Plea to Pres Obama to let Mohamedou Slahi go home. [View all]
Article by: Jon Wiener in the February 23, 2015 edition of The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/article/197137/why-did-it-take-10-years-publish-diary-guantanamo-detainee
Mohamedou is a 44-year-old man from Mauritania. He went to Afghanistan as a young man to join the fight against the communists there. To do that, he trained at an Al Qaeda camp and pledged loyalty to Al Qaeda. He has said repeatedly that he broke all ties with them after the communist government there collapsed in 1992.
In 2001, he was at his mother’s house in Mauritania and got a call from the police. He turned himself in—and his family has never seen him again. He was taken by the United States to Jordan, where he was detained for eight months. Then he was taken to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, then finally to Guantánamo in August 2002. He’s been there ever since. Originally, the United States thought he was a suspect in the millennium bombing conspiracy to blow up LAX. The government concluded that Mohamedou had nothing to do with that. Then they accused him of being a recruiter of pilots for the 9/11 attack. They then figured out that he probably didn’t even know about 9/11. He won his petition for habeas corpus in 2010 when a judge ordered him released, but the Obama administration has appealed, so that’s where he is today.
Sign the ACLU petition to free Mohamedou Slahi at aclu.org/secure/free-slahi.
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