The F.B.I. I hope you treasure every minute of strangers telling you to treasure every minute., I ordered my meal more than an hour ago! One day, German officers questioned one of Salahis friends. Wood, then a member of the. 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. guard Steve Wood and director Kevin Macdonald. Salahi and Wood sat in front of a laptop, with the Webcam on, and Skyped into a room in Washington. At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. There, Schroen contacted the leaders of the Northern Alliance, an armed group that had spent years fighting the Taliban, with little external support. Wed try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually we were, like, fuck it. His turban was still damp from where his wife had cleaned off other peoples blood. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022 . Mohamedou Salahi spent more than fourteen years in detention at Guantnamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured. Outside of the political discussions, he and Salahi passed the hours playing rummy, Risk, and chess. and the G.I.D., but received none. Salahi was asked about innocuous exchanges from intercepted e-mails and phone calls, as if they had been conducted in code. Wood walked into the main area, which housed the guards; through a door was the prisoners sleeping space. On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for Salahi. 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. The Corrupt World Behind the Murdaugh Murders. The release comes 14 years after he was first brought by the United States to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. 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. Salahi told him that he was now home. In a newly published journal he reveals allegations of torture and sexual abuse. He also contacted another guard from Echo Special. [4] Slahi traveled from his home in Germany to Afghanistan in December 1990 "to support the mujahideen." In all this time, his family had had no official confirmation of his whereabouts. Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that enemy combatants could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as torture it must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. By the end of the following year, Salahi knew more about classified security operations than any private American citizen. After the prayer session, Abu Hafs led me into his living room, and for four hours he detailed his falling-out with bin Laden, his whereabouts and activities in the aftermath of 9/11, and his relationship with Mauritanias President. Each government claims that it has come to the rescue of the population, which had been neglected and abused by the previous government, Badre Eddine told me. But he derived immense satisfaction from the work, and saw in it the kind of moral clarity that Guantnamo had lacked. He left the Oregon National Guard, and started working night shifts at a twenty-four-hour gym near Portland. 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. And now he belongs to the Americans.. He now has two American clients, whom he helps to navigate personal and professional woes through weekly Skype meetings. I just remember being super excited, because I thought, Im going to be doing something important, Wood told me. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.. I felt so bad, and kept praying silently, Nothings gonna happen to you dear brother.. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantnamo Diary is at least the fifth autobiography by a Guantnamo prisoner. He sought structure and disciplinea life of pride, purpose, and clarity of mission. Neuer Kurator des African Book Festival Berlin" wird Mohamedou Ould Slahi Houbeini. But he subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply. How did they do it?. (Until 2007, a terrorist sanctions list included Salahis name as an alias for Abu Hafs.). You must be very tough. When Abu Hafs reached Quetta, in Pakistan, he found the citys private hospital filled with injured Al Qaeda members. They look like a prison uniform with stripes! This was my first time hearing these words, Salahi said. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. There are so many Ahmeds that itll be difficult for them to put him on the no-fly list, Salahi joked. The Ambassador called Nouakchott, and the foreign minister ordered the Embassy to fabricate a passport, using a fake name. I was an agent of the state. 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. When Wood told the old man that he had worked at Guantnamo Bay, the man suggested that he keep it to himself. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. 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. More detainees have died at Guantnamo than have been convicted of a crime. I just wanted this to be me and God.. 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. Few people worked out at two or three in the morning, so he had plenty of time to continue his self-education on global affairs. So look at me, Salahi said. Cole, and hoped that some of the men who were being shipped to Guantnamo would have information about the case. 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. On the other end of the line was a man whose voice he hadnt heard in more than eleven years. Taliban fighters walked the streets, confident in the support they received from Pakistans intelligence service. 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. Btihal Remli for The New York. A security guard handed him a filthy black turban, to hide his face during the drive to the secret-police headquarters. There was a famous Mauritanian poet named Taki, the former minister of communications, the current Mauritanian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. 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. It was Ramadan again. Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. Mauritanian immigration officials detained him for an hourhere was a giant American, all muscle and veins, saying that he had met Salahi in Guantnamo Baybut eventually one of Salahis nephews persuaded them to let Wood in. 