How I Finally Met Former Guantánamo Prisoner Mohamedou Ould Salahi As A Free Man

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Last Thursday, at Chatham House, the independent policy institute in St. James’s Square in London, I finally got to meet someone I greatly admire, who I’ve been writing about since 2006 — Mohamedou Ould Salahi (aka Slahi), former Guantánamo prisoner, torture survivor, and the author of the best-selling memoir Guantánamo Diary, who was taking part in a discussion about Guantánamo with Rachel Briggs, a Chatham House Fellow, and Sonya Sceats of Freedom from Torture, as part of his ongoing UK speaking tour.

I’ve taken part in various online events with Mohamedou over the last year (see here, here and here), but meeting him in person was a particular thrill. He was as witty and as playful as I expected, and, at the event, spoke compellingly about the importance of forgiveness, which he has extended to all those who tortured and abused him, and which is a defining aspect of his philosophy.

I first came across Mohamedou’s case in 2006-07, while I was researching and writing about the stories of all the men held at Guantánamo for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in September 2007.

For the first four years of Guantánamo’s history, it was largely impossible to write a coherent account of who was held. The Bush administration had refused to release any information relating to them — not even their names — and it was not until April and May 2006 that prisoner lists were publicly released after the Pentagon lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit submitted by the Associated Press.

Also released were unclassified summaries of evidence against the prisoners (which were all quite shockingly insubstantial), and many thousands of pages of transcripts from the cursory reviews — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — that the US government had held in 2004-05, which were designed to enable panels of three military officials to rubber-stamp the men’s designation, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who were “guilty” of whatever it was that they were vaguely accused of, and who could continue to be held without rights.

The unclassified summaries of evidence and the transcripts — which were often translated from the Arabic that most of the men spoke, and often revealed bewilderment on the part of the prisoners, as they were confronted with extremely vague allegations whose provenance, moreover, was not disclosed to them — generally only provided me, at best, with brief sketches of who the men were, and the differences between their accounts and what the government was saying.

Occasionally, however, the voices of the prisoners leapt off the page, and one particularly memorable example was Mohamedou. Recounting how he had been handed over to US operatives by the authorities in his home country, Mauritania, in November 2001, Mohamedou said, in English (which he didn’t speak before his capture), “My country turned me over, shortcutting all kinds of due process of law, like a candy bar to the United States.”

I used that quote in my book, as well as also discussing Mohamedou’s horrendous torture, as ordered by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, based on an erroneous belief that he was involved with Al-Qaeda, and I continued to follow his story, particularly when the prosecutor assigned to his proposed military commission trial, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, resigned rather than pursuing the case, appalled by the lack of evidence, and by the torture to which Mohamedou was subjected.

Mohamedou’s post-torture cooperation — after he had been taken out on a boat and threatened with death —  meant that he and another cooperative prisoner were held separately from the rest of the prison population, and it was there, ironically, that he was allowed to begin writing the account of his experiences that eventually became Guantánamo Diary. Shortly after these circumstances were reported by Peter Finn for the Washington Post, in an article entitled, “For two detainees who told what they knew, Guantánamo becomes a gilded cage,” there seemed to be significant progress in his case, when, in March 2010 his habeas corpus petition was granted by a judge in the District Court, Judge James Robertson.

Shamefully, however, the government appealed — after Attorney General Eric Holder had, rather unprofessionally, stated that, although “[w]e obviously respect the decision that the judge made, [h]opefully an appeals court will look at the evidence that we presented in the habeas proceeding and come to a contrary conclusion” — and in September 2010 an appeals court vacated the ruling. This meant that his case was supposed to be sent back to the lower court to be reconsidered, but it never was, and as the years passed it seemed that Mohamedou had been forgotten.

All this changed in January 2015, when Guantánamo Diary was published to widespread acclaim. The road to my eventual meeting with Mohamedou began when Bernard and Susie Sullivan, a retired couple in Dorset with an enthusiasm for human rights activism, picked up on Mohamedou’s case via an article Susie was reading in a newspaper. She suggested that they should do something to help him, and they then approached the Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake, who held a Parliamentary meeting about Mohamedou’s plight in April 2016, attended by Mohamedou’s brother Yahdih and his lawyer, Nancy Hollander, at which the actors Sanjeev Bhaskar and Toby Jones read out passages from his book.

I met Bernie and Susie at the meeting, and we have been in touch ever since. Soon after, to our delight, Mohamedou was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established by President Obama, and in October 2016 he was finally released, although he was still not a free man, as the US pressurized the Mauritanian government not to return his passport, and I reported on this particular predicament in March 2019.

Mohamedou eventually secured the return of his passport, and in the meantime his story reached even more people when film director Kevin Macdonald adapted Guantánamo Diary as a feature film, “The Mauritanian,” starring Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou, Jodie Foster as Nancy Hollander, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Lt. Col. Stuart Couch. Taking advantage of Mohamedou’s ability to travel, Bernie and his niece Oriel arranged the speaking tour for him that is still underway, and that led, after all these years, to my eventual meeting with him.

After I related to him how I had first found out about him, he told me that he had first got to know me when the prisoners in Guantánamo were, for a while, allowed to watch the news — but only, bizarrely, on Press TV, where, from 2008 to 2010, I regularly took part in programs.

Mohamedou told me that, when watching me on Press TV, telling the truth about Guantánamo, he had thought, “I wonder if I’ll ever get to meet this guy?”

I had wondered the same thing when I read Mohamedou’s “candy bar” comment back in 2006, and it was small wonder, then, that it was such a pleasure for us to finally meet.

I look forward to taking part in discussions with Mohamedou at Brighton University this Thursday, March 17, following a screening of “The Mauritanian,” and at the Trinity Theatre in Tunbridge Wells on Sunday, March 20, following another screening, and also featuring Kevin Macdonald and, via Zoom, Nancy Hollander, as well as seeing him again at his event at the LSE in London this Wednesday, March 16.

Amongst other things, we will, I am sure, be discussing how, although Mohamedou is now, in many ways, a free man, that freedom is still dependent on the good will of the US government, and many other prisoners remain in the predicament that Mohamedou was in for years after his release, when, as he described it at Chatham House, he was essentially under house arrest.

Around the world, former prisoners who were repatriated, or resettled in third countries when they were unable to be repatriated, or it was regarded as unsafe to do so, remain fundamentally without rights, unable to travel, unable to receive visitors, unable to work, and unable to defend themselves from arbitrary harassment.

As I have previously mentioned, I am in the early stages of setting up a new campaign, the Guantánamo Accountability Project, to address how the stigma of Guantánamo continues to dog former prisoners, and, ultimately, to call for those responsible, in the US government, to be held accountable. Please do get in touch if this is a project in which you would like to be involved.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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