mohamedou ould slahi wife and son
For seventy-six days, he lived in solitary confinement, in a cold cell with surveillance cameras and the lights always on. The men never abused Salahi, but, as the days became weeks, he wished that they would just turn him over to the United States, where, he assumed, he could at least challenge the legal grounds of his detention. They married in 2010, and had a child six years later. He walked into the morning sunlight in a daze, unable to reconcile his impression of the man in Echo Special with the depiction of the terrorist in the dossier. Why is standing limited to 4 hours? he wrote in the margin, referring to a proposed stress position. 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. On July 17, 2003, a masked interrogator told Salahi that he had dreamed that he saw other detainees digging a grave and tossing a pine casket with Salahis detainee number into it. In Nouakchott, Abdellahis men detained Salahi again in the fall of 2001, at the request of the Americans. Larry Siems visited Salahi in Mauritania, and they set about filling in the redactions in the book. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, now 50, was arrested in Mauritania three months after the 9/11 attacks, and detained in Jordan and Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantnamo in August 2002, where his long incarceration included 70 days of intensive torture and three years of 18-hours-a-day interrogations. What followed was a period of experimentationoverseen by psychologists, lawyers, and medical personnelat C.I.A. His friend, Hosni Mohsen, introduced him to the imam at the Al Sunnah mosque. The Mauritanian is stunningly tragic and leaves audiences with a host of questions about how its events were allowed to take place, but another notable issue is why the Obama administration blocked Mohamedou Ould Slahi's release from Guantanamo Bay. He was accused of being a part of the Al-Qaeda by the American government. Abu Hafs was back in Afghanistan, living with his family in Kandahar. by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Larry Siems ( 32 ) $17.49 An epic story of a Bedouin family's survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert. Slahi's rare contacts with the cousin, and an occasion in which he allowed travelers from near his hometown to stay the night only to learn they were Al Qaeda soldiers were among the . 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. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up. 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. 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.) 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. 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. Salahi and Wood sat in front of a laptop, with the Webcam on, and Skyped into a room in Washington. An M.P. (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. Nevertheless, he spent 14 years of captivity in America's notorious Guantanamo Bay prison,. Katja's life collapses after the deaths of her husband and son in a bomb attack. Abdellahi called Salahis boss at the telecommunications company, to assure him that Salahi should be allowed to resume work. Where is Abu Hafs? one of them asked. In 1999, shortly after graduating from high school, Wood started a job at the local sawmill. I had started to lose feeling and it would have made no difference anyway.. I tried to press the topic with Salahi, but it was as if his transfer from Guantnamo had carried with it a kind of transposition of restraint, from shackles to self-policing. A couple of years later, he considered visiting Mauritania, to track down Salahis family and apologize for his role in Salahis detention. I was thinking, Those were the worst people the world had to offer?, Investigators had the same question. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born on 21 December, 1970, is a Writer. Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely, Jonathan Fredman, a senior C.I.A. 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. Now bin al-Shibh, who was being tortured in C.I.A. Force-feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are supposed to fast. During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani province of Balochistan. Moreover, he is handicapped. 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. 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. In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. And then it behaves the same way as the last. When he asked the new regime about Salahi, he said, they just replied, We didnt kidnap himit was the previous government that did it. He is seen as one of the most successful Writer of all times. TV crews were present at meals, and an interviewer showed up at Salahis apartment, recorder in hand, and asked Wood, who still hadnt told his brothers that he is a Muslim, to comment on his favorite Quranic passages, and to share his thoughts on the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. 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. By the end of the following year, Salahi knew more about classified security operations than any private American citizen. 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. 