Read Guantánamo Diary for Free Online

Senate Armed Services Committee describes “a fictitious letter that had been drafted by the Interrogation Team Chief stating that his mother had been detained, would be interrogated, and if she were uncooperative she might be transferred to GTMO. The letter pointed out that she would be the only female detained at ‘this previously all-male prison environment.’ ”
    The second was an October 17, 2003, e-mail exchange betweenone of Mohamedou’s interrogators and a U.S. military psychiatrist. In it, the committee found, the interrogator “stated that ‘Slahi told me he is “hearing voices” now.… He is worried as he knows this is not normal.… By the way… is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? Seems a little creepy.’ ” The psychologist responded, “Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than auditory, but you never know.… In the dark you create things out of what little you have.” 24
    In a 2009 interview, Lt. Col. Couch described the impact of these discoveries:
    Right in the middle of this time, when I had received this information from the NCIS agent—the documents, the State Department letterhead—and it was at the end of this, hearing all of this information, reading all this information, months and months and months of wrangling with the issue, that I was in church this Sunday, and we had a baptism. We got to the part of the liturgy where the congregation repeats—I’m paraphrasing here, but the essence is that we respect the dignity of every human being and seek peace and justice on earth. And when we spoke those words that morning, there were a lot of people in that church, but I could have been the only one there. I just felt this incredible, alright, there it is. You can’t come in here on Sunday, and as a Christian, subscribe to this belief of dignity of every human being and say I will seek justice and peace on the earth, and continue to go with the prosecution using that kind of evidence. And at that point I knew what I had to do. I had to get off the fence.
25
    Stuart Couch withdrew from Mohamedou’s case, refusing to proceed with any effort to try him before a military commission.
    No charge sheet has ever been drawn up against MohamedouOuld Slahi in Guantánamo, no military commission defense attorney was ever appointed to his case, and it appears there have been no further attempts to prepare a case for prosecution. The
Daily News
editorial decrying Judge Robertson’s habeas decision attributes this to “squeamishness” over using “evidence acquired under rough treatment,” but it is not at all clear that Mohamedou’s brutal Guantánamo interrogation yielded any evidence that he had a hand in any criminal or terrorist activities. At his 2005 ARB hearing, he told of manufacturing confessions under torture, but the interrogators themselves must have discounted what they knew to be induced confessions; what they passed along in their scrubbed intelligence reports consisted instead, Stuart Couch has said, of a kind of “Who’s Who of al Qaeda in Germany and all of Europe.” 26
    Just as his extreme treatment is often cited as an indicator of his guilt, so those intelligence reports have come to serve as a kind of after-the-fact proof that Mohamedou himself must be among the Who’s Who. And yet, Stuart Couch has suggested, Mohamedou’s knowledge seems to have been little better than his interrogators’. “I think, if my recollection is right, that most of them had already been known to the intelligence services when he was being questioned,” Couch noted in the 2012 interview, adding:
    I’ve got to be clear on something. When you read the intelligence reports given up by Slahi, he doesn’t implicate himself in anything. The only way he implicates himself is by his knowledge of these people. He never implicates himself in any of what I would consider to be an overt