GUANTÁNAMO DIARY
Mohamedou Ould Slahi (editor: Larry Siems)
Little, Brown & Company;
379 pages; $29
On or about September 11, 2001, American character changed. What Americans had proudly flaunted as "our highest values" were now judged to be luxuries that in a new time of peril the country could ill afford. Justice, and its cardinal principle of innocent until proven guilty, became a risk, its indulgence a weakness. Asked recently about an innocent man who had been tortured to death in an American "black site" in Afghanistan, former vice-president Dick Cheney did not hesitate. "I'm more concerned," he said, "with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent." In this new era in which all would be sacrificed to protect the country, torture and even murder of the innocent must be counted simply "collateral damage".
Guantánamo Diary is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be that collateral damage. One fall day 13 years ago Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist, received a visit at his house in Noakchott, Mauritania, from two officers summoning him to come answer questions at the country's intelligence ministry. "Take your car," one of the men told him, as Mr Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and his aunt. "We hope you can come back today." Listening to these words, Mr Slahi's mother fixed her eyes on her son. "It is the taste of helplessness," he writes, "when you see your beloved fading away like a dream and you cannot help him ... I would watch both my mom and my aunt praying in my rearview mirror until we took the first turn and I saw my beloved ones disappear."
That was November 20, 2001. Mr Slahi's mother has since died. Her son has never returned. He had begun, that fall day two months after 9/11, what he calls his "endless world tour", courtesy of the various American national security bureaucracies, travelling, after a week of interrogation in Mauritania, via "extraordinary rendition" to a black site in Jordan, where he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, for eight months; thence he is flown, blindfolded, shackled and diapered, to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, for two weeks of interrogation; and finally, to Guantánamo, where he suffered months of strictest isolation, weeks of sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and sound, and other elaborate tortures set out in a "special plan" approved personally by then secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld - and where he remains to this day. He composed these memoirs in his isolation cell in the summer of 2005, and a six-year legal battle has finally brought them to us. Written in the colloquial if limited English he picked up during his captivity, its pages disfigured with thousands of pitch-black "redactions" courtesy of the American intelligence agents who play such major parts, the work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humour that the Dostoyevsky of The House of the Dead would have recognised and embraced.
At its root is a maddening ambiguity born of a system governed not by any recognisable rules of evidence or due process but by suspicion, paranoia and violence. Blindfolded, earmuffed and shackled, Mr Slahi is rendered to a secret prison in Jordan (though he is supposed to have no idea where on the globe he is) and interviewed on arrival by two dim clerks straight out of a Beckett play:
" 'What have you done?'
" 'I've done nothing!'
"Both burst out in laughter. 'Oh, very convenient! You have done nothing, but you are here!' I thought, What crime should I say in order to satisfy them?"
What crime indeed? If guilt is assumed, how to prove innocence? And as with Kafka's Joseph K, the third great literary spirit looming over these pages, the signs of Mr Slahi's guilt are everywhere: he fought in Afghanistan in the early 1990s with Al Qaeda (then indirectly supported by the United States); his distant cousin and sometime brother-in-law became a key Osama bin Laden spiritual advisor; he had studied in Germany, like the 9/11 conspirators; had prayed at the same Montreal mosque as the "millennium" plotter; had known the 9/11 planner Ramzi bin al-Shibh. These signs and others meant he fit the profile, Mr Slahi says, of "a high-level, smart-beyond-belief terrorist". That will be the American interrogators' premise, and nothing the Mauritanians and Jordanians will tell them, let alone what Mr Slahi will say in the months of increasingly brutal interrogation, can alter their view. Mr Slahi's memoirs are filled with numbingly absurd exchanges that could have been lifted whole cloth from The Trial.
Mr Slahi's guilt remains certain, unquestioned and unquestionable, even as the claims of what precisely he did change. The Americans begin with the certainty that their prisoner had been the mastermind of the "millennium plot", the 1999 attempt by Ahmed Ressam to smuggle explosives over the Canadian border to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport. When the interrogators are ready to bow at last to evidence long since extracted by Mauritanian, Jordanian and Canadian interrogators that Mr Ressam had left Montreal before Mr Slahi arrived there, they grasp at a new theory, thanks to a confession extracted from Ramzi bin al-Shibh: Mr Slahi had been the main "recruiter" for the "Big Wedding" itself - the 9/11 plot.
Mr Bin al-Shibh, as we know from the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report, was even then enduring brutal torture in a black site in Morocco.
The vast and brutal American interrogation mechanism, stretching around the globe in an archipelago of black sites housing hundreds of detainees at the mercy of untold numbers of interrogators, transformed itself into an intricate machine for generating self-reinforcing fiction. When the suffering of the untried and unconvicted becomes nothing more than collateral damage, America has crossed a gulf. The steps that took us there were largely secret, but thanks to this and other accounts we know about them now: we know where we came from, and we know where we are. We do not yet know how to get back.
©The New York Times News Service 2015
