Ex-Guantanamo prisoner sues Canadian authorities over role in his detention

A former prisoner at the United States’ infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government for its alleged role in his detention.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years at the prison without trial. The 51-year-old says Ottawa relayed false information about him when he was a permanent resident in Montreal in 1999, after extracting forcible confessions from him that incriminated the Mauritanian in an alleged plot “to bomb Los Angeles.”

The reported misinformation brought about his arrest in 2001 in Mauritania, from which he was forced to experience a “world tour of torture and humiliation” that saw him being transferred to Jordan, Afghanistan, and then Guantanamo before he was released in 2016, AFP reported, citing the contents of his lawsuit.

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Slahi was incarcerated in Guantanamo in 2002. According to his lawsuit, his period of imprisonment there featured "physical beatings, sleep deprivation, forced standing, incessant noise, sexual assault, mock assassination, death threats, religious humiliation, and more."

"Slahi's detention and maltreatment were prolonged because the receipt and use of forced confessions by Canadian authorities validated the continued torture and detention," his lawyers said in the complaint.

Slahi is suing the Canadian government for a compensation fee amounting to 35 million Canadian dollars (USD28 million).

His story was a best-selling book that was adapted for the screen. The biopic, which was titled The Mauritanian accurately depicts the extreme conditions on the American base.

Guantanamo: Extraordinary rendition, torture, eternal detention

Guantanamo, which at its peak held over 700 inmates, has been synonymous with human rights abuses perpetrated by the US government in the name of the war on terrorism.

In early January 2022, a group of US experts strongly urged the government to act on its promise to close down its detention center at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, calling the facility’s 2002-present period of operation “an ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations."

The demand came in a statement released by more than a dozen independent UN human rights experts, who voiced outrage that the military prison was still in operation two decades after being set up under Washington’s self-proclaimed “war on terror” campaign.

UN experts say after 20 years of running 'ugly' Guantanamo prison, US must close it down

UN experts strongly urge the US to act on its promise to close down its detention center at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.

"Twenty years of practicing arbitrary detention without trial accompanied by torture or ill-treatment is simply unacceptable for any government, particularly a government which has a stated claim to protecting human rights," the UN experts said.

In the past 20 years, the ill-famed prison has come to be known as the symbol of US human rights abuses. Many detainees – mostly Muslim men – were tortured or held for years without charges.

Washington’s promises of closing down the site go back to the first tenure of former President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2013. Obama had made the closing of Guantanamo one of his top priorities and issued an executive order to do so soon after taking office in 2009. However, he failed to achieve that goal by the end of his second term in face of stiff opposition in Congress. His successor, Donald Trump, rescinded Obama’s order to close Guantanamo.

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Majid Khan details being subjected to various forms of torture, including waterboarding, forced feedings and other physical and sexual abuse.

On January 11, 2022, US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar said that day, which marked 20 years since the opening of Guantanamo Bay, should be "a day to reflect and to act," urging Americans to build pressure on President Joe Biden to finally put an end to the “lawlessness and cruelty” of the offshore military prison.

"I reflect on what scores of men lost when the United States tortured them, systematically dismantling their identity and humanity,” Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, wrote in an op-ed published in Teen Vogue.

“I reflect on what the families of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks lost — any possibility of fair and impartial justice — when the United States decided to trade away decency and the rule of law for torture and indefinite detention. And I reflect on our refusal to hold anyone meaningfully accountable for these acts," the Muslim lawmaker said.

Close Guantanamo and end 20 years of ‘lawlessness and cruelty’: US Muslim lawmaker

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar urges Americans to put pressure on President Joe Biden to put an end to the “lawlessness and cruelty” of the Guantanamo prison 20 years after it was established.

Opened in the wake of the September 11, 2011 attacks, Guantanamo has held almost 780 men over two decades. Many had been abducted and tortured in secret US-run prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo to begin their indefinite detention there. Very few have ever been charged with a crime, and none given a fair trial.

Many detainees were subject to psychological and physical abuse -- including waterboarding, beating, exposure to deafening noise, and sleep and food deprivation-- as part of their "enhanced interrogation," the accounts of which were gradually leaked to the outside world by the few lawyers who visited the prison and the inmates who have since been released.

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