Mourad Benchellali is a French citizen, who was captured by Pakistanis forces and detained in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps.
[7] Following the first three suicides at Guantanamo the New York Times published an op-ed by Benchellali, entitled "Detainees in despair".
In the op-ed, Benchellali described how he came to spend two months in an al Qaeda training camp: In the early summer of 2001, when I was 19, I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan on what I thought was a dream vacation.
For two months, I was there, trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.Benchellali said that his training didn't make him an enemy of the United States, that as soon as his course was finished he made his way to the Pakistan border, so he could fly back to France.
Benchellali concluded his op-ed with:[7] I believe that a small number of the detainees at Guantánamo are guilty of criminal acts, but as analysis of the military's documents on the prisoners has shown, there is no evidence that most of the 465 or so men there have committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies.
[6] In February 2014, Benchellali, and his friend Sassi, sought a subpoena to compel testimony from Geoffrey D. Miller, the former Commandant of the Guantanamo camp.
[11][12] The pair's lawyers argued that Miller was responsible for ordering the unauthorized use of interrogation techniques which violated international agreements, and constituted war crimes.