Habeas Corpus

Habeas Corpus is the procedure that allowed Mohamedou Ould Slahi to ask a federal court to examine the basis for his detention at Guantánamo. His handwritten petition turned a question repeatedly posed in interrogation into a legal demand for an answer: why was he being held? The case brought that demand before a judge, resulted in an order for release, and was then sent back for rehearing on appeal. Its course makes the remedy’s importance plain without making its promise absolute: judicial review became possible, but release did not follow immediately and the litigation remained pending.

The Remedy and the Detention

Habeas Corpus gives a detained person a means to challenge the legal grounds for confinement before a court. In Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case, the procedure mattered because he had spent years in United States custody without criminal charges being brought against him. In his account of the detention, the United States’ post-September 11 operations were not ordinary criminal proceedings: he described questioning in Mauritania, transfer to Jordan, subsequent detention at Bagram Air Base, and transfer to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The legal question raised by his petition was not simply whether interrogators had questioned him or whether officials suspected him. It was whether the government had a sufficient legal basis to continue holding him.

The distinction between a government’s account of suspicion and a court’s review of the authority to detain is central to the procedure’s role here. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s imprisonment began amid the broader detention system established after the September 11 attacks. A congressional resolution authorized the use of force against those responsible for, or connected to, the attacks, while Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account characterized the subsequent secret detention operations as lacking a legal basis. Habeas Corpus provided a route for testing his individual detention in court rather than leaving the question solely to the agencies holding him.

A Petition in His Own Hand

On March 3, 2005, Mohamedou Ould Slahi handwrote his petition for a writ of Habeas Corpus. A short handwritten application from the same date stated that he was detained at Guantánamo, had not been charged with crimes by the United States, and sought immediate release. Its plainness contrasts with the formal name of the remedy. Mohamedou Ould Slahi later explained that he was not a lawyer and that the legal phrase had not been familiar to him; in ordinary terms, he wanted to know why he was being locked up and what his crime was.

The petition followed years of interrogation and deprivation of liberty. In an exchange recounted in the manuscript, Mohamedou Ould Slahi told interrogators that he would not continue cooperating without an answer about why he was detained. He had initially asked for an explanation in everyday language; later, his lawyers helped him identify the formal legal procedure through which that question could be put to a court. The handwritten filing therefore records both a practical demand for reasons and a transition from interrogation-room requests to judicial process.

The same conditions that made the petition important also shaped its setting. Mohamedou Ould Slahi wrote it while confined at Guantánamo, and he wrote the 466 pages that became his book in a segregation cell there during the summer of 2005. The petition was not a judgment, and writing it did not itself end his confinement. It was a request that the government’s authority to hold him be examined through a legal proceeding.

The Right to Seek Judicial Review

On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled by a 5–4 vote in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantánamo detainees had a right to challenge their detention through Habeas Corpus. The decision established a route to judicial review for detainees held at the base. It did not, by itself, decide the merits of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case or order his release; his individual petition still had to be heard and assessed.

That distinction became concrete in the proceedings that followed. From August through December 2009, U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson heard Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s petition. The hearing placed the government’s basis for detention before a federal judge. By the time the case was litigated, the government was not arguing that Mohamedou Ould Slahi was a major al-Qaeda figure or had taken part in an al-Qaeda plan or attack. The government’s position, as described in the subsequent appellate review, was instead that he had been part of al-Qaeda through his oath of allegiance, associations, and assistance to the organization and its members. The legal dispute thus concerned the significance and sufficiency of the alleged relationship, not simply a claim that he had personally carried out an attack.

The government had also initially argued that Mohamedou Ould Slahi could be detained under a theory that he aided the September 11 attacks. It later abandoned that theory, acknowledging that he probably did not know of the attacks. That change matters to the history of the petition because it separates a public image of direct involvement in September 11 from the grounds the government ultimately relied on in court. Habeas review made those grounds consequential as legal arguments to be examined, rather than allowing a label or allegation to stand in for a judicial determination.

Release Ordered, Case Returned

On March 22, 2010, Judge Robertson granted Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s petition and ordered his release. The decision came five years after the handwritten filing and followed the 2008 recognition that Guantánamo detainees could challenge their detention through Habeas Corpus. The ruling was a decisive result in the district court: the petition had moved from a handwritten demand to an order that the government release him.

The order did not produce immediate freedom. On March 26, the government filed a notice of appeal. On November 5, 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sent the case back to the district court for rehearing. The return for rehearing changed the status of the district court victory: the release order had been made, but the case was again unresolved. As the account accompanying the manuscript later noted, the case remained pending.

The sequence distinguishes access to Habeas Corpus from a final, uninterrupted remedy. The Supreme Court’s ruling opened the courthouse door; Judge Robertson’s decision granted the petition; the appeal then prevented that decision from settling the case. The procedure provided a forum and produced a release order, but its practical effect remained subject to further proceedings. The account also records that, when the manuscript reached its editor in 2012, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was still at Guantánamo, years after the district court had ordered his release.

Evidence, Voice, and the Unanswered Question

The petition’s significance extends beyond its procedural milestones because it asks the reader to distinguish what was alleged from what was established. In 2005, Mohamedou Ould Slahi stated that he had committed no crimes against the United States and had not been charged. Later, the government’s litigation position focused on whether his past oath, associations, and assistance made him detainable as part of al-Qaeda. The hearing and ruling mattered because the government had to present a basis for continued detention to a judge; the record did not reduce that question to the most dramatic public accusations made about him.

The wider account also emphasizes that the evidence available to outsiders was incomplete. Government redactions obscured parts of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s manuscript, and records of interrogation were classified. Investigative files later described in public reports included detailed memoranda about interrogation sessions and the methods used to obtain information. The manuscript’s editor explains that annotations drew on the text’s context and publicly available materials, while declining to reconstruct redacted passages or claim access to classified content. This caution is pertinent to the legal story: a petition calls for review, but the public account of what a court and the government considered can remain partial.

Habeas Corpus therefore appears in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story as both a formal legal mechanism and a demand for an intelligible reason for confinement. The handwritten petition gave that demand a recognized form; the Supreme Court’s ruling made the challenge available to detainees at Guantánamo; and Judge Robertson’s order demonstrated that the court could grant relief. The appeal and rehearing, however, left the central question unsettled in practice. The petition succeeded in bringing detention under judicial scrutiny, yet the proceedings did not quickly resolve the confinement it challenged.