What crime indeed? If guilt is assumed, how to prove innocence? And as with Kafka’s Joseph K., the third great literary spirit looming over these pages, the signs of Slahi’s guilt are everywhere: He fought in Afghanistan in the early 1990s with Al Qaeda (then indirectly supported by the United States); his distant cousin and sometime brother-in-law became a key bin Laden spiritual adviser; he had studied in Germany, like the 9/11 conspirators; had prayed at the same Montreal mosque as the “millennium” plotter; had known the 9/11 planner Ramzi bin al-Shibh. These signs and others meant he fit the profile, Slahi says, of “a high-level, smart-beyond-belief terrorist.” That will be the American interrogators’ premise, and nothing the Mauritanians and Jordanians will tell them, let alone what Slahi will say in the months of increasingly brutal interrogation, can alter their view. Slahi’s memoirs are filled with numbingly absurd exchanges that could have been lifted whole cloth from “The Trial”:
“ ‘The rules have changed. What was no crime is now considered a crime.’
“ ‘But I’ve done no crimes, and no matter how harsh you guys’ laws are, I have done nothing.’
“ ‘But what if I show you the evidence?'”
The interrogator shows him a list of the 15 “worst people” in Guantánamo, on which he is counted “No. 1.”
“ ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ I said.
“ ‘No, I’m not. Don’t you understand the seriousness of your case?’
“ ‘So, you kidnapped me from my house, in my country, and sent me to Jordan for torture, and then took me from Jordan to Bagram, and I’m still worse than the people you captured with guns in their hands?’
“ ‘Yes, you are. You’re very smart! To me, you meet all the criteria of a top terrorist. When I check the terrorist checklist, you pass with a very high score.’
“I was so scared, but I always tried to suppress my fear. ‘And what is your [redacted] checklist?’
“ ‘You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline.’
“ ‘And what crime is that?’ I said.
“ ‘Look at the hijackers: They were the same way.’ ”
In a later session the interrogator greets Slahi with a video player, promising to show definitive proof. “Are you ready?” he asks dramatically, his finger poised on the play button. Slahi braces himself, “ready to jump when I saw myself blowing up some U.S. facility in Timbuktu.” Instead, the tape shows bin Laden discussing the 9/11 attacks. “You realize,” he asks his interrogator with typical acid humor, “I am not Osama bin Laden, don’t you?”
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Slahi’s guilt remains certain, unquestioned and unquestionable, even as the claims of what precisely he did change. The Americans begin with the certainty that their prisoner had been the mastermind of the “millennium plot,” the 1999 attempt by Ahmed Ressam to smuggle explosives over the Canadian border to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport. There comes a point where Slahi would happily confess to it — there comes a point where he would confess to anything — but he is caught in an inescapable paradox: “If you don’t know somebody, you just don’t know him, and there is no changing it.” When the interrogators are ready to bow at last to evidence long since extracted by Mauritanian, Jordanian and Canadian interrogators that Ressam had left Montreal before Slahi arrived there, they grasp at a new theory, thanks to a confession extracted from Ramzi bin al-Shibh: Slahi had been the main “recruiter” for the “Big Wedding” itself — the 9/11 plot.
Bin al-Shibh, as we know from the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report, was even then enduring brutal torture in a black site in Morocco. By now, Slahi is being pummeled by the myriad techniques in Rumsfeld’s “special plan”: strict isolation; constant freezing temperatures “to the point I was shaking all the time”; stress positions, including hours of standing painfully bent over with his hands shackled to the floor; periodic dousing with very cold water that left him “shaking like a Parkinson’s patient”; beatings about the face and ribs; repulsive sexual abuse; threats to kill him and to kidnap his mother and other family members; and unending interrogation without sleep. “For the next 70 days,” he writes, “I wouldn’t know the sweetness of sleeping: interrogation 24 hours a day, three and sometimes four shifts a day.” Periodically he is dragged into a lightless room, thrown onto the dirty floor:
“The room was as dark as ebony. [Redacted] started playing a track very loudly — I mean very loudly. The song was ‘Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.’ I might never forget that song. At the same time, [redacted] turned on some colored blinkers that hurt the eyes. ‘If you [expletive] fall asleep, I’m gonna hurt you,’ he said. I had to listen to the song over and over until next morning. I started praying.