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.. The proceeds from his book were paying for a nieces studies in Dubai and a nephews masters degree in applied mathematics at a university in Kuala Lumpur. 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. 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. The videos had been pulled from jihadi Web sites, or captured by intelligence officers during raids, and Salahis role was to identify the people in them. At the beginning, Mohamedou wanted to be docile and sweet, he said. Like, really stressful. They slept under mosquito nets in Salahis bedroom, and woke up to the sound of a bleating sheep. His was the first guard force that didnt wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. I said, No. (Investigators later determined that Ressam had left Montreal for a safe house in Vancouver on November 17thnine days before Salahi arrived in Canada.) And Steves interest is to impress the girls. 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. Larry Siems visited Salahi in Mauritania, and they set about filling in the redactions in the book. When Wood agreed to talk about Salahi for a TV documentary, Wendys parents staged an intervention. 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. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day; every once in a while they gave me a rec-time at night to keep me from seeing or interacting with any detainees. The United States released Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of a renowned prison memoir, after he was detained for more than 14 years in Jordan, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, and returned him. Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health problemsincluding a damaged sciatic nervethen led him to a cell. Every day, Mariem Mint Elwadia asked God for the same thing: She wanted to see her son, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, just one . 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. The students acted as Woods witnesses. In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and lite Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top officials. He slept in remote villages, and entrusted his life to Afghan sheepherders who were presumably unaware of the twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in late December, 1970, the ninth child of a Mauritanian camel herder and his wife. And Id say, No matter what you did in the past, man, youve saved thousands of lives. Id always say that, and hed just shake his head, like, Bullshit., One night, when Salahi was asleep, Wood heard sounds that reminded him of a child having a nightmare. In 2008, he met a woman named Wendy at a bar. It was such a good feeling.. One night in October, 2016, Woods phone rang while he was in a Safeway in Portland. The night shift was twelve hours, and he never saw Salahi shackled or restrained. Notably absent is any mention of the Millennium Plot, or any allegation that Salahi had committed a crime. He wore handcuffs, leg shackles, earmuffs, blackout goggles, a surgical mask, and a bright-orange jumpsuit. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years of his life as a detainee in the United States military prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. In the spring of 1999, French intelligence officers asked their Canadian counterparts if they could question Ressam about jihadi activities in Europe, but the Canadians couldnt locate him, because he had entered the country on a fake passport. They asked me do I know Ahmed Ressam. Another officer tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 44, has been held prisoner inside Guantanomo Bay since 2002. But it stopped abruptly after a failed assassination attempt against the President, in 2011, which raised questions about whether he was cutting deals with Al Qaeda. Salahi noted that Steve snores likehow do you call it?a steam train.. Afghanistans civil war entered a new stage, with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of it. 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. Force-feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast. It was the pretty blond interrogator bringing in these disks with footage from Al Qaeda and Taliban training camps in Afghanistan, Wood recalled. I Tweeted it. 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. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. 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. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Having accepted his guards, Salahi wrote, the next phase of captivity was getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.. . In return, they passed along messages from Salahi, which they had invented, and assured the family that Salahi was well. Her wife was on hand to support her last month, as she scooped the coveted Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for her efforts in The Mauritanian. 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. As we walked to the house, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white turban and long robes. Something is going on.. When the ice melted, they punched him, then repacked the ice to freeze him again. 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. Wood compliedhe felt that it was the least he could do for Salahi. That dictatorship was built in Guantnamo Bay.. He also believed that Slahi's interrogators had broken the law tormenting him physically and sexually, and. 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! Salahi was led to a small private aircraft. He was forced to swallow salt water, and, every few minutes, the men packed ice cubes between his clothes and his skin. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 50, has never been convicted of any crime or even charged with any offence. On his third visit, he told two Saudi students that he wanted to become a Muslim. 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