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. 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. If you say that you are angry, it is understood as an emotion, he said. Another dissonance was that Salahis eloquent orations on fundamental human rights stopped short of confronting a reality that Wood noticed on the second day: as guests of Mauritanian lites, they were served lavish meals by people who appeared to be slaves. But I changed my mind after Guantnamo, he told me. In 1998, shortly after Al Qaeda detonated truck bombs outside the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Salahi took a call from a phone number belonging to bin Laden. Thirty or forty of Abu Hafss followers filled a small wooden shack next to his home, spilling into the street, while he led prayers through a microphone. Seven or eight of his ribs were broken. Where is Abu Hafs? one of them asked. But, when he wanted to engage, he spoke with a worldly, provocative humor that Wood found appealing. When Wood told the old man that he had worked at Guantnamo Bay, the man suggested that he keep it to himself. 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.). [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . My cell expanded, the lights became brighter, colors more colorful, the sun shone warmer and gentler, and everyone around me looked friendlier, he wrote. Thats like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated. The important stuff was in his diary, he said, which they could read only inside a secure facility near Washington, D.C. 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. Theyd ask me, Whos in there?, and Id say, I dont know, probably somebody famous.. He walked into the sleeping area and found Salahi lying in the fetal position, shaking. How does he behave? The transcript omits much of his testimony, noting that, at the moment he started to describe the abuse, the recording equipment began to malfunction and that the tapes were distorted. The transcript continues, The Detainee wanted to show the Board his scars and location of injuries, but the board declined the viewing. (By now, the U.S. government was rolling back authorizations for torture techniques, and the military and the C.I.A. Les carnets de Guantanamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Eric Betsch, Michel Lafon. February 27, 2019. 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,. 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. They werent the only people taken by this strugglethe C.I.A. I really think that he's a good man. Other men carried box cutters and explosives; Salahi was a ghost on the periphery. His mother was dead, and so was one of his brothers, but there were teen-age nieces and nephews whom he was meeting for the first time. In September, 2002, Army officers started referring to Guantnamo as Americas Battle Lab., Early in the afternoon of October 2, 2002, a group of interagency lawyers and psychologists met to come up with a framework that used psychological stressors and environmental manipulation to foster dependence and compliance. The C.I.A. You can receive millions of dollars, one of the flyers said. Before dawn, Salahi was taken to an interrogation room. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. The point is to pave, seal, and waterproof it, to preserve its lifespan, he said. 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. had been torturing detainees at black sites for several months; now the Guantnamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. The 2021 legal drama follows the true story of the aforementioned protagonist (played by Tahar Rahim), a man who was arrested, taken from his . 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. Wood was the second of three boys. After work, Salahi went to his mothers house. He told me he hated Jews also. Abu Hafs, Salahis cousin and a senior Al Qaeda official, evaded capture. After that, whenever anybody tried to explain anything to the guy, he always asked, Compare it with the rat: Is it bigger? The interrogations covered the same topics as before: Abu Hafs; Al Qaedas training camps in 1992; the Millennium Plot. He denied involvement with terrorism and was never charged with a crime. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was detained for 14 years at Guantnamo Bay. As he read about Islamic history, he began to seek clarity in the Quran itself. detainees were whisked to the cellar, to be hidden from view. Salahis brother, who is a German citizen, had read in Der Spiegel that he was in Guantnamo, but Abdellahi insisted that it wasnt truethat he was looking after Salahi in a Mauritanian prison. But the climactic descriptions of what it took for him to "break" are almost . You very much become a child again.. In June, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantnamo detainees could challenge the grounds for their detention. 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. contract psychologist who devised the enhanced-interrogation program, describes this period as an element of Pavlovian conditioning, in which the detainee sees his situation improve or deteriorate in direct accordance with his level of compliance. The interrogators head-butted him, and made degrading remarks about his religion and his family. came to much the same conclusion.) 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantnamo Diary is at least the fifth autobiography by a Guantnamo prisoner. Sometimes the sessions veer into his own coping mechanismsthe routines he made up to fill his days in Guantnamo, for example, when we had nothing to look forward to except the world we created inside my cell., Earlier this month, Amanda gave birth to a son. (Forty people remain in the camp, at an annual cost of some ten million dollars a detainee.) Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who lived briefly in Montreal, has launched a $30-million lawsuit against the federal government. Have you heard of Nelson Mandela? Wood recalled Salahi saying. One of the men momentarily removed Salahis blindfold, and shined a flashlight into his eyes. