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 I changed my mind after Guantnamo, he told me. Having accepted his guards, Salahi wrote, the next phase of captivity was getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.. His detention at Guantnamo Bay grabbed a lot of attention worldwide. agents walked into the cell. A few weeks later, Iranian spies told Abu Hafs to call other Al Qaeda officials and inform them that they would be welcome in Iranalthough, like him, they would live with their wives and children under a form of house arrest, sometimes in prisons, sometimes in lavish compounds and hotels, always in the company of the Revolutionary Guard. Slahi told me he is hearing voices now, the interrogator wrote. Once every fifteen minutes, a prisoner tried to hang himself by tying his sheet around his neck and fastening it through the mesh of the cage wall, James Yee, an Army captain who served as the Muslim chaplain in Guantnamo, recalled in his memoir, For God and Country, from 2005. For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a friend. There, an intelligence officer named Yacoub confiscated Salahis Quran and left him in a dank cell. Walid, who was sixteen, stayed behind. . After a few months, he signed up for the Oregon National Guard, on the military-police track. But instead the United States is stating to the world very clear and loud that democracy does not workthat when you need to get down and dirty, you need a dictatorship. He told me he hated Jews also. 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. If the detainee dies, youre doing it wrong. (Fredman has disputed the accuracy of the meeting minutes. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. He was terrifiedhe wanted to go back to Canada, where interrogators behaved within the bounds of the law. . It was the first time Wood had encountered the Quran. After work, Salahi went to his mothers house. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. Instead, he began to wonder whether what he was actually protecting at Guantnamo was one of the governments darkest secrets: that its highest-value military detainee was being held essentially by mistake, and that his isolation in Echo Special was intended to cover up the hell that had been inflicted upon him. The night shift was twelve hours, and he never saw Salahi shackled or restrained. It will look worse.. That dictatorship was built in Guantnamo Bay.. He often turned to a verse by the Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar: I stood in my cellWondering about my situationAm I the prisoner, or is it that guard standing nearby?Between me and him stood a wallIn the wall, there was a holeThrough which I see light, and he sees darknessJust like me he has a wife, kids, a houseJust like me he came here on orders from above. Salahi was on a publicity campaign, to draw attention to the injustice of his withheld passport, and at times it seemed to Wood as if he were a propthe former guard who recognized Salahis innocence. 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. 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. A few days later, Salahi was released. He often wakes up shaking, crying, and grinding his teeth. A security guard handed him a filthy black turban, to hide his face during the drive to the secret-police headquarters. Salahi withdrew the cash and gave it to friends who were travelling to Nouakchott, and they delivered it to Abu Hafss family. came to much the same conclusion.) Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 44, has been held prisoner inside Guantanomo Bay since 2002. But the government appealed, and Salahi stayed in Guantnamo. They punched Salahi in the face and the ribs, then covered his eyes with blackout goggles, his ears with earmuffs, and his head with a bag. 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. He knew what he expected to hear. He recalled, I took the pen and paper and wrote all kinds of incriminating lies about a poor person who was just seeking refuge in Canada and trying to make some money so he could start a family. Striking horror, panic, and fear in the hearts of the enemies of Allah is a divine commandment. He added that American citizens should blame their law-enforcement and intelligence agencieswith their satellites, ground stations, millions of spies, and huge budgetsfor the fact that the hijackers had found a security breach as big as a whole fleet of hijacked civilian aircraft, and managed to shove Americas nose into the ground.. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes, Black said, according to Schroens memoir, First In, published in 2005. A similar phone call, followed by a second transaction, took place in December, 1998. Although Wood had introduced himself to Salahi as Stretch, his nickname from the sawmill, Salahi had quickly learned his real name, as well as those of the other guards. A week after Salahi began leading prayers at the Al Sunnah mosque, Ressam drove a rental car onto a U.S.-bound ferry in Victoria, British Columbia. Some guards saw an opportunity to torment the detaineesby tossing the Quran into the toilet, for example, or by breaking the binding under the guise of searching for weapons. Desecration of the Quran provoked riots in the cellblocks, which resulted in IRF teams storming into the cells and beating up detainees. 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. In 1967, Martin Seligman, a twenty-four-year-old Ph.D. student in psychology, conducted an experiment that involved delivering electric shocks to dogs in various states of restraint. It was my way of telling him, Man, I trust you. For the first time, he described his experiences without fear of retribution. Under the new regime, Abdellahi, the spy chief, was demoted, and given the task of investigating corruption and malfeasance within the security services; the standard path for accountability required Abdellahi to investigate himself. (All charges were later dropped, and Yee was honorably discharged. 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. One of the men momentarily removed Salahis blindfold, and shined a flashlight into his eyes. It is basically subject to perception. 