We got to the site at sunrise; the sky was a hazy, muted orange, from wildfires burning to the south. 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. But a friend helped him find work installing Internet routers for a telecommunications company. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. Mohamedou Ould Salahi, from Mauritania, was born in 1970. 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. The irony is that I have never been in the States, and all the other countries I have been in kept saying, The guy is alright.. It was cheaper to fly to Dakar than to Nouakchott, and his brothers drove three hundred miles to meet him there. For many years, Mohamedou Slahi was considered one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. By Ben Taub April 15, 2019 Mohamedou Salahi spent more. In the minutes before the first detainees set foot on Guantnamo, you could literally hear a pin drop, Brandon Neely, a military-police officer, recalled, in an interview with the Guantnamo Testimonials Project, at the University of California, Davis, in 2008. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. This is the exact opposite of whats supposed to happen. The night terrors kept coming. A security guard handed him a filthy black turban, to hide his face during the drive to the secret-police headquarters. But the government appealed, and Salahi stayed in Guantnamo. You know, when you just fall asleep and the saliva starts to come out of your mouth? Salahi said. From the floor of Parliament, Badre Eddine noted that Mauritania has no extradition treaty with the United States. Im now in Canada, attending a mosque where we believe a very dangerous group is attending. And, because it was Ramadan, Salahi was leading prayers. You must be very tough. NEW YORK The U.S. government has transferred Mohamedou Ould Slahi to his native Mauritania, where he is to be reunited with his family.The release comes 14 years after he was first brought by the United States to the prison at Guantnamo Bay. One night in October, 2016, Woods phone rang while he was in a Safeway in Portland. The next morning, Salahi was led to the office of the Mauritanian intelligence chief, Deddahi Ould Abdellahi. The latter, the actor last seen on our screens playing a serial killer in . There is no Allah. Salahi was led to a small private aircraft. They took off from Uzbekistan and flew into northern Afghanistan, over the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. 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. Eventually, Salahi understood that bin al-Shibh was one of the three men who had stayed at his apartment in Germany for a night, in October, 1999; the other two had become 9/11 hijackers. He sought structure and disciplinea life of pride, purpose, and clarity of mission. They went through checklists of questions that had been developed by their superiors, and seemed impervious to nuance, or to the notion that some detainees may have been sent there in error. His family moved to the capital of Nouakchott when he was a child, where he excelled in school and earned a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Gerhard-Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany. . Another two years passed before Salahis name caught the attention of Deddahi Ould Abdellahi, the head of Mauritanias security-intelligence apparatus. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. 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. 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. But two months later, when Salahi returned to Mauritania and described his experience of the jihad, Walid resolved to set off on his own for Afghanistan. The next morning, he found two pinhole cameras. He was held in Guantanamo Bay from. During interrogations, an intelligence officer, known among the detainees as William the Torturer, forced Salahi into stress positions that exacerbated his sciatic-nerve issues. Then one of them shouted, Pillow, you can come out now! A short man in his mid-thirties stepped into the guards area, unshackled. I just remember being super excited, because I thought, Im going to be doing something important, Wood told me. But the government had abandoned the theory that Salahi knew about 9/11 before it happened. Der hat eine recht interessante Vita, war bei Al-Qaida ttig und soll whrend seiner . In time, he was given back his pain medication. 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. He signed it. There, Schroen contacted the leaders of the Northern Alliance, an armed group that had spent years fighting the Taliban, with little external support. 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. A year in Echo Special shattered Woods ideas about his post-military future. I was scared to hell, Salahi recalled at his hearing. Another dissonance was that Salahis eloquent orations on fundamental human rights stopped short of confronting a reality that Wood noticed on the second day: as guests of Mauritanian lites, they were served lavish meals by people who appeared to be slaves. . He stopped praying in public. (The C.I.A. According to Wood, the guard drafted a note, but he decided not to submit it. In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and lite Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top officials. The F.B.I. 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. Salahi denied knowing Ahmed Ressam, and added that he thought the entire narrative around the attack had been concocted to unlock the terrorism budget and hurt the Muslims. At the time, he later wrote, I believed excessively in Conspiracy Theoriesthough maybe not as much as the U.S. government does.. 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. He just said, Dude, they fucked me up.. It was silly, but if you get scared you are not you anymore. No. By 1990, the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, but Al Qaeda was still fighting against the Communist Afghan government that the Soviets had installed. His whole reputation rested on this fiction. According to an investigation by Der Spiegel, he preached in gloomy back-yard mosques, and remained in occasional contact with jihadismen whose names and cell-phone numbers would turn up in investigations spanning Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. detainees were whisked to the cellar, to be hidden from view. Soon afterward, in Guantnamo Bay, Salahi saw his own face on a TV screen. See if you think his captivity was just. Seven or eight of his ribs were broken. agents threatened Salahi with torture, and tried to intimidate him. It was a grand compound, white stone decorated with lavish carpets and chandeliers. Id read about Muslim heroes who faced the death penalty, head up, he wrote. Illustration by Tyler Comrie; source photograph from Stringer/ AFP/ Getty (face). At that time, Slahi was seen as one of the most important detainees at Guantanamo with allegations that he had helped organise the 9/11 attacks. In Arabic countries there are oodles, but in Europe and Canada one is very rare.. He also contacted another guard from Echo Special. When they finished, Salahis lawyers delivered a CD-rom with the scanned pages to Larry Siems, a writer and a human-rights advocate, who has written extensively on government misconduct in the aftermath of 9/11. Around that time, after a long period without contact, Abu Hafs called Salahi from bin Ladens satellite phone. On May 22nd, Salahis lead F.B.I. They showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. Meanwhile, his subordinates continued to collect bribes from Salahis family. (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. After lunch, I stood in the reception area, watching Mauritanian politicians and tribal leaders kiss Abu Hafs on both cheeks and thank him for coming. Each time, the minister liedeven after the Red Cross had started delivering Salahis letters from Guantnamo to his family. 