The local dive shop offered gear and certifications for sailing, water-skiing, snorkelling, scuba diving, and more: No experience, no problem. More detainees have died at Guantnamo than have been convicted of a crime. By now, Salahi was under surveillance by German intelligence. He and his family had spent almost ten years under the protection of the Revolutionary Guard, but, with talk of the Obama Administrations thaw in relations with Iran, Abu Hafs began to worry that he could be traded into U.S. custody. 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. 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. 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. Until recently, the guards and the interrogators had worn Halloween masks inside the cell. I want bin Ladins head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. It was a grand compound, white stone decorated with lavish carpets and chandeliers. Wood was the second of three boys. I executed orders. 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. 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. 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,. During a lull in conversation, he turned to Salahi and, gesturing toward Wood and me, said, So, you studied in the United States?. Siems was doing an interview about the diary, and in that moment Salahi finally felt as if he was beginning to take back the narrative of his life. He liked to rile his guards into debating equality, race, and religion, and he wielded a sophisticated understanding of history and geopolitics to chip away at their beliefs. Salahi had been living in a cell practically since the beginning of the invasion, nine months earlier. The men were dragged out of their cells. Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. But the government had abandoned the theory that Salahi knew about 9/11 before it happened. (Abdellahi says that, after Salahi disappeared, the family never contacted him.) Nice to meet you, Wood said. Although slavery was criminalized in 2007, Mauritanian human-rights advocates told me that the law was drafted to appease international organizationsthat virtually nothing has changed. By the following day, the lead Senegalese officer was convinced that there was no reason to hold Salahi. For the next two months, Abu Hafs taught jihadi recruits at a madrassa. They look like a prison uniform with stripes! 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 the call to jihad interrupted his studies. Before dawn, Salahi was taken to an interrogation room. In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. Id read about Muslim heroes who faced the death penalty, head up, he wrote. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch truly believed Mohamedou Ould Slahi was guilty. Theyd ask me, Whos in there?, and Id say, I dont know, probably somebody famous.. They said I was bringing shame upon the family, and protecting a terrorist, Wood recalled. 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. . He recalled his political views as being whatever Fox News told us. He didnt know the difference between a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslimhe had never met one. Then, he wrote, the plane landed, the doors opened, and the warm Cuban sun hit me gracefully. He grew up measuring political eras by military coups1978, 1979, 1984changes in power that did little to alter the ways in which Mauritanians experienced power. I was educating myself on the world. But, because Salahis trailer was a national secret, Wood kept a cordial distance from most of the other guards. Several Mauritanians had travelled to battlefields in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and Mahfouz Walid had become an important figure in Al Qaeda; he now went by the nom de guerre Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. The Taliban was rapidly losing ground. By Ben Taub April 15, 2019 Mohamedou Salahi spent more. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. 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 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. ; mosques in Duisburg; and his cousin Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. 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. The gulf between the U.S. governments public disclosures and its secret practices was etched into his body and his mind. One day they would deprive him of food, and the next theyd force him to drink water until he vomited. When they finished, Salahis lawyers delivered a CD-rom with the scanned pages to Larry Siems, a writer and a human-rights advocate, who has written extensively on government misconduct in the aftermath of 9/11. The U.S. military prison's leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. After a near-fatal stabbingand decades of threatsthe novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act. I told him I have no problem with the Jews, either, man. And Mohamedou probably thought I was thinking the same thingthat, to me, he was just a job, and nothing more. So, during one of his final shifts, Wood broke protocol and showed Salahi a photo of Summer. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. . How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been lasting the last 7 years. While in custody, Salahi had befriended Yacoub, the intelligence officer who had been one of his guards. So that scared me away, he said. One of Salahis friends, who was now living in Canada, suggested that he move to Montreal. Slahi says his interrogator could not sell his false confessions up the chain of command. 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. Its not looking good, the presiding military officer replied. In Mauritania, Abdellahis men detained Salahis wife and brothers and interrogated them about the Millennium Plot. The protest lasted for several days as twenty-three prisoners tried to hang themselves.. He wore handcuffs, leg shackles, earmuffs, blackout goggles, a surgical mask, and a bright-orange jumpsuit. Having accepted his guards, Salahi wrote, the next phase of captivity was getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.. He signed it. A panel of U.S. national security, intelligence, and other officials cleared Slahi for release in July after determining that he poses investigations and was on a no-fly list, and that several men who had attended the Masjid As-Saber had been convicted on terrorism charges. Steve Wood walked into Echo Special in the spring of 2004 unaware of everything that had happened before. In response, detainees would stop coperating and start chanting or praying; in an attempt to reassert control, Fallon wrote, the interrogators would duct-tape their mouths, further guaranteeing that they wouldnt get any informationand so it would go. Nevertheless, he recalled, each failed interrogation was taken as proof that the detainees were both Al Qaeda and trained to resist these methods. In 2000, investigators in northern England had discovered a jihadi field manual that included advice on lying to captors. 