), One night, Salahi awoke to the sound of a tiny hole being drilled into his wall. Mauritanian hospitals dont have the capacitythey typically send such patients to Francebut what Salahi didnt know was that his repatriation would not amount to the restitution of his rights. 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. That dictatorship was built in Guantnamo Bay.. I went back to my tent and laid down to go to sleep. I want to be able to show bin Ladins head to the President. Black added that he and Bush wanted to avoid the spectacle of a courtroom trial. He slept in remote villages, and entrusted his life to Afghan sheepherders who were presumably unaware of the twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. I was, like, Maybe hes right. (In fact, the 9/11 plot was organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) Just remember Allah always has a plan. He stopped praying in public. The Americans supplied the questions, and the Jordanians extracted the responses, often through coercive means. I was scared to hell, Salahi recalled at his hearing. Having accepted his guards, Salahi wrote, the next phase of captivity was getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.. With the assistance of German intelligence, Abdellahi told me, we started collecting the maximum amount of information. Salahi didnt know their real names, and never heard from them again. 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. Allah! But Amanda is an American, and so their son is now a citizen of the country whose purported values Salahi wants to believe in but has never seen. The 2021 legal drama follows the true story of the aforementioned protagonist (played by Tahar Rahim), a man who was arrested, taken from his . You very much become a child again.. One night in October, 2016, Woods phone rang while he was in a Safeway in Portland. Summer/Autumn 2015. The protest lasted for several days as twenty-three prisoners tried to hang themselves.. (All charges were later dropped, and Yee was honorably discharged. . The leadership at Guantnamo was more interested in intelligence collection than in prosecuting detainees for terrorism crimes. 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. with you, and that is to tell me five things that you are grateful for today, he told one of them. The lead officer couldnt speak Mauritanias Hassaniya Arabic, and Abdellahi hardly understood the Jordanian dialect, so Salahi translated for them. Before his deployment, he had aspired to become a police officer. By Marisa Egerstrom. (The phrase Work sets you free appeared on the gates of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. 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.. 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. ECCHR, which represents Mohamedou Ould Slahi together with partner lawyer Matthias Lehnert, calls on the authorities to speed up the procedure for issuing his visa and to conclude it swiftly. Salahi saw a mentally ill old man subjected to this method. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was detained for 14 years at Guantnamo Bay. In the U.S., it was morning. agents visited Salahis cell. Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he disappeared into U.S. custody and daily life as a detainee. Before his first shift in Echo Special, Wood was told to place a strip of electrical tape over the name on his uniform, and to use only nicknames inside the cell, so that if 760 were to somehow sneak a message out of the camp he couldnt issue fatwas against his guards or their families. 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. In return, they passed along messages from Salahi, which they had invented, and assured the family that Salahi was well. Force-feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast. 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. Allah! Salahi agreed, and Abu Hafs wired around four thousand dollars to his German account. Salahi became Slahi. So began a life in which governments treated Salahi in accordance with their own mistakes. Because he had no experience with weapons, Al Qaeda personnel sent him to the Al Farouq training camp, near Khost, where he learned how to use a Kalashnikov rifle and launch rocket-propelled grenades. Where is Mullah Omar? they asked. So, when Abu Hafs called Salahi for assistance a third time, in early 1999, Salahi refused, and hung up. In his home country, Neely said, this man had seen some of his friends and family members executed on their knees. The mans response was hardly unique; a military document, drafted ten days later for the base commander, noted that the detainees think they are being taken to be shot., Officially, the job of the Internal Reaction Force was to restrain unruly detainees, to prevent them from injuring themselves or the guards. Then one of them shouted, Pillow, you can come out now! A short man in his mid-thirties stepped into the guards area, unshackled. By now, he had enough information about the kind of story he had to craft, because, he wrote, through my conversations with the FBI and the DoD, I had a good idea as to what wild theories the government had about me., Zuley walked in, and Salahi started lying. I was scared to ask too many questions, I was scared to read a book on Islam while I was in there, or show too much interest., Woods concerns were not unjustified. Where are you from? one of them said. Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely, Jonathan Fredman, a senior C.I.A. What would we tell the Mauritanians? the diplomat replied. In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder surgery. Afghanistans civil war entered a new stage, with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of it. Its hard to sit there and laugh and chat with the guy, if hes actually that bad, Wood told me. A private jet landed, and out climbed a Jordanian rendition team. Mohamedou Ould Salahi Net Worth & Basic source of earning is being a successful Mauritanian Writer. On paper, Salahi is not listed as the father. But because Slahi remains in US custody, unlike the others, his is the only first-person account that the government had the power to redact. For the next two months, Abu Hafs taught jihadi recruits at a madrassa. At first, Salahi was relievedhe assumed that the Americans had come to understand his irrelevance to 9/11 and the Millennium Plot, and that he was being sent back to Mauritania. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years of his life as a detainee in the United States military prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Mohamed Elmoustapha Ould Badre Eddine, a left-wing member of the Mauritanian Parliament, conducted inquiries of his own, but made no progress. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who underwent brutal interrogations while he was held at Guantnamo Bay, is a free man in Mauritania after nearly 15 years as a detainee. I dont like power, he said. It was silly, but if you get scared you are not you anymore. He was never charged with a crime, although the U.S. government suspected him of involvement in the September 11th attacks. A week after Salahi began leading prayers at the Al Sunnah mosque, Ressam drove a rental car onto a U.S.-bound ferry in Victoria, British Columbia. After a hustled day of tackling a myriad of issues and directly contributing to the global war on terrorism, it reads, fun awaits. Officers could partake in pottery classes, paintball, rugby, tennis, and softball, or exercise in several pools and gyms. Neither of them knew that the United States had asked Mauritanias President to hand over Salahi to a rendition team. I'm a really big believer in Joe Biden. One of the arresting agents suggested that Salahi drive his own car to the station, so that he could drive himself home afterward. 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. When my turn came, two guards grabbed me by the hands and feet and threw me toward the reception team, Salahi wrote. So empty., In recent months, the push for Salahis passport has taken on new urgency. James Mitchell, the C.I.A. team left Guantnamo, and the torture began. After lunch, I stood in the reception area, watching Mauritanian politicians and tribal leaders kiss Abu Hafs on both cheeks and thank him for coming. 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. In Islam, the Quran is considered the transcribed word of God; some Muslims keep the book wrapped in cloth, never letting it touch unclean surfaces. Salahi and I sat on either side of the leader of a political party that has more than a hundred and fifty seats in Parliament. 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. But, after the diary came out, they learned that Mohamedou is not high value, hes just a guy who got fucked over for years. He added, Guantnamo has a long shadow for everyonenot just the detainees.. I want to ask you a favor, if it is O.K. But Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who spent almost 14 years at Guantnamo and says he was brutally beaten and threatened with execution without ever being charged with a crime, has some advice for his onetime captors: Come clean about what was done to the detainees there, and transfer those accused of committing the Sept. 11 attacks to the United . Then, and on at least one other occasion, a member of Al Qaedas Shura Councilits leadershipwired some four thousand dollars to Salahis bank account in Germany; Salahi withdrew the cash and handed it to men who were travelling to West Africa, to facilitate what the Americans assessed to be money-laundering and telecommunications projects for al-Qaida., In 1999, the Shura member called Salahi, but U.S. intelligence didnt know what his instructions were. The cellbetter, the boxwas cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time. But with these people you cannot be likable. Abu Hafs, however, regarded the Pakistanis as duplicitous. He identified himself as Captain Collins, a Navy officer who had been sent to Guantnamo by the White House. Thank you for a wonderful evening!, Ive done it, Igor! Pendant des mois, il a crit ses mmoires . Salahi generally avoids Abu Hafsthey have fundamentally different views of Islam, and he worries that any association could further complicate his life. The 58-year-old actress, who won the Best Supporting Actress prize for her role in The Mauritanian, appeared on screen for the virtual ceremony with her wife Alexandra Hedison and their dog,. His wife, two-year-old son and brother live here. Something is going on.. