Several young men mentioned Salahi as a contact in Germany. Every day, Mariem Mint Elwadia asked God for the same thing: She wanted to see her son, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, just one . ), Later that month, a military lawyer named Diane Beaver drafted a legal justificationdescribed later by a congressional inquiry on torture as profoundly in error and legally insufficientfor a set of abusive interrogation techniques. Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Ladens pamphlets. 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. I figured Ive seen the guy, but where and when? Salahi wrote in his diary. In 1994, as the director of state security, he opened an investigation into Nouakchotts jihadi scene. He grabbed his shortwave radio. Les carnets de Guantanamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Eric Betsch, Michel Lafon. 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. I pictured my family already having prepared the Iftar fast-breaking food, my mom mumbling her prayers while duly working the modest delicacies, everybody looking for the sun to take its last steps and hide beneath the horizon, Salahi wrote. The release comes 14 years after he was first brought by the United States to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Oct. 17, 2016. 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. The cellbetter, the boxwas cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time. 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. 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 . I tried to make my time there morally neutral, without being called a traitor, he told me. Its hard to sit there and laugh and chat with the guy, if hes actually that bad, Wood told me. Its so empty, now that Steve left, he said to me. with you, and that is to tell me five things that you are grateful for today, he told one of them. No chairs, no lying down, no more access to his prescription pain medication. 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. Mohamedou Salahi spent more than fourteen years in detention at Guantnamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured. When they removed his shackles, the man, who was shaking with fear, suddenly jerked to the left. He was driven around for three hours, to make him think that he was being transported to a different facility. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. Mohamedou Ould Slahi (em rabe: ) (nascido em 21 de dezembro de 1970) um mauritano que foi detido no campo de deteno de Guantnamo Bay sem acusao de 2002 at sua libertao em 17 de outubro de 2016. Ive finally found a way to reuse all our wine corks!, If youd like, I can set you up with a bullet I dodged.. (ge) A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history . And Jodie Foster, 58, was spotted enjoying some. 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. 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. Detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi joined the terrorist organisation Al-. 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. It sucked that I didnt have the freedom to travel, Salahi recalled in the military hearing. Each time, the minister liedeven after the Red Cross had started delivering Salahis letters from Guantnamo to his family. In June, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantnamo detainees could challenge the grounds for their detention. 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. Man, youve had a really tough time of it, he said. Everyone on the team was dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured by balaclavas. By the end of the boat ride, Salahi was bleeding from his ankles, mouth, and wrists. (All charges were later dropped, and Yee was honorably discharged. [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . They werent the only people taken by this strugglethe C.I.A. During the next few months, Wood showed up between prayer times, to avoid any pressure to participate. Theyd ask me, Whos in there?, and Id say, I dont know, probably somebody famous.. Wood stayed with Salahi for four days. The lead officer couldnt speak Mauritanias Hassaniya Arabic, and Abdellahi hardly understood the Jordanian dialect, so Salahi translated for them. An officer shouted Code Red! into a radio, and the Internal Reaction Force team raced to the scene and hog-tied him. Fmr. See if you think his captivity was just. There was a really profound sense of responsibility and ethical risk which came with editing the manuscript of someone who was alive but unable to participate in that process, Siems told me. They were afraid that I would kill some people.. For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a friend. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.. Something is going on.. 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. I thought there would be a lot of formalities, especially for a terrorist suspect such as myself, but nothing like that happened, Salahi wrote. 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. Government officials suggested that Yee was running an elaborate spy ringthat he and other Muslims had infiltrated the military, and represented the gravest insider threat since the Cold War. detainees were whisked to the cellar, to be hidden from view. Wood was the second of three boys. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. Two intelligence officers, including Yacoub, arrived and said that Abdellahi needed to see him again. But he thought, What the fuck is this? Oh, Allah, have mercy on me! one of them said, mockingly. I was scared to hell, Salahi recalled at his hearing. For the rest of the interrogation session, he was forced to look at photos of corpses from the aftermath of the attacks. Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the men in Guantnamo were among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth. But after Brandon Neelys first shift, on the day the detention camp opened, no one really spoke much, he recalled. 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. The interrogator added that, if Salahi didnt start talking, he would be buried on Christian, sovereign American soil., On August 2nd, military records show, an interrogator told Salahi that he and his colleagues are sick of hearing the same lies over and over and over and are seriously considering washing their hands of him. Before his deployment, he had aspired to become a police officer. My interest is not to be tortured, he 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.. 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. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. 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. 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. I keep thinking, Here it comesI am fixing to see what a terrorist looks like face to face, Neely, who was twenty-one at the time, said. Before meeting Salahi, Wood had never heard of Mauritania; Salahi told him that, to his great embarrassment, slavery was still practiced there, even among people close to him. The first rumors of a planes operation began circulating among Al Qaeda leaders in 1999. The next time the Red Cross delegation visited Guantnamo, a representative reported that medical files are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan., Female interrogators groped him. After three months, he left Afghanistan and returned to Duisburg, where he worked in a computer-repair shop while he finished his degree. He would be held there for 14 years without charge. 