Guantánamo Diary Read Online Free PDF

interrogated for months in a Jordanian prison?
    In any case, there is no indication that when a U.S. military C-17 carrying Mohamedou and thirty-four other prisoners landed in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, the thirty-one-year-old Mauritanian was an especially high-value detainee. He would have stood out if so: an article published two weeks later in the
Los Angeles Times
titled “No Leaders of al Qaeda Found at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” quoted government sources who said that there were “no big fish” in custody there, and the island’s nearly six hundred detainees were not “high enough in the command and control structure to help counter-terrorismexperts unravel al Qaeda’s tightknit cell and security system.” 18 A top secret CIA audit of the facility around the same time reportedly echoed those conclusions. When journalists visited the camp that August, the commander of Guantánamo’s detention operations told them his own uniformed officers were questioning the continuing designation of detainees as “enemy combatants” as opposed to prisoners of war entitled to Geneva convention protections. The Pentagon’s solution was to replace that commander and ratchet up the camp’s intelligence operations.
    Almost immediately a schism opened between military interrogators and the FBI and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents who had generally been leading prisoner interviews in Guantánamo. In September and October, over the fierce objections of the FBI and CITF agents, the military set up its first “Special Projects Team” and developed a written plan for the interrogation of the Saudi prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani. That plan incorporated some of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA had been employing for several months in its own secret prison. Under the plan, which was implemented in fits and starts through the fall and finally, with the signed authorization of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, in a harrowing fifty-day barrage starting in November, military interrogators subjected Qahtani to a round-the-clock regime of extreme sleep deprivation, loud music and white noise, frigid temperatures, stress positions, threats, and a variety of physical and sexual humiliations.
    It was during this time, as the struggle over interrogation methods was playing out in the camp, that a link surfaced between Mohamedou Ould Slahi and the 9/11 hijackers. “September 11, 2002, America arrested a man by the name of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who is said to be the key guy in the September 11th attacks,” Mohamedou recounted at his 2005 ARB hearing.
    It is exactly one year after September 11, and since his capture my life has changed drastically. The guy identified me as the guy that he saw in October 1999, which is correct, he was in my house. He said that I advised him to go to Afghanistan to train. Okay, then his interrogator
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from the FBI asked him to speculate who I was as a person. He said I think he is an operative of Usama Bin Laden and without him I would never have been involved in September 11th.
19
    Bin al-Shibh had been the target of an international manhunt since 9/11 for his alleged role in coordinating the “Hamburg cell” of hijackers. He was transferred to CIA custody immediately after his capture in a shoot-out in a suburb of Karachi and was held first in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan and then, through the fall, in a prison near Rabat, Morocco. During interrogations in one of those facilities, bin al-Shibh told of a chance meeting with a stranger on a train in Germany, where he and two friends talked of jihad and their desire to travel to Chechnya to join the fight against the Russians. The stranger suggested they contact Mohamedou in Duisburg, and when they did, Mohamedou put them up for a night. “When they arrived,” the 9/11 Commission recorded in a description drawn from intelligence reports from those interrogations, “Slahi explained that it was