Mohamedou Ould Slahi—James Robertson relationship

James Robertson’s relationship with Mohamedou Ould Slahi was judicial, but its consequences reached beyond a single ruling: after reviewing Slahi’s habeas corpus petition, Robertson ordered his release, only for the government to appeal and the case to return to district court. The sequence made Robertson the judge who had most fully examined the basis for Slahi’s detention, while leaving the promised release unrealized and the legal challenge unresolved.

The habeas case and its setting

The case followed a major change in the law governing detention at Guantánamo. In June 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that detainees there had the right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus. That ruling opened a route for Slahi to contest the government’s authority to hold him, after years in custody without release.

Slahi’s petition had a striking physical history: he handwrote it in his cell at Camp Echo, five years before Robertson granted it. Robertson heard the petition from August through December 2009 in the United States District Court. The hearing period placed the legal dispute before a judge able to consider the government’s grounds for detention rather than leaving those grounds solely within the executive branch’s account.

Ruling and appeal

On March 22, 2010, Robertson granted Slahi’s habeas petition and ordered his release. The ruling was a consequential judicial conclusion about the government’s case for continuing to detain him. It did not, however, result in Slahi’s departure from Guantánamo: four days later, the Obama administration filed a notice of appeal.

The public discussion surrounding the order initially unfolded without access to the judge’s reasoning. A newspaper editorial criticized the release decision before the order or the underlying court proceedings were available to its editors. Two weeks later, a declassified, redacted version of Robertson’s order was released. Its account of the government’s position included a significant qualification: the government had initially argued that Slahi could be detained under the theory that he had aided the September 11 attacks, but later abandoned that argument, acknowledging that he probably did not even know of the attacks. The disclosed point complicated public portrayals of Slahi as a major September 11 figure, even as the redactions limited what readers could see of the judicial record.

What the record clarified—and left open

The distinction between the allegations that first drew official attention to Slahi and later public descriptions of his case was central to the debate around Robertson’s decision. When FBI agents questioned Slahi in Mauritania in February 2000, and again a few weeks after the September 11 attacks, their focus was the Millennium Plot. Slahi later told an Administrative Review Board that Jordanian investigators had also been concerned with that plot. The available account therefore presents a shifting set of investigative and detention rationales, not a single, consistently stated basis for his confinement.

The order’s declassified footnote offered a specific correction to one strand of the government’s argument, but it did not make the broader case transparent. The order was redacted, and the newspaper’s earlier criticism had been formed without access to it. Robertson’s role consequently matters not as proof that every uncertainty had been settled, but because he had thoroughly reviewed the case before ordering Slahi released. The account describes him as the one judge who had done so, while also emphasizing that the public remained far from understanding the government’s case.

Remand and continuing detention

On November 5, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sent the habeas case back to the district court for rehearing. The appellate action did not produce Slahi’s release; the case remained pending. By the time described in the account, the gap between the order and its practical effect had widened: nine years in custody had become thirteen, and Slahi remained at Guantánamo, in the same cell where many of the events in his book had taken place.

Robertson’s decision thus occupies an unresolved place in Slahi’s story. It established that a federal judge, after hearing the petition, had ordered his release; the appeal and remand prevented that order from ending his detention. The relationship is defined by this sharp difference between judicial recognition and lived outcome: access to habeas review gave Slahi a forum, and Robertson’s ruling supplied a decisive result, but neither brought the continuing detention to a close.