Through the window I started to see the sand-covered small villages around Nouakchott, as bleak as their prospects, he wrote. His turban was still damp from where his wife had cleaned off other peoples blood. The next morning, he found two pinhole cameras. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. Nice to meet you, Wood said. I really think that he's a good man. Seven or eight of his ribs were broken. In Arabic countries there are oodles, but in Europe and Canada one is very rare.. Medical records indicate that he weighed a hundred and nine poundsaround thirty per cent less than his normal weight. Comments. Then Abu Hafs greeted Wood, who, appearing paralyzed by confusion, coldly took his hand. But he subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply. Two intelligence officers, including Yacoub, arrived and said that Abdellahi needed to see him again. lawyer, said, according to the meeting minutes. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was detained for 14 years at Guantnamo Bay. Military doctors offered to take care of it, but Salahi declined; his release date was only a couple of months away, and he wanted to get the surgery on his own terms, once he was free. I hope you think of us as more than just guards. They drove to the airport in silence, in Abdellahis black Mercedes. He was held in Guantanamo Bay from. Larry Siems visited Salahi in Mauritania, and they set about filling in the redactions in the book. Near the airport parking lot, Salahi stood in a light-blue boubou, the traditional Mauritanian robe, with a turban to obscure his identity. He no longer derived much solace from Islam, and rarely prayed. But it wasnt until two years later that bin Laden shared with the Shura Council the broad outlines of the attack: four planes; two civilian targets; two government targets. He's a believer. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. In fact, Id say, without you, September 11th would never have happened, one of Salahis interrogators told him. Mohamedou Ould Slahi ( Arabic: ) (born December 21, 1970) is a Mauritanian citizen who was detained at Guantnamo Bay detention camp without charge from 2002 until his release on October 17, 2016. As we walked to the house, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white turban and long robes. Steve Wood with Salahi, his former prisoner, in Mauritania, in January. Like, really stressful. They slept under mosquito nets in Salahis bedroom, and woke up to the sound of a bleating sheep. Stand the fuck up! an interrogator said. 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. He grabbed his shortwave radio. Until recently, the guards and the interrogators had worn Halloween masks inside the cell. In the two and a half years since his return, he has received several professional visitorsSiems, his lawyers, and the filmmaker Michael Bronner, who is adapting Salahis diaryand also personal visits from a lawyer, whom Ill call Amanda. The 58-year-old actress, who won the Best Supporting Actress prize for her role in The Mauritanian, appeared on screen for the virtual ceremony with her wife Alexandra Hedison and their dog,. 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. In return, they passed along messages from Salahi, which they had invented, and assured the family that Salahi was well. . How does he live? I just kind of shrugged it off, like, What does it matter? They decided to get a divorce. The detainees protested, and so it was decided that every detainee who refused the Quran would be IRFed. While the detainees were receiving medical treatment for their post-IRF injuries, the Qurans were placed back in their cells. Around that time, after a long period without contact, Abu Hafs called Salahi from bin Ladens satellite phone. At first, Salahi was relievedhe assumed that the Americans had come to understand his irrelevance to 9/11 and the Millennium Plot, and that he was being sent back to Mauritania. Abu Hafs, Salahis cousin and a senior Al Qaeda official, evaded capture. Salahi underwent daily interrogations. Salahi also pushed him to research Western foreign-policy blundersfor example, that in 1953 the American and the British intelligence services had orchestrated a coup in Iran, overthrowing a popular Prime Minister in order to prop up a tyrannical, pro-Western Shah. Its hard to sit there and laugh and chat with the guy, if hes actually that bad, Wood told me. For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a friend. 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. 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. But, with every day going by, the optimists lost ground, he wrote. A private jet landed, and out climbed a Jordanian rendition team. Where is Abu Hafs? one of them asked. The Ambassador called Nouakchott, and the foreign minister ordered the Embassy to fabricate a passport, using a fake name. I tried to make my time there morally neutral, without being called a traitor, he told me. Did you see what Steve brought me? Salahi said, pointing to some baby clothes. 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. After roughly three weeks, F.B.I. Two UNM School of Law graduates, Nancy Hollander ('78) and Teri Duncan ('00), represented Mohamedou between 2005 and 2016, when he was finally released. For some thirty hours, Salahi was strapped to a board. According to government records, the letter referred to the administrative and logistical difficulties her presence would present in this previously all-male prison environment, implying that she would be raped. . 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?. 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. Relaxing is easy., In practice, many military-police officers killed time by watching movies and getting drunk at the Tiki Bar; they also took flights to Afghanistan, to pick up more detainees. The gulf between the U.S. governments public disclosures and its secret practices was etched into his body and his mind. When Salahis female interrogators came in for a game of Monopoly, Salahi always threw the match. Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which would be his home for several years. According to interrogation memos, they decorated the walls with photos of genitalia, and set up a baby crib, because he was sensitive about the fact that he had no children. Even if the military believed he was innocent, he figured that he knew too much about classified torture programs to be let out into the world. I was an agent of the state. When my turn came, two guards grabbed me by the hands and feet and threw me toward the reception team, Salahi wrote. (They were no longer brothers-in-law, as Salahi and his wife had divorced.) So that scared me away, he said. 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. And Steves interest is to impress the girls. 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. On May 22nd, Salahis lead F.B.I. The examiner described Salahi, whose answers contradicted everything he had confessed to Zuley in the preceding weeks, as eager to prove that he is providing accurate information. The results were decisive: No deception indicated.. 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. He was the first person in his family to attend university. He was guilty of nothing, Abdellahi told me, and he had not been charged with a crime. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. When they asked whether Salahi was involved in any terrorist activities, the friend laughed. All he saw was a rat, Salahi wrote. An M.P. It was January 11, 2002. 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. Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Ladens pamphlets. By now, Wood was no longer dating Summers mother. But he derived immense satisfaction from the work, and saw in it the kind of moral clarity that Guantnamo had lacked. Twelve days later, a group of men charged into Salahis cell with a snarling German shepherd. At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. 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. During a lull in conversation, he turned to Salahi and, gesturing toward Wood and me, said, So, you studied in the United States?. 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