“ ‘Stop the [expletive] praying,’ he said loudly.”
Slahi begins to hallucinate, hear voices: Friends and family “visit” him, attempt to console him; he fears he is losing his mind. Throughout, in interrogation after interrogation, he is confronted with the “evidence” from bin al-Shibh. “Why should he lie to us?” the interrogators demand.
The answer was before them, as it is before us starkly on the page. Bin al-Shibh lies for the same reason Slahi lies: It is the only way to stop the pain. Desperate to confess to plots the details of which he doesn’t know, Slahi begs his interrogators to tell him what he was supposed to have done:
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“ ‘And what was my evil plan?’
“ ‘Maybe not exactly to harm the U.S., but to attack the CN Tower in Toronto?’ he said. I was thinking, Is this guy crazy? I’ve never heard of such a tower.
“ ‘You realize if I admit to such a thing I have to involve other people! What if it turns out I was lying?’ I said.
“ ‘So what? We know your friends are bad, so if they get arrested, even if you lie about [redacted] it doesn’t matter, because they’re bad.’ ”
And so Slahi, brutalized, exhausted, clinging to sanity, begins to name names, describe plots, provide incriminating information about anyone mentioned, “even if I didn’t know him. Whenever I thought about the words ‘I don’t know’ I got nauseous, because I remembered the words of [redacted]: ‘All you have to say is “I don’t know, I don’t remember,” and we’ll [expletive] you!’ ”
In this way the vast and brutal American interrogation mechanism, stretching around the globe in an archipelago of black sites housing hundreds of detainees at the mercy of untold numbers of interrogators, transformed itself into an intricate machine for generating self-reinforcing fiction. The process, which has never been described more intimately or more convincingly, resembles nothing so much as a postmodern globalized version of the Salem witch trials: zealous inquisitors, untroubled by doubt, applying a relentless violence to conjure up a fantasy world born of the collective terrors of their own imaginations.
They are our terrors, too, of course. There will be no author tour for this book. Mohamedou Ould Slahi remains in Guantánamo. We are keeping him there. It has been almost five years since United States District Court Judge James Robertson granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition and ordered him released, but the government appealed and he remains imprisoned and incommunicado. In his absence, Larry Siems writes, Slahi’s book “has been edited twice: first by the United States government, which added more than 2,500 black-bar redactions censoring Mohamedou’s text, and then by me. Mohamedou was not able to participate in, or respond to, either one of these edits.” In these redactions, stubbornly absurd and carelessly stupid as many of them are, the dialogue of interrogator and prisoner goes on.
At Guantánamo, meantime, the charges of grand plots have one by one fallen away. What exactly is Slahi’s crime? Now, only that he joined Al Qaeda, which he never disputed, and remained a member, which he has always denied. At the end, as at the beginning, guilt is born of association: whom he knew, not what he can be shown to have done. “He reminded me,” Guantánamo’s former chief prosecutor, Morris D. Davis, told Siems in a 2013 interview, “of Forrest Gump.”
“There were a lot of noteworthy events in the history of Al Qaeda and terrorism,” Davis said, “and there was Slahi, lurking somewhere in the background. He was in Germany, Canada, different places that look suspicious, and that caused them to believe that he was a big fish, but then when they really invested the effort to look into it, that’s not where they came out. . . . Their conclusion was there’s a lot of smoke and no fire.”
How to distinguish smoke from fire when your hallowed premise is that your prisoner is a “smart-beyond-belief terrorist” and anything he says to the contrary is dismissed as lies? Rules of evidence, demands of due process: These are designed to separate justice — founded on real acts that can be proved — from suspicion and paranoia. When they are discarded, we plunge into Cheney’s world, where all is sacrificed to security, and suspicion and fear take the place of evidence of guilt. Our country tortured Slahi and thus made it impossible, as the prosecutor determined, to try him; fear and suspicion leave us unable still to follow the judge’s order and free him. It is easier on us to let him suffer indefinite detention. When the suffering of the untried and unconvicted becomes nothing more than collateral damage, America has crossed a gulf. The steps that took us there were largely secret, but thanks to this and other accounts we know about them now: We know where we came from, and we know where we are. We do not yet know how to get back.