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Mauritania is an Islamic republic, with rich traditions in poetry and recitation that belie its dismal rates of literacy and economic growth. Like, really stressful. They slept under mosquito nets in Salahis bedroom, and woke up to the sound of a bleating sheep. At other times, the questions originated from material on his hard drive, which the F.B.I. Steve Wood with Salahi, his former prisoner, in Mauritania, in January. Id come home and iron my uniform, and my roommates didnt know a thing, he said. T ahar Rahim plays Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who is arrested in 2001 in his native Mauritania with the connivance of his own government, and eventually spirited to the US prison camp on the Cuban . Abdellahi called Salahis boss at the telecommunications company, to assure him that Salahi should be allowed to resume work. 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. One day they would deprive him of food, and the next theyd force him to drink water until he vomited. At first I thought it was an armed robbery, but, when the airport police approached, the guy behind me flashed a magic badge, which immediately made the policemen retreat. Salahi and his brothers were thrown into the back of a van and driven to a detention site. Illustration by Tyler Comrie; source photograph from Stringer/ AFP/ Getty (face). In 1994, as the director of state security, he opened an investigation into Nouakchotts jihadi scene. Everyone, including myself, was very nervous, he said. And Steves interest is to impress the girls. In the eighties, he and a younger cousin, a slender poet named Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, spent their evenings at a local caf, where the owner showed videos of the Palestinian struggle and the jihad in Afghanistan, which the Soviet Union had invaded in 1979. . 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. The anteroom was filled with Mauritanian dignitaries and lites, all men, sitting on couches that lined the perimeter. By now, Wood was no longer dating Summers mother. Where is Osama bin Laden? They shouted and threw objects against the wall. Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for . The U.S. military prisons leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. All I had were some numbers of business partners in Mauritania and Germany, he later wrote, but I didnt want the U.S. government harassing those peaceful people just because I had their numbers in my phone. One of the contacts was listed as P.C. When Salahis female interrogators came in for a game of Monopoly, Salahi always threw the match. By now, Salahi was under surveillance by German intelligence. Among such methods as forced nakedness, dietary manipulation, daily twenty-hour interrogations, waterboarding, exposure to freezing temperatures, and the withholding of medical care, Beaver endorsed the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death was imminent. (She later expressed surprise that her legal opinion had become the final word on interrogation policies and practices within the Department of Defense.) An accompanying memo, drafted by a military psychologist and a psychiatrist, explained that all aspects of the environment should enhance capture shock, dislocate expectations, foster dependence, and support exploitation to the fullest extent possible., In November, 2002, the set of proposed techniques landed on Donald Rumsfelds desk. Look him up, dude. Peace be upon you. They shook hands. Mohamedou Ould Salahi has a net worth of $5.00 million (Estimated) which he earned from his occupation as Writer. We knew he wasnt a threat. Where once he had struggled to forgive himself for enjoying Salahis company, he now felt bad about having to lock the door at the end of each shift. By the following day, the lead Senegalese officer was convinced that there was no reason to hold Salahi. Wed try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually we were, like, fuck it. Later that summer, Abu Hafs wrote a twelve-page dissent, but bin Laden bristled at his defiance, and the objections of other Al Qaeda leaders, and moved forward. The next day, Abu Hafs invited me to his house, in one of Nouakchotts most expensive neighborhoods. There, an intelligence officer named Yacoub confiscated Salahis Quran and left him in a dank cell. 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. Where is Abu Hafs? one of them asked. If you say that you are angry, it is understood as an emotion, he said. But he subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. He was a victim of an extremely rare crime: that a country had kidnapped its own citizen and handed it over to a foreign country, outside of the justice system, outside of all legal processes, Brahim Ebety, the Salahi familys lawyer in Nouakchott, told me. His heavily redacted book about his time in the U.S. facility was published in January 2015. