favourite quote: “ The (U.S.) government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy.”
This is neither an easy nor a fun read, but is sobering, even frightening, and a reminder to all of how fragile and in need of support democracy really is. And it was written before Donald Trump’s cynical attacks on the remaining fragments of democracy. A valuable resource book for any course in Political Science, if that term is not an oxymoron.
P.S. The injustices that this man has suffered continue. Recently, he has been denied a exit visa from Mauritania to obtain medical treatment abroad- for the injuries he suffered during his 14 years of torture.
The Passionate Reader 