had raided a hotel in Khartoum. On a Tuesday afternoon in September, 2001, one of bin Ladens messengers sought out Salahis cousin, Abu Hafs, and told him to keep an eye on the news. agents visited Salahis cell. How does he live? I am not in Afghanistan, Salahi replied. Mitchell argued that, by reverse-engineering this program, interrogators could overwhelm whatever resistance training a detainee might have absorbed from the Manchester manual. I asked Abu Hafs to tell me the name printed in his diplomatic passport, assuming that the identity was no longer valid. With the assistance of German intelligence, Abdellahi told me, we started collecting the maximum amount of information. Then he was prescribed antidepressants. Because he had no experience with weapons, Al Qaeda personnel sent him to the Al Farouq training camp, near Khost, where he learned how to use a Kalashnikov rifle and launch rocket-propelled grenades. They asked me do I know Ahmed Ressam. His detention at Guantnamo Bay grabbed a lot of attention worldwide. He wrote a letter to his wife and children, but there was no way to send it, and so he kept it in a pocket in his robes. By the time Salahi arrived at Guantnamo, on August 5, 2002, Fallons lite interagency criminal-investigation task force had been sidelined, and Lehnert had been replaced. As a teen-ager, Salahi memorized the entire Quran. 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. The Mauritanian tells the true story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi - played by Tahar Rahim in a Bafta-nominated turn - a man from the northwestern African state of the title, whose tenuous. The next morning, Salahi was led to the office of the Mauritanian intelligence chief, Deddahi Ould Abdellahi. detainees were whisked to the cellar, to be hidden from view. Other men carried box cutters and explosives; Salahi was a ghost on the periphery. Salahis freedom became a strain on Woods marriage. Wood contacted one of Salahis lawyers, using a made-up name and a new e-mail address, to inquire about Salahis well-being and the status of his case. (The C.I.A. One was a self-help book about finding happiness in a hopeless place. And Steves interest is to impress the girls. 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. 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. 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. Since then, I have received it, eaten it, and paid for it! No, its not looking good at all, Salahi said. 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. Soon afterward, Salahis brothers were released with instructions to return to Mauritania. On his third visit, he told two Saudi students that he wanted to become a Muslim. A panel of U.S. national security, intelligence, and other officials cleared Slahi for release in . 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.. When I heard him say that, I knew the truth wouldnt set me free, because Arbeit didnt set the Jews free, Salahi recalled. The students acted as Woods witnesses. His was the first guard force that didnt wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. The U.S. military prisons leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. When I visited Wood, last August, he and his team were layering the surface of a bridge near Dayton, Oregon, with epoxy, rocks, and primer. The tape would fall off our uniforms, Wood recalled. O.K., screw it, it is not a problemthey can watch me, he said. Wife: Not Available: Sibling: Not Available: Children: Not Available : Mohamedou Ould Slahi Net Worth. I executed orders. special agent, was eager to receive the flight manifest. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Assalaamu alaikum, he said to Mohamedou. He was guilty of nothing, Abdellahi told me, and he had not been charged with a crime. [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . The devotion, the routine of the five daily prayersthat kept Mohamedou going, Wood told me. 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. 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. 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. Outside of the political discussions, he and Salahi passed the hours playing rummy, Risk, and chess. Mohamedou Ould Slahi: I always told myself, at the end of the day, I didn't do wrong to anyone. Some of Mohsens bad friends, as Salahi described them, visited Mohsens apartment while he was hosting Salahi. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. After the failed attack, Canada began to aggressively investigate the Montreal cell. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi waited for updates from the C.I.A. Abu Hafs ascended to Al Qaedas Shura Council, where he served as bin Ladens personal adviser on Sharia law. . 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi. During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani province of Balochistan. When they asked whether Salahi was involved in any terrorist activities, the friend laughed. TV crews were present at meals, and an interviewer showed up at Salahis apartment, recorder in hand, and asked Wood, who still hadnt told his brothers that he is a Muslim, to comment on his favorite Quranic passages, and to share his thoughts on the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. In his fourth year of U.S. detention, Mohamedou Ould Slahi bonded with one particular Guantnamo guard over prison meals, American TV and the quirky movie, "The Big Lebowski." They were afraid that I would kill some people.. A year in Echo Special shattered Woods ideas about his post-military future. He had come to think of himself as a dead camel in the desert, when all kinds of bugs start to eat it. Most of the interrogations were conducted by the F.B.I., whose questions now centered on establishing a connection between Salahi and 9/11. Like, really stressful. They slept under mosquito nets in Salahis bedroom, and woke up to the sound of a bleating sheep. Wood walked into the main area, which housed the guards; through a door was the prisoners sleeping space. Their questions were much the same, Salahi wrote, but the whole environmental setup made me very skeptical toward the honesty and humanity of the U.S. interrogators. In Arabic countries there are oodles, but in Europe and Canada one is very rare.. 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. One day, German officers questioned one of Salahis friends. One of the Algerian jihadis was Ahmed Ressam, a serial thief who was living in Canada under a false identity. 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. Because detainees are not in U.S. territory, the government has not allowed them to be tried in U.S. courts. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal team of a current Guantnamo detainee. 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. 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. Soon afterward, Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about the Millennium Plot. 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. Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely, Jonathan Fredman, a senior C.I.A. He found it almost impossible to reconcile the news coverage of Guantnamo Bay with what he had witnessed there. 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. On March 22, 2010, a U.S. district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahis petition to be released. He was not happyhe didnt want to leave, Abdellahi told me. had copied in Nouakchott. Amna Nawaz: He was tortured by his American interrogators, subjected to solitary confinement,. Before leaving Guantnamo, he gave Salahi a novel by Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company. Pillow, good luck with your situation, he wrote inside. In some versions I saved many lives, in others I was saved, but somehow we all managed to escape, unharmed and free., Wood reconnected with Salahis lawyers, this time using his real name. were entering a period of self-reflection; during the next several years, internal and congressional investigations would expose many of the worst abuses that had been inflicted on Salahi and other men in custody. Several more days of interrogation followed. Steve Wood was elated when he heard the news. Mohamedou Salahi spent more than fourteen years in detention at Guantnamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured. . The sessions Wood witnessed were calm and courteous, with Salahi attempting to answer everything asked of him. 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. He grabbed his shortwave radio. That day, Neelys job was to haul captives from a bus to a holding area for processing, and then to small, outdoor cages, where they would spend nearly four months sleeping on rocks, and relieving themselves in buckets, while soldiers constructed more permanent cellblocks. It was Ramadan again. The men were dragged out of their cells. 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. Anyway, he said, I know you are part of the Millennium Plot.. From the floor of Parliament, Badre Eddine noted that Mauritania has no extradition treaty with the United States. They were told not to wait for Salahi. 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. El delito por el que Mohamedou es acusado es haber sido un miembro activo de al Qaeda, haber recibido entrenamiento en Afganistn a principios de los 90, reclutar a tres de los . 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! His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took the children to an evangelical church on Sundays; Pat Robertsons sermons blasted from the living-room TV. Military-police officers so frequently abused the Quran during cell searches that detainees demanded that the books be kept in the library, where they would be safe. 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