Mohamedou Ould Slahi's habeas corpus petition

Mohamedou Ould Slahi's habeas corpus petition was a short handwritten challenge to his detention at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Dated March 3, 2005, it put his central claim and request for release on record in English, years before the public could read the much longer account he was writing in prison.

Filing and Form

Mohamedou Ould Slahi handwrote the petition on March 3, 2005. A contemporaneous note in his own handwriting identified him as detained at Guantánamo and stated that he was applying for a writ of habeas corpus. The surviving excerpt begins, “Hello. I, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, detained in GTMO under ISN #760, herewith apply for a writ of habeas corpus.” Its plain opening makes the filing at once a legal request and a first-person declaration of who was making it.

The petition was notably brief beside the 466-page memoir Mohamedou Ould Slahi later wrote by hand in his segregation cell in the summer and fall of 2005. The two writings served different purposes: the petition formally sought judicial review, while the memoir set out a broader account of his experiences. The manuscript was subsequently edited and subjected to more than 2,500 government redactions; those facts concern the book, not the petition itself.

Claim and Requested Remedy

In the handwritten note, Mohamedou Ould Slahi said that he had committed no crimes against the United States and had not been charged with crimes by the United States. He therefore requested immediate release. He also offered to provide further details about his case at future hearings, connecting the concise filing to the possibility of a fuller account in court.

The wording presents the petition as a direct challenge to detention without a stated criminal charge, not as a record of a hearing or a ruling. Its importance lies in the clear distinction it draws between being held and being charged, and in the remedy it asks the court to provide.

Relation to the Manuscript and Public Record

The petition was one of the handwritten English documents that gave readers access to Mohamedou Ould Slahi's own words while his memoir remained unavailable to them. The memoir, written later that year, was initially stamped SECRET and NOFORN and held in a secure facility. After years of litigation and negotiations, the manuscript was cleared for public release and reached the editor on a disk in the summer of 2012. The petition and the memoir thus entered the public record through different routes: one as a short legal application, the other as a censored and edited book.

The editor's notes describe efforts to read the book alongside public records, including declassified documents and government investigations, while distinguishing publicly supported information from conjecture about redacted passages. That distinction matters to the petition's place in the record: the note supplies a concrete, contemporaneous statement of Slahi's claim, but it does not by itself establish the truth of every allegation or resolve the legal case.

Legal Aftermath

In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Guantánamo detainees had a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus. Two years later, a federal judge granted Mohamedou Ould Slahi's petition and ordered his release. The United States government appealed, and the appeals court returned the petition to the district court for rehearing; the case was still pending when the manuscript was delivered to the editor in 2012.

The petition therefore marks the beginning of a legal effort whose eventual course remained unresolved in the account's publication history. Its request for immediate release was not itself the release order: the later ruling, appeal, and remand were separate steps. The contrast between the short handwritten application and the years of subsequent litigation gives the document its particular significance as both a specific legal filing and an early, direct assertion of Slahi's claim to challenge his confinement.