After a near-fatal stabbingand decades of threatsthe novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act. One was a self-help book about finding happiness in a hopeless place. 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. Salahi became Slahi. So began a life in which governments treated Salahi in accordance with their own mistakes. . Wahrheit macht frei, the officer saidthe truth sets you free. I was scared to hell, Salahi recalled at his hearing. Salahi was asked about innocuous exchanges from intercepted e-mails and phone calls, as if they had been conducted in code. Notably absent is any mention of the Millennium Plot, or any allegation that Salahi had committed a crime. What I was told was that his information had saved thousands of American lives, Wood said, and this is what theyd given him to keep talking., Salahi was taken into custody when he was thirty years old, but he had already lived on four continents, and spoke fluent Arabic, French, and German. He just said, Dude, they fucked me up.. 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. According to Wood, the guard drafted a note, but he decided not to submit it. Abdellahi called Salahis boss at the telecommunications company, to assure him that Salahi should be allowed to resume work. 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 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. Only one of the twenty-six interrogators was capable of working without an interpreter. I told him I have no problem with the Jews, either, man. But, hey, I have to cope with it. But I wasnt the decider. In Arabic countries there are oodles, but in Europe and Canada one is very rare.. That dictatorship was built in Guantnamo Bay.. The guards would rush in to save him and the chaos would start again. 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. Salahi had been living in a cell practically since the beginning of the invasion, nine months earlier. Guantnamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative. 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. 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. On March 22, 2010, a U.S. district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahis petition to be released. You know, when you just fall asleep and the saliva starts to come out of your mouth? Salahi said. They tightened the chains on his ankles and wrists, then threw him into the back of a truck, drove to the water, and loaded him into a speedboat. Cole, and hoped that some of the men who were being shipped to Guantnamo would have information about the case. To dispel notions that the United States was at war with Islam, detainees were allowed to have private meetings with a Muslim military chaplain, and were given copies of the Quran. Abu Hafs was back in Afghanistan, living with his family in Kandahar. The night terrors kept coming. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes, Black said, according to Schroens memoir, First In, published in 2005. It sucked that I didnt have the freedom to travel, Salahi recalled in the military hearing. 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. ), One night, Salahi awoke to the sound of a tiny hole being drilled into his wall. His detention at Guantnamo Bay grabbed a lot of attention worldwide. Another officer tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German. So look at me, Salahi 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. In Nouakchott, Abdellahis men detained Salahi again in the fall of 2001, at the request of the Americans. I was living literally in terror. ), In October, 2004, Woods girlfriend gave birth to a daughter, Summer. 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. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. He stopped praying in public. The guards also brought him books from the library, including the Bible, which he had requested, he wrote, because I wanted to study the book that must more or less have shaped the lives of the Americans.. He was not happyhe didnt want to leave, Abdellahi told me. 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. On paper, Salahi is not listed as the father. Twenty-hour interrogations. Bin Ladens family was en route to Pakistan, and Abu Hafs needed to make arrangements for their protection. 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. Through the window I started to see the sand-covered small villages around Nouakchott, as bleak as their prospects, he wrote. No adult in Woods life had ever looked so frightened and so vulnerable. 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. Ramadan was approachingwhen the men leading prayers read aloud the entire Quran during the course of a lunar cycleand, Salahi recalled, my friend said, We need you here in Canada because we have no Hafez, the Arabic word for a man who can recite the Quran from memory. The Taliban was rapidly losing ground. The decision to keep his conversion a secret from everyone in his life made him feel at times as if being Muslim were wrong, even though, in his heart, he still believed. 