After the prayer session, Abu Hafs led me into his living room, and for four hours he detailed his falling-out with bin Laden, his whereabouts and activities in the aftermath of 9/11, and his relationship with Mauritanias President. The next day, Wood pressed him to talk about the episode, but Salahi wouldnt elaborate. As the result of a recent court ruling, Guantnamo detainees had access to legal representation, and so, during the next several months, Salahi drafted a diary of his detention as a series of harrowing letters to his lawyers, Nancy Hollander, Sylvia Royce, and Theresa Duncanfour hundred and sixty-six pages, sealed in envelopes and mailed to a classified facility near Washington, D.C. No guards or interrogators were allowed to read Salahis work. The first man off the bus had only one leg. Mitchell argued that, by reverse-engineering this program, interrogators could overwhelm whatever resistance training a detainee might have absorbed from the Manchester manual. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was detained for 14 years at Guantnamo Bay. Not yet released in France, this film, which tells the story of this man's . The irony is that I have never been in the States, and all the other countries I have been in kept saying, The guy is alright.. He also believed that Slahi's interrogators had broken the law tormenting him physically and sexually, and. But his guard suspected otherwise. Wed try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually we were, like, fuck it. Afghanistans civil war entered a new stage, with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of it. Two UNM School of Law graduates, Nancy Hollander ('78) and Teri Duncan ('00), represented Mohamedou between 2005 and 2016, when he was finally released. Der hat eine recht interessante Vita, war bei Al-Qaida ttig und soll whrend seiner . One day, after an interrogator kicked a Quran across the floor, detainees organized a mass suicide attempt. On most days, he searched Salahis name online, hoping to learn more about the case, and to make sense of his own deployment to Echo Special, to no avail. After. Wood walked into the main area, which housed the guards; through a door was the prisoners sleeping space. On September 26th, Schroen and six other officers loaded an aging Soviet helicopter with weapons, tactical gear, and three million dollars in used, nonconsecutive bills. A couple of weeks into his detention, two F.B.I. When Wood agreed to talk about Salahi for a TV documentary, Wendys parents staged an intervention. Just remember Allah always has a plan. He no longer derived much solace from Islam, and rarely prayed. Although many of the detainees arrived malnourished, with their bodies marked by bullet wounds and broken bones, some IRF teams punched them and slammed their heads into the ground until they were bloody and unconscious. It was Ramadan again. Mohamedou Ould Slahi was sent to his home country of Mauritania after 14 years of imprisonment. The United States released Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of a renowned prison memoir, after he was detained for more than 14 years in Jordan, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, and returned him. From the floor of Parliament, Badre Eddine noted that Mauritania has no extradition treaty with the United States. It became fashionable for high-profile corporate-law firms to represent Guantnamo clients, pro bono, but many detainees rejected representation, because they thought it was a ploy to lend legitimacy to an unjust detention. The proceeds from his book were paying for a nieces studies in Dubai and a nephews masters degree in applied mathematics at a university in Kuala Lumpur. . (His wife returned to Nouakchott.) For the first time, Salahi was in the custody of uniformed American soldiers. It was the pretty blond interrogator bringing in these disks with footage from Al Qaeda and Taliban training camps in Afghanistan, Wood recalled. 2023 Cond Nast. But I changed my mind after Guantnamo, he told me. He was very silly. According to The Exile, a comprehensive account of post-9/11 Al Qaeda, by the investigative journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, who gained access to Abu Hafss diaries, he ghostwrote most of Osamas speeches, religious judgments, and press releases. In 1998, bin Laden wrote Abu Hafs into his will. For many years, Mohamedou Slahi was considered one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. (During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso.) No prayers, no information about the direction of Mecca. Anyway, he said, I know you are part of the Millennium Plot.. During interrogations, an intelligence officer, known among the detainees as William the Torturer, forced Salahi into stress positions that exacerbated his sciatic-nerve issues. Neuer Kurator des African Book Festival Berlin" wird Mohamedou Ould Slahi Houbeini. For seventy-six days, he lived in solitary confinement, in a cold cell with surveillance cameras and the lights always on. Slahi's rare contacts with the cousin, and an occasion in which he allowed travelers from near his hometown to stay the night only to learn they were Al Qaeda soldiers were among the . After the failed attack, Canada began to aggressively investigate the Montreal cell. You will have a job at the snap of a finger, his friend told him. