Twenty-hour interrogations. Recently released "Guantnamo Diary" author Mohamedou Slahi gives a heartfelt thanks to his supporters in this moving new video, filmed where he belongs: at home with his family. English was his fourth language. Moreover, he is handicapped. 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,. Its so empty, now that Steve left, he said to me. At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan. After a near-fatal stabbingand decades of threatsthe novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. He tried to sleep, but his mind was racing with the expectation of torture at dawn. 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. In all this time, his family had had no official confirmation of his whereabouts. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. At a Pakistani Army checkpoint, he slipped a wad of bills into his passport, and went through unquestioned. 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. He was very silly. The tape would fall off our uniforms, Wood recalled. During a lull in conversation, he turned to Salahi and, gesturing toward Wood and me, said, So, you studied in the United States?. One was a self-help book about finding happiness in a hopeless place. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes, Black said, according to Schroens memoir, First In, published in 2005. The students acted as Woods witnesses. I dont have a problem with black peoplehalf my country is black people! But the agent kept using racial slurs. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. . So, when Abu Hafs called Salahi for assistance a third time, in early 1999, Salahi refused, and hung up. A private jet landed, and out climbed a Jordanian rendition team. An earlier version of this story misidentified Canadas Security Intelligence Service. Notably absent is any mention of the Millennium Plot, or any allegation that Salahi had committed a crime. I was, like, What else have they lied about? he said. He remains locked inside the notorious naval base. After work, Salahi went to his mothers house. On his third visit, he told two Saudi students that he wanted to become a Muslim. 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. One day in the spring of 2012, Abu Hafs slipped out of custody during a visit to the gym. Seven months later, his deployment ended. By the time Wood left, he had come to accept his guards and interrogators as family. I thought hed be back in no time, he told me. Born on 21 December 1970 in a small town in Mauritania, Ould Slahi received a scholarship to study in Germany in 1988. Two UNM School of Law graduates, Nancy Hollander ('78) and Teri Duncan ('00), represented Mohamedou between 2005 and 2016, when he was finally released. 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. 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. and the G.I.D., but received none. ; mosques in Duisburg; and his cousin Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day; every once in a while they gave me a rec-time at night to keep me from seeing or interacting with any detainees. Once, on a technical assignment, Salahi had been photographed near the President of Mauritania; now the lead interrogator accused Salahi of having plotted to kill him. I was thinking, Those were the worst people the world had to offer?, Investigators had the same question. Look him up, dude. Oh, Allah, help me! You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming, Neely recalled. He slept in remote villages, and entrusted his life to Afghan sheepherders who were presumably unaware of the twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. His order for release in 2010 was appealed by the Obama administration, and resulted in another six years in the camp. WASHINGTON - The U.S. government has transferred Mohamedou Ould Slahi to his native Mauritania, where he is to be reunited with his family. (He escaped through a kitchen door.) There were no weapons of mass destruction. For years, Mohamedou Salahi was imprisoned on the grounds of being a suspected collaborator in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The fragmented image of Mohamedou Salahi that United States military, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies assembled in a classified dossier was that of a highly intelligent Mauritanian electrical engineer, who, as a key al-Qaida member, had played a role in several mass-casualty plots. I just couldnt wait to see who the detainees were, he told me. In Amman, Jordan, Salahi was hooded and taken to a detention facility in the headquarters of the countrys General Intelligence Directorate. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani province of Balochistan. He was belted so tightly that he struggled to breathe, but he didnt have the English vocabulary to tell the guards. . He signed it. 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. As a teen-ager, Salahi memorized the entire Quran. But I changed my mind after Guantnamo, he told me. Wood compliedhe felt that it was the least he could do for Salahi. James Mitchell, the C.I.A. 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. It will look worse.. And, by the way, I pay my boy, he added, unprompted. 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. Wood started sporadically attending prayers. Comments. 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. Mohamedou Ould Salahi has a net worth of $5.00 million (Estimated) which he earned from his occupation as Writer. lawyer, said, according to the meeting minutes. I want to go to a country where I can enjoy my freedom, he said. Later that day, Neely and his partner brought an elderly detainee to the holding area and forced him to his knees. (After 9/11, the directorate acted as a proxy jailer for the C.I.A.) But it wasnt enough; the government wanted him to link other people in Canada to various plots. He wasnt sure what he wanted out of the visithe knew only that curiosity eclipsed his misgivings. In Nouakchott, Abdellahis men detained Salahi again in the fall of 2001, at the request of the Americans. On May 22nd, Salahis lead F.B.I. 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. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. Is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? He told me he hated Jews also. Outside Echo Special, Wood started reading about Guantnamo on activist Web sites, but a colleague warned him that Internet traffic was monitored on the base. But a friend helped him find work installing Internet routers for a telecommunications company. I told him I have no problem with the Jews, either, man. 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. Wed try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually we were, like, fuck it. Bin Ladens family was en route to Pakistan, and Abu Hafs needed to make arrangements for their protection. In Arabic countries there are oodles, but in Europe and Canada one is very rare.. 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 at Guantnamo, he often worked at night. On most days, he searched Salahis name online, hoping to learn more about the case, and to make sense of his own deployment to Echo Special, to no avail. 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. This was my first time hearing these words, Salahi said. explained to Wood that the current guard force called Detainee 760 Pillow, because when they had arrived, several months earlier, a pillow was the only object in his possession. One day, Zuley walked into Salahis cell, carrying a pillow. "And then what they -- pretty much told him, 'This is a bunch of B.S.'" Slahi's life changed . 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. He stopped praying in public. In some versions I saved many lives, in others I was saved, but somehow we all managed to escape, unharmed and free., Wood reconnected with Salahis lawyers, this time using his real name. Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that enemy combatants could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as torture it must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. 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