@MOHAMEDOUOULDSALAHI / INSTAGRAM
Shortly after that, he says, “three masked
guys came in with a snarling German
shepherd and started beating me really
heavily. They blindfolded me. I couldn’t
breathe and later found out I had broken
ribs. They took me on a boat and started
forcing my head into the sea to swallow
seawater. Then they gave me to another team
of two — one with an Egyptian dialect,
one Syrian — who kept beating me, then
poured ice cubes between my clothes,
then beat me again, then more ice. This
went on maybe seven or eight hours.”
It’s so horrendous that I don’t know what
to say. This wasn’t some evil dictatorship
but 21st-century America. “People are
people and unfortunately can commit
heinous crimes,” he replies.
That’s when he decided he could take
no more. “They threw me into a cell that
turned out to be Camp Echo — for special
interrogation. They kept me in the dark
and when I arrived there, broken, I decided
I wanted to tell them everything.”
Slahi confessed he had planned to blow up
a skyscraper, the CN Tower in Toronto. How
did he feel admitting to something he now
says he hadn’t done? “I did not have any
feeling,” he says, “just one thing in my head
— I don’t want the torture to continue,
I don’t want my mother to be kidnapped.”
After he’d said everything he thought his
interrogators wanted to hear, one day one
of his tormentors walked in with a pillow.
A few days later he was given painkillers.
He also received a letter from his mother.
His family had had no idea he was in
Guantanamo until they had read about
it in the German magazine Der Spiegel —
they’d thought he was still in custody in
Mauritania and had been sending food there.
The following year a new guard arrived
called Steve Wood. He and Slahi passed
hours talking politics, playing rummy and
chess. So disturbed was Wood by what he
saw in Guantanamo that he subsequently
converted to Islam.
Things started to change in 2005, when
two lawyers arrived to meet Slahi — Nancy
Hollander, an American criminal defence
lawyer of international repute, and her
assistant Theresa Duncan. Despite earlier
claims that Guantanamo was beyond US
jurisdiction, the Supreme Court had ruled
that inmates could challenge the grounds
for their detention. Many detainees refused
representation despite some high-profile
law firms offering to act for free, because
they thought it would legitimise an unjust
system. But Slahi saw nothing to lose.
When his lawyers finally gained access
to his records they were horrified to find
he had made a confession — but even more
horrified to read about the torture that
preceded it. In March 2010 the district
court judge James Robertson ruled that
the government’s evidence about Slahi was
“so tainted by coercion and mistreatment
that it cannot support a successful criminalprosecution.” He concluded: “Slahi must
be released from custody.”
The government appealed. Slahi was
stuck and wounded by what he saw as
hypocrisy. “One time in Gitmo I saw Hillary
Clinton on TV receiving this Chinese blind
man who had been imprisoned without due
process and China had been nice enough
to let him go. He was received as a hero in
the US and Hillary was saying China must
abide by the rule of law, must respect due
process. I was shouting, ‘Please look at me!’ ”
I tell him I travelled to Guantanamo in- “Why didn’t you visit me?” he laughs.
It was one of the most surreal places I had
ever been to. I flew in on Air Sunshine,
driving past the only McDonald’s on Cuban
soil, an open-air cinema and signs warning
of hefty fines if you run over an iguana —
the saying goes that the iguanas have more
rights than the inmates.
Slahi’s only solace was writing. As a child
he had always wanted to write and teach.
“I would write things down anywhere
and everywhere,” he says. He wrote a diary
of his detention as a series of harrowing
letters to his lawyers — 466 pages, which
had to be posted to a classified facility
near Washington.
In 2012 Slahi’s lawyers won a seven-year
legal battle to declassify this information.
Government censors redacted names,
dates, locations and anything they
considered sensitive or embarrassing.
Guantanamo Diary was published in 2015
with vast portions blacked out. But as the
first account from someone still inside, it
became an international bestseller. A year
later he was finally released.
“It was beautiful,” he says. “In the
beginning it was twilight — I couldn’t tell
whether I was awake or asleep.” On his
release the US authorities cited his
“highly compliant behaviour in detention”
and “clear indications of a change in the
detainee’s mindset”, yet did not comment
on the treatment he had received.
For Slahi, freedom was hard to take in.
“It was like a flood of information and
everything had changed,” he says. “I felt like
the old man in The Shawshank Redemption
coming out of jail [after 40 years] and finding
everything different, the cars different.
“One of my fantasies in Guantanamo
was to have every TV channel so I could
watch anything I wanted, so I bought two
satellite dishes and two TVs and asked my
niece to set up channels.” He was baffled
when she told him she watched everything
on her phone. “How could I watch a movie
on a phone?”
Flashbacks still haunt his nights. The
music on his playlist are songs that were
pounding over the system into his cell: In
da Club by 50 Cent, I Surrender by Celine
Dion, Anywhere But Here by Chris Cagle.
He prefers online contact to real. “I feel
safer to have online friends than real
friends because real people you have to
listen to, whereas with Twitter or Facebook
you can always be offline.”
It was through Twitter that he met
Catherine Austin, the American lawyer to
whom he is now married. “I liked her tweets
so I DM’d her, then we started talking. The
rest is history.” Her job is in Berlin and
since Slahi could not travel, she went to
Mauritania to visit him. They married while
she was out there and now have a two-year-
old son called Ahmed, who lives with his
mother in Berlin.
Denied a visa for Germany to join
them, Slahi spends his time writing and
lobbying for the release of the remaining
40 Guantanamo prisoners. He is hoping
that the new US president, Joe Biden,
might finally carry out the pledge by Biden’s
former boss Barack Obama finally to close
the place. He hopes too that the new
administration will end the pressure on
other countries not to let him in. Though
some of those countries may remain
suspicious of him of their own accord, he’d
like to move to Germany and visit Britain.
In Mauritania he has been visited by his
lawyers and the former guard Steve Wood,
who is godfather to Ahmed. The Netflix
film ends with footage of these encounters,
then Slahi himself crooning The Man in Me,
a Bob Dylan song that features in the 1998
hit movie The Big Lebowski. He was shown
the movie in Guantanamo by Wood and
identified with Jeff Bridges’s character, “the
Dude”, who is a victim of mistaken identity.
Slahi’s favourite line from the film?
The Dude saying with frustration: “You got
the wrong guy.” nThe Mauritanian is released in the UK on
April 1One US investigator
calls him “the Forrest
Gump of al-Qaeda” due
to the coincidences
linking him to terrorists
FRIEND IN NEED Slahi, left, found an unlikely
ally at Guantanamo in his guard Steve WoodThe Sunday Times Magazine • 23