Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

One Guantánamo Detainee Pleads for Release, but Another Does Not Appear

WASHINGTON — Two longtime detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, made rare public appearances in separate military hearings on Thursday, including Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose memoir recounting abuse by American interrogators became a best-seller last year after he waged a yearslong battle with the government for permission to publish it.

But the expected first public appearance of another, even more prominent Guantánamo captive, Abu Zubaydah, was abruptly postponed. Mr. Zubaydah is one of three terrorism suspects the Central Intelligence Agency is known to have tortured through a technique called waterboarding.

The day began with a hearing for Mr. Slahi before a Periodic Review Board, offering him his first chance to make the case for why he should be released after nearly 14 years of imprisonment. Mr. Slahi, 45, has not been charged with a crime, and the review board is considering whether to recommend that he be released.

Wearing glasses and a white shirt, Mr. Slahi did not speak during the part of the hearing that was not classified and was streamed to the Pentagon for reporters to observe. There was no word on when a decision would be made on whether to free Mr. Slahi, who would prefer to be sent to Germany or Mauritania, where he was born, according to his lawyers and representatives.

Image
Mohamedou Ould SlahiCredit...Department of Defense

Mr. Slahi fought with Al Qaeda in the 1990s against Afghanistan’s Communist government and later ended up in Germany, where he was arrested after crossing paths with one of the planners of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In his book, “Guantánamo Diary,” Mr. Slahi says he was deprived of sleep for long stretches at the prison, shackled for days at a time in a freezing cell, beaten, doused with ice water and threatened by interrogators who said they could make him disappear. Interrogators also threatened to have his mother arrested and gang-raped, he wrote.

Despite the mistreatment, the impression that emerged of Mr. Slahi during the hearing was of an engaging and intellectually curious man eager to reconnect with the world. Mr. Slahi, said one of his American military representatives, is a model prisoner, and he “is uniquely talented, and speaks multiple languages, including English.”

The military representative, who was not identified, said he believed that Mr. Slahi genuinely intended to live a peaceful life and posed no threat to the United States if released.

A government-written profile of Mr. Slahi said that if freed, he would most likely reunite with his family and travel the world to promote his book. But it also warned that releasing him was not without risks, given his old “terrorist contacts.”

The United States determined years ago that Mr. Slahi was a senior recruiter for Al Qaeda, and for some time it considered him the most dangerous person imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

A federal judge saw the case differently, and ordered Mr. Slahi released in 2010, concluding that the government’s evidence against him was marred by coercion and mistreatment, or was “so classified” that it could not be used in court. But the Obama administration challenged the decision, which was overturned on appeal, leaving Mr. Slahi in legal limbo.

Mr. Slahi’s lawyer, Theresa Duncan, said in her opening statement that her client had never taken any hostile action against the United States, noting that when he joined Al Qaeda in the early 1990s, the Islamist militants “and the United States were aligned.”

In his memoir, which was based on a handwritten diary he composed in 2005, Mr. Slahi detailed much of the treatment that tainted the government’s case, including a “special interrogation” that lasted for months. The interrogation was personally approved in 2003 by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary.

Separately on Thursday, a pretrial hearing was convened in a high-security courtroom at Guantánamo in the yearslong effort to use a military commission to prosecute five detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11 attacks. Reporters could watch a video feed of that hearing at Fort Meade, Md.

Image
Mr. Slahi’s best-selling memoir, which described abuse by his American interrogators, came out last year after a long battle with the government for permission to publish it.Credit...Patricia Wall/The New York Times

The session focused on long-running complaints by one of the defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who says guards are making banging noises and making his cell vibrate so that he cannot sleep. The military has denied Mr. bin al-Shibh’s allegations. In November 2015, the judge overseeing the case, Col. James Pohl of the Army, issued an order not to harass him, but Mr. bin al-Shibh says the commotion has continued.

Mr. Bin al-Shibh lives in Camp 7, a part of the prison complex where former C.I.A. “black site” prisoners are housed and which reporters are not permitted to visit. His lawyer, James Harrington, called as a witness another Camp 7 resident, Gouled Hassan Dourad, a Somali man who has been accused of being a member of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in East Africa and who had not been seen publicly since his capture.

Mr. Dourad, bearded and dressed in white clothing and a checkered kaffiyeh, swiveled in the witness chair as he testified that he, too, had been subjected to continuous floor vibrations, bangs and bad smells since 2009. He said he had complained about the disruptions for a time, but had stopped because no one cared.

“We have mental torture in Camp 7,” he said.

During cross-examination, a prosecutor, Edward Ryan, accused Mr. Dourad of lying. Saying that he wanted to establish that the witness was biased, Mr. Ryan grilled him about alleged Qaeda activities like evaluating a military base in Djibouti for a potential suicide bombing, which Mr. Dourad denied.

Mr. Harrington had intended to call Mr. Zubaydah, who was once viewed as the first “high value” terrorism suspect captured by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks but whose significance was later downgraded.

However, as Mr. Zubaydah prepared to take the stand — he was said to be waiting outside the door — a lawyer representing him told the judge that he would object if questioning went beyond the conditions of confinement in Camp 7 and reached potentially incriminating topics. Mr. Ryan said he did intend to ask about his alleged terrorist activities, and the testimony was postponed.

Follow The New York Times’s politics and Washington coverage on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: One Guantánamo Detainee Pleads for Release, but Another Does Not Appear. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT