Why Was Guantánamo Diary‘s Author Denied a Passport?

When Mohamedou Ould Slahi walked away, unshackled, from a U.S. military plane in Nouakchott, Mauritania, the author of Guantánamo Diary hoped he was finally free. In October 2016 he made it home after 14 years in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. government had imprisoned and tortured him as a suspected terrorist. But Slahi was never charged with a crime and, in 2010, a federal judge ordered his discharge from Guantánamo’s U.S. naval base. It was another six years before he was released.

By then, his diary had become a bestseller and the only published memoir by a Guantánamo detainee penned behind prison walls. Declassifying the 466-page handwritten manuscript involved a years-long legal battle, with the version published in 2015 heavily redacted by government censors. After returning to Mauritania, Slahi worked with an editor on a restored version, filling in from memory the long bars of blacked out text that marr the first edition.

Meanwhile, Slahi has remained in a kind of holding pattern in Mauritania, where the 48-year-old says the government refuses to grant him a passport, preventing him from leaving the Northwest African nation of his birth. In a Skype interview, Slahi said that the day after he returned to Nouakchott, Mauritania’s director of state security told him that he couldn’t leave the country for two years. Although Slahi said he received no formal document outlining those terms, he accepted them. So when the two-year anniversary of his discharge from Guantánamo passed in October, Slahi expected to be granted his passport. But the Mauritanian government denied his application, he said, leaving him in limbo once again.

Slahi’s attorney Brahim Ebetty is preparing to file a petition with Mauritania’s Ministry of the Interior and Decentralization asking it to issue Slahi’s passport immediately. The petition will include a letter of support from Larry Siems, Guantánamo Diary’s editor, and more than 190 others from the human rights, academic, and literary communities urging Mauritania to grant Slahi “the freedom of movement to which he is entitled under domestic and international law.” (Readers can still sign the letter, and signatures will continue to be collected and periodically submitted to Mauritania as Slahi’s petition moves forward.)

Beyond Slahi’s legal entitlement to his passport, the letter stresses the urgency of his poor health. “Mr. Slahi requires advanced medical treatment for conditions associated with his ordeal of detention and abuse,” says the letter, adding that a “physician in Germany has offered to oversee and cover all costs associated with his treatment.”

“This is to let the Mauritanian government know that he has a lot of supporters who certainly want to see him finally free,” Siems said.

Slahi described headaches, nightmares, and chronic pain that have plagued him since he left Guantánamo. Audibly frustrated, he described the morass of uncertainty that has characterized his life since 2001, when he was arrested in Nouakchott and transported to Jordan, Afghanistan, then to Guantánamo through the U.S. government’s “extraordinary rendition” counterterrorism program. In the process, he said, he was stripped of all of his paperwork: his driver’s license, his passport, and an ID card. None of those materials were returned to him when he arrived back on Mauritanian soil 15 years later, he said, feeling “dead” after a hell of isolation, beatings, sleep deprivation, and other abuses he described in Guantánamo Diary.

“This is hard to understand because it’s so weird,” Slahi said of his continued circumscription. “I need my freedom. I need it now.”

The U.S. government initially arrested Slahi as a suspect in the 1999 “millennium plot” to detonate explosives in the Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day, 2000, according Guantánamo Diary. After determining that Slahi had no connection to that plot, U.S. interrogators tried to implicate him in various other terrorist activities, including being a “recruiter” for the 9/11 attacks. But the U.S. government never brought any charges against Slahi, and U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson ordered his release in 2010, ruling that the government had not met the burden of proof necessary to justify Slahi’s imprisonment and could not hold him “indefinitely upon suspicion.” Currently, 40 prisoners remain at Guantanamo, more than half of whom have been held in indefinite detention without charge or trial and five of whom have been ordered released, according to Human Rights First.

