Guantánamo: Im Herz der Finsternis | ZEIT ONLINE.

Seit 13 Jahren ist Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Guantánamo: Sein erschütternder Bericht über seine Leidenszeit erscheint jetzt weltweit – er schildert Gewalt und Lebensmut. von Alexander Cammann

Kultur, Guantánamo, Guantánamo, Tagebuch, Mauretanien, Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama, Donald Rumsfeld, FBI, Al-Kaida-Anschlag, Dschihad, Afghanistan, USA, Duisburg, Afrika, Asien, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington D.C.

Ein Zellentrakt von Guantánamo  |  © Mark Wilson/Reuters

Duisburg, warum in aller Welt ausgerechnet Duisburg? Der Name der Stadt wirkt wie eine absurde Laune in der finsteren Geschichte, die Mohamedou Ould Slahi erzählt. In Duisburg lebte er bis 1999 – und seit August 2002 in Guantánamo, bis zum heutigen Tag. Als Gefangener Nr. 760 schrieb er 2005 in der Isolationszelle seinen Bericht, handschriftlich auf Papier, in englischer Sprache, die er zuvor gelernt hatte. Nach vielen juristischen Auseinandersetzungen ist das Buch jetzt in einer von den amerikanischen Behörden zensierten Fassung erschienen. Vieles ist geschwärzt, Namen, Begriffe, Absätze, manchmal mehrere Seiten; allerdings gelingt es dem Herausgeber Larry Siems meist, in Fußnoten zu rekonstruieren, was sich hinter den schwarzen Balken verbirgt. Die Welt des Lagers wird sichtbar – und auch der treueste Amerikafreund dürfte ins Grübeln kommen, ob von der dort gegebenen Antwort des Westens auf den Terror – nämlich Entwürdigung des Feindes – eine Linie führt zu den Pariser Morden vor zwei Wochen.

Slahis Fall ist nicht unbekannt; es gibt zugängliche Protokolle diverser amerikanischer Untersuchungskommissionen, es gibt Presseartikel, der Spiegel berichtete schon vor Jahren. Zufällig erscheint diese Woche auch auf Deutsch jener Senatsbericht, der im Herbst die CIA-Folterpraktiken präsentierte (Wolfgang Nešković [Hrsg.]: Der CIA-Folterreport. Der offizielle Bericht des US-Senats zum Internierungs- und Verhörprogramm der CIA; Westend Verlag). Unser Buch aber, von einem Opfer selbst geschrieben, ist etwas Besonderes: Lagerliteratur aus dem Mutterland der Demokratie. Und es ist erstaunlich unterhaltsame Lagerliteratur, so zynisch das klingen mag: spannend und mit Humor erzählt, ohne Hass gegen die eigenen Peiniger. Unwillkürlich wähnt man sich in einem Hollywood-Film über den War on Terror.

Es ist ein Leben unter Verdacht, das Slahi führt, zwischen unzähligen Verhören in Afrika, Asien, Amerika. 1988 kommt der 18-Jährige, der den Koran auswendig kann, aus seiner Heimat Mauretanien nach Deutschland und studiert Elektrotechnik. 1991 und 1992 geht er für ein paar Monate nach Afghanistan, um dort als gläubiger Muslim im Dschihad gegen die noch existierende kommunistische Regierung zu kämpfen. Er schwört im Ausbildungslager Al-Kaida den Treueeid – will aber später, im deutschen Alltag, Osama bin Ladens antiamerikanischen Schwenk im Dschihad nicht mitgemacht haben: „Ich habe mich dieser Idee nicht angeschlossen.“ Kontakt hält er in dieser Zeit zu den Exkämpfern, zumal sein entfernter Vetter und Schwager Abu Hafs prominentes Mitglied des Führungszirkels um Bin Laden ist; der BND registriert 1999 einen Anruf Abu Hafs bei seinem Vetter, mit Bin Ladens Satellitentelefon.

