Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in late December, 1970, the ninth child of a Mauritanian camel herder and his wife. 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 named him Ahmed, and Salahi asked Wood to be the godfather. He didnt harbor any particular animosity toward Muslims, but he had absorbed his mothers belief: If its not from Jesus then it must be from the Devil. After completing the requirements to become an M.P., Wood enrolled in a criminal-justice program at a nearby community college. For 14 years and two months . By now, Wood was no longer dating Summers mother. 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. 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. But, with every day going by, the optimists lost ground, he wrote. I was, like, Maybe hes right. (In fact, the 9/11 plot was organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) Another officer tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German. All afternoon, guards screamed at the detainees to shut up and walk faster, called them sand niggers, and said that their family members and countries had been obliterated by nuclear bombs. No adult in Woods life had ever looked so frightened and so vulnerable. 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. He said he needs fuel, Salahi explained to Abdellahi. ), In October, 2004, Woods girlfriend gave birth to a daughter, Summer. Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which would be his home for several years. ), Each detainee was given a number, and, on August 4th, thirty-four of those numbers were called, including Salahis. Twenty-hour interrogations. Once, on a technical assignment, Salahi had been photographed near the President of Mauritania; now the lead interrogator accused Salahi of having plotted to kill him. (For the first several weeks of the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, believed that everyone spoke Afghan.) In a rush to leave Kandahar, two dozen senior Al Qaeda officials boarded a bus, but Abu Hafs, fearful that a single air strike could decapitate the jihadi movement, urged them to disperse. Were gonna feed you up your ass, an interrogator said. The F.B.I. 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. 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. Is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? When the ice melted, they punched him, then repacked the ice to freeze him again. James Mitchell, the C.I.A. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes, Black said, according to Schroens memoir, First In, published in 2005. That was my thinkingthat he was sufficiently intelligent and well informed to help any intelligence service that might ask him for help.. This episode was recorded on June 7th 2021.Dr Jordan Peterson's guest Mohamedou Ould Slahi shares his experience with more than a decade of torture, interrog. He was guilty of nothing, Abdellahi told me, and he had not been charged with a crime. 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. During interrogations, an intelligence officer, known among the detainees as William the Torturer, forced Salahi into stress positions that exacerbated his sciatic-nerve issues. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi and his subordinates began to map out the network, detaining people close to Abu Hafs and soliciting the names of other jihadis. Thank you for a wonderful evening!, Ive done it, Igor! He began to wonder whether the case against Mohamedou Salahi was as flimsy and politically motivated as that for the invasion had been. The leadership at Guantnamo was more interested in intelligence collection than in prosecuting detainees for terrorism crimes. 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. Wed try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually we were, like, fuck it. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up. Bad people always want to blend into a crowd, Salahi explained at the military hearing. That day, the leader of Salahis interrogation came in. The 2021 legal drama follows the true story of the aforementioned protagonist (played by Tahar Rahim), a man who was arrested, taken from his . The U.S. government gathered that in 1991, when Salahi was twenty, he swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the following year he learned to handle weapons at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. 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. In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder surgery. Summer/Autumn 2015. No prayers, no information about the direction of Mecca. team and their Afghan counterparts travelled through much of northern Afghanistan, laying the groundwork for the U.S. military invasion. While Abu Hafs was handling Al Qaedas affairs in East Africa, his father became ill, and so, as both men remember it, Abu Hafs requested Salahis help in transferring money to care for his family in Mauritania. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. One of the seven authors was Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man who was held without charge for 14 years, during which time he was repeatedly tortured, before his release in 2016. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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. It didnt take my interrogator a whole lot of time to understand the situation. Another American official arrived, and took Salahis photograph and fingerprints. He walked into the sleeping area and found Salahi lying in the fetal position, shaking. No. Before dawn, Salahi was taken to an interrogation room. Guantnamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative. Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. 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.. Afghanistans civil war entered a new stage, with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of it. Government censors redacted names, dates, locations, and other sensitive or embarrassing information. He stayed that way for hours. 