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. Abu Hafs, however, regarded the Pakistanis as duplicitous. 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. 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. 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. As soon as the prisoner was taken to the hospital, another detainee would be foundhis sheet wound around his neck and tied to his cage wall. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. In Mauritania, Abdellahis men detained Salahis wife and brothers and interrogated them about the Millennium Plot. (He escaped through a kitchen door.) 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. 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. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. Wood stayed with Salahi for four days. 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. . In late 2003a period that Salahi described in a letter as where my brake broke looseCouch struggled to keep up with the constant stream of information. They were afraid that I would kill some people.. 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. . 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. They kept him in alternately hot and cold cells, blasted him with strobe lights and heavy-metal music, and poured ice water on him. On paper, Salahi is not listed as the father. His wife, two-year-old son and brother live here. 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. In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder surgery. Instead, the men stripped him naked, strapped a diaper on him, and swapped out his shackles for a heavier set. English was his fourth language. No adult in Woods life had ever looked so frightened and so vulnerable. He walked into the morning sunlight in a daze, unable to reconcile his impression of the man in Echo Special with the depiction of the terrorist in the dossier. I Tweeted it. The Mauritanian tells the story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a man of Mauritanian origin who spent 14 years in the notorious American military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he. . In Kandahar, Abu Hafs felt the Americans closing in. Every time there was a hurricane warning in Guantnamo Bay, Salahi dreamed that the storm had wiped away the prison camp, and everyone, detainees and captors alike, was fighting side by side to survive, he wrote. O.K., screw it, it is not a problemthey can watch me, he said. Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch received summaries of each new confession. 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 time, he was given back his pain medication. By the following day, the lead Senegalese officer was convinced that there was no reason to hold Salahi. Nice to meet you, Wood said. Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. special agent, was eager to receive the flight manifest. One day, after an interrogator kicked a Quran across the floor, detainees organized a mass suicide attempt. The local dive shop offered gear and certifications for sailing, water-skiing, snorkelling, scuba diving, and more: No experience, no problem. Few locals spoke French, but since the country had been arbitrarily drawn up as a vast, mostly desert territory, populated by numerous ethnic groups who spoke different languages, there was no alternative for official documentation. How does he react to world events? It was unclear to Abdellahi whether Salahi was still active within Al Qaeda, but he seemed to be someone whom all the Mauritanian Islamists knew. He sought structure and disciplinea life of pride, purpose, and clarity of mission. Nevertheless, he spent 14 years of captivity in America's notorious Guantanamo Bay prison,. 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. He listed his accomplices and added, thanks to Canadian Intel, the plan was discovered and sentenced to failure. After years of holding out in interrogations, he had become what the classified dossier described as a highly cooperative font of intelligenceone of the most valuable sources in detention. He described Al Qaedas financial involvement in credit-card fraud and drug smuggling, and also the groups investment in unwitting companies in Bosnia, Canada, Chechnya, Denmark, England, Germany, Mauritania, and Spain. He drew organizational charts, with the names and operational roles of key figures, and supplied intelligence on jihadi cells and safe houses all over Europe and West Africa. By now, Salahi was under surveillance by German intelligence. Mohamedou Ould Salahi Net Worth & Basic source of earning is being a successful Mauritanian Writer. Salahi denied knowing Ahmed Ressam, and added that he thought the entire narrative around the attack had been concocted to unlock the terrorism budget and hurt the Muslims. At the time, he later wrote, I believed excessively in Conspiracy Theoriesthough maybe not as much as the U.S. government does.. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi waited for updates from the C.I.A. They really know who is who, and, as a result, they were very reluctant to torture me. Salahi and Wood sat in front of a laptop, with the Webcam on, and Skyped into a room in Washington. A year in Echo Special shattered Woods ideas about his post-military future. I just remember being super excited, because I thought, Im going to be doing something important, Wood told me. Although many of the detainees arrived malnourished, with their bodies marked by bullet wounds and broken bones, some IRF teams punched them and slammed their heads into the ground until they were bloody and unconscious. 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. 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. He stayed that way for hours. 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. But Wood spent his days in the base library, researching topics that Salahi had brought up in the cell. He let you down! An interrogation memo listed plans to shave Salahis head and beard, dress him in a burqa, and make him bark and perform dog tricks, to reduce the detainees ego and establish control.. The Senegalese did the talking, but the Americans provided the questions and reported back to D.C. Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Steve Wood met in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2004. 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. I asked Abu Hafs to tell me the name printed in his diplomatic passport, assuming that the identity was no longer valid. As for his jihadi connections, Robertson continued, the governments classified filings tend to support Salahis submission that he was attempting to find the appropriate balanceavoiding close relationships with al-Qaida members, but also trying to avoid making himself an enemy of the group. 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.. 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. 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. All I had were some numbers of business partners in Mauritania and Germany, he later wrote, but I didnt want the U.S. government harassing those peaceful people just because I had their numbers in my phone. One of the contacts was listed as P.C. 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. 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. One day in the spring of 2012, Abu Hafs slipped out of custody during a visit to the gym. Everyone on the team was dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured by balaclavas. His specialty was in brutalizing detainees who were considered important, but not valuable enough to get them tickets to the secret CIA prisons, Salahi wrote. 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. A private hospital in Germany has offered to cover the costs of Salahis gallbladder surgery, plus a year of physical and psychological rehabilitation, but without a passport he cannot travel to Europe. Throughout 2002 and 2003, whenever the foreign minister visited the parliamentary chamber, Badre Eddine demanded to know Salahis whereabouts. Discover Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. What if he is, like, I hate these sons of bitches for locking me up? Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born on 21 December, 1970, is a Writer. 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. 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. At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. I dont remember whether I hit the floor or was caught by the other guards. 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. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for Salahi. Most of his incarceration was spent in a cell at a detention camp at. Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. 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. 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. 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. At other times, the questions originated from material on his hard drive, which the F.B.I. And in. Mohamedou Ould Slahi: I always told myself, at the end of the day, I didn't do wrong to anyone. Every day, Mariem Mint Elwadia asked God for the same thing: She wanted to see her son, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, just one . I am denied my freedom because I was denied my freedom, Salahi said. The Bush Administration had decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror, which meant that the men captured abroad could be deprived of the rights of prisoners of war. I thought there would be a lot of formalities, especially for a terrorist suspect such as myself, but nothing like that happened, Salahi wrote. But, hey, I have to cope with it. [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . One of Salahis friends, who was now living in Canada, suggested that he move to Montreal. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal team of a current Guantnamo detainee. Soon afterward, in a room at the same hotel, the U.S. State Department hosted a training session for Mauritanias security-intelligence apparatus, on Interdiction of Terrorist Activities. Salahi suffered night terrors, and Wood suffered a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal. Zuley read Salahi a letter, later shown to be forged, stating that his mother was in U.S. custody and might soon be transferred to Guantnamo. T ahar Rahim plays Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who is arrested in 2001 in his native Mauritania with the connivance of his own government, and eventually spirited to the US prison camp on the Cuban . . Wood, then a member of the. 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. They showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. He was driven around for three hours, to make him think that he was being transported to a different facility. His whole reputation rested on this fiction. Wood became secretive about his calls with Salahi; Wendy began to suspect that he was having an affair. They were everywhere in the mosque, in the police car, twenty-four hours. Among the targets of the investigation was Mohsen, Salahis friend and host. Over a three-way Anglo-French-African video call, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Tahar Rahim are exchanging hearty greetings. By 1990, the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, but Al Qaeda was still fighting against the Communist Afghan government that the Soviets had installed. A fourth was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator; while in C.I.A. French actor Tahar Rahim is making headlines for his performance in the film The Mauritanian, which chronicles the true life story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Wood is six feet three, with a shaved head, a shy, stoic manner, and the musculature of an lite bodybuilder. Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. As they walked to the car, Salahi dug into Woods personal life. Man, youve had a really tough time of it, he said. Were gonna feed you up your ass, an interrogator said. Guantnamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative.

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