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.. This friendship is real., Salahi saw no path out of Guantnamo. But Amanda is an American, and so their son is now a citizen of the country whose purported values Salahi wants to believe in but has never seen. The prosecutor assigned to Salahis case was a lieutenant colonel named Stuart Couch, who had retired from the military before 9/11. You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming, Neely recalled. This was my first time hearing these words, Salahi said. He wasnt sure what he wanted out of the visithe knew only that curiosity eclipsed his misgivings. At the beginning, Mohamedou wanted to be docile and sweet, he said. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. A common bounty was five thousand dollarsfar more money than most Afghans earned in a yearand the result was an explosion of human trafficking by various armed groups, Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of Guantnamos Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote in his memoir, Unjustifiable Means, which was heavily redacted before being published, in 2017. He was forced to swallow salt water, and, every few minutes, the men packed ice cubes between his clothes and his skin. 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. 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. Wood had come to see Islam in much the same way that many of the detainees did: as the only thing that couldnt be stripped from them. It didnt take my interrogator a whole lot of time to understand the situation. Another American official arrived, and took Salahis photograph and fingerprints. 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. Bet youll think twice next time about saying you know me, he said, laughing. It was such a good feeling.. 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. He began to notice surveillance everywhere. 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. Not long afterward, in mid-November, Salahis boss sent him to Mauritanias Presidential palace, to install Internet routers and update the phones. Today Slahi, who is now 50, resides back home in Mauritania, though he is far from free. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.. On December 19th, Abu Hafs boarded a bus in Quetta, carrying a fake passport and a suitcase full of cash. . After work, Salahi went to his mothers house. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. That December, shortly before his twentieth birthday, Salahi boarded a flight to Pakistan and crossed into Afghanistan, and although he never met bin Laden, he soon pledged his allegiance to the Al Qaeda leadership. Under the new regime, Abdellahi, the spy chief, was demoted, and given the task of investigating corruption and malfeasance within the security services; the standard path for accountability required Abdellahi to investigate himself. Defense attorneys have accused the government of denying them access to evidence, leaving secret recording equipment in client meeting rooms, and infiltrating their legal teams; a few years ago, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who may face the death penalty, recognized a linguist on his own defense team from a C.I.A. She is my life. During interrogations, an intelligence officer, known among the detainees as William the Torturer, forced Salahi into stress positions that exacerbated his sciatic-nerve issues. Another officer tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German. In most movies that dramatize true stories, at the very end, you see the real person. 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. agents threatened Salahi with torture, and tried to intimidate him. I keep thinking, Here it comesI am fixing to see what a terrorist looks like face to face, Neely, who was twenty-one at the time, said. When Wood told the old man that he had worked at Guantnamo Bay, the man suggested that he keep it to himself. Seven or eight of his ribs were broken. I thought it was a new U.S. method to suck intels out of your brain and send them directly to a main computer which analyzes the information, he wrote. Mohamedou Ould Slahi Born: December 21, 1970 Birthplace: Rosso, Mauritania Jodie Foster Born: November 19, 1962 Birthplace: Los Angeles, California, USA Nancy Hollander Born: March 10, 1944 Benedict Cumberbatch Born: July 19, 1976 Birthplace: Hammersmith, London, England, UK Lt. Col. Stuart Couch Born: April 20, 1965 James Mitchell, the C.I.A. But, after Salahi returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. Before dawn, Salahi was taken to an interrogation room. Ressam told investigators that he had planned to detonate suitcases in a crowded terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. Another two years passed before Salahis name caught the attention of Deddahi Ould Abdellahi, the head of Mauritanias security-intelligence apparatus. So empty., In recent months, the push for Salahis passport has taken on new urgency. Two UNM School of Law graduates, Nancy Hollander ('78) and Teri Duncan ('00), represented Mohamedou between 2005 and 2016, when he was finally released. When I shared Abu Hafss account of his return with the senior U.S. diplomat, she replied, Its the first Im hearing any of it. The Mauritanians didnt inform the United States of his return until probably weeks later, she said. It takes a lot of prep to start the job, but, when youve done your bit, youre leaving things better than when you arrived, he said. Seems a little creepy., Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than auditory, but you never know, Zierhoffer replied. When he refused to back out of the interview, Wendy insisted that he wear an on-camera disguise. Medical personnel had noted that Salahi had sciatic-nerve issues; now interrogators kept him in stress positions that exacerbated them. Soon afterward, Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about the Millennium Plot. Medical records indicate that he weighed a hundred and nine poundsaround thirty per cent less than his normal weight. 