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. As Michael Lehnert, a Marine Corps major general who briefly served as the detention camps first commander, later testified to Congress, What better way to enrich yourself, while resolving old grudges, than to finger a neighbor who was your enemy, regardless of his support for either Al Qaeda or the Taliban?. Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. Wood is six feet three, with a shaved head, a shy, stoic manner, and the musculature of an lite bodybuilder. Defense attorneys have accused the government of denying them access to evidence, leaving secret recording equipment in client meeting rooms, and infiltrating their legal teams; a few years ago, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who may face the death penalty, recognized a linguist on his own defense team from a C.I.A. On one page, he recalled the day he got his nickname, when an interrogator brought him a pillow. He is seen as one of the most successful Writer of all times. No showers for weeks. Since then, I have received it, eaten it, and paid for it! Finally, when Slahi and his wife moved to Montreal, in 1999, they attended the al Sunnah mosquethe same mosque attended by Ahmed Ressam, a member of Al Qaeda who had been arrested, shortly. For the rest of the interrogation session, he was forced to look at photos of corpses from the aftermath of the attacks. The whole time I was thinking, you know, What does he really think of us? he recalled. It will look worse.. He grabbed his shortwave radio. His father died in a plane crash when he was three years old, and his mother brought him and his brothers up in Molalla, Oregon, a lumber town about an hour south of Portland. In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and lite Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top officials. Abu Hafs wouldnt say which countries he had travelled throughonly that, in the first two, the Mauritanian Ambassador met him on the tarmac, walked him through the airport, and stayed with him until he got on the next plane. According to Fallon, The Northern Alliance would jam so many detainees into Conex shipping containers that they started to die of suffocation. As a teen-ager, Salahi memorized the entire Quran. The United States leases the land beneath the Guantnamo Bay detention facility from Cuba, for four thousand and eighty-five dollars a year, under an agreement signed after the Spanish-American War. But, when he wanted to engage, he spoke with a worldly, provocative humor that Wood found appealing. In time, he was given back his pain medication. Published now for the first time, Guantanamo . Shortly before the first detainees arrived, Robert McFadden, an N.C.I.S. They look like a prison uniform with stripes! 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. As at Guantnamo, he often worked at night. 17k Followers, 1,031 Following, 371 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Mohamedou Ould Salahi (@mohamedououldsalahi) The Mauritanian, Kevin Macdonald's movie based on the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man . He had spent much of the past fifteen months in Yemen, investigating Al Qaedas bombing of the U.S.S. I am denied my freedom because I was denied my freedom, Salahi said. It was not every day, the tortureI would say maybe twice a week. While other detainees were mercilessly beaten, strung up by their limbs, and sexually assaulted, he added, all they did was strike me at different times in the face, and hit me against the concrete wall.. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Were gonna feed you up your ass, an interrogator said. He was forced to swallow salt water, and, every few minutes, the men packed ice cubes between his clothes and his skin. He said he needs fuel, Salahi explained to Abdellahi. A security guard handed him a filthy black turban, to hide his face during the drive to the secret-police headquarters. He denied involvement with terrorism and was never charged with a crime. 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. No, Im an ex-prisoner of Guantnamo Bay, Salahi replied, instantly ending the conversation. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. Comments. It had been five years since the Taliban had taken over most of the country, and televisions were banned. Bin Laden had fled to the mountains, and the remaining Al Qaeda leaders understood that, as Arabs and North Africans, they could never blend in with the locals, who spoke Dari, Pashto, Balochi, and other regional languages. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. According to an investigation by Der Spiegel, he preached in gloomy back-yard mosques, and remained in occasional contact with jihadismen whose names and cell-phone numbers would turn up in investigations spanning Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. 