The protest lasted for several days as twenty-three prisoners tried to hang themselves.. While Salahi was being tortured, James Yee, the Muslim military chaplain, discovered that he and the interpreters at Guantnamomany of whom were Muslim Americans, with Middle Eastern backgroundswere being spied on by law-enforcement and intelligence officers. That is not appropriate language, man. The Pentagon had reported that he was dead. Anyway, he said, I know you are part of the Millennium Plot.. It was kind of like, We aint gonna beat you ourselves, but you know where you are! So I knew the FBI wanted to interrogate me under the pressure and threat of a non-democratic country., On February 19, 2000, Abdellahi let him go home. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. When Mohamedou Ould Slahi walked away, unshackled, from a U.S. military plane in Nouakchott, Mauritania, the author of Guantnamo Diary hoped he was finally free. Then, he wrote, the plane landed, the doors opened, and the warm Cuban sun hit me gracefully. Echo Special was a trailer that had been divided in two. I dont have a problem with black peoplehalf my country is black people! But the agent kept using racial slurs. Another year passed. 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. Bad people always want to blend into a crowd, Salahi explained at the military hearing. (He escaped through a kitchen door.) Id come home and iron my uniform, and my roommates didnt know a thing, he said. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely, Jonathan Fredman, a senior C.I.A. Salahi was terrified. In the first edition of Guantnamo Diary, Siems had included an authors note: In a recent conversation with one of his lawyers, Mohamedou said that he holds no grudge against any of the people he mentions in this book, that he appeals to them to read it and correct it if they think it contains any errors, and that he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after having learned so much from one another. After three months, he left Afghanistan and returned to Duisburg, where he worked in a computer-repair shop while he finished his degree. At first I thought it was an armed robbery, but, when the airport police approached, the guy behind me flashed a magic badge, which immediately made the policemen retreat. Salahi and his brothers were thrown into the back of a van and driven to a detention site. 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. Since he had learned it in captivity, some of his earliest phrases were I aint done nothing, cavity search, fuck this, and fuck that. My problem is that I had been picking the language from the wrong peoplenamely, U.S. This winter, Steve Wood set off for Mauritania. You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming, Neely recalled. As they walked to the car, Salahi dug into Woods personal life. Meanwhile, the Bush Administrations pretext for invading Iraq was collapsing, and so was Woods trust in government. 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. 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. His proximity to so many events and high-level jihadi figures could not be explained by coincidence, they thought, and only a logistical mastermind could have left so faint a trail. He is seen as one of the most successful Writer of all times. A close friend of his had been the co-pilot of one of the planes that was flown into the World Trade Center, and Couch told the Wall Street Journal that he had renlisted because he wanted to get a crack at the guys who attacked the United States. When he saw the governments file on Salahi, he considered pursuing the death penalty. smaller?, One of the F.B.I. Salahis family wasnt notified of his rendition, and so they were surprised that Abdellahi refused to let them see him. He thought, It must be somebody really importantthe most dangerous person in the world, perhapsto have this special attention, a guard force just for him. In 1999, shortly after graduating from high school, Wood started a job at the local sawmill. Moreover, he is handicapped. 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. His very existence will become erased. For the next seventy days I wouldnt know the sweetness of sleeping. Mauritania is an Islamic republic, with rich traditions in poetry and recitation that belie its dismal rates of literacy and economic growth. It will look worse.. The next time the Red Cross delegation visited Guantnamo, a representative reported that medical files are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan., Female interrogators groped him. By 1990, the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, but Al Qaeda was still fighting against the Communist Afghan government that the Soviets had installed. He was belted so tightly that he struggled to breathe, but he didnt have the English vocabulary to tell the guards. "And then what they -- pretty much told him, 'This is a bunch of B.S.'" Slahi's life changed . He began to worry that awareness among his co-workers of his increasingly complex feelings toward Salahi might elicit accusations that he was unpatriotic, or an insider threat. There is no Allah. February 27, 2019. I'm a really big believer in Joe Biden. had been torturing detainees at black sites for several months; now the Guantnamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. Soon afterward, a jihadi who had attended the same mosqueand who the Americans believed had met Salahiattempted to smuggle explosives in the trunk of a car across the U.S. border; his plan was to detonate suitcases inside Los Angeles International Airport, in what became known as the Millennium Plot. Like, what is a motherfucker? had copied in Nouakchott. The U.S. government gathered that in 1991, when Salahi was twenty, he swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the following year he learned to handle weapons at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He didnt harbor any particular animosity toward Muslims, but he had absorbed his mothers belief: If its not from Jesus then it must be from the Devil. After completing the requirements to become an M.P., Wood enrolled in a criminal-justice program at a nearby community college. I thought they were going to execute me, Salahi wrote. On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for Salahi. 