guardian | “I will be back soon,” I said, as we stood up and shook hands. Then I
turned and walked a few steps to the gate, and waited for the guard to
unlock it so I could leave. Those were the last words I said to Mohamedou Ould Slahi
after I met him in the tiny compound he shared with Tariq al-Sawah in
the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. That was seven and a half years
ago. I have never been inside the camp again. Slahi has never been out.
I didn’t know, that afternoon in the summer of 2007, that in a few
weeks I would send an email to the US deputy secretary of defence,
Gordon England, saying I could no longer in good conscience serve as
chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions. I reached that
decision after receiving a written order placing Brigadier-General Tom
Hartmann over me and the Pentagon general counsel, Jim Haynes, over
Hartmann.
Hartmann had chastised me for refusing to use evidence obtained by
“enhanced” interrogation techniques, saying: “President Bush said we
don’t torture, so who are you to say we do?” Haynes authored the
“torture memo” that the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld,
signed in April 2003 approving interrogation techniques that were not
authorised by military regulations – the memo where Rumsfeld scribbled
in the margin: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [for
detainees during interrogations] limited to 4 hours?” Rather than face a
Hobson’s choice when they directed me to go into court with
torture-derived evidence, I chose to quit before they had the chance.
Slahi and al-Sawah had been recommended to me as potential
cooperating witnesses. Before I met them, I asked one of my prosecutors
to review their files and check with other agencies to be sure nothing
had been overlooked. We attended a meeting where those who had spent
years investigating Slahi briefed their findings. The end result was
a consensus that, like Forrest Gump, Slahi popped up around significant
events by coincidence, not design.
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