Morris Davis

Morris Davis was chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions in 2005. His later account of the effort to develop a charge against Mohamedou Ould Slahi captures a central contradiction in the case: suspicion accumulated around Slahi’s connections and travels, but investigators struggled to turn that suspicion into evidence of a chargeable offense.

Role in the Slahi case

Davis’s account concerns a late attempt to find a basis for charging Slahi, nearly two years after Stuart Couch withdrew from the case. By then, Davis said, Slahi had largely faded from the prosecution’s immediate attention. The effort arose because another detainee, held in a neighboring hut after prolonged solitary confinement and torture, would not accept a plea bargain unless Slahi received a comparable offer. Prosecutors therefore had to find something they could charge Slahi with as part of constructing a similar deal.

The difficulty was not merely how to formulate an offer. Davis recalled that the prosecution was having real trouble finding an offense to support it. His description places the proposed charge within the practical demands of a plea negotiation, rather than presenting it as the result of newly uncovered evidence against Slahi.

Suspicion and the evidence

Davis remembered that, when Slahi first came into custody, officials suspected they had caught a major figure. Slahi had been in Germany and Canada and appeared, in Davis’s retrospective account, to be present in the background of several notable episodes in the history of al-Qaeda and terrorism. Those associations helped create the impression that he was a “big fish.” Davis said that closer investigation did not support that initial impression.

At a large interagency meeting in early 2007, Davis recalled, representatives of the CIA, FBI, U.S. Department of Defense, and U.S. Department of Justice heard from investigators who had worked on the Slahi case. Their conclusion, as Davis remembered it, was that there was “a lot of smoke and no fire.” The phrase conveys the gap between the conspicuous pattern of associations that had attracted suspicion and the investigators’ inability to substantiate it as a prosecutable case.

Retrospective significance

Davis’s recollection is significant because it comes from a senior prosecutor describing the difficulty of finding a charge, rather than from Slahi or his defense team. It does not by itself establish a judicial finding or settle every allegation against Slahi; it does show that, in Davis’s account, the case’s apparent scale diminished when investigators examined it closely. The attempted plea arrangement and the later interagency assessment thus point in the same direction: Slahi’s perceived importance persisted longer than the evidence prosecutors could identify to support a charge.