This entry is about the kindest, most patient man that America has ever tortured, Mohamedou Ould Slahi.[1]

Mohamedou’s lead attorney Nancy Hollander recalls her team’s introduction to their client in 2005. “And our first visit was perhaps the one that sticks in my head the most. It was our very first visit to Guantánamo for both of us. We walked into the hut. The guards opened the door, and there was Mohamedou. And he stood up, and he smiled, and he put his arms out as though to walk up to embrace us. But he didn’t move. And we stood there for a moment, and then I realized, to my horror, that he was chained to the floor, with chains around his ankle, and couldn’t move. So he could just stand there and smile. And we walked into his embrace, and he hugged us. I think we were the first people he had hugged in several years.”

This was the way that a gentle man greeted his representatives for the first time. This was after years of “special interrogation” that our highest leaders prescribed for a man who has never been charged with any crime. This was after Mohamedou was spirited away from his family—a large family that depended on him for everything. They were led to believe that Mohamedou was jailed in his home country, Mauritania[2]. But under secret rendition, our government flew him to torture sites in Jordan and in Afghanistan and, finally, to the pit known as GTMO. Mohamedou had been deprived of sleep for months on end (a tactic that the torturers called “the frequent flyer plan”), and terrified by dogs in his tiny cell, kept naked and abused, water-boarded, and nearly frozen to death. But to Mohamedou, the greatest insult may have been the treatment for which one of his interrogators told him, “I know I can go to hell for what I do to you."

Nancy Hollander explained why that guard worried for his immortal soul: “One of the things on the list of special interrogation techniques that the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, approved specifically for Mohamedou was that he not be allowed to pray.”

Imagine—you are an employee of the United States of America, and you are told that part of your duty is to prevent a man from praying.

Despite all this, Mohamedou greeted these strangers with the sublime graciousness of a long-lost friend who welcomed his company with smiling eyes and wanted them to sit down and join him for a cup of hot tea—if only he were not chained to the floor.

Examine this African man’s story. Lay it alongside our study of African-American history. What comparisons come to your mind? What conclusions do you reach about our nation’s policy, those who write the policy and those who are paid to carry out the policy?

On March 22, 2010, US Judge James Robertson found no grounds for the detention of Mohamedou Ould Slahi--none. The judge ordered his release. The US government will not comply.

Editor and friend, Larry Siems said, “What’s remarkable about Mohamedou’s book is that we have a voice that’s come out of this void, and that it’s such a remarkable, humane and, I think, ultimately, forgiving voice. It’s a wonder.”

Thanks to his courage and wisdom, we may read Mohamedou’s story in his memoir Guantánamo Diary.[3] Thanks, also, to Nancy Hollander and Larry Siems for supporting this man who answers dire travail with intrepid grace.[4]

Mohamedou Ould Slahi is one exceptional African. Let us restore him to his family—with all speed, let him go home.

Image: Mohamedou Ould Slahi (photo file found online at Wikipedia[5]; author: International Committee of the Red Cross; shared in accordance with GNU Free Documentation License)

[1] Resides GTMO, author of Guantánamo Diary, edited by Larry Siems, Little, Brown and Company, 2015

[2] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritania a country in the Maghreb region of western North Africa

[3] See: http://guantanamodiary.com/ One man’s account of rendition, torture and detention without charge at the hands of the US

[4] Hear Mohamedou’s editor Larry Siems, attorney Nancy Hollander, and former prosecutor Col. Morris Davis on “Democracy Now!”: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/22/inside_the_us_torture_chambers_prisoners

[5] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamedou_Ould_Slahi