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. 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. But he thought, What the fuck is this? I am denied my freedom because I was denied my freedom, Salahi said. Salahis freedom became a strain on Woods marriage. When Abu Hafs reached Quetta, in Pakistan, he found the citys private hospital filled with injured Al Qaeda members. But the government appealed, and Salahi stayed in Guantnamo. Salahi was terrified. Bin Laden, wary of Al Qaedas fragility, urged him not to speak publicly of his departure. 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. . This is my daughter. According to one of Salahis brothers, Abdellahi told the family that Salahi was being kept in a detention facility in the desert, far from Nouakchott. Mohamedou Ould Slahi fights for freedom after being detained and imprisoned without charge by the U.S. Government for . 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. They prayed together, ate together, and enjoyed a picnic of bread and tea in the dunes of the Sahara. When Wendy saw the post, she was outragedbut also somewhat relieved, since it partly explained his secretive behavior. An elderly white convert warned him to avoid a couple of other white converts, who dressed in religious clothing and talked about wanting to participate in the jihad. In 2012, Salahis lawyers won a seven-year legal battle to declassify his diary. That was my thinkingthat he was sufficiently intelligent and well informed to help any intelligence service that might ask him for help.. In late 2003a period that Salahi described in a letter as where my brake broke looseCouch struggled to keep up with the constant stream of information. came to much the same conclusion.) How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been lasting the last 7 years. To insure Salahis upkeep, the family regularly gave Abdellahis men money, food, clothes, and gifts. Look up the prison on Robben Island. (They were no longer brothers-in-law, as Salahi and his wife had divorced.) When they asked whether Salahi was involved in any terrorist activities, the friend laughed. 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. 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. 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. The 2021 legal drama follows the true story of the aforementioned protagonist (played by Tahar Rahim), a man who was arrested, taken from his . You must be very tough. Popularly known as the Writer of Mauritania. Salahi had spent the morning reviewing a speech he had prepared for events hosted by Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights. But instead the United States is stating to the world very clear and loud that democracy does not workthat when you need to get down and dirty, you need a dictatorship. black site. They said I was bringing shame upon the family, and protecting a terrorist, Wood recalled. 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. In Mauritania, Abdellahis men detained Salahis wife and brothers and interrogated them about the Millennium Plot. Salahi, I wish I were not part of this shit, he said. The abuse wound down slowlyno more hitting, but no comfort items, either, and no uninterrupted periods of rest. There, Schroen contacted the leaders of the Northern Alliance, an armed group that had spent years fighting the Taliban, with little external support. If you say that you are angry, it is understood as an emotion, he said. (He escaped through a kitchen door.) They were everywhere in the mosque, in the police car, twenty-four hours. Among the targets of the investigation was Mohsen, Salahis friend and host. Salahi landed in Montreal on November 26, 1999. The F.B.I. In time, he was given back his pain medication. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. I want to go to a country where I can enjoy my freedom, he said. We met like any decent person these dayson social media, Salahi said. A similar phone call, followed by a second transaction, took place in December, 1998. O.K., screw it, it is not a problemthey can watch me, he said. One night in October, 2016, Woods phone rang while he was in a Safeway in Portland. In 2005, during the military hearing, Salahi had urged the presiding officer not to send him back to Mauritania. Like most countries in West Africa, Mauritania had gained independence from France a decade earlier. At Los Angeles International Airport de delitos que no cometieron because I was my... Salahis family and apologize for his role in Salahis detention, his paper will... Been in touch company, to assure him that Salahi should be allowed to resume.!, believed that everyone spoke Afghan., food, clothes, and they set about filling in the of! Pakistan, he spent 14 years of captivity in America & # x27 ; s notorious Guantanamo Bay prison.... 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