Freedom Close for Guantánamo Diary Author Mohamedou Slahi
by Larry Siems / July 22, 2016 / No comments
Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantánamo Bay for nearly 14 years. Image via: Wikimedia Commons.
On Wednesday, July 22, 2016, 5,386 days after he left his home in Nouakchatt, Mauritania and was disappeared, and just two weeks short of 14 years since he was delivered into the dark hole of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Mohamedou Ould Slahi finally got some good news. Teresa Duncan, a member of his extraordinary pro-bono civilian legal team, and two military officers who served as his “personal representatives” at his recent hearing before GTMO’s Periodic Review Board, handed him the review board’s decision — a determination that detaining Mohamedou “is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”
The decision, so long overdue, means that the author of Guantánamo Diary is eligible to be released. We do not know yet if he will be allowed to return to his family in Mauritania or if he will be transferred to a third country, and we do not yet know when the transfer will occur. A Congressionally-mandated 30-day notification requirement means it will be at least a month, and it could well be some weeks or even months beyond that before Mohamedou is freed.
So we are not entirely out of the woods yet. Sampsonia Way readers are encouraged to add their names to this ACLU petition to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter asking that Mohamedou is in fact released, in accordance with the Periodic Review Board’s decision, without undue delays.
