In his first state of the union this week, Donald J. Trump made good on his campaign promises

to rescind his predecessor's order to close Guantanamo Bay and instead, quote,

fill it with bad dudes.

I just signed, prior to walking in, an order directing Secretary Mattis, to re-examine our

military detention policy, and to keep open the detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay.

The prison camp was first established in 2002, and for many years, lawyers representing the inmates

and journalists trying to report on them were kept in the dark about Gitmo operations.

But in 2015, the world did get a peek inside the prison with the publication of Guantanamo

Diary, the heavily redacted

account of interrogation, imprisonment, and torture written by inmate Muhammadu Utslaahi.

A 29-year-old Mauritanian engineer, Slahi was first detained in the year 2000 for his supposed

connections to the Millennium Bomb Plot.

Though quickly cleared in that matter, he was nonetheless kept in custody at the prison for 14 years.

Writer and human rights activist Larry Seams edited the book Mohamadu wrote while imprisoned.

A year later, Slahi was finally released, and he and Seams spent

months unredacting the manuscript. When I spoke to Seams last fall, I asked him to explain why

Slahi was originally suspected of trying to blow up L-A-X airport. He briefly moved to Canada in 1999, got there just about the time that this guy named

Ahmad Rassam was caught coming into the United States with a trunk load of explosives to try

to blow up LAX Airport.

And because they had gone to the same mosque, Mohamedu fell under suspicion.

He actually was living, working peacefully in Mauritania

through 9-11. After 9-11, the United States picked up Mohamedu, and then on November 20, 2001,

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