Ins Visier der Amerikaner gerät Slahi, nachdem 2000 der Millennium Plot, ein Al-Kaida-Anschlag auf den Flughafen Los Angeles, scheiterte: Er gehörte zum Bekanntenkreis des Attentäters in Toronto, wo der Mauretanier mittlerweile lebt. Slahi kehrt dann aus Furcht vor Verfolgung schnell in seine Heimat zurück, wo der Geheimdienstchef ihm vertraut. Doch nach dem 11. September nützt ihm das nichts mehr: Auf Druck der Amerikaner wird Slahi festgenommen und widerrechtlich nach Jordanien ausgeflogen – zum Verhör unter Folter, worin die Jordanier Profis sind, die von jeher brutalstmöglich gegen Islamisten vorgehen; Slahis Angst scheint damals am größten gewesen zu sein. Dann übernehmen die Amerikaner die Arbeit selber: zuerst auf dem Stützpunkt Bagram in Afghanistan und seit August 2002 schließlich in Guantánamo.

In den endlosen Verhören durchs FBI bestreitet Slahi jede Mitwisserschaft. Doch er passt zu perfekt in das Täterprofil, das die Amerikaner suchen: strenggläubig und weltgewandt, intelligent und charmant, mit technischer Ausbildung und Al-Kaida-Schwur, zudem im Milieu unterwegs. Plötzlich ist er auf der Liste der Topgefährlichen ganz oben.

Im Sommer 2003 wird dem FBI die Zuständigkeit entzogen, Washington will endlich Erkenntnisse, und das Militär übernimmt. Slahi wird zum Opfer ganz neuer „Spezialbefragungsmethoden“, persönlich am 13. August 2003 abgesegnet von Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld, der den Spitzenfall genau verfolgt. „Schluck, du motherfucker!“: Während einer rasenden Bootsfahrt zwingt man ihn, Salzwasser zu trinken. Eingeflogene Ägypter und Jordanier veranstalten anstelle der Amerikaner brutale Prügelorgien mit ihm; er wird zu stundenlangem Stehen gezwungen, in Kälteräume gesteckt, rund um die Uhr verhört von abwechselnden Teams, zwecks Schlafentzugs, und sexuell erniedrigt: „Okay, dann geben wir dir heute eine Lektion in tollem amerikanischem Sex“, woraufhin sich zwei weibliche Armeeangehörige an ihm stundenlang unter Obszönitäten vergehen, während Slahi betet – aber „alles passierte so, dass ich meine Uniform anbehielt“.

Diese Tortur dauert mehr als zwei Monate; auch das Beten wird ihm verboten. Irgendwann beschließt Slahi, die Aussagen zu machen, die die Amerikaner hören wollen – er liefert Tausende Seiten ab, mit irgendwelchen mehr oder weniger sinnlos ausgedachten Fakten (darüber wüsste man gerne Genaueres); die Vernehmer sind begeistert. Und die Lage bessert sich im Frühjahr 2004, als die übelsten Folterer versetzt werden; ohnehin wird bald deutlich, dass die so gewonnenen Informationen kaum zu gebrauchen sind. Ein Lügendetektortest bei Slahi, den er besteht, hilft ihm ebenso. Bald schaut er mit einem Vernehmer den Film Black Hawk Down, und er lacht das erste Mal wieder, als er Salingers Fänger im Roggen lesen darf. Sein Witz hat nicht gelitten: „Eine der Strafen ihrer Zivilisation besteht darin, dass Amerikaner videospielsüchtig sind.“

Slahis Erinnerungen sind verblüffend präzise – er registriert den Horror ebenso wie menschliche Regungen. Ist er tatsächlich unschuldig? 2010 beschied ein Richter seinen Haftprüfungsantrag positiv und ordnete Freilassung an, wogegen die Regierung Obama in Berufung ging; bis heute ist darüber nicht entschieden. Natürlich liest man das Buch mit größter Sympathie, schon die Frage nach der Unschuld ist ja falsch gestellt. Wer sich dennoch zu kritischer Nüchternheit zwingen kann, der sieht die Lücken von Slahis Bericht. „Tatsächlich ist es aber so, dass ich fast keinen Häftling getroffen habe, der in irgendwelche Straftaten gegen die USA verwickelt gewesen wäre.“ Ganz kann das auch in Guantánamo nicht stimmen; überhaupt redet Slahi durchgängig von seinen „Brüdern“ und „Freunden“, wenn er von Mitgefangenen spricht, kein Wort des Mitleids hat er hingegen für die Opfer des islamistischen Terrors. Seine Distanzierung bleibt aus: „Ich habe damit nichts zu tun.“ Er bleibt ein lässiger Islamist, der die Amerikaner ein bisschen verachtet, aber nicht hasst – mit Kontakten zu Menschen, die gegen Amerika kämpfen. Nebulös wird der sonst so übergenaue Erinnerer immer dann, wenn es um solche Zusammenhänge geht.

