Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Guantanamo Diary 2

If you like to see eric talk in a longer segment about his book the nazis next door go to booktv. Org type in his last name in the search function. Mohamedou slahi was a more tarynan engineer and was kept at Guantanamo Bay without being charged. During the book event two of his attorneys discuss guantanamo diary and his legal case. This is about an hour. [inaudible conversations] good evening. Im Bradley Graham open ore of politics and prose along will be wife. On behalf of the entire staff, thank you so much for coming out on this dark and stormy night. A few quick administrative notes. Now would be a good time if you have a cell phone or Something Else that might go beep later to turn it off. When we get to the q a part of the session, because we have cspan here it would help them to hear your question. If you could make it up to this microphone right here. And at the end, before you come up to get your books signed our staff would appreciate it if you would fold up the chairs youre seated in and lean them against something that wont topple over. Were in a rather unusual situation here this evening in that were hosting an event for a book, guantanamo diary, without the author. Thats because the author, Mohamedou Slahi is still in prison at guantanamo. He has been there since 2002, and he still is in the same cell he was where he wrote the book. Back in the summer and fall of 2005. He is there even though he has never actually been charged with a crime and even though a federal judge ruling on a habeas corpus petition, ordinary his release five years ago. The u. S. Government has appealed the judges decision so the case continues to grind its way through the court. We have members a couple members of mohamedous legal group here, and ill be moderating a discussion among them. First ill take a few minutes and provide some background to the case. Mohamedous handwritten account of how he ended up at guantanamo and his extreme treatment there constitutes the only diary by a serving detainee that has been published. Its immensely revealing and descriptive, quite scary and disturbing in many places but also ironic and humannous at times humorously at types and astonishly gracious. At the end theres a note regarding a recent conversation with one of his lawyers he says he holds no garage against any of the people he mentions in the book. He appeals to them to read and it correct it if they think it contains any errors and he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea after having learned so much from one another. Now, that gives you some hint of mohamedous voice and the kind of thoughtful and humane way he comes across. Born 44 years ago in mauritania he is the first member of his large family to attend university. The first even to travel on a plane. He went to germany to study Electrical Engineering. Though he ended up in afghanistan in 1991 to join the insurgency against the communistled government there. Thats when he swore an oath to al qaeda, which was operating the camp where he was trained. Once the communists were ousted and muslim factions fell to fighting each other, mohamedou left. He has said that marks the end of his commitment to al qaeda. Back in germany he completed his degree in Electrical Engineering and worked in germany for most of the 1990s. But during that time he remained friends or kept in touch with companions from his time in afghanistan. Some of whom maintained their own al qaeda ties. Mohamedou also had a direct association with a cousin and a former brotherinlaw who was a prominent member of al qaeda. In late 1999 mohamedou moved to montreal and got involved with a large mosque there. Another person who attended that mosque a. L. Jeeran immigrant and al qaeda member ahmed was arrested shortly after mohamedous arrival for plotting to bomb the los angeles airport on new years day. Investigating the millennium plot mohamedou was questioned by canadian authorities about possible terrorist connections. Then in early 2000 he decided to return to mauritania and was detained twice on the way back, in senegal and once he got back to mauritania questioned by fbi agents but the investigators couldnt find anything linking him to the millennium plot and he was released. But then within days of the 9 11 attacks, he was detained for two weeks, and again questioned by the fbi but again released. Then in november 2001 several months after 9 11, he was summoned by a mauritanian police, and taken in a cia plane to a prison in ammann, youre where he was interrogated and held for nearly eight months. In july 2002 he was flown to Bagram Air Base in afghanistan, after a couple of weeks there he was transported to guantanamo arriving in august 2002. Now, at goon mohamedou was subjected to a number of socalled interrogation techniques approved by then defense secretary donald resumes field. The was deprived of food and sleep, held in extreme temperatures, spent long days in isolation, doused we very cold water, beaten, chained to the floor in agonizing position and confronted with threats to kill him and kidnap his mother and other family members. He says that he began to make false confessions in order to stop the torturous treatment. In the summer and fall of 2005 three years after arriving at the prison in cuba, mohamedou wrote the pages that would become the guantanamo diary. The pains were written in english. His fourth language, which he learned mostfully mostly in u. S. Custody, and the pages were expressly intended for public readership but they were classified by the government and not released for seven years. And then with many redactions. You know if you leaf through the book you can see many many places where sentences, phrases, sometimes even whole pages, have been crossed out. One of my favorites in this regard starts on page 301, and continues for another seven pages here where theres not a word that you can read. The responsibility of editing the manuscript ended up with larry seem, a poet and Nonfiction Author who has written extensively on immigration and crosscultural issues. For a number of years larry directed the freedom to write and