Stuart Couch

Stuart Couch, a Marine lieutenant colonel and prosecutor at Guantánamo, entered Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case hoping to prosecute people connected to the September 11 attacks. What he learned about the interrogation that produced the government’s evidence changed his view of the case: records showed that Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s treatment had followed a planned course of coercion, and Couch ultimately refused to continue toward trial. His account traces a shift from prosecutorial purpose to a refusal to rely on evidence he believed had been obtained through torture.

Background and prosecutorial purpose

Couch was assigned Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case in the fall of 2003. His personal connection to the September 11 attacks was close: Michael Horrocks, his friend and fellow Marine refueling-tanker pilot, had been the copilot on the United Airlines flight used to bring down the World Trade Center’s South Tower. The attacks had brought Couch back to active service. When he joined the prosecution team for the Guantánamo military commissions, he hoped to pursue those responsible for attacking the United States.

That purpose shaped the stakes of the intelligence reports placed before him. One set concerned Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whose reports Couch later recalled did not say that Mohamedou Ould Slahi had directed the men to join a plan to attack the United States. Rather, the account as Couch remembered it described Mohamedou Ould Slahi as indicating where training could be found. In the government’s habeas proceedings, the allegation was that this recommendation made him an al-Qaeda recruiter; Judge James Robertson found that the record established lodging for three men for one night in Germany, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and discussion of jihad and Afghanistan. The distinction between facilitating access to training and directing an attack mattered to the case Couch had been assigned to build.

Signs of a compromised interrogation

Couch soon received batches of intelligence reports drawn from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo interrogation, which military interrogators were presenting as their most successful. The reports recorded information but did not explain the circumstances in which it had been obtained. Couch had been told that Mohamedou Ould Slahi was on a special project. On his first visit to the base, he glimpsed another prisoner shackled in an interrogation booth while a strobe light flashed and heavy metal music played. The scene raised his suspicions; he also recognized the techniques from a week of training he had endured as a Marine pilot preparing for capture and torture.

Those suspicions gained documentary support when a Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigator working with Couch obtained access to military interrogators’ files. The files included daily memoranda by the Special Projects Team, detailing both what was said during sessions and how information had been extracted. Though the records remained classified, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice summarized them in reports. Their accounts described a special interrogation conducted under a second, carefully developed plan and broadly consistent with the account in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s diary.

Two documents made the significance of the records especially clear to Couch. One was a fictitious State Department letter presented to Mohamedou Ould Slahi in August 2003. It falsely said that his mother had been detained and might be transferred to Guantánamo if she did not cooperate, exploiting the importance of their relationship. The other was an October 17, 2003, email exchange between an interrogator and a military psychiatrist. The interrogator reported that Mohamedou Ould Slahi was hearing voices and wondered whether the lack of daylight and human contact might be responsible. The psychiatrist replied that sensory deprivation could cause hallucinations. Taken together, the documents linked the interrogation environment to a deterioration that the interrogators themselves had noticed.

The public accounts also corroborated elements of the planned isolation described in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s diary. The interrogation plan called for a staged transfer by watercraft, intended to make him believe he had been taken away from the island. It then directed that he be held in an isolated hut at Camp Echo, altered to minimize outside stimulation. The original proposal for a helicopter transfer was abandoned as logistically difficult; on August 25, 2003, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was instead taken from Camp Delta on a disorienting boat ride. These details helped Couch understand that the interrogation was not simply a series of disputed exchanges: its setting and methods had been designed in advance.

Ethical break and withdrawal

In a 2009 interview, Couch described reaching his decision after months of dealing with the documents and the questions they raised. During a church service that included a baptism, the congregation affirmed the dignity of every human being and the pursuit of peace and justice. Couch said that, at that moment, continuing the prosecution with this kind of evidence became incompatible with those commitments. He understood that he had to stop treating the case as a matter of standing aside from the methods used to obtain its evidence. He withdrew from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case and would not proceed with an effort to try him before a military commission.

His departure did not lead to a charge sheet or an appointed military commission defense attorney for Mohamedou Ould Slahi; the account reports no further sustained effort to prepare a prosecution. Couch’s role thus ended not with a trial, but with a refusal to bring one forward on the available basis. The records that prompted his decision were later summarized in official investigations, while the government’s redactions and the continuing limits on access to the unredacted material left some aspects beyond public confirmation. The editor’s annotations to the diary present plausible readings of redacted passages from public records and close reading, but expressly do not claim to reconstruct the concealed text. Couch’s account is consequential within that evidentiary landscape because it connects an intended prosecution to the documents that caused its prosecutor to withdraw.

What the intelligence did and did not establish

Couch later emphasized the difference between Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s knowledge of people associated with al-Qaeda and evidence that he had taken part in an attack. In Couch’s assessment, the intelligence reports did not implicate Mohamedou Ould Slahi in an overt act forming part of a conspiracy to attack the United States on September 11. His knowledge of names and connections could appear incriminating when detached from its context, but Couch recalled that many of those people were already known to intelligence services when the questioning took place. The reports, he suggested, showed familiarity with a network more clearly than participation in a plot.

The flow of information to the prosecution added to the uncertainty. Although the Central Intelligence Agency had held Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Jordan for months, Couch said the agency showed him no intelligence reports of its own; most of the reports it shared came from the Guantánamo interrogation. He understood that the government was contemplating a capital case and that evidence linking Mohamedou Ould Slahi to September 11 would have made the death penalty a possible objective. Yet the material available to him did not supply the incriminating connection that such a prosecution required. Nor did the account establish that the harsh interrogation had produced reliable proof of terrorist activity: Mohamedou Ould Slahi had told the Administrative Review Board that he manufactured confessions under torture, while the intelligence reports passed along by interrogators did not, in Couch’s reading, show his participation in an attack.

Narrative significance

Couch’s trajectory turns on a reversal in the meaning of the evidence. He began as a prosecutor whose return to service was bound to the attacks and whose assignment offered a route toward accountability. As he examined the source of the intelligence, however, the methods used to obtain it became central to whether the case could be pursued at all. His withdrawal does not resolve every question about Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s history; it establishes the boundary Couch drew between seeking a prosecution and proceeding with evidence he believed was tainted by torture. In the narrative, his decision makes the integrity of the process—not merely the volume of intelligence—the measure of whether a case can stand.