“When the Military sets itself in motion…”

“When the Military sets itself in motion…” is a proverb Mohamedou Ould Slahi recalls in Guantánamo Diary as he considers the stories told by other detainees. Its force lies in the distance it names: military action can move quickly, while truth arrives late, obscured by detention, interrogation, and competing accounts of what happened.

The Proverb and Its Context

Slahi gives the saying first in German: “Wenn das Militar sich bewegt, bleibt die Wahrheit auf der Strecke.” He then renders it in English: “When the Military sets itself in motion, the truth is too slow to keep up, so it stays behind.” The proverb follows a passage about fellow detainees’ accounts of capture and mistreatment. Their stories accumulated until, as Slahi writes, each one seemed to make him forget the last. He could not decide whose story was saddest; other detainees, meanwhile, agreed that his was the saddest. The proverb gathers this uncertainty into a single image: when military force sets events in motion, a reliable account struggles to keep pace.

A Personal History of Delayed Answers

The saying resonates with Slahi’s own sequence of detention and release. In January 2000, after he returned to Mauritania, he was detained in Senegal and again by Mauritanian authorities, then questioned by American FBI agents about the Millennium Plot. Authorities concluded there was no basis to believe he was involved, and released him on February 19. After another detention and questioning in September 2001, Mauritanian authorities publicly affirmed his innocence. On November 28, however, a CIA rendition plane took him to a prison in Amman, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. The proverb does not itself explain that reversal; placed alongside the chronology, it underscores the gap between earlier findings and the renewed, secretive course of his detention.

Institutions, Secrecy, and the Struggle to Establish Facts

The phrase also finds an institutional echo in the account of Slahi’s transfer into U.S. military custody. A CIA inspector general report stated that the agency had an interest in the disposition of detainees who, if not kept isolated, might reveal information about the circumstances of their detention. The report’s concern links the management of detainees to the control of what could become known about their treatment. This does not establish what Slahi’s interrogators learned or why he was transferred; it does show why the circumstances surrounding detention could remain difficult to recover.

At Guantánamo, disagreements over interrogation methods further complicated the search for reliable information. In 2002, military interrogators established a Special Projects Team and developed a written plan for the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, over objections from FBI and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents. The plan incorporated techniques the CIA had used in its secret prison system, and, after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized it, was carried out in a fifty-day interrogation campaign. The memoir places this institutional conflict alongside the appearance of a link between Slahi and the September 11 hijackers. The proverb’s warning is therefore not simply that truth takes time: the methods used to obtain information, and the institutions controlling its circulation, shape what can be known.

Retrospective Significance

The saying remains pertinent when Slahi’s detention is later considered in court. In 2010, Judge James Robertson granted his habeas corpus petition and ordered his release; the appeals court subsequently reversed that order and sent the case back for rehearing under a looser standard for determining whether a detainee was part of al-Qaeda. The court emphasized that the government had not criminally indicted Slahi for providing material support to terrorists and was not seeking to detain him on the ground that he aided the September 11 attacks. This legal history does not settle every question raised by the memoir, but it makes the proverb’s distinction between events and knowledge especially sharp: detention can proceed while the evidentiary basis and its interpretation remain contested. As a remembered line among stories of capture, isolation, and official judgment, the expression becomes a compact account of the book’s central problem of truth arriving after power has already acted.