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. Why is standing limited to 4 hours? he wrote in the margin, referring to a proposed stress position. At other times, the questions originated from material on his hard drive, which the F.B.I. But he subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply. It was January 11, 2002. 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. It sucked that I didnt have the freedom to travel, Salahi recalled in the military hearing. black sites and military facilities. 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. Several more days of interrogation followed. No adult in Woods life had ever looked so frightened and so vulnerable. He bolted through the changing room and into the street, dressed in his gym clothes, and hailed a taxi to the Mauritanian Embassy in Tehran. 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. Eventually, one of the interrogators told Salahi that he was going to be sent to Mauritania for more questioning. To insure Salahis upkeep, the family regularly gave Abdellahis men money, food, clothes, and gifts. Amanda, who lives in Europe, was pregnant, and Salahi would miss the birth of his son. special agent, was eager to receive the flight manifest. So empty., In recent months, the push for Salahis passport has taken on new urgency. 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. Oh, Allah, have mercy on me! one of them said, mockingly. Wood left for the airport at 4 A.M. Salahi spent much of the day watching YouTube compilations of the worst American Idol auditions. The Mauritanian, Kevin Macdonald's movie based on the true story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man . 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. Zuley read Salahi a letter, later shown to be forged, stating that his mother was in U.S. custody and might soon be transferred to Guantnamo. . In addition to Salahis abdominal pain, and regular migraines, he still suffers from night terrors. When Wood tried to search for 760 in Guantnamos detainee database, he found nothing. He said he needs fuel, Salahi explained to Abdellahi. "And then what they -- pretty much told him, 'This is a bunch of B.S.'" Slahi's life changed . It didnt take my interrogator a whole lot of time to understand the situation. Another American official arrived, and took Salahis photograph and fingerprints. 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." 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. It was such a good feeling.. Soon afterward, Wood learned that the imam, a Somali immigrant who practiced a conservative strain of Islam known as Salafism, had been the subject of F.B.I. During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani province of Balochistan. In Islam, the Quran is considered the transcribed word of God; some Muslims keep the book wrapped in cloth, never letting it touch unclean surfaces. 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. The point is to pave, seal, and waterproof it, to preserve its lifespan, he said. 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. Helicopters dropped flyers in remote Afghan villages, offering wealth and power beyond your dreams to anyone who turned in a member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder surgery. 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. But with these people you cannot be likable. In 2005, during the military hearing, Salahi had urged the presiding officer not to send him back to Mauritania. They asked me do I know Ahmed Ressam. 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. Badre Eddine had spent some four decades organizing grassroots campaigns against the practice of slavery and other human-rights violations, and for this he had spent years in remote detention sites, under a succession of authoritarian regimes. Born on 21 December 1970 in a small town in Mauritania, Ould Slahi received a scholarship to study in Germany in 1988. How did they do it?. He was a victim of an extremely rare crime: that a country had kidnapped its own citizen and handed it over to a foreign country, outside of the justice system, outside of all legal processes, Brahim Ebety, the Salahi familys lawyer in Nouakchott, told me. 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. Did you see what Steve brought me? Salahi said, pointing to some baby clothes. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. I think we all became friends. But he wasnt sure that Salahi believed him. You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming, Neely recalled. custody, bin al-Shibh named Salahi as the man who had arranged his travel to Afghanistan and his introduction to bin Laden. in the United States on February 12. What if he is, like, I hate these sons of bitches for locking me up? Where is Mullah Omar? they asked. Salahi was asked about innocuous exchanges from intercepted e-mails and phone calls, as if they had been conducted in code. Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch received summaries of each new confession. 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. . Salahis freedom became a strain on Woods marriage. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 50, has never been convicted of any crime or even charged with any offence. After a few months, he signed up for the Oregon National Guard, on the military-police track. Steve Wood with Salahi, his former prisoner, in Mauritania, in January. More detainees have died at Guantnamo than have been convicted of a crime. 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,. Neely jumped on top of him, and forced his face into the concrete floor. (ge) A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history . Thats like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated. The important stuff was in his diary, he said, which they could read only inside a secure facility near Washington, D.C. After the prayer session, Abu Hafs led me into his living room, and for four hours he detailed his falling-out with bin Laden, his whereabouts and activities in the aftermath of 9/11, and his relationship with Mauritanias President. Military police officers put blackout goggles over their eyes and mittens on their hands, then hooded them, lined them up, and tied each detainee to the one in front of him and the one behind him. Ressam told investigators that he had planned to detonate suitcases in a crowded terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. I tried to make my time there morally neutral, without being called a traitor, he told me. Everyone on the team was dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured by balaclavas. I really think that he's a good man. Where is Osama bin Laden? They shouted and threw objects against the wall. Salahi had deleted the contents of his phone. 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. The Corrupt World Behind the Murdaugh Murders. You trust the handcuffs and everything, but, no matter what, wed never be with him one on onethere would always be a partner, Wood told me.

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