Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Slahi was arrested in November 2001 and held in Guantánamo (Cuba) in 2002, accused of being part of Al-Qaeda. He had traveled to Afghanistan in 1990 to support the mujahideen, when they were trying to overthrow the communist government of Mohammad Najibullah, with the support of the United States. He was trained in an Al-Qaeda camp, but says he broke ties with the organization after leaving the country. When in 2001 he surrendered to the Mauritanian authorities for questioning about the Millennium Plot, he was detained for seven days and interrogated by Mauritanian and FBI officials. Then the CIA moved him to Jordan, Afghanistan and, finally, to the detention camp at Guantánamo, where he was isolated and subjected to extreme temperatures, beatings, sexual humiliations and even documented execution drills. Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Couch refused to prosecute him in a military commission in 2003, arguing that all incriminating statements were obtained through torture, and Judge James Robertson granted a writ of habeas corpus in 2010. But the Justice Department appealed the decision, and the Court of Appeals of Washington DC He annulled the sentence. Despite having been exonerated by multiple courts and foreign governments, he remains in prison, although he has never been accused of any crime. His memoirs, written in prison in 2005, were declassified (though widely censored) by the US government in 2013. Since its publication in 2015, it has become an international bestseller.