Exactly why Mauritania won’t grant Slahi’s passport more than two years after his discharge from U.S. custody remains unclear. But Slahi suspects it has something to do with an agreement between the United States and Mauritania governing the terms of his release. The New York Times has reported on such deals struck by the U.S. with nations that have accepted other former Guantánamo detainees. Those nations “provide basic assistance while monitoring them,” and “typically, the receiving countries also agreed not to let the former detainees travel for two or three years, leaving ambiguous what would come next,” according to an April Times report. A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of State declined to comment and referred Literary Hub to the government of Mauritania. Phone calls and emails seeking comment from the Mauritanian embassy in Washington and the Mauritania Permanent Mission to the United Nations were not returned.

Beyond Slahi’s inability to access medical care in Germany, the letter supporting his passport petition laments how the restrictions on his movement have prevented his travel abroad to engage with readers of his work. Guantánamo Diary has been published in more than two dozen countries and languages. And Slahi has continued to write since returning to Mauritania, where he recently completed a novel—for which he is seeking a publisher—and is working on several other projects.

“Some of us have hosted him in events and have invited him to share his writing in our universities via Skype,” the letter says. “As rich as these exchanges have been, however, they are limited by time and technology in ways that deny both Mr. Slahi and his hosts and audiences many of the opportunities to share stories and ideas that face-to-face encounters would offer.”

Asked whether he looks forward to embarking on a literary tour, Slahi said he can’t think beyond his medical concerns at this point.

“The only thing that I’m concentrated on now is getting my medical treatment. I really, really, need to … be a healthy person,” he said. “And then from there, when I get to the next bridge, I’ll cross it.”

Dr. Alexandra Moore—who co-directs the Human Rights Institute at the State University of New York at Binghamton—includes Guantánamo Diary in the courses she teaches and hosted a Skype event last year where Slahi spoke with her students. Moore says she is compelled by the diary as both a work of literature and record documenting the failure of the U.S. after 9/11 to uphold its commitment to human rights, rebranding the torture practices banned by the Geneva Conventions as “enhanced” or “special” interrogation.

“What strikes me about Guantánamo Diary is that it tells us a lot about Mohamedou, but it also tells us a lot about the U.S. and the workings of the security state,” said Moore, who has been working with Siems to drum up support for Slahi’s petition.

Moore said she admires Slahi as a person who promotes the values of non-violence and ethical communication that are so crucial to the cause of international human rights. “It’s clear from being with him and from reading his work, his commitment to peace and to community, to understanding across cultures,” Moore said. Guantánamo Diary “illuminates Slahi’s openness to everyone around him and his willingness not to do what was done to him, but instead to take each encounter as a chance to establish a personal relationship, even as he’s being abused.”

The generosity of Slahi’s voice registers as a surreal counterpoint to the catalogue of horrors he narrates in Guantánamo Diary. Throughout the memoir, Slahi continually engages his captors in conversation, at times disarming them with his curiosity about their lives or the English language, which he was in the process of learning at Guantánamo. Despite his precarious circumstances, he remains sensitive to the people he encounters, alert to their feelings and careful of his manners. “I needed to survive, but I also wanted to keep my dignity and respect the dignity of others,” he wrote in a passage about overhearing an interpreter’s phone conversation. “To hear her…was just what I needed on that cold, unfriendly evening … To this day I am sorry for eavesdropping, and I can only hope she would forgive my unintentional transgression.”

Over Skype, Slahi’s voice radiated a similar warmth even as he detailed the obstacles he has faced at every turn for the last 18 years.

“I will get my rights peacefully, going to court and going through the right channels,” he said. “Isn’t that what everybody wants, my people and your people, that everybody is treated within the rule of law and that peace be everywhere in the world?”

Siems and Moore hope the petition—and the support it generates from the international community—will convince Mauritania to restore Slahi’s ability to travel.

“As a colleague, as somebody who has been so lucky to come to know him and work with him, come to know his great, incredible gifts. I know how much the world deserves to have the same kind of contact with him that a small group has had,” Siems said.