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, now 50, was arrested in Mauritania three months after the 9/11 attacks, and detained in Jordan and Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantnamo in August 2002, where his long incarceration included 70 days of intensive torture and three years of 18-hours-a-day interrogations. When the ice melted, they punched him, then repacked the ice to freeze him again. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. A couple of years later, he considered visiting Mauritania, to track down Salahis family and apologize for his role in Salahis detention. When Mohamedou Ould Slahi walked away, unshackled, from a U.S. military plane in Nouakchott, Mauritania, the author of Guantnamo Diary hoped he was finally free. The students acted as Woods witnesses. M Despite the Covid pandemic, which postponed its initial release by one year, the biopic "Designated Guilty" (The Mauritanian), adaptation by director Kevin MacDonald of the memoir "Les carnets de Guantanamo" by Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, has finally been released. Where is Osama bin Laden? They shouted and threw objects against the wall. They really know who is who, and, as a result, they were very reluctant to torture me. Canadas Security Intelligence Service began a surveillance operation focussing on Salahi and his associates, but Salahi noticed two pinhole cameras poking through his apartment walls and left the country. But by then the Soviet Union had collapsed, and, while Salahi was in training, the Afghan government lost its Russian support. They werent the only people taken by this strugglethe C.I.A. All his friends and family knew him as the guy who was guarding a high-value detainee, and really proud of it, Wood told me. The punishment for talking to another detainee was to be hung by the wrists, feet barely touching the ground. It was the first time Wood had encountered the Quran. (All charges were later dropped, and Yee was honorably discharged. I figured Ive seen the guy, but where and when? Salahi wrote in his diary. But it wasnt enough; the government wanted him to link other people in Canada to various plots. That May, U.S. Navy Seals killed bin Laden, and collected more than a million documents from his compound in northern Pakistan; among them was a letter from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, seeking the central leaderships blessing to enter into a secret agreement with the Mauritanian government. Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi discusses his story being adapted as "The Mauritanian", alongside fmr. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay prison. He's a believer. Around that time, after a long period without contact, Abu Hafs called Salahi from bin Ladens satellite phone. Comments. Outside of the political discussions, he and Salahi passed the hours playing rummy, Risk, and chess. They drove to the airport in silence, in Abdellahis black Mercedes. In the first edition of Guantnamo Diary, Siems had included an authors note: In a recent conversation with one of his lawyers, Mohamedou said that he holds no grudge against any of the people he mentions in this book, that he appeals to them to read it and correct it if they think it contains any errors, and that he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after having learned so much from one another. True, you didnt choose this family, nor did you grow up with it, but its a family all the same, he wrote in his diary. Mauritanian immigration officials detained him for an hourhere was a giant American, all muscle and veins, saying that he had met Salahi in Guantnamo Baybut eventually one of Salahis nephews persuaded them to let Wood in. His family moved to the capital of Nouakchott when he was a child, where he excelled in school and earned a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany. Salahi noted that Steve snores likehow do you call it?a steam train.. And Id say, No matter what you did in the past, man, youve saved thousands of lives. Id always say that, and hed just shake his head, like, Bullshit., One night, when Salahi was asleep, Wood heard sounds that reminded him of a child having a nightmare. Peace be upon you. They shook hands. Salahi became Slahi. So began a life in which governments treated Salahi in accordance with their own mistakes. In October 2016 he made it home after 14 years in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. government had imprisoned and tortured him as a suspected terrorist. Wood walked through the camp to Echo Special proud to be part of a serious national-security operation. Had Wood remained as a regular guard, in one of the regular cellblocks, he might have finished his deployment with his understanding of the global war on terror more or less intact. In November of that year, Salahi moved to Montreal, where he began leading prayers at a prominent mosque. But the government had abandoned the theory that Salahi knew about 9/11 before it happened. In the third country, the Mauritanian foreign minister greeted Abu Hafs, and accompanied him on the flight to Nouakchott. And in. But, with every day going by, the optimists lost ground, he wrote. Stand the fuck up! an interrogator said. Man, youve had a really tough time of it, he said. Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. In Guantnamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes the months of brutal interrogation, sleep deprivation, beatings, starvation, and sexual assault he endured at the U.S. government's notorious detention center in Cuba. As he was led away for questioning, he said: "Don't worry mom, I'll be back soon." He has been charged with no crime, but Slahi never returned. How could he possibly know? . The Mauritanian: The True Story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi The 50-year-old was detained for 14 years without being charged with a crime By Laura Martin 31 Mar 2021 This year sees the 20th. Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that enemy combatants could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as torture it must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. By the end of the following year, Salahi knew more about classified security operations than any private American citizen. Salahi tried to convince the skeptics that their arrival in Cuba was a blessing, and that they would be treated fairly and exonerated by the American justice system. The fragmented image of Mohamedou Salahi that United States military, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies assembled in a classified dossier was that of a highly intelligent Mauritanian electrical engineer, who, as a key al-Qaida member, had played a role in several mass-casualty plots. Thats why we had previously let him go. But, Abdellahi continued, shrugging, to refuse a demand from an intelligence agency, in the fight against terrorismthat would have been impossible., On the evening of November 28thMauritanias Independence DaySalahi had been in custody for a week. Its their citizen, and its their country.. At the time, Slahi had been in captivity for two years, accused of acts of terrorism. During interrogations, detainees were forced to perform mock satanic rituals, or were draped in the Israeli flag. came to much the same conclusion.) On March 22, 2010, a U.S. district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahis petition to be released. He didnt harbor any particular animosity toward Muslims, but he had absorbed his mothers belief: If its not from Jesus then it must be from the Devil. After completing the requirements to become an M.P., Wood enrolled in a criminal-justice program at a nearby community college. Mohamedou Ould Slahi Born: December 21, 1970 Birthplace: Rosso, Mauritania Jodie Foster Born: November 19, 1962 Birthplace: Los Angeles, California, USA Nancy Hollander Born: March 10, 1944 Benedict Cumberbatch Born: July 19, 1976 Birthplace: Hammersmith, London, England, UK Lt. Col. Stuart Couch Born: April 20, 1965 Salahi generally avoids Abu Hafsthey have fundamentally different views of Islam, and he worries that any association could further complicate his life. But, in practice, IRFing was often done as a form of revenge, initiated liberallyfor example, when a detainee was found to have two plastic cups instead of one, or refused to drink a bottle of Ensure, because he thought that he was being given poison. He did not respond to requests for comment.) This winter, Steve Wood set off for Mauritania. They were everywhere in the mosque, in the police car, twenty-four hours. Among the targets of the investigation was Mohsen, Salahis friend and host. The examiner described Salahi, whose answers contradicted everything he had confessed to Zuley in the preceding weeks, as eager to prove that he is providing accurate information. The results were decisive: No deception indicated.. In the military hearing, Salahi described the torture program in vivid detail. He was belted so tightly that he struggled to breathe, but he didnt have the English vocabulary to tell the guards. smaller?, One of the F.B.I. But, when the new commander asked Stuart Herrington, a retired colonel and Army intelligence officer, to assess operations at the facility, Herrington found that most interrogators lacked the training and the experience required to be effective. According to one of Salahis brothers, Abdellahi told the family that Salahi was being kept in a detention facility in the desert, far from Nouakchott. After work, Salahi went to his mothers house. In the minutes before the first detainees set foot on Guantnamo, you could literally hear a pin drop, Brandon Neely, a military-police officer, recalled, in an interview with the Guantnamo Testimonials Project, at the University of California, Davis, in 2008. At that time, Slahi was seen as one of the most important detainees at Guantanamo with allegations that he had helped organise the 9/11 attacks. . Salahis family wasnt notified of his rendition, and so they were surprised that Abdellahi refused to let them see him. The whole time I was thinking, you know, What does he really think of us? he recalled. Until recently, the guards and the interrogators had worn Halloween masks inside the cell. But he