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. A government report describes the facility as having been modified in such a way as to reduce as much outside stimuli as possible, with doors that had been sealed to a point that allows no light to enter the room. Inside, the walls were covered with white paint or paper to further eliminate objects the detainee may concentrate on. There was an eyebolt for shackling him to the floor, and speakers for bombarding him with sound. I felt this decision stemmed from the commands desire to be able to tell the media that we gave all detainees a Quran out of sensitivity to their religious needs, he wrote. Every other week, when Red Cross representatives visited the prison, Salahi and a handful of other C.I.A. His mother was dead, and so was one of his brothers, but there were teen-age nieces and nephews whom he was meeting for the first time. But I wasnt the decider. He was not happyhe didnt want to leave, Abdellahi told me. Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for . Mohamedou Ould Slahi: I always told myself, at the end of the day, I didn't do wrong to anyone. 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 . 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. 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. 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. To insure Salahis upkeep, the family regularly gave Abdellahis men money, food, clothes, and gifts. WASHINGTON - The U.S. government has transferred Mohamedou Ould Slahi to his native Mauritania, where he is to be reunited with his family. I hope you think of us as more than just guards. According to a senior U.S. diplomat, when the United States was negotiating the terms of his return, the Mauritanians did agree that they would not give him a passport for some x amount of time. Two and a half years later, Salahi and his lawyers have no clarity about the parameters of x, or about why the United States has any say in whether the Mauritanian government issues a passport to a Mauritanian. 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 wanted no part of a system in which he might have control over another persons liberty. I figured Ive seen the guy, but where and when? Salahi wrote in his diary. Salahi called the police to report that his neighbors were spying on him, but they told him that he should just cover the cameras with glue. Is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? Once they do, he will disappear and never be heard from again. Salahi was told to imagine the worst possible scenario he could end up in, and that he would soon disappear down a very dark hole. Later, Salahi moved to Germany, where, the Americans assessed, his primary responsibility was to recruit for al-Qaida in Europe. Among his alleged recruits were three of the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom served as pilots on separate planes. He tried to sleep, but his mind was racing with the expectation of torture at dawn. And Jodie Foster, 58, was spotted enjoying some. Schroen recalled, When I began to distribute moneytwo hundred thousand dollars here, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for thisI think that they were convinced that we were sincere. In the next few weeks, Schroens C.I.A. Before dawn, Salahi was taken to an interrogation room. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who underwent brutal interrogations while he was held at Guantnamo Bay, is a free man in Mauritania after nearly 15 years as a detainee. 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. This is my daughter. I was an agent of the state. Illustration by Tyler Comrie; source photograph from Stringer/ AFP/ Getty (face). One day, German officers questioned one of Salahis friends. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal team of a current Guantnamo detainee. But his guard suspected otherwise. One night in October, 2016, Woods phone rang while he was in a Safeway in Portland. The interrogations always circled back to the Millennium Plot. A lot of these prisoners were actually looking forward to being handed over to the Americans, figuring it would be pretty obvious they werent Al Qaeda. Yet hundreds of them were sent to Guantnamo Bay, which ended up housing seven hundred and eighty people. . His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up. 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. I thought hed be back in no time, he told me. He wouldnt take any chances. His heavily redacted book about his time in the U.S. facility was published in January 2015. Now, as he read, I saw how beautiful the religion was, he said. Its their citizen, and its their country.. In 1988, Salahi graduated from high school and won a scholarship to study engineering in Duisburg, Germany. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantnamo Diary (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). had raided a hotel in Khartoum. One day in November, after burying several friends, Abu Hafs sought out an Al Jazeera journalist. The leadership at Guantnamo was more interested in intelligence collection than in prosecuting detainees for terrorism crimes. In Nouakchott, Abdellahis men detained Salahi again in the fall of 2001, at the request of the Americans. 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. 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! 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. 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. When Abu Hafs reached Quetta, in Pakistan, he found the citys private hospital filled with injured Al Qaeda members. You can receive millions of dollars, one of the flyers said. 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. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi and his subordinates began to map out the network, detaining people close to Abu Hafs and soliciting the names of other jihadis. Soon afterward, in a room at the same hotel, the U.S. State Department hosted a training session for Mauritanias security-intelligence apparatus, on Interdiction of Terrorist Activities. Salahi suffered night terrors, and Wood suffered a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal. The release comes 14 years after he was first brought by the United States to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. 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?. One night in October, 1999, a friend of Salahis asked him to host three Muslims who were passing through Duisburg. 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. In July, 2001, according to Scott-Clark and Levy, the authors of The Exile, Abu Hafs handed bin Laden his resignation letter. We got to the site at sunrise; the sky was a hazy, muted orange, from wildfires burning to the south. 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. Salahi told him that he was now home. Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the men in Guantnamo were among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth. But after Brandon Neelys first shift, on the day the detention camp opened, no one really spoke much, he recalled. 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