International Program at pan american center. Also the author most recently of the torture report, what the documents say about americas powe post9 11 torture program. Now, remarkably larry has never met mohamedou. The pentagon denied his request, even to go over and edit with the guantanamo inmates but mohamedou did authorize publication of the book sight unseen. So who do we have here this evening . Two people who have been very closely involved with the effort to free mohamedou. Immediately to my right is nancy hollander, who is based in new mexico and has practiced criminal law for more than 30 years and has considerable experience defending clients charged with offenses related to terrorism and national security. And next to her is hina shamsi who helps litigate cases related to national security, Civil Liberties and human rights. So lets begin with talking a little bit about the legal team. The two of you constitute quite a formidable pair yourself, but there are others on the team. Right . How many others are on the team and how does guantanamo prisoner end up having such skillful legal representatives . I can explain how we got this case. And it started in 2005, when a lawyer in france sent me an email a lawyer i had met because we had been doing some training together. He sent me an email saying that a lawyer in mauritania mr. Ebeta had asked him if perhaps they could find mohamedou, that the family believed him to be in guantanamo, and i found thats where he was and agreed to represent him. I also then discovered the center for Constitutional Rights had assigned a lawyer to him. They were assigning lawyers just as quickly as they could to all of the prisoners, and they had assigned a woman named sylvia royce, and they picked her because she spoke french and we assumed that mohamedou spoke french because mauritania had been a french colony and that way she wouldnt need an interpreter. I talked to sylvia. We agreed we would both represent him, and we started making arrangements for our first trip to guantanamo and we went we met on the way there, and we walked in to see him. The guards took us to the hut where they had him it wasnt the hut where he lived but where they were doing the interviews and he stood up and he smiled and he put his arms out as though to embrace us, but he didnt move. And i stood there wondering why he didnt move, and then realized in some horror he was chained to the floor. And couldnt move. And we literally sylvia and i walked into his embrace, and he gave us 90 pages, which was the beginning of this book. Shortly, some point later, sylvia left our team and decided to represent someone else. Another lawyer in albuquerque agreed to work with me, teresa done duncan so she started that year. And then in 2009 the aclu joint us hina and her tame, give jonathan now a professor but at seton hall but works with us, and art spitzer in washington. Then we needed a lawyer to go sit with mohamedou during his testimony. So i recruited another friend of mine linda moreno, from tampa, to go and sit with him. All of this is probono. When i asked terry to do and it i asked linda to do it of course the aclu didnt require being paid, but linda and terry i said, i have a great assignment for you and by the way, theres no money. So that is how it all started, and thats how he ended up with this big team. Plus he has the lawyer in mauritania mr. Ebita who works with us also. Thats how it started in this case and actually our cocounsel is here today, art spitzer. But i also want to recognize that mohamedous case is one of many that have been brought on behalf of guantanamo detainees, and the center for Constitutional Rights has done a tremendous job recruiting people to represent the population. Remember, there were over 774 people there at the time. And it is particularly heartening to see many of our colleagues in what is sometimes referred to with dark humor that you bring to this kind of situation, that mohamedou brings to his situation the guantanamo bar association. Im glad to see many of you here. The proceeds of the book where are they going . We set up a trust for mow mamadou mohamedou and theyll go into the trust to help him rebuild his life but at his instruction, we have also actually used some of that money to send one of his nephews to a college, and he wants to get all of the people of college age in his family educated and then he would like to if theres enough money and we sell enough books start a foundation to actually educate girls in mauritania. But we would like him to have the money to rebuild his life when he gets out. Lets talk for a bit about the case that the government thought it had against mohamedou. Now, again, havent been any charges formally filed against him, but theres suspicions about him have been clear over time. And those suspicions and their case seem to have evolved some with the government retreating from its most damning allegations. Initially the claim was that mohamedou had aided in the 9 11 attacks and he had materially supported forces associated with al qaeda. But the government isnt claiming that anymore. Is that right . Do you want to take this . At the very beginning, mohamedou was accused of being involved with what was called the millennium bombing plot. This was a plot to bomb Los Angeles International airport in 1999 and that was because he was in he actually came to montreal just as the person who was ultimately arrested for that plot was leaving montreal. They didnt know each other. Theres no reason to think they ever had any connection except that they prayed at the same mosque. So everyone who played at that mosque was under suspicion, and they learned the government learned that mohamedou couldnt have been and was not involved in that. That was after eight months of torture in jordan, where we sent him. And then instead of sending him home, the United States arranged for him to go to Bagram Air Force base in afghanistan, and then to cuba in august of 2002, and then shortly after that they accused him of being one of the recruiters for the pilots in 9 11. Ultimately, the government couldnt prove that because it wasnt true. And the judge ruled that mohamedou could not have