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. And, by the way, I pay my boy, he added, unprompted. Once, he watched an IRF team leader beat a detainee so badly that he had to be sent to the hospital and the floor of his cell was stained with blood; the next time the team leader was in the cellblock, another detainee yelled out, Sergeant, have you come back to finish him off?. 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. Is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? My interest is not to be tortured, he said. It is a fact that they understand this whole concept of terrorism much better than the average American interrogator, Salahi said, in his military hearing. 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. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. That December, shortly before his twentieth birthday, Salahi boarded a flight to Pakistan and crossed into Afghanistan, and although he never met bin Laden, he soon pledged his allegiance to the Al Qaeda leadership. Salahi was on a diet of Ensure nutrition shakes and antidepressants. On December 19th, Abu Hafs boarded a bus in Quetta, carrying a fake passport and a suitcase full of cash. 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. He devoured volumes on history, foreign affairs, politics, civil rightspretty much any type of book you could think of, other than, like, romance novels, he said. He was the first person in his family to attend university. ), The government no longer attempted to prosecute Salahinobody had touched the criminal case since Couch withdrewbut it argued that he should nevertheless be detained indefinitely. 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. English was his fourth language. I went back to my tent and laid down to go to sleep. They must no longer be denied the right to family. In the U.S., it was morning. He often wakes up shaking, crying, and grinding his teeth. 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. While he was held at Gitmo, Slahi was repeatedly tortured in an . In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and lite Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top officials. For the next seventy days I wouldnt know the sweetness of sleeping. 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. His was the first guard force that didnt wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. But his family members were eager for Salahi to return, and so they told him that his mother was ill. On January 21, 2000, Salahi boarded a flight to Senegal. 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. Salahi didnt know their real names, and never heard from them again. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. Soon afterward, Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about the Millennium Plot. (Abdellahi says that, after Salahi disappeared, the family never contacted him.) 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. The devotion, the routine of the five daily prayersthat kept Mohamedou going, Wood told me. Several Mauritanians had travelled to battlefields in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and Mahfouz Walid had become an important figure in Al Qaeda; he now went by the nom de guerre Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. You very much become a child again.. The U.S. military prisons leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. Before his deployment, he had aspired to become a police officer. Several more days of interrogation followed. 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. That is not appropriate language, man. . He just said, Dude, they fucked me up.. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. Several young men mentioned Salahi as a contact in Germany. It was a grand compound, white stone decorated with lavish carpets and chandeliers. No one will know what happened to him, and eventually, no one will care.. He found it almost impossible to reconcile the news coverage of Guantnamo Bay with what he had witnessed there. A couple of years later, he considered visiting Mauritania, to track down Salahis family and apologize for his role in Salahis detention. How does he behave? As at Guantnamo, he often worked at night. 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 . I was educating myself on the world. But, because Salahis trailer was a national secret, Wood kept a cordial distance from most of 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. The Senegalese did the talking, but the Americans provided the questions and reported back to D.C. Ad Choices. No adult in Woods life had ever looked so frightened and so vulnerable. He was terrifiedhe wanted to go back to Canada, where interrogators behaved within the bounds of the law. In 1998, shortly after Al Qaeda detonated truck bombs outside the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Salahi took a call from a phone number belonging to bin Laden. ; mosques in Duisburg; and his cousin Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. In return, they passed along messages from Salahi, which they had invented, and assured the family that Salahi was well. Salahi came to think of his interrogators as acting out a Mauritanian folktale in which a blind man is given the gift of a single, fleeting glimpse of the world. On February 14, 2004, Salahi received a short letter from his mother in Mauritania, informing him that her health situation is OK. It had been eight hundred and fifteen days since he had seen heran ailing woman in the rearview mirror, waving from the street as he drove to Deddahi Abdellahis intelligence headquarters. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Every other week, when Red Cross representatives visited the prison, Salahi and a handful of other C.I.A. Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly, he wrote on a scrap of paper inside his cell. 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. One of the arresting agents suggested that Salahi drive his own car to the station, so that he could drive himself home afterward. 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. 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.. Salahi was no dirt farmer. When they removed his shackles, the man, who was shaking with fear, suddenly jerked to the left. Like most countries in West Africa, Mauritania had gained independence from France a decade earlier. Anyway, he said, I know you are part of the Millennium Plot.. Discover Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for . He would be held there for 14 years without charge. . The anteroom was filled with Mauritanian dignitaries and lites, all men, sitting on couches that lined the perimeter. No showers for weeks. 