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F
rom a tent in west Africa,
Mohamedou Ould Slahi is
sharing his screen to show the
movies he has watched recently
on YouTube. They are all Polish
and he doesn’t understand a
word. “This is what the guards
used to put on in Guantanamo,”
he explains. “Polish and
Romanian films we couldn’t
understand. I guess I’m trying to recreate
my cell, as that’s where I felt comfortable.”
“Crazy, huh?” he shrugs. “Human beings
are very complicated.”
Comfortable is the last word anyone
would use about the 6ft by 8ft box where he
was kept in one of those orange jumpsuits,
shackled 24 hours a day, often in freezing
temperatures, rap music pounding to stop
him sleeping. Subjected to beating,
waterboarding and sexual abuse, he has
been described as Guantanamo’s most
tortured prisoner.
Slahi spent 14 years and two months as
Prisoner 760 in America’s most notorious
detention centre — yet he was never charged
with a crime. Almost seven years of that
was after a court ordered that he should be
released. When finally told in October 2016
that he was going home, it was, he says,
“as if someone had told me I would be
going to Mars or Jupiter”.
He was given no apology, no
compensation; a medical officer simply
said, “760, I declare you fit to fly,” and he
was marched blindfolded and earmuffed on
to a military plane, just as he had been when
first taken there.
In some ways the torture continues.
“Sometimes I wake up and cannot breathe,”
he says. “I think I’m in Guantanamo Bay
and it takes me a long time to realise I’m not.
Sometimes I don’t want to talk to people.
I close my door and go away.” Sexual abuse
from female guards has left him hating to
be touched. “I feel physical pain,” he says.
To my surprise he is now married to an
American. Hadn’t his experience turned
him against the US? “That would be very
childish,” he chides me. “If the American
government is bad, it doesn’t make
American people bad. Tarring people with
the same brush is what led to all this.”
The pandemic renders it impossible for
me to travel to Slahi’s home in Nouakchott,
the capital of Mauritania; so he is on Zoom,
peering at me through fluorescent green-
rimmed glasses from what appears to be
a small white tent — he later explains it’s
his mosquito net. Now watching the rest
of the world locked up but in the comfort
of their own homes, he laughs: “This is a
good time for schadenfreude!”
Yet it is not the pandemic that stops him
from travelling to Germany to see his wife
and baby son. First he was denied a passport
for more than three years; now he is
refused visas, including to Britain, owing to
pressure from Washington, he claims.“They don’t want me travelling around
talking about Guantanamo or anything
that happened,” he says.
The Guantanamo detention centre
became notorious during the “war on terror”
waged by George W Bush’s administration.
Built on a small area of Cuba that America
has leased as a naval base since 1903, the site
was deliberately chosen for being outside
US territory and, it was initially argued,
beyond US laws.
As America furiously sought the jihadists
responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks,
suspects were seized far and wide, many
ending up in Guantanamo. When the 9/
masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were captured, they
were held and interrogated there. But of
779 prisoners, only eight were convicted and
three of those judgments were overturned.
While some cases were impossible to prove,other inmates were guilty only of being in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
After four years of Donald Trump
psychodrama, Guantanamo — often known
as Gitmo — has been largely forgotten,
even though it still holds 40 prisoners. That
may be about to change. Slahi’s story has
been turned into a big-budget Netflix movie,
The Mauritanian, starring Jodie Foster and
Benedict Cumberbatch as opposing lawyers
duelling over his fate. Slahi is played by
Tahar Rahim, the French-Algerian actor
garnering rave reviews as the lead in the
BBC series The Serpent. Rahim and Foster
have picked up Golden Globe nominations
for best actor and best supporting actress
for their performances in The Mauritanian.
Although, as Slahi says, “You cannot
tell 20 years in less than two hours,” and
although the movie focuses as much on
the courtroom drama as his ordeal, it is still
shocking to see his character being abused
by a female guard in a mask and repeatedly
dunked underwater from a speedboat.
When Slahi visited the set in South Africa
(which did give him a visa) he couldn’t
watch. “I just closed my eyes,” he says.
It is disconcerting that he appears on my
laptop looking exactly like Rahim. He looks
younger than his 50 years, laughs a lot and
his fluent English is peppered with American
expressions — such as “no shit”, “frickin’ ”
and various expletives — which he learnt
from the Gitmo guards. One of the earliest
phrases he learnt was “cavity search”.
The son of a camel herder in Mauritania,
Slahi was the ninth of 12 children. He
became the great hope of the family when
in 1988 he gained a scholarship to study
electrical engineering in Germany. There
he met other youthful Muslims who told
him about the Soviet Union’s occupation
of Afghanistan and he decided to join the
fight against the invaders. “I was young,
idealistic and thought doing jihad with
the mujahidin was going to bring us
freedom,” he says. “I was wrong, but that’s
the right of a person to be stupid in a free
country. What’s not my right is to commit
violence — and I never did.”
As he says, at that point the West and
Osama bin Laden’s Arabs were on the same
side, supporting the mujahidin fighting the
Russians in the last front of the Cold War.
Slahi obtained a visa to go first to Peshawar
in Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan.
“I got my visa from the Bureau of Mujahidin
in Bonn, which was a recognised body
supported by Germany, the UK and the US.”
As a cub reporter I was in Peshawar at the
same time, and the American Club where
we journalists used to enjoy cheeseburgers
and Budweisers was just along the road from
Bin Laden’s guesthouse, where Slahi stayed.
His first trip to Afghanistan lasted just
two months. He returned in 1991 for military
training but says he didn’t fight. There
was also his cousin Mahfouz Ould al-Walid,
a poet who later became a spiritualInterrogations could last
24 hours. His cell was
so cold he was shaking
and he was alternately
starved and force-fed
TWINS IN TERROR Slahi was suspected of
links with 9/11 masterminds Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, left, and Ramzi bin al-ShibhThe Sunday Times Magazine • 19