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. But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country. 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. The governments case, essentially, is that Salahi was so connected to al-Qaida for a decade beginning in 1990 that he must have been part of al-Qaida at the time of his capture, Robertson wrote. Wood walked through the camp to Echo Special proud to be part of a serious national-security operation. 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. His wife, two-year-old son and brother live here. In deliberations with Al Qaeda leaders, he decided that the safest place was Iran. One night in October, 1999, a friend of Salahis asked him to host three Muslims who were passing through Duisburg. Youve still got, like, a solid eight inches.. Neely later found out that the elderly detainee had jerked because, when he was forced to his knees, he thought he was about to be shot in the back of the head. 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. had raided a hotel in Khartoum. He was held in Guantanamo Bay from. Have you heard of Nelson Mandela? Wood recalled Salahi saying. . When a nurse, who spoke only Hassaniya Arabic, filled out Mohamedous birth certificate in the Latin alphabet, she omitted a syllable from his last name. Then one of them shouted, Pillow, you can come out now! A short man in his mid-thirties stepped into the guards area, unshackled. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. 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. 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. 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. 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 all this time, his family had had no official confirmation of his whereabouts. team and their Afghan counterparts travelled through much of northern Afghanistan, laying the groundwork for the U.S. military invasion. Eventually, one of the interrogators told Salahi that he was going to be sent to Mauritania for more questioning. 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.. One of the hardest things to do is to tell an untruthful story and maintain it, and that is exactly where I was stuck., On September 8th, Salahi asked to speak to Zuley. And in. 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 When he refused to back out of the interview, Wendy insisted that he wear an on-camera disguise. Meanwhile, his subordinates continued to collect bribes from Salahis family. He wanted to ask Salahi more about its contents, but he suspected that there were microphones and cameras in the cell. 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. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security., The next day, Salahi brought Wood and me to a friends wedding party, hosted by Mauritanias best radiologist. The International Committee of the Red Crosswhich has access to many of the worlds most notorious detention sites, some of them in countries where there is no rule of lawhad recently sent representatives to Guantnamo, but the base commander, citing military necessity, had refused to allow them into Echo Special. 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. Salahi saw a mentally ill old man subjected to this method. Like, what is a motherfucker? Steve Wood with Salahi, his former prisoner, in Mauritania, in January. [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . A few days later, Salahi was released. guard Steve Wood and director Kevin Macdonald. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. The next morning, he found two pinhole cameras. 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. I hope you treasure every minute of strangers telling you to treasure every minute., I ordered my meal more than an hour ago! Salahi was horrified. He no longer derived much solace from Islam, and rarely prayed. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal team of a current Guantnamo detainee. He wrote a letter to his wife and children, but there was no way to send it, and so he kept it in a pocket in his robes. Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch received summaries of each new confession. The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga - Mohamedou Ould Slahi 2021-02-23 An epic story of a Bedouin family's survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert. custody, bin al-Shibh named Salahi as the man who had arranged his travel to Afghanistan and his introduction to bin Laden. This is the exact opposite of whats supposed to happen. 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 . It was such a good feeling.. They really know who is who, and, as a result, they were very reluctant to torture me. . 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. 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. 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. On paper, Salahi is not listed as the father. On his third visit, he told two Saudi students that he wanted to become a Muslim. (Until 2007, a terrorist sanctions list included Salahis name as an alias for Abu Hafs.). Wood left for the airport at 4 A.M. Salahi spent much of the day watching YouTube compilations of the worst American Idol auditions. 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. Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly, he wrote on a scrap of paper inside his cell. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. An elderly white convert warned him to avoid a couple of other white converts, who dressed in religious clothing and talked about wanting to participate in the jihad. Salahi didnt know their real names, and never heard from them again. He started in on the books he had been too afraid to request in Guantnamoones about Islam. Bin Laden, wary of Al Qaedas fragility, urged him not to speak publicly of his departure. 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. Des milliers de livres avec la livraison chez vous en 1 jour ou en magasin avec -5% de rduction ou tlchargez la version eBook. 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. Salahi was led to a small private aircraft. What if he is, like, I hate these sons of bitches for locking me up? in the United States on February 12. 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