James Robertson

Judge James Robertson is the federal judge who heard Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s habeas corpus petition, granted it, and ordered Slahi’s release in March 2010. The appellate court later sent the case back for rehearing, leaving the order without a final effect on Slahi’s detention. Robertson’s significance in the account lies both in that consequential ruling and in the documentary record he made available: his order set out a timeline of Slahi’s detention and exposed a significant retreat in the government’s argument.

The Habeas Case

From August through December 2009, Robertson heard Slahi’s petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case followed the Supreme Court of the United States’ 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which recognized Guantánamo detainees’ right to challenge their detention through Habeas Corpus. Slahi had written his petition by hand in his cell at Camp Echo, five years before Robertson ruled on it. The long interval between the petition and its hearing underscores the constrained setting in which Slahi sought judicial review: he remained in military detention while attempting to contest the government’s authority to hold him.

The book does not supply a detailed account of the hearing or a complete description of Robertson’s legal reasoning. It does establish that he considered the petition and, on March 22, 2010, granted it and ordered Slahi released. The distinction between what the record establishes and what it leaves unavailable matters here. Robertson’s decision was a concrete judicial outcome, but the account does not treat it as a complete public explanation of every issue he considered.

The Order as a Record

A timeline included in Robertson’s order traces Slahi’s early detentions. It records that in January 2000 Slahi flew from Canada to Senegal, where his brothers met him; the brothers were then seized by authorities and questioned about the Millennium Plot. The timeline also records that an American came and took photographs, that Slahi was taken to Mauritania and questioned further by Mauritanian authorities, and that he was interrogated again in February. Some of the authorities’ identities remain redacted in the version described in the book. The order therefore serves not only as the outcome of a legal challenge but also as a compact official account of events that the surrounding narrative recounts at greater length.

A declassified, redacted version of the order later disclosed a change in the government’s position. The government had initially argued that Slahi could be detained under the theory that he had aided the September 11 attacks, but abandoned that argument, acknowledging that he probably did not know about the attacks. That disclosure narrowed what could responsibly be claimed about the basis for detention. It also showed why the order mattered beyond its release directive: it made part of the government’s own shifting case visible, while the redactions and the limits of the published record remained.

Ruling and Public Reaction

Robertson’s order arrived amid public commentary that had not been based on access to the judicial record. A newspaper editorial characterized Slahi as responsible for the deaths of thousands and urged the government to appeal, although the editorial board had not seen the order, the filings, or the hearing. The book sets that response beside the later disclosure that the government had dropped its claim that Slahi aided the September 11 attacks. The contrast is not simply between a judge and a newspaper: it is between a ruling reached through review of a case and confident public claims made without access to the material before the court.

The account describes Robertson as the one judge who had thoroughly reviewed Slahi’s case by that point. His decision to grant the petition thus stands as a legal judgment amid persistent uncertainty about the government’s grounds for detention. The order did not, however, resolve that uncertainty for the public or bring Slahi’s detention to an end. Its declassified form remained redacted, and the available text offered a partial view of both the proceedings and the claims at issue.

Appeal and Unresolved Outcome

On March 26, 2010, the government filed a notice of appeal. On November 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sent the case back to the district court for rehearing. The book describes the case as still pending at the time of its account. Robertson’s release order was therefore followed not by Slahi’s release, but by another stage of litigation and continued detention. At the book’s stated present, Slahi remained in Guantánamo, in the same cell where many of the events he recounts had taken place.

Robertson’s place in the narrative is consequently defined by both the force and the limits of judicial review. He granted the petition after hearing it, and his order supplied a timeline and revealed that the government had abandoned one of its theories. Yet the appellate remand left the case open, while Slahi remained imprisoned. The ruling marks a decisive legal intervention, not a settled ending: its promise of release and its unfinished procedural aftermath remain side by side.