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. He was not happyhe didnt want to leave, Abdellahi told me. His friend, Hosni Mohsen, introduced him to the imam at the Al Sunnah mosque. Im now in Canada, attending a mosque where we believe a very dangerous group is attending. And, because it was Ramadan, Salahi was leading prayers. The cousins had married a pair of sisters, and so they were now also brothers-in-law. came to much the same conclusion.) But it wasnt enough; the government wanted him to link other people in Canada to various plots. The decision to keep his conversion a secret from everyone in his life made him feel at times as if being Muslim were wrong, even though, in his heart, he still believed. But the C.I.A., which spent the next few years shuffling its high-value detainees among so-called black sites in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, had seen fit to transfer him into military custody. The men never abused Salahi, but, as the days became weeks, he wished that they would just turn him over to the United States, where, he assumed, he could at least challenge the legal grounds of his detention. Until recently, the former spy chief Deddahi Ould Abdellahi lived directly across the street. 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. After a time of mourning and injustice, Katja seeks revenge. I took the pillow as a sign of the end of the physical torture.. Before leaving Guantnamo, he gave Salahi a novel by Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company. Pillow, good luck with your situation, he wrote inside. You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming, Neely recalled. The U.S. government concluded that he was the leader of the Montreal-based al-Qaida cell., In Guantnamo, Salahi admitted to this and other allegations. Echo Special was a trailer that had been divided in two. The men were dragged out of their cells. The F.B.I. I have contact with Osama bin Ladens operative, who was helping launder money. On March 22, 2010, a U.S. district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahis petition to be released. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. 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. But his family members were eager for Salahi to return, and so they told him that his mother was ill. On January 21, 2000, Salahi boarded a flight to Senegal. I tried to make my time there morally neutral, without being called a traitor, he told me. He added that, as the worlds most powerful democracy, the United States had the means to uphold and pressure other countries to uphold human rights. In Kandahar, Abu Hafs felt the Americans closing in. I tried to press the topic with Salahi, but it was as if his transfer from Guantnamo had carried with it a kind of transposition of restraint, from shackles to self-policing. As they left baggage claim, Salahi later wrote in his diary, my hands were shackled behind my back and I was encircled by a bunch of ghosts who cut me off from the rest of my company. team and their Afghan counterparts travelled through much of northern Afghanistan, laying the groundwork for the U.S. military invasion. But he did not consider himself a member of Al Qaeda, or a facilitator of its operations. Two intelligence officers, including Yacoub, arrived and said that Abdellahi needed to see him again. Salahi told Wood that he had written four more books in detention, but he hadnt been allowed to take them out of Guantnamo. I really think that he's a good man. But the problem is that you cannot just admit to something you havent done; you need to deliver the details, which you cant when you hadnt done anything. Now, faced with their own incompetence, Fallon wrote, interrogators were quick to blame classic Manchester resistance tactics!. Everyone wants to close Guantnamo, but what will happen to the detainees? Then Abu Hafs greeted Wood, who, appearing paralyzed by confusion, coldly took his hand. So look at me, Salahi said. By the end of the boat ride, Salahi was bleeding from his ankles, mouth, and wrists. They were afraid that I would kill some people.. Ive finally found a way to reuse all our wine corks!, If youd like, I can set you up with a bullet I dodged.. When I shared Abu Hafss account of his return with the senior U.S. diplomat, she replied, Its the first Im hearing any of it. The Mauritanians didnt inform the United States of his return until probably weeks later, she said. His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took the children to an evangelical church on Sundays; Pat Robertsons sermons blasted from the living-room TV. There, Abu Hafs spent two months in custody, as a formality. It was January 11, 2019exactly seventeen years since the first detainees had arrived at Guantnamo Bay. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay prison. I felt this decision stemmed from the commands desire to be able to tell the media that we gave all detainees a Quran out of sensitivity to their religious needs, he wrote.
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