Stuart Couch

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian businessman and alleged liaison between Islamic radicals in Hamburg and Osama bin Laden with foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot (see 1999 and January-April 2000), is arrested in Mauritania by secret police, his family says. By December, he will be in US custody. He will later be housed at a secret CIA facility within Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. [Washington Post, 12/17/2004] In 2007, it will be reported that one of Slahi’s prosecutors, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, has refused to continue to prosecute Slahi after learning details of Slahi’s tortures at Guantanamo. [Wall Street Journal, 3/31/2007] The Nation will later report, “Aside from the beatings, waterboarding, stress positions, and sexual degradation that have been the norm at Guantanamo, Slahi was taunted with details of his mother’s incarceration and rape in an elaborate hoax by an officer who claimed to be representing the White House.” While Couch believes Slahi is a high-level al-Qaeda operative, he also believes the much of the evidence against him is not credible because of the methods used to obtain it. [Nation, 4/4/2007]