Die härteste Zeit von Guantánamo ist zwar vorbei, doch das Lager existiert noch. „Hier wird dem Hass furchterregend Vorschub geleistet“, lautet Slahis Bilanz. Einen „Charismatiker“ hat ihn einer seiner übelsten Vernehmer genannt; tatsächlich kann man sich gut vorstellen, dass Barack Obama nach Schließung des Lagers den Exhäftling Nr. 760 einmal im Weißen Haus empfangen könnte. Uns Deutsche erinnert dieser einstige Duisburger Elektrotechniker daran, wie nah Guantánamo ist – auch BND-Agenten haben Mohamedou Ould Slahi dort verhört.

‘Guantánamo Diary,’ by Mohamedou Ould Slahi – NYTimes.com.

On or about Sept. 11, 2001, American character changed. What Americans had proudly flaunted as “our highest values” were now judged to be luxuries that in a new time of peril the country could ill afford. Justice, and its cardinal principle of innocent until proven guilty, became a risk, its indulgence a weakness. Asked recently about an innocent man who had been tortured to death in an American “black site” in Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not hesitate. “I’m more concerned,” he said, “with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.” In this new era in which all would be sacrificed to protect the country, torture and even murder of the innocent must be counted simply “collateral damage.”

“Guantánamo Diary” is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be that collateral damage. One fall day 13 years ago Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist, received a visit at his house in Noakchott, Mauritania, from two officers summoning him to come answer questions at the country’s intelligence ministry. “Take your car,” one of the men told him, as Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and his aunt. “We hope you can come back today.” Listening to these words, Slahi’s mother fixed her eyes on her son. “It is the taste of helplessness,” he writes, “when you see your beloved fading away like a dream and you cannot help him. . . . I would watch both my mom and my aunt praying in my rearview mirror until we took the first turn and I saw my beloved ones disappear.”

Mohamedou Ould Slahi Credit International Committee of the Red Cross

That was Nov. 20, 2001. Slahi’s mother has since died. Her son has never returned. He had begun, that fall day two months after 9/11, what he calls his “endless world tour,” courtesy of the various American national security bureaucracies, traveling, after a week of interrogation in Mauritania, via “extraordinary rendition” to a black site in Jordan, where he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, for eight months; thence he is flown, blindfolded, shackled and diapered, to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, for two weeks of interrogation; and finally, to Guantánamo, where he suffered months of strictest isolation, weeks of sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and sound, and other elaborate tortures set out in a “special plan” approved personally by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — and where he remains to this day. He composed these memoirs in his isolation cell in the summer of 2005, and a six-year legal battle has finally brought them to us. Written in the colloquial if limited English he picked up during his captivity, its pages disfigured with thousands of pitch-black “redactions” courtesy of the American intelligence agents who play such major parts, the work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humor that the Dostoyevsky of “The House of the Dead” would have recognized and embraced.

At its root is a maddening ambiguity born of a system governed not by any recognizable rules of evidence or due process but by suspicion, paranoia and violence. Blindfolded, earmuffed and shackled, Slahi is rendered to a secret prison in Jordan (though he is supposed to have no idea where on the globe he is) and interviewed on arrival by two dim clerks straight out of a Beckett play:

“ ‘What have you done?’

“ ‘I’ve done nothing!’

“Both burst out in laughter. ‘Oh, very convenient! You have done nothing, but you are here!’ I thought, What crime should I say in order to satisfy them?”

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?”

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.

“ ‘Stop the [expletive] praying,’ he said loudly.”

