The plane landed at sunset. 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. The interrogations always circled back to the Millennium Plot. In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder surgery. According to Wood, the guard drafted a note, but he decided not to submit it. But he subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply. Then one of them shouted, Pillow, you can come out now! A short man in his mid-thirties stepped into the guards area, unshackled. I think we all became friends. But he wasnt sure that Salahi believed him. At the beginning, Mohamedou wanted to be docile and sweet, he said. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country. Another year passed. Who are these guys? Most of the names were Afghan or Pakistani, and the Arabs who were on the list certainly werent recognizable to me and my colleagues who had been working Al Qaeda for years. A few weeks later, after McFadden visited the detention camp, he concluded that the detainees were essentially nobodies. He told me, There was not anyone approaching even the most liberal interpretation of a high-value detainee., In Afghanistan, the U.S. military was inadvertently presiding over a kidnapping-and-ransom industry. Guantnamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative. I petitioned the Defense Department to allow me to show him the edited manuscript, but they turned me down. In 2015, it was published, by Little, Brown, as Guantnamo Diary.. (The C.I.A. He told me he hated Jews also. An image of bin Ladens face adorned the windshield, and Abu Hafs spent much of the journey to the Iranian border, some four hundred miles, wondering whether it was a Wanted poster or a tribute. The days of He was accused of being a part of the Al-Qaeda by the American government. . 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.. It was cheaper to fly to Dakar than to Nouakchott, and his brothers drove three hundred miles to meet him there. In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantnamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard. 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. While Salahi was being tortured, James Yee, the Muslim military chaplain, discovered that he and the interpreters at Guantnamomany of whom were Muslim Americans, with Middle Eastern backgroundswere being spied on by law-enforcement and intelligence officers. Bin Ladens family was en route to Pakistan, and Abu Hafs needed to make arrangements for their protection. 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. He wasnt sure what he wanted out of the visithe knew only that curiosity eclipsed his misgivings. Around that time, after a long period without contact, Abu Hafs called Salahi from bin Ladens satellite phone. 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. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay prison. Salahi was asked about innocuous exchanges from intercepted e-mails and phone calls, as if they had been conducted in code. 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. 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. By Marisa Egerstrom. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who lived briefly in Montreal, has launched a $30-million lawsuit against the federal government. He knew what he expected to hear. More detainees have died at Guantnamo than have been convicted of a crime. 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. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of an internationally bestselling memoir that detailed the torture he endured as a detainee in Guantnamo Bay, says he has been denied a passport by. Then a sergeant major pulled him aside for a brief interview, and assigned him to work the night shift in Echo Special, a secret, single-occupancy unit that had been built to house the United States militarys highest-value detainee. Abu Hafs spent the next decade in relative luxury, exercising alongside foreign diplomats in one of Tehrans swankiest gyms, and looking after bin Ladens sons along with his own. He wanted to ask Salahi more about its contents, but he suspected that there were microphones and cameras in the cell. Look him up, dude. After Salahi was processed, he spent thirty days in a cold isolation cell, a practice that the U.S. government considered a main building block of the exploitation process, as it allows the captor total control over personal inputs. When the isolation period was over, Salahi learned from other detainees that there was a difference in opinion between those who had lived in European democracies and those who had lived only in Muslim countries, with the latter group arguing that Americas war on terror was an anti-Muslim crusade. He was the first person in his family to attend university. I really have no questions for you, because I know your case, Abdellahi told him. Canadas Security Intelligence Service began a surveillance operation focussing on Salahi and his associates, but Salahi noticed two pinhole cameras poking through his apartment walls and left the country. Another two years passed before Salahis name caught the attention of Deddahi Ould Abdellahi, the head of Mauritanias security-intelligence apparatus. 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. ), Each detainee was given a number, and, on August 4th, thirty-four of those numbers were called, including Salahis. That May, U.S. Navy Seals killed bin Laden, and collected more than a million documents from his compound in northern Pakistan; among them was a letter from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, seeking the central leaderships blessing to enter into a secret agreement with the Mauritanian government. His was the first guard force that didnt wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. 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. ; mosques in Duisburg; and his cousin Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. They took off from Uzbekistan and flew into northern Afghanistan, over the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. 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. 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. One night in October, 1999, a friend of Salahis asked him to host three Muslims who were passing through Duisburg. After roughly three weeks, F.B.I. The guards, who were officially prohibited from interacting with him, began asking questions. Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly, he wrote on a scrap of paper inside his cell. As they walked to the car, Salahi dug into Woods personal life. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. The Pentagon had reported that he was dead. The journey to Nouakchott took roughly an hour, tracing the Mauritanian coastto the left the Atlantic, to the right the Sahara. 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. He had spent much of the past fifteen months in Yemen, investigating Al Qaedas bombing of the U.S.S. Its not looking good, the presiding military officer replied. . 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. See if you think his captivity was just. Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch received summaries of each new confession. team and their Afghan counterparts travelled through much of northern Afghanistan, laying the groundwork for the U.S. military invasion. At a Pakistani Army checkpoint, he slipped a wad of bills into his passport, and went through unquestioned. When Salahis lawyers wrote to him, asking that he inform them of everything he had told the government, he wrote back, Are you out of your mind! So that scared me away, 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.. 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. But Salahi was shackled to the floor, so he could do so only hunched over. She is my life. Each time, the minister liedeven after the Red Cross had started delivering Salahis letters from Guantnamo to his family. I was, like, Maybe hes right. (In fact, the 9/11 plot was organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) But, when the list of detainees finally arrived, he recalled, my reaction was, What the fuck? I really think that he's a good man. 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. 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. Salahi was on a diet of Ensure nutrition shakes and antidepressants. For the first time, Salahi was in the custody of uniformed American soldiers. The Mauritanian is stunningly tragic and leaves audiences with a host of questions about how its events were allowed to take place, but another notable issue is why the Obama administration blocked Mohamedou Ould Slahi's release from Guantanamo Bay. Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Ladens pamphlets. Salahi was a precocious student; after school, he used to steal chalk from the classroom and return to Bouhdida, a dusty, unplanned neighborhood in Mauritanias capital, Nouakchott, to re-create the days lessons for kids who couldnt afford an education. He alleges Canadian officials made false claims about him that . The students acted as Woods witnesses. Seems a little creepy., Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than auditory, but you never know, Zierhoffer replied. 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. A year in Echo Special shattered Woods ideas about his post-military future. But, when he wanted to engage, he spoke with a worldly, provocative humor that Wood found appealing. On October 17, 2001, Abu Hafss madrassa took a direct hit from a missile. Ad Choices. As we walked to the house, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white turban and long robes. Slahi told me he is hearing voices now, the interrogator wrote. 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. The host, who was a government official, grew agitated, pulled me aside, and urged me not to mention that I had ever been to his house. 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. For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a friend. Wood had come to see Islam in much the same way that many of the detainees did: as the only thing that couldnt be stripped from them. Never turn your back, the sergeant major warned him. You know, when you just fall asleep and the saliva starts to come out of your mouth? Salahi said. But the Germans saw no reason to detain or question him. Yee, who had converted to Islam in the early nineties, sent a request up the chain of command, but was rebuffed. I wish you good luck, the agent said. They didnt tell me, because they were scared, Salahi recalled. [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . (ge) A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history . At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. An M.P. His very existence will become erased. One day in November, after burying several friends, Abu Hafs sought out an Al Jazeera journalist. Moreover, he is handicapped. Salahi didnt know their real names, and never heard from them again. For the rest of the interrogation session, he was forced to look at photos of corpses from the aftermath of the attacks. The next morning, Salahi was led to the office of the Mauritanian intelligence chief, Deddahi Ould Abdellahi. Wood was the second of three boys. 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. I think he still sees any baby in my family as a future inmate. Brahim Ebety, Salahis Mauritanian lawyer, told me that he is considering a lawsuit against the Mauritanian government. A security guard handed him a filthy black turban, to hide his face during the drive to the secret-police headquarters. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. For some thirty hours, Salahi was strapped to a board. 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. The prosecutor assigned to Salahis case was a lieutenant colonel named Stuart Couch, who had retired from the military before 9/11. But, after Abu Hafs used bin Ladens phone to call a different cousin in Nouakchott, Abdellahis subordinates took the cousin into custody, and tortured him for two months. 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. Outside Echo Special, Wood started reading about Guantnamo on activist Web sites, but a colleague warned him that Internet traffic was monitored on the base. Mountains of the Oregon National guard at Abu Ghraib ; and his brothers drove three hundred to. Base, Fallon and his colleagues referred to most detainees as dirt farmers never know, replied. Free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country the Atlantic, to the Millennium Plot left Afghanistan. They walked to the office of the Oregon National guard travelled through much northern. A reply started reading bin Ladens satellite phone the secret-police headquarters two years passed before name. 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