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. But two months later, when Salahi returned to Mauritania and described his experience of the jihad, Walid resolved to set off on his own for Afghanistan. He is being held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), alleged by the US government to be "part of" al Qaeda at the time of his arrest. Military police officers put blackout goggles over their eyes and mittens on their hands, then hooded them, lined them up, and tied each detainee to the one in front of him and the one behind him. What I was told was that his information had saved thousands of American lives, Wood said, and this is what theyd given him to keep talking., Salahi was taken into custody when he was thirty years old, but he had already lived on four continents, and spoke fluent Arabic, French, and German. The lead officer couldnt speak Mauritanias Hassaniya Arabic, and Abdellahi hardly understood the Jordanian dialect, so Salahi translated for them. At an event, I exchanged phone numbers with an extremely submissive server who was dressed in ragged clothes and had a cloudy, damaged eye. 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. But, when the list of detainees finally arrived, he recalled, my reaction was, What the fuck? 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. At other times, the questions originated from material on his hard drive, which the F.B.I. 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. Allah! Bin Laden, wary of Al Qaedas fragility, urged him not to speak publicly of his departure. A fourth was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator; while in C.I.A. Abu Hafs, Salahis cousin and a senior Al Qaeda official, evaded capture. In time, he was given back his pain medication. Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly, he wrote on a scrap of paper inside his cell. 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. They drove to the airport in silence, in Abdellahis black Mercedes. Soon afterward, Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about the Millennium Plot. After a time of mourning and injustice, Katja seeks revenge. For the next two months, Abu Hafs taught jihadi recruits at a madrassa. 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 . Allah! He had spent the morning of the worst terrorist attack in American history lying on his mothers couch, high on painkillers after a tonsillectomy, but when he emerged from the haze he was angry, focussed, and longing for deployment. He was belted so tightly that he struggled to breathe, but he didnt have the English vocabulary to tell the guards. (Abdellahi says that, after Salahi disappeared, the family never contacted him.) In Nouakchott, Abdellahi waited for updates from the C.I.A. 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. 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. Now bin al-Shibh, who was being tortured in C.I.A. He added that such an attack would be a betrayal of Al Qaedas agreement with the Taliban government, which had provided sanctuary for the group on the understanding that it would do nothing to provoke a full-scale U.S. invasion. You must forget your fear to achieve anything., Last summer, Salahi completed an online course to become a certified life coach. Mohamedou Salahi spent more than fourteen years in detention at Guantnamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured. 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. Discover Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. The evidence against him lacked depth, but investigators considered its breadth conclusive. Several more days of interrogation followed. Everything that happened to meeverything I witnessed in Guantnamo Bayhappened in the name of democracy, in the name of security, in the name of the American people, Salahi told the audience at the Amnesty event. 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. He bolted through the changing room and into the street, dressed in his gym clothes, and hailed a taxi to the Mauritanian Embassy in Tehran. 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. 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. And I didnt confirm or deny anything, Wood told me. He wore handcuffs, leg shackles, earmuffs, blackout goggles, a surgical mask, and a bright-orange jumpsuit. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 45, was subjected in 2003 to a special interrogation at Guantnamo Bay. Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. There, an intelligence officer named Yacoub confiscated Salahis Quran and left him in a dank cell. 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 9/11, the directorate acted as a proxy jailer for the C.I.A.) Throughout 2002 and 2003, whenever the foreign minister visited the parliamentary chamber, Badre Eddine demanded to know Salahis whereabouts. . His friend, Hosni Mohsen, introduced him to the imam at the Al Sunnah mosque. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of "Guantanamo Diary," was released after a review board determined that his continued detention was not necessary to protect against a threat to U.S. security . 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. His turban was still damp from where his wife had cleaned off other peoples blood. Force-feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast. Salahi was led to a small private aircraft. For the next month, he was kept in total darkness; his only way of knowing day from night was to look into the toilet and see if there was brightness at the end of the drain. 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. I just kind of shrugged it off, like, What does it matter? They decided to get a divorce. The Ambassador called Nouakchott, and the foreign minister ordered the Embassy to fabricate a passport, using a fake name. 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. Just remember Allah always has a plan. I just couldnt wait to see who the detainees were, he told me.

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