Slahi begins to hallucinate, hear voices: Friends and family “visit” him, attempt to console him; he fears he is losing his mind. Throughout, in interrogation after interrogation, he is confronted with the “evidence” from bin al-Shibh. “Why should he lie to us?” the interrogators demand.

The answer was before them, as it is before us starkly on the page. Bin al-Shibh lies for the same reason Slahi lies: It is the only way to stop the pain. Desperate to confess to plots the details of which he doesn’t know, Slahi begs his interrogators to tell him what he was supposed to have done:

“ ‘And what was my evil plan?’

“ ‘Maybe not exactly to harm the U.S., but to attack the CN Tower in Toronto?’ he said. I was thinking, Is this guy crazy? I’ve never heard of such a tower.

“ ‘You realize if I admit to such a thing I have to involve other people! What if it turns out I was lying?’ I said.

“ ‘So what? We know your friends are bad, so if they get arrested, even if you lie about [redacted] it doesn’t matter, because they’re bad.’ ”

And so Slahi, brutalized, exhausted, clinging to sanity, begins to name names, describe plots, provide incriminating information about anyone mentioned, “even if I didn’t know him. Whenever I thought about the words ‘I don’t know’ I got nauseous, because I remembered the words of [redacted]: ‘All you have to say is “I don’t know, I don’t remember,” and we’ll [expletive] you!’ ”

In this way the vast and brutal American interrogation mechanism, stretching around the globe in an archipelago of black sites housing hundreds of detainees at the mercy of untold numbers of interrogators, transformed itself into an intricate machine for generating self-reinforcing fiction. The process, which has never been described more intimately or more convincingly, resembles nothing so much as a postmodern globalized version of the Salem witch trials: zealous inquisitors, untroubled by doubt, applying a relentless violence to conjure up a fantasy world born of the collective terrors of their own imaginations.

They are our terrors, too, of course. There will be no author tour for this book. Mohamedou Ould Slahi remains in Guantánamo. We are keeping him there. It has been almost five years since United States District Court Judge James Robertson granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition and ordered him released, but the government appealed and he remains imprisoned and incommunicado. In his absence, Larry Siems writes, Slahi’s book “has been edited twice: first by the United States government, which added more than 2,500 black-bar redactions censoring Mohamedou’s text, and then by me. Mohamedou was not able to participate in, or respond to, either one of these edits.” In these redactions, stubbornly absurd and carelessly stupid as many of them are, the dialogue of interrogator and prisoner goes on.

At Guantánamo, meantime, the ­charges of grand plots have one by one fallen away. What exactly is Slahi’s crime? Now, only that he joined Al Qaeda, which he never disputed, and remained a member, which he has always denied. At the end, as at the beginning, guilt is born of association: whom he knew, not what he can be shown to have done. “He reminded me,” Guantánamo’s former chief prosecutor, Morris D. Davis, told Siems in a 2013 interview, “of Forrest Gump.”

“There were a lot of noteworthy events in the history of Al Qaeda and terrorism,” Davis said, “and there was Slahi, lurking somewhere in the background. He was in Germany, Canada, different places that look suspicious, and that caused them to believe that he was a big fish, but then when they really invested the effort to look into it, that’s not where they came out. . . . Their conclusion was there’s a lot of smoke and no fire.”

How to distinguish smoke from fire when your hallowed premise is that your prisoner is a “smart-beyond-belief terrorist” and anything he says to the contrary is dismissed as lies? Rules of evidence, demands of due process: These are designed to separate justice — founded on real acts that can be proved — from suspicion and paranoia. When they are discarded, we plunge into Cheney’s world, where all is sacrificed to security, and suspicion and fear take the place of evidence of guilt. Our country tortured Slahi and thus made it impossible, as the prosecutor determined, to try him; fear and suspicion leave us unable still to follow the judge’s order and free him. It is easier on us to let him suffer indefinite detention. When the suffering of the untried and unconvicted becomes nothing more than collateral damage, America has crossed a gulf. The steps that took us there were largely secret, but thanks to this and other accounts we know about them now: We know where we came from, and we know where we are. We do not yet know how to get back.

GUANTÁNAMO DIARY

By Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Edited by Larry Siems

379 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $29.