derived immense satisfaction from the work, and saw in it the kind of moral clarity that Guantnamo had lacked. The doors of my house are open.. Upon Mohsens arrest, according to a court filing, investigators found pocket litter that included both Salahis name and Ressams phone number. (Mohsen could not be reached for comment. I want to go to a country where I can enjoy my freedom, he said. In 1994, as the director of state security, he opened an investigation into Nouakchotts jihadi scene. But I wasnt the decider. Meanwhile, the Bush Administrations pretext for invading Iraq was collapsing, and so was Woods trust in government. They drove up to the stairs of an airplane, but, Salahi wrote, he was so exhausted, sick, and tired that I couldnt walk, which compelled the escort to pull me up the steps like a dead body.. [4] Slahi traveled from his home in Germany to Afghanistan in December 1990 "to support the mujahideen." In June, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantnamo detainees could challenge the grounds for their detention. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years of his life as a detainee in the United States military prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The latter, the actor last seen on our screens playing a serial killer in . As two M.P.s dragged him to the holding area, someone tossed his prosthetic leg out of the bus. He was not happyhe didnt want to leave, Abdellahi told me. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 44, has been held prisoner inside Guantanomo Bay since 2002. The plan, conceived by James Mitchell, a psychologist working on contract for the C.I.A., was to induce learned helplessness in humans by combining an individually tailored regimen of torture techniques with environmental manipulation. Now bin al-Shibh, who was being tortured in C.I.A. One of Salahis friends, who was now living in Canada, suggested that he move to Montreal. The Mujahideen are committed to not carry out any military activity in Mauritania, the letter saysas long as the Mauritanian government released imprisoned fighters, abstained from attacking Al Qaeda cells abroad, and paid the group between ten and twenty million euros per year, to compensate and prevent the kidnapping of tourists. (The Mauritanian government has denied that it negotiates with terrorist groups.). He let you down! An interrogation memo listed plans to shave Salahis head and beard, dress him in a burqa, and make him bark and perform dog tricks, to reduce the detainees ego and establish control.. with you, and that is to tell me five things that you are grateful for today, he told one of them. In late 2003a period that Salahi described in a letter as where my brake broke looseCouch struggled to keep up with the constant stream of information. (ge) A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history . By the spring of 2003, Salahi had been visited in Guantnamo by investigators from Canada and Germany, and questioned by various U.S. government agencies. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of "Guantanamo Diary," was released after a review board determined that his continued detention was not necessary to protect against a threat to U.S. security . Salahi also pushed him to research Western foreign-policy blundersfor example, that in 1953 the American and the British intelligence services had orchestrated a coup in Iran, overthrowing a popular Prime Minister in order to prop up a tyrannical, pro-Western Shah. His wife and children left first; once they had settled in Nouakchott, Abu Hafs said, the challenge was to transport himself thousands of miles without being detected, arrested, or subjected to rendition. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. When I visited Wood, last August, he and his team were layering the surface of a bridge near Dayton, Oregon, with epoxy, rocks, and primer. Soon afterward, Wood learned that the imam, a Somali immigrant who practiced a conservative strain of Islam known as Salafism, had been the subject of F.B.I. And I knew that the request was justified, because he had connections in this milieu, these Islamo-terrorist circles, and he might be able to give his captors some ideas of how to improve security. Military-police officers so frequently abused the Quran during cell searches that detainees demanded that the books be kept in the library, where they would be safe. All he saw was a rat, Salahi wrote. His very existence will become erased. While he was held at Gitmo, Slahi was repeatedly tortured in an . He grabbed his shortwave radio. (Until 2007, a terrorist sanctions list included Salahis name as an alias for Abu Hafs.). For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. At an event, I exchanged phone numbers with an extremely submissive server who was dressed in ragged clothes and had a cloudy, damaged eye. A panel of U.S. national security, intelligence, and other officials cleared Slahi for release in . Wahrheit macht frei, the officer saidthe truth sets you free. An American woman, who he assumed was an intelligence officer, entered the room, and stood by as a Senegalese officer questioned him about the Millennium Plot. His was the first guard force that