even known about 9 11. So, that allegation is gone. So all that were left with is that he was at one time part of al qaeda. And its important to remember that the al qaeda that he fought with in 1990 and 1991, against the soviet union, the United States was supporting that effort support ited it with millions of dollars, with munitions and weapons, and theres no secret about that. If you have seen the movie Charlie Wilsons war you know all about it. So the judge found which is also correct, that was not the al qaeda that came and attacked us many years later. But that is where we are with the government. You know i think the judges decision back in 2010 is really instructive because he said, hes the first person who is a neutral person to have reviewed all of the evidence in the case, and he decided that the evidence in the case was either not credible, because it was obtained through torture or coercion or for other reasons. And i remember reading the first time i was able to read the diary years ago so much more became clear to me because mohamedou talked about the torture that he was subjected to that resulted in him providing false information about himself and others because essentially he was told that he was told what they wanted him to say. And so he was also in a position, he says in the book, of the more incriminating the fiction he could make up, the happier his interrogators were. Theres one point he talks about whenever they asked me about somebody in canada i had some incriminating information about that person even if i didnt know him. Whenever i thought about the word i dont know i got nauseous because i remember the words of redacted. All you have to say, now were quoting, redynamicked, all you have to say is, dont know, i dont remember, and well f you. And thats the on sent that was used. So he said i erased thats words from the dictionary. That passage comes of you read about the pain he goes through and one of the things again as i think about this book and in the last year, that we have had with more information coming out about torture, our debate about torture in the last few months has been so debased in a way because its focused on effectiveness, and effectiveness doesnt matter right . Its unlawful, its imparl, and this sews there are two things that torture absolutely guarantees, one is pain, and the other is false information. Why was is that the government even suspected mohamedou in connection with 9 11 . Somebody incriminate him under torture or otherwise . Well, they there was some evidence that he had met Ramsey Ben Al sheed in his home two years earlier and the judge said who is he . One of the people who is currently charged with one of the 9 11 defendants, will be on trial in the military commissions in guantanamo, and he is in guantanamo, and the judge found that all that proved was that they had met two years before 9 11, and that is when judge robertson said in his opinion, thats no evidence that mohamedou knew anything about 9 11 but the government in 2003 was just desseparate to find people desperate to find people to charge and was convinced that everyone that they had must be guilty of something, and they were determined to do that, and the other thing that we have learned, just recently is they were also experimenting on torture tactics. What is it we can do to get people to talk or to get people to fail to resist . And mohamedou gives another example that they said we know you want you were conspiring to blow up the tower in toronto and he talks about this in the book. And he said i didnt even know there was tower in toronto but i said yes of course issue was involved in that. And they asked him about another young man in florida, and mohamedou talks about how terrible he felt that he said all these terrible things about this man who he didnt even know and was relieved to hear later that ultimately he was released. But what this book brings in my view is that we know about the torture and the reason that this book came out and the government allowed it out is because the governments own investigations have talked about mohamedous torture specifically. It was a Senate Armed Services Committee Report in 2008 that devoted 11 pages and described what he described, but we have never heard it from his side from the side of the person who is the victim. He talks about it. You can feel it. You can taste it. You can smell what he goes through, because he gives us such vivid accounts, and yet even with that he still maintains his humor and his humanity, and he understands there are good people and bad people and he even talks about how you dont get to choose your family, and he didnt get to choose this family but that his Prison Guards and interrogators became his family, and so you really get a sense from him of the pain of the torture and yet at the same time the humanity that drives him and keeps him i think, keeps him sane. Even show it seems the government no longer sees mohamedou as being connected to 9 11 theres still the issue of these connections to some members of al qaeda that mohamedou had through the 90s and especially this tie to his former brotherinlaw who is abu who was a senior al qaeda member. How problematic do you think that might be for him. Ill talk about abu. Abu is a very interesting situation. He is a distant cousin of mohamedous and was related to mohamedous exwife, i believe. He supposedly was with Osama Bin Laden as a spiritual leader, a mauritanian, obviously, but he left in 2001 and in the 9 11 report it actually says that he disapproved of the 9 11 bombings abuse he said they were a violation of the koran. We now know, and we didnt know for a long long time that he left at that time and went to iran where he was under some kind of a house arrest for many years. Ultimately, in about 2013 he showed up back in mauritania, in jail and then was released after he was interrogated by the americans. So although all throughout the years we have been battling the government, they said its because mohamedou was connected to his cousin abu and now abu is out and a free man and mohamedou is still there. And we dont know what he and the government discussed because the government has been unw