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 remains locked inside the notorious naval base. I just remember being super excited, because I thought, Im going to be doing something important, Wood told me. M Despite the Covid pandemic, which postponed its initial release by one year, the biopic "Designated Guilty" (The Mauritanian), adaptation by director Kevin MacDonald of the memoir "Les carnets de Guantanamo" by Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, has finally been released. He was driven around for three hours, to make him think that he was being transported to a different facility. investigations and was on a no-fly list, and that several men who had attended the Masjid As-Saber had been convicted on terrorism charges. Salahi had deleted the contents of his phone. But I changed my mind after Guantnamo, he told me. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. More detainees have died at Guantnamo than have been convicted of a crime. They were afraid that I would kill some people.. Salahi agreed, and Abu Hafs wired around four thousand dollars to his German account. Seven months later, his deployment ended. ECCHR, which represents Mohamedou Ould Slahi together with partner lawyer Matthias Lehnert, calls on the authorities to speed up the procedure for issuing his visa and to conclude it swiftly. Herrington later reported that the interrogators were unsure of the real names of more than half the detainees. 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. There are so many Ahmeds that itll be difficult for them to put him on the no-fly list, Salahi joked. On the night of July 19, 2002, the Jordanians transported Mohamedou Salahi, blindfolded and in chains, to the airport in Amman, where a new team took over. I tried to make my time there morally neutral, without being called a traitor, he told me. 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. This winter, Steve Wood set off for Mauritania. He wasnt sure what he wanted out of the visithe knew only that curiosity eclipsed his misgivings. He began to wonder whether the case against Mohamedou Salahi was as flimsy and politically motivated as that for the invasion had been. 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. Abu Hafs spent the next decade in relative luxury, exercising alongside foreign diplomats in one of Tehrans swankiest gyms, and looking after bin Ladens sons along with his own. Look up the prison on Robben Island. Did you see what Steve brought me? Salahi said, pointing to some baby clothes. He also believed that Slahi's interrogators had broken the law tormenting him physically and sexually, and. . Have you heard of Nelson Mandela? Wood recalled Salahi saying. One day, after an interrogator kicked a Quran across the floor, detainees organized a mass suicide attempt. He added that, as the worlds most powerful democracy, the United States had the means to uphold and pressure other countries to uphold human rights. 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. One day, Zuley walked into Salahis cell, carrying a pillow. Now, in a phone call, Amanda suggested edits for Salahis speechthat he take out lynching, for example, and make his remarks more graciousand Salahi accepted all of them. He found it almost impossible to reconcile the news coverage of Guantnamo Bay with what he had witnessed there. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 45, was subjected in 2003 to a special interrogation at Guantnamo Bay. 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,. There, Schroen contacted the leaders of the Northern Alliance, an armed group that had spent years fighting the Taliban, with little external support. (For the first several weeks of the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, believed that everyone spoke Afghan.) In a rush to leave Kandahar, two dozen senior Al Qaeda officials boarded a bus, but Abu Hafs, fearful that a single air strike could decapitate the jihadi movement, urged them to disperse. A Guantanamo bay convict claims he was forced to have sex with female interrogators in his recently published memoir. The Ambassador called Nouakchott, and the foreign minister ordered the Embassy to fabricate a passport, using a fake name. 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. I asked Abu Hafs to tell me the name printed in his diplomatic passport, assuming that the identity was no longer valid. Amna Nawaz: He was tortured by his American interrogators, subjected to solitary confinement,. There, Abu Hafs spent two months in custody, as a formality. Like most countries in West Africa, Mauritania had gained independence from France a decade earlier. His order for release in 2010 was appealed by the Obama administration, and resulted in another six years in the camp. At the time, Slahi had been in captivity for two years, accused of acts of terrorism. 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.) Finally, when Slahi and his wife moved to Montreal, in 1999, they attended the al Sunnah mosquethe same mosque attended by Ahmed Ressam, a member of Al Qaeda who had been arrested, shortly. Walid, who was sixteen, stayed behind. 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 was left for hours in the Caribbean sun. On May 22nd, Salahis lead F.B.I. At the beginning, Mohamedou wanted to be docile and sweet, he said. The latter, the actor last seen on our screens playing a serial killer in . Out here, Im probably only drinking seven or eight coffees per day, he told me. In fact, Id say, without you, September 11th would never have happened, one of Salahis interrogators told him. Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely, Jonathan Fredman, a senior C.I.A. Ressam told investigators that he had planned to detonate suitcases in a crowded terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. He knew what he expected to hear. Another year passed. Near the airport parking lot, Salahi stood in a light-blue boubou, the traditional Mauritanian robe, with a turban to obscure his identity. The tape would fall off our uniforms, Wood recalled. After she converted to Islam, they married in a religious ceremony. had copied in Nouakchott. Wife: Not Available: Sibling: Not Available: Children: Not Available : Mohamedou Ould Slahi Net Worth. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. (During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso.) 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. In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantnamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard. Yacoub had a large family and a small salary, so, when Salahi was released, he started paying Yacoub to do occasional tasks. 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. Der hat eine recht interessante Vita, war bei Al-Qaida ttig und soll whrend seiner . I thought there would be a lot of formalities, especially for a terrorist suspect such as myself, but nothing like that happened, Salahi wrote. By the end of the boat ride, Salahi was bleeding from his ankles, mouth, and wrists. 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. 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. 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. One of Salahis friends, who was now living in Canada, suggested that he move to Montreal. . It became fashionable for high-profile corporate-law firms to represent Guantnamo clients, pro bono, but many detainees rejected representation, because they thought it was a ploy to lend legitimacy to an unjust detention. But sometimes, after coperating, hed get depressed and anxious, and say, Im a bad Muslim, Wood told me. The Americans, with their policies, bore the fruit of the events of September 11th, Abu Hafs said on camera. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. Al Qaeda had by this time transformed into an international terrorist organization that was launching attacks in East Africa and the Middle East. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.. Just remember Allah always has a plan. Pendant des mois, il a crit ses mmoires . As a teen-ager, Salahi memorized the entire Quran. They named him Ahmed, and Salahi asked Wood to be the godfather. No, its not looking good at all, Salahi said. Throughout 2002 and 2003, whenever the foreign minister visited the parliamentary chamber, Badre Eddine demanded to know Salahis whereabouts. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was detained for 14 years at Guantnamo Bay. The first rumors of a planes operation began circulating among Al Qaeda leaders in 1999. Had Wood remained as a regular guard, in one of the regular cellblocks, he might have finished his deployment with his understanding of the global war on terror more or less intact. Before his first shift in Echo Special, Wood was told to place a strip of electrical tape over the name on his uniform, and to use only nicknames inside the cell, so that if 760 were to somehow sneak a message out of the camp he couldnt issue fatwas against his guards or their families. For the rest of the interrogation session, he was forced to look at photos of corpses from the aftermath of the attacks. He wore a broad smile and a white jumpsuit, and moved cautiously toward Wood. Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health problemsincluding a damaged sciatic nervethen led him to a cell. The local dive shop offered gear and certifications for sailing, water-skiing, snorkelling, scuba diving, and more: No experience, no problem. 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. His was the first guard force that didnt wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. He began to notice surveillance everywhere. Walid was a prodigious poetin Nouakchott, he had won several awardsand when bin Laden met him he was impressed by his eloquence and conviction. A fourth was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator; while in C.I.A. I just couldnt wait to see who the detainees were, he told me. The interrogations always circled back to the Millennium Plot. After 9/11, patriotism eclipsed restlessness as Woods primary motivation to serve. I'm a really big believer in Joe Biden. (Abdellahi says that, after Salahi disappeared, the family never contacted him.) 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. As the result of a recent court ruling, Guantnamo detainees had access to legal representation, and so, during the next several months, Salahi drafted a diary of his detention as a series of harrowing letters to his lawyers, Nancy Hollander, Sylvia Royce, and Theresa Duncanfour hundred and sixty-six pages, sealed in envelopes and mailed to a classified facility near Washington, D.C. No guards or interrogators were allowed to read Salahis work. 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. With a movie based on his ordeal. came to much the same conclusion.) No chairs, no lying down, no more access to his prescription pain medication.