What do Al-Qaeda members think of light aircraft?

by philg

Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi contains a Jihadi’s view of light aircraft. Our tax dollars paid for him to fly from Senegal to Mauritania to Jordan to Afghanistan to Cuba. Here are Mr. Slahi’s notes on the trip from Senegal to Mauritania:

But it didn’t take very long to realize I had my own plane to myself. As soon as the guy returned with my stamped passport, all five of us stepped toward the runway, where a very small white plane was already running its engines.

The plane was as small as it could be. We were four, and barely managed to squeeze ourselves inside the butterfly with heads down and backs bent. The pilot had the most comfortable place. She was a French lady, you could tell from her accent. She was very talkative, and rather on the older side, skinny and blond.

The bigger guard and I squeezed ourselves, knees-on-faces, in the back seat, facing the inspector, who had a little better seat in front of us. The plane was obviously overloaded.

I heard her at one point telling him that the trip was only 300 miles, and would take between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on the wind direction. That sounded so medieval.

I hate traveling in small planes because they’re shaky and I always think the wind is going to blow the plane away.

My company seemed to have a good time checking the weather and enjoying the beach we had been flying along the whole time. I don’t think that the plane had any type of navigation technologies because the pilot kept a ridiculously low altitude and oriented us with the beach.

The account of the trip from Mauritania to Jordan is hard to reconcile with geography. This is a 2600-mile (nautical) trip so a fuel stop makes sense, but not in Cyprus, which is about the same distance from Mauritania as Jordan. And it certainly wouldn’t make sense to make a fuel stop between Cyprus and Amman, which is what Slahi describes. Maybe this is why the U.S. government has been interrogating him for 15 years. There is no way to get a straight story out of him! (The one area where Slahi is consistent and clear is in assigning blame for terrorism: “The whole problem of terrorism was caused by the aggression of Israel against Palestinian civilians, and the fact that the U.S. is backing the Israeli government in its mischiefs.”)