Guantánamo Diary Read Online Free PDF Page B

difficult to get to Chechnya at the time because many travelers were being detained in Georgia. He recommended they go through Afghanistan instead, where they could train for jihad before traveling to Chechnya.” 20
    Bin al-Shibh did not assert that Mohamedou sent him to Afghanistan to join a plot against the United States. Lt. Col. Couch, who saw the bin al-Shibh intelligence report, recalled in the 2012 interview, “I never saw any mention that it was to attack America. I never saw the fact that Ramzi Bin al-Shibhhad said, ‘We told him what we wanted to do, and he said, “This is where you need to go train.” ’ It was sort of, ‘This is where you can get training.’ ” 21 During Mohamedou’s habeas proceedings, the U.S. government did not argue that he had persuaded the men to join bin Laden’s plot; rather, the government alleged that in suggesting that the men seek training in Afghanistan—something Mohamedou had learned was necessary to join an earlier fight involving Russians—he was serving in general as an al-Qaeda recruiter. Judge Robertson disagreed, finding that the record showed only that “Salahi provided lodging for three men for one night in Germany, that one of these was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and that there was discussion of jihad and Afghanistan.” 22
    Stuart Couch received bin al-Shibh’s intelligence reports when he was assigned Mohamedou’s case in the fall of 2003. The reports, and the assignment itself, had particular significance for the former Marine pilot: his close friend Michael Horrocks, a fellow refueling tanker pilot in the Marines, was the copilot on the United Airlines flight that the 9/11 hijackers used to bring down the World Trade Center’s South Tower. That event had drawn Stuart Couch back to active service. He joined the Guantánamo military commission’s team of prosecutors with a purpose, hoping, as he explained in a 2007
Wall Street Journal
profile, “to get a crack at the guys who attacked the United States.” 23
    Soon he was looking at batches of intelligence reports from another source, Mohamedou himself, the fruit of what military interrogators were already touting as their most successful Guantánamo interrogation. Those reports contained no information about the circumstances of that interrogation, but Lt. Col. Couch had his suspicions. He had been told that Mohamedou was on “Special Projects.” He had caught a glimpse, onhis first visit to the base, of another prisoner shackled to the floor in an empty interrogation booth, rocking back and forth as a strobe light flashed and heavy metal blared. He had seen this kind of thing before: as a Marine pilot, he had endured a week of such techniques in a program that prepares U.S. airmen for the experience of capture and torture.
    Those suspicions were confirmed when the lieutenant colonel’s investigator, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent, gained access to military interrogators’ files. Those files included the Special Projects Team’s daily memoranda for the record, the interrogators’ detailed accounts not only of what was said in each session but also of how the information was extracted.
    Those records remain classified, but they are summarized in the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008
Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody
and the Justice Department’s own 2008 review of interrogations in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Those reports document a “special interrogation” that followed a second painstaking, Rumsfeld-approved plan and unfolded almost exactly as Mohamedou describes it in his
Guantánamo Diary
. Among the specific documents described in those reports are two that, when Stuart Couch uncovered them in early 2004, convinced him that Mohamedou had been tortured.
    The first was a fake State Department letter Mohamedou had been presented in August 2003, which was clearly meant to exploit his close relationship with his mother. In its report, the