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. Conversion to Islam requires only that, in the presence of Muslim witnesses, you declare the ShahadaThere is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophetand that you believe it in your heart. Slahi . O.K., screw it, it is not a problemthey can watch me, he said. special agent, was eager to receive the flight manifest. No. Abu Hafs, Salahis cousin and a senior Al Qaeda official, evaded capture. Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. I dont remember whether I hit the floor or was caught by the other guards. Amna Nawaz: He was tortured by his American interrogators, subjected to solitary confinement,. I am not in Afghanistan, Salahi replied. I want to ask you a favor, if it is O.K. One day, he complained to Wood that the interrogators were demanding information on events that he couldnt possibly know about, because they had taken place while he was in custody. 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. Salahi, I wish I were not part of this shit, he said. 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. 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. A similar phone call, followed by a second transaction, took place in December, 1998. It didnt take my interrogator a whole lot of time to understand the situation. Another American official arrived, and took Salahis photograph and fingerprints. They showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. Were gonna feed you up your ass, an interrogator said. In 1998, he had travelled to Afghanistan, and spent a year in Al Qaeda training camps, where he learned to handle weapons and explosives. The anteroom was filled with Mauritanian dignitaries and lites, all men, sitting on couches that lined the perimeter. 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. 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.. came to much the same conclusion.) His friend, Hosni Mohsen, introduced him to the imam at the Al Sunnah mosque. Bin Laden, wary of Al Qaedas fragility, urged him not to speak publicly of his departure. 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. 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. Salahi was horrified. Where are you from? one of them said. Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which would be his home for several years. They prayed together, ate together, and enjoyed a picnic of bread and tea in the dunes of the Sahara. Salahi handed him some leftover ibuprofen from the Guantnamo pharmacy. In the military hearing, Salahi described the torture program in vivid detail. I received the present with a fake overwhelming happiness, and not because I was dying to get a pillow, he wrote. Other men carried box cutters and explosives; Salahi was a ghost on the periphery. 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. IRFing typically involved a team of six or more men dressed in riot gear: the first man would pepper-spray the detainee, then charge into the cell and, using a heavy shield and his body weight, tackle the detainee; the rest would jump on top, shackling or binding the detainee until he was no longer moving. Outside of the political discussions, he and Salahi passed the hours playing rummy, Risk, and chess. 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. 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. Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly, he wrote on a scrap of paper inside his cell. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. As at Guantnamo, he often worked at night. A lot of these prisoners were actually looking forward to being handed over to the Americans, figuring it would be pretty obvious they werent Al Qaeda. Yet hundreds of them were sent to Guantnamo Bay, which ended up housing seven hundred and eighty people. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. He told me he hated Jews also. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 50, has never been convicted of any crime or even charged with any offence. 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. How could he possibly know? 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 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. 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. 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. He began to wonder whether the case against Mohamedou Salahi was as flimsy and politically motivated as that for the invasion had been. 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. In Robertsons assessment, the governments evidence about Salahi was so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution. He concluded, Salahi must be released from custody.. 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. They took off from Uzbekistan and flew into northern Afghanistan, over the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. agents walked into the cell. custody, claimed that Salahi had recruited him into Al Qaeda. Until recently, the former spy chief Deddahi Ould Abdellahi lived directly across the street. The document he signed listed one aim of the abuse as to replicate and exploit the Stockholm Syndrome, in which kidnapping victims come to trust and feel affection for their captors. That was my thinkingthat he was sufficiently intelligent and well informed to help any intelligence service that might ask him for help.. . Illustration by Tyler Comrie; source photograph from Stringer/ AFP/ Getty (face). 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. The men were dragged out of their cells. There was a famous Mauritanian poet named Taki, the former minister of communications, the current Mauritanian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. 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. The night terrors kept coming. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. A couple of weeks into his detention, two F.B.I. There is no Allah. During the Amnesty International live stream, someone on Twitter commented that, of the two of them, Wood looked like the detainee. Force-feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast. When Abu Hafs reached Quetta, in Pakistan, he found the citys private hospital filled with injured Al Qaeda members. 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,. I came to Canada with a plan to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto, Salahi wrote, in one of his many confessions. 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. Ramadan was approachingwhen the men leading prayers read aloud the entire Quran during the course of a lunar cycleand, Salahi recalled, my friend said, We need you here in Canada because we have no Hafez, the Arabic word for a man who can recite the Quran from memory. I just couldnt wait to see who the detainees were, he told me. On May 22nd, Salahis lead F.B.I. He wanted no part of a system in which he might have control over another persons liberty. Eventually, one of the interrogators told Salahi that he was going to be sent to Mauritania for more questioning. Soon afterward, Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about the Millennium Plot. Have you heard of Nelson Mandela? Wood recalled Salahi saying. Abdellahis men confiscated his passport, once again citing a request by the Americans. Guantanamo Diary Revisited recounts the experience of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a citizen of Mauritania, who was imprisoned at the Guantnamo Bay facility from 2002 to 2016, accused by American. 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. International . I stand for 8-10.. 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