didnt wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. He denied involvement with terrorism and was never charged with a crime. I am denied my freedom because I was denied my freedom, Salahi said. He recalled, I took the pen and paper and wrote all kinds of incriminating lies about a poor person who was just seeking refuge in Canada and trying to make some money so he could start a family. (In his diary, Salahi wrote, I was eager to let my predator know, I am, I am.) When the conversation was over, the Jordanians blindfolded Salahi and put a set of soundproof earmuffs on him. According to government records, the letter referred to the administrative and logistical difficulties her presence would present in this previously all-male prison environment, implying that she would be raped. The mosque had thousands of attendees, a few of whom belonged to an Algerian jihadi group that had come to the attention of the French and Canadian intelligence services. No one will know what happened to him, and eventually, no one will care.. And, by the way, I pay my boy, he added, unprompted. But Salahi was shackled to the floor, so he could do so only hunched over. By the time Wood left, he had come to accept his guards and interrogators as family. Once, he watched an IRF team leader beat a detainee so badly that he had to be sent to the hospital and the floor of his cell was stained with blood; the next time the team leader was in the cellblock, another detainee yelled out, Sergeant, have you come back to finish him off?. The Mauritanian, Kevin Macdonald's movie based on the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man . Soon after 9/11 attacks, a call from Slahi's cousin Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, a friend of Osama bin Laden's son, got him arrested in his motherland Mauritania in West Africa and transported to Guantanamo. (His name was actually Richard Zuley; he was a Chicago police detective, working as a military contractor, who has an extensive record of abusing suspects until they confessed to crimes that they hadnt committed. The Americans, with their policies, bore the fruit of the events of September 11th, Abu Hafs said on camera. What if he is, like, I hate these sons of bitches for locking me up? A year in Echo Special shattered Woods ideas about his post-military future. Owing to his expertise as an electrical engineer, the dossier concludes, Salahi was also able to describe Al Qaedas elaborate communications systems, including radio relay, couriers, encryption, phone boutiques, and satellite communication links to laptops. But the U.S. government was sure there was more to be gleaned from him; the dossier says that he still has useful information on a variety of subjects, including the 9/11 attacks, and lists twenty-two additional areas of potential exploitation. Military officials considered him the poster child for the intelligence effort at Guantnamo., As a result of Salahis coperation, his private cell was now stocked with what the government referred to as comfort items. After the pillow came soap, towels, a prayer cap, and prayer beadsby the time Steve Wood arrived, Salahi also had books, a television, a PlayStation, and an old laptop, on which he killed time playing chess and watching DVDs. English accepts more curses than any other language, and I soon learned to curse with the commoners., As a matter of professionalism, Wood resolved from the outset to bury in the back of his mind what he had heard of Salahis past. In the two and a half years since his return, he has received several professional visitorsSiems, his lawyers, and the filmmaker Michael Bronner, who is adapting Salahis diaryand also personal visits from a lawyer, whom Ill call Amanda. According to a senior U.S. diplomat, when the United States was negotiating the terms of his return, the Mauritanians did agree that they would not give him a passport for some x amount of time. Two and a half years later, Salahi and his lawyers have no clarity about the parameters of x, or about why the United States has any say in whether the Mauritanian government issues a passport to a Mauritanian. Popularly known as the Writer of Mauritania. Ad Choices. Another year passed. James Mitchell, the C.I.A. The next morning, he found two pinhole cameras. The next day, Abu Hafs invited me to his house, in one of Nouakchotts most expensive neighborhoods. I wish you good luck, the agent said. I just couldnt wait to see who the detainees were, he told me. . Bet youll think twice next time about saying you know me, he said, laughing. Badre Eddine had spent some four decades organizing grassroots campaigns against the practice of slavery and other human-rights violations, and for this he had spent years in remote detention sites, under a succession of authoritarian regimes. and the G.I.D., but received none. While in custody, Salahi had befriended Yacoub, the intelligence officer who had been one of his guards. I executed orders. But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country. After a hustled day of tackling a myriad of issues and directly contributing to the global war on terrorism, it reads, fun awaits. 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