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. was funding and equipping many of the mujahideen groups. The room was large and well-furnished, Salahi wrote, with a portrait of the President conveying the weakness of the law and the strength of the government. In the course of the next several days, Abdellahi and his men, citing the concerns of the American government, interrogated Salahi about his time in Afghanistan, his contact with his cousin Abu Hafs, and the Millennium Plot. He tried to sleep, but his mind was racing with the expectation of torture at dawn. They said I was bringing shame upon the family, and protecting a terrorist, Wood recalled. 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. 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. In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. They look like a prison uniform with stripes! (His name was actually Richard Zuley; he was a Chicago police detective, working as a military contractor, who has an extensive record of abusing suspects until they confessed to crimes that they hadnt committed. So empty., In recent months, the push for Salahis passport has taken on new urgency. The goal was to assess whether inescapable pain could condition an animal into learned helplessness, whereby it simply accepts its fate. The doors of my house are open.. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. In the eighties, he and a younger cousin, a slender poet named Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, spent their evenings at a local caf, where the owner showed videos of the Palestinian struggle and the jihad in Afghanistan, which the Soviet Union had invaded in 1979. 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. In addition to Salahis abdominal pain, and regular migraines, he still suffers from night terrors. 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. interrogator told him that the military would take over his interrogation. 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. On paper, Salahi is not listed as the father. Two intelligence officers, including Yacoub, arrived and said that Abdellahi needed to see him again. I was scared to hell, Salahi recalled at his hearing. He walked into the sleeping area and found Salahi lying in the fetal position, shaking. Over a three-way Anglo-French-African video call, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Tahar Rahim are exchanging hearty greetings. I really have no questions for you, because I know your case, Abdellahi told him. 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. Amanda, who lives in Europe, was pregnant, and Salahi would miss the birth of his son. By the end of the boat ride, Salahi was bleeding from his ankles, mouth, and wrists. Salahi noted that Steve snores likehow do you call it?a steam train.. The students acted as Woods witnesses. In the spring of 1992, Salahi returned to Afghanistan. He began to notice surveillance everywhere. After the attacks, Cofer Black, the head of the C.I.A.s Counterterrorism Center, who had served as the agencys Khartoum station chief while bin Laden was in Sudan, assured President GeorgeW. Bush that men like Abu Hafs would soon have flies walking across their eyeballs. The next day, he ordered Gary Schroen, the agencys former Kabul station chief, to gather a team for a paramilitary mission. He remains locked inside the notorious naval base. The first man off the bus had only one leg. The interrogations always circled back to the Millennium Plot. Bet youll think twice next time about saying you know me, he said, laughing. agents visited Salahis cell. Eventually, Salahi would be allowed access to a small patch of soil outside his trailer, where he tended sunflowers, basil, sage, parsley, and cilantro. Stand the fuck up! an interrogator said. According to The Exile, a comprehensive account of post-9/11 Al Qaeda, by the investigative journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, who gained access to Abu Hafss diaries, he ghostwrote most of Osamas speeches, religious judgments, and press releases. In 1998, bin Laden wrote Abu Hafs into his will. 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. The cousins had married a pair of sisters, and so they were now also brothers-in-law. black sites and military facilities. In most movies that dramatize true stories, at the very end, you see the real person. They married in 2010, and had a child six years later. After 14 years. 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. When Salahis female interrogators came in for a game of Monopoly, Salahi always threw the match. 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! 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. The men never abused Salahi, but, as the days became weeks, he wished that they would just turn him over to the United States, where, he assumed, he could at least challenge the legal grounds of his detention. I want to be able to show bin Ladins head to the President. Black added that he and Bush wanted to avoid the spectacle of a courtroom trial. Then Abu Hafs greeted Wood, who, appearing paralyzed by confusion, coldly took his hand. 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. As we walked to the house, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white turban and long robes. 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. (ge) A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history . I wish you good luck, the agent said. Oh, Allah, have mercy on me! one of them said, mockingly. Mohamedou Ould Salahi has a net worth of $5.00 million (Estimated) which he earned from his occupation as Writer. Theyd ask me, Whos in there?, and Id say, I dont know, probably somebody famous.. 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. 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. According to Wood, the guard drafted a note, but he decided not to submit it. 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. But the problem is that you cannot just admit to something you havent done; you need to deliver the details, which you cant when you hadnt done anything. The Pentagon had reported that he was dead. Larry Siems visited Salahi in Mauritania, and they set about filling in the redactions in the book. 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. One day in the spring of 2012, Abu Hafs slipped out of custody during a visit to the gym. 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