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. According to interrogation memos, they decorated the walls with photos of genitalia, and set up a baby crib, because he was sensitive about the fact that he had no children. Since then, the U.S. military has exposed some lite soldiers to the techniques, to prepare them for the kinds of abuses they might encounter should they be captured by terrorist groups or governments that dont abide by the Geneva Conventions. 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. So much had changed since he had been taken into custody, more than fifty-four hundred days earlier. Ressam told investigators that he had planned to detonate suitcases in a crowded terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. In the dark you create things out of what little you have., Had I done what they accused me of, I would have relieved myself on day one, Salahi wrote in his diary. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.. In the military hearing, Salahi described the torture program in vivid detail. 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. 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. But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country. I told him I have no problem with the Jews, either, man. Salahis detainee dossier lists his reasons for transfer to Guantnamo: to provide information on the Al Qaeda training camp he had attended in 1992; a separate Afghan militia, which had received substantial backing from the C.I.A. This friendship is real., Salahi saw no path out of Guantnamo. Herrington later reported that the interrogators were unsure of the real names of more than half the detainees. To be honest I can report very little about the next couple of weeks, Salahi wrote, because I was not in the right state of mind., Soon afterward, an interrogator e-mailed Diane Zierhoffer, a military psychologist, with concerns about Salahis mental health. Abu Hafs, however, regarded the Pakistanis as duplicitous. was funding and equipping many of the mujahideen groups. Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which would be his home for several years. If the detainee dies, youre doing it wrong. (Fredman has disputed the accuracy of the meeting minutes. When he discovered the forged letter from Zuleys team, saying that the United States had captured Salahis mother, he resigned from the case. Mohamedou Ould Slahi or Salahi (Arabic language: ) (born December 31, 1970) is a Mauritanian who has been detained at Guantnamo Bay detention camp since August 4, 2002. In 2008, he met a woman named Wendy at a bar. When I visited their house, a real-estate agent had removed all the family photographs and replaced them with catalogue art, to make it easier for prospective buyers to think of the house as a blank slate. The abuse wound down slowlyno more hitting, but no comfort items, either, and no uninterrupted periods of rest. 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. Salahi handed him some leftover ibuprofen from the Guantnamo pharmacy. When they removed his shackles, the man, who was shaking with fear, suddenly jerked to the left. At a Pakistani Army checkpoint, he slipped a wad of bills into his passport, and went through unquestioned. The mission had not been accomplished. When Wood watched the evening news, he saw photographs of American M.P.s torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. You trust the handcuffs and everything, but, no matter what, wed never be with him one on onethere would always be a partner, Wood told me. Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for . The protest lasted for several days as twenty-three prisoners tried to hang themselves.. 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. According to Fallon, most of the interrogators were basically conscripts who would walk into a room for the first time thinking the detainee was just waiting to be cracked open and they were the next Jack Bauer, the fictional protagonist of 24, who used abusive tactics to elicit information and save his city from terrorist attacks. 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. 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.. It was kind of like, We aint gonna beat you ourselves, but you know where you are! So I knew the FBI wanted to interrogate me under the pressure and threat of a non-democratic country., On February 19, 2000, Abdellahi let him go home. 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. Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health problemsincluding a damaged sciatic nervethen led him to a cell. By the time Salahi arrived at Guantnamo, on August 5, 2002, Fallons lite interagency criminal-investigation task force had been sidelined, and Lehnert had been replaced. The latter, the actor last seen on our screens playing a serial killer in . But by then the Soviet Union had collapsed, and, while Salahi was in training, the Afghan government lost its Russian support. Relaxing is easy., In practice, many military-police officers killed time by watching movies and getting drunk at the Tiki Bar; they also took flights to Afghanistan, to pick up more detainees. I was, like, Maybe hes right. (In fact, the 9/11 plot was organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) They really know who is who, and, as a result, they were very reluctant to torture me. Wahrheit macht frei, the officer saidthe truth sets you free. My interest is not to be tortured, he said. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantnamo Diary (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). 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. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch truly believed Mohamedou Ould Slahi was guilty. Salahi, who hadnt been home since 1993, was filled with nostalgia and dread. In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. 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 asked Abu Hafs to tell me the name printed in his diplomatic passport, assuming that the identity was no longer valid. 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