http://www.lawweekly.org/?module=displaystory&story_id=2377&edition_id=112&format=html“You’ve got to know the basic tools of navigation,” explained Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, prefacing his lecture in Caplin Pavilion on Tuesday, February 16, which addressed his time as a military prosecutor for the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Couch, who is also a Marine Corps pilot and Boy Scout, broke his tools into three parts: terrain, map, and compass. He uses each as a metaphor for life events, education, and morality respectively. With regard to the last, he draws heavily on his Christian faith as an Anglican, but all three informed his work following September 11, 2001. The next four years saw him go from private practice to military volunteer, where he rose to become a chief prosecutor of top terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, before ultimately resigning that post over reservations about their treatment. He now serves as a judge on the Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals.
Couch met Slahi at the Guantanamo facility in August 2003. Slahi was suspected of being a member of al-Qaeda’s “Hamburg Cell.” Many of the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were connected to that cell, including Mohamed Atta, the operational leader and pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, which was the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.
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A sudden spike in the number of reports produced—at one point up to as many as half a dozen per day—raised further concern. “In the fall of 2003, something caused Slahi to start singing like a canary,” recalled Couch.
But intelligence representatives offered scant details, saying only that Slahi was in the custody of the CIA and had been put on a “special projects” interrogation plan....
A chance encounter during a trip to Guantanamo proved to be a turning point for Couch. Overhearing very loud heavy-metal music for which he has a particular aversion, he determined to make his presence known to the young Marines he assumed were just horsing around.
He found the source, but, to his surprise, the room contained no Marines. Lit only by a strobe light and vibrating from the blare of the deafening music, a detainee cowered in a back corner as he prayed.The scene reminded him of training he had had to endure before earning his Marine pilot’s wings. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, as he described, is a weeklong course designed to mimic confinement behind enemy lines in places such as Vietnam and North Korea. “It’s the only training in the United States that actually sanctions the beating of American servicemen as part of the simulation,” recalled Couch. (This fact has actually been used to justify similar practices with regard to detainees.)
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Soon a more complete picture of the tactics employed against Slahi began to emerge. “My agent managed to steal stuff right out from under the table of the intelligence community. And they had a cow when they found out,” said Couch. But through these efforts he learned much about Slahi’s interrogations. Slahi was part of “operation sandman” and, as a “frequent flyer” in this program, was moved every couple hours to cause sleep deprivation. His interrogators had learned about fertility issues he had with his wife, so they created a “sex room” plastered with pictures of pregnant women and other sexual subjects sensitive to him. Role-playing interrogators told him of dreams they had of him in a casket being buried at Guantanamo.
They showed him faked memoranda from the White House indicating his mother might be brought there and forced to fend for herself among the all-male prison population. Couch alluded to one other extremely unsavory technique employed with Slahi but could not discuss it, since it remains classified.Then, one Sunday in church, Couch decided he had to take decisive action. The Falls Church, Virginia, Episcopal parish he attends conducted a baptism that day, and part of the ceremony required the congregation to answer affirmatively to a charge from the Book of Common Prayer about upholding the dignity of human life.
Couch recalled, “It was like God was putting his thumb on me as if to ask, ‘You’re going to come in here and do the liturgy, but what about the other six days of the week?’” At that point Couch determined he “had read enough, seen enough, heard enough, and had enough.”He soon met with his superior and requested to be taken off the Slahi case.
Legally, it was his conclusion that Slahi’s treatment met the broad international definition of torture under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Congress had ratified and adopted as domestic law in 1994. The corresponding federal statute specifically prohibits the actual or threatened use of “procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.” Debate continues as to whether the convention applies to military commissions, but its absolute bar in Article 15 against using statements made “as a result of torture . . . as evidence in any proceedings” was clear enough for Couch.
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