Every day, Mariem Mint Elwadia asked God for the same thing: She wanted to see her son, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, just one . 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. He now has two American clients, whom he helps to navigate personal and professional woes through weekly Skype meetings. I was thinking, Those were the worst people the world had to offer?, Investigators had the same question. Echo Special was a trailer that had been divided in two. Did you see what Steve brought me? Salahi said, pointing to some baby clothes. While he was held at Gitmo, Slahi was repeatedly tortured in an . I was an agent of the state. In the third country, the Mauritanian foreign minister greeted Abu Hafs, and accompanied him on the flight to Nouakchott. Within a few months, dozens of Al Qaeda members were living in Tehran, undergoing occasional interrogations, aware that their Iranian hosts could betray them at any moment. But sometimes, after coperating, hed get depressed and anxious, and say, Im a bad Muslim, Wood told me. ), In October, 2004, Woods girlfriend gave birth to a daughter, Summer. The doors of my house are open.. Why is standing limited to 4 hours? he wrote in the margin, referring to a proposed stress position. He and Salahi were smitten with the Al Qaeda narrative, that a ragtag group of mujahideen, carrying light weapons and hiding in caves, were taking on a superpower in the defense of all Muslims. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal team of a current Guantnamo detainee. The decision to simultaneously protect and detain Al Qaeda members was apparently made by Irans spy chief, Qassem Suleimani. Mr Slahi was release on Monday 17 October after being held in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years without charge. 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. French actor Tahar Rahim is making headlines for his performance in the film The Mauritanian, which chronicles the true life story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Force-feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast. But it wasnt until two years later that bin Laden shared with the Shura Council the broad outlines of the attack: four planes; two civilian targets; two government targets. But I give him advice, and he takes it., Mauritania was the site of regular jihadi violence in the second half of the aughts, while Abu Hafs was living in Iran. They prayed together, ate together, and enjoyed a picnic of bread and tea in the dunes of the Sahara. After 9/11, patriotism eclipsed restlessness as Woods primary motivation to serve. I was happy because the one-ton stack of paper the U.S. government had provided the Senegalese about me didnt seem to impress them, Salahi wrote. After the attacks, Cofer Black, the head of the C.I.A.s Counterterrorism Center, who had served as the agencys Khartoum station chief while bin Laden was in Sudan, assured President GeorgeW. Bush that men like Abu Hafs would soon have flies walking across their eyeballs. The next day, he ordered Gary Schroen, the agencys former Kabul station chief, to gather a team for a paramilitary mission. He would be held there for 14 years without charge. I dont remember whether I hit the floor or was caught by the other guards. On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for Salahi. 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. I really think that he's a good man. Wood told Salahi that he was working for his brothers construction company, repairing bridges. Walid, who was sixteen, stayed behind. After a near-fatal stabbingand decades of threatsthe novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act. More detainees have died at Guantnamo than have been convicted of a crime. He had spent the morning of the worst terrorist attack in American history lying on his mothers couch, high on painkillers after a tonsillectomy, but when he emerged from the haze he was angry, focussed, and longing for deployment. Mohamedou Ould Slahi: I always told myself, at the end of the day, I didn't do wrong to anyone. 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. When Wendy saw the post, she was outragedbut also somewhat relieved, since it partly explained his secretive behavior. The U.S. had fired cruise missiles at Al Qaeda-linked targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, and, in a bid to capture Abu Hafs, the C.I.A. He was terrifiedhe wanted to go back to Canada, where interrogators behaved within the bounds of the law. See what it did to his family., A job posting depicts life as an intelligence officer in Guantnamo Bay as a rewarding challenge with incredible surroundingssunsets, beaches, iguanas, pristine Caribbean blue. He just said, Dude, they fucked me up.. How did they do it?. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. By the following day, the lead Senegalese officer was convinced that there was no reason to hold Salahi. The days of In 1988, Salahi graduated from high school and won a scholarship to study engineering in Duisburg, Germany. And then it behaves the same way as the last. When he asked the new regime about Salahi, he said, they just replied, We didnt kidnap himit was the previous government that did it. Like, really stressful. They slept under mosquito nets in Salahis bedroom, and woke up to the sound of a bleating sheep. On one page, he recalled the day he got his nickname, when an interrogator brought him a pillow. I was, like, Maybe hes right. (In fact, the 9/11 plot was organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) In November of that year, Salahi moved to Montreal, where he began leading prayers at a prominent mosque. So far, so good.. The Bush Administration had decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror, which meant that the men captured abroad could be deprived of the rights of prisoners of war. (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. Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which would be his home for several years. But instead the United States is stating to the world very clear and loud that democracy does not workthat when you need to get down and dirty, you need a dictatorship. 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. My cell expanded, the lights became brighter, colors more colorful, the sun shone warmer and gentler, and everyone around me looked friendlier, he wrote. Soon afterward, they travelled together to Sudan, where bin Laden ran a construction company and a jihadi training camp, and sped around Khartoum in bin Ladens white Mercedes. Alicia Florrick has been a good wife to her husband, a former state's attorney . The detainee introduced himself as Mohamedou Salahi, then reached for a handshake, and said, Whats up, dude?. A fourth was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator; while in C.I.A. He began to worry that awareness among his co-workers of his increasingly complex feelings toward Salahi might elicit accusations that he was unpatriotic, or an insider threat. 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. (Until 2007, a terrorist sanctions list included Salahis name as an alias for Abu Hafs.). There, an intelligence officer named Yacoub confiscated Salahis Quran and left him in a dank cell. LadenGerman for computer shopand he figured that, to the Americans, Laden would be a red flag. Then one of them shouted, Pillow, you can come out now! A short man in his mid-thirties stepped into the guards area, unshackled. When the boat reached Port Angeles, near Seattle, customs officers found in the car more than a hundred pounds of explosives, along with four timed detonators, each fashioned from a nine-volt battery, a circuit board, and a Casio watch. . Mohamedou Ould Salahi, from Mauritania, was born in 1970. The detainees protested, and so it was decided that every detainee who refused the Quran would be IRFed. While the detainees were receiving medical treatment for their post-IRF injuries, the Qurans were placed back in their cells. As we walked to the house, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white turban and long robes. Salahi called the police to report that his neighbors were spying on him, but they told him that he should just cover the cameras with glue. Its not looking good, the presiding military officer replied. You can receive millions of dollars, one of the flyers said. But, on the base, Fallon and his colleagues referred to most detainees as dirt farmers. Lehnert lamented, It takes an Army captain to send someone to Gitmo, and the President of the United States to get them out.. The U.S. military prison's leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. On December 19th, Abu Hafs boarded a bus in Quetta, carrying a fake passport and a suitcase full of cash. One of Salahis friends, who was now living in Canada, suggested that he move to Montreal. Salahi, who hadnt been home since 1993, was filled with nostalgia and dread. It was silly, but if you get scared you are not you anymore. I just remember being super excited, because I thought, Im going to be doing something important, Wood told me. The 2021 legal drama follows the true story of the aforementioned protagonist (played by Tahar Rahim), a man who was arrested, taken from his . But I wasnt the decider. 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. I thought it was a new U.S. method to suck intels out of your brain and send them directly to a main computer which analyzes the information, he wrote. Salahi denied knowing Ahmed Ressam, and added that he thought the entire narrative around the attack had been concocted to unlock the terrorism budget and hurt the Muslims. At the time, he later wrote, I believed excessively in Conspiracy Theoriesthough maybe not as much as the U.S. government does.. When Wood tried to search for 760 in Guantnamos detainee database, he found nothing. And, by the way, I pay my boy, he added, unprompted. After that, whenever anybody tried to explain anything to the guy, he always asked, Compare it with the rat: Is it bigger? As at Guantnamo, he often worked at night. Salahi had spent the morning reviewing a speech he had prepared for events hosted by Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights. In 2005, during the military hearing, Salahi had urged the presiding officer not to send him back to Mauritania. Meanwhile, the Bush Administrations pretext for invading Iraq was collapsing, and so was Woods trust in government. were entering a period of self-reflection; during the next several years, internal and congressional investigations would expose many of the worst abuses that had been inflicted on Salahi and other men in custody. It was the first time Wood had encountered the Quran. Wood started sporadically attending prayers. Few locals spoke French, but since the country had been arbitrarily drawn up as a vast, mostly desert territory, populated by numerous ethnic groups who spoke different languages, there was no alternative for official documentation. Everyone, including myself, was very nervous, he said. Helicopters dropped flyers in remote Afghan villages, offering wealth and power beyond your dreams to anyone who turned in a member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The lack of progress, development, and freedom in Mauritanian society inspired in Salahi a righteous anger toward autocracy and corruption, and a desire to fight for something bigger than himself. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. His very existence will become erased. But his guard suspected otherwise. 17k Followers, 1,031 Following, 371 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Mohamedou Ould Salahi (@mohamedououldsalahi) 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. I arrived just before the sunset prayers. For the next month, he was kept in total darkness; his only way of knowing day from night was to look into the toilet and see if there was brightness at the end of the drain. The goal was to assess whether inescapable pain could condition an animal into learned helplessness, whereby it simply accepts its fate. . Each government claims that it has come to the rescue of the population, which had been neglected and abused by the previous government, Badre Eddine told me. They went through checklists of questions that had been developed by their superiors, and seemed impervious to nuance, or to the notion that some detainees may have been sent there in error. 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. Salahi told him that he was now home. Their questions were much the same, Salahi wrote, but the whole environmental setup made me very skeptical toward the honesty and humanity of the U.S. interrogators. . He was accused of being a part of the Al-Qaeda by the American government. He signed it. For years, Mohamedou Salahi was imprisoned on the grounds of being a suspected collaborator in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When he learned that a military review board would consider releasing Salahi, he wrote a letter saying that, based on my interactions with Mr. Slahi in Guantnamo, I would be pleased to welcome him into my home, and offering to testify in person. It was a temporary facility, he explained, while he raises money to build a mosque. The night shift was twelve hours, and he never saw Salahi shackled or restrained. So that scared me away, he said. I thought there would be a lot of formalities, especially for a terrorist suspect such as myself, but nothing like that happened, Salahi wrote. . Over a three-way Anglo-French-African video call, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Tahar Rahim are exchanging hearty greetings. Wood was the second of three boys. Recently released "Guantnamo Diary" author Mohamedou Slahi gives a heartfelt thanks to his supporters in this moving new video, filmed where he belongs: at home with his family. But the government had abandoned the theory that Salahi knew about 9/11 before it happened. Salahi became Slahi. So began a life in which governments treated Salahi in accordance with their own mistakes. How does he behave? 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. It was January 11, 2002. 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. 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 . While Abu Hafs was handling Al Qaedas affairs in East Africa, his father became ill, and so, as both men remember it, Abu Hafs requested Salahis help in transferring money to care for his family in Mauritania. But the climactic descriptions of what it took for him to "break" are almost . 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. But a friend helped him find work installing Internet routers for a telecommunications company. in the United States on February 12. He no longer derived much solace from Islam, and rarely prayed. He knew what he expected to hear. Is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? That December, shortly before his twentieth birthday, Salahi boarded a flight to Pakistan and crossed into Afghanistan, and although he never met bin Laden, he soon pledged his allegiance to the Al Qaeda leadership. Salahi generally avoids Abu Hafsthey have fundamentally different views of Islam, and he worries that any association could further complicate his life. Shortly before the first detainees arrived, Robert McFadden, an N.C.I.S. Even if the military believed he was innocent, he figured that he knew too much about classified torture programs to be let out into the world. He thought, It must be somebody really importantthe most dangerous person in the world, perhapsto have this special attention, a guard force just for him. Wood stayed with Salahi for four days. She told me that she thought he was doing something really dangerousthat people might think Steve was sympathetic to someone who was involved in 9/11, and go after him, her, and their baby daughter. Seven or eight of his ribs were broken. As a teen-ager, Salahi memorized the entire Quran. In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantnamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard. and the G.I.D., but received none. 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.. 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