Salahi and Wood sat in front of a laptop, with the Webcam on, and Skyped into a room in Washington. He was the first person in his family to attend university. Since then, I have received it, eaten it, and paid for it! 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi (em rabe: ) (nascido em 21 de dezembro de 1970) um mauritano que foi detido no campo de deteno de Guantnamo Bay sem acusao de 2002 at sua libertao em 17 de outubro de 2016. 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.. Salahi had been living in a cell practically since the beginning of the invasion, nine months earlier. T ahar Rahim plays Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who is arrested in 2001 in his native Mauritania with the connivance of his own government, and eventually spirited to the US prison camp on the Cuban . It was the spring of 2004. 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. Few people worked out at two or three in the morning, so he had plenty of time to continue his self-education on global affairs. Afghanistans civil war entered a new stage, with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of it. 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. By the time Salahi arrived at Guantnamo, on August 5, 2002, Fallons lite interagency criminal-investigation task force had been sidelined, and Lehnert had been replaced. To be honest I can report very little about the next couple of weeks, Salahi wrote, because I was not in the right state of mind., Soon afterward, an interrogator e-mailed Diane Zierhoffer, a military psychologist, with concerns about Salahis mental health. He was not happyhe didnt want to leave, Abdellahi told me. Alicia Florrick has been a good wife to her husband, a former state's attorney . How could he possibly know? He is being held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), alleged by the US government to be "part of" al Qaeda at the time of his arrest. Cole, and hoped that some of the men who were being shipped to Guantnamo would have information about the case. In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder surgery. An officer shouted Code Red! into a radio, and the Internal Reaction Force team raced to the scene and hog-tied him. Its not just, Yes, I did! No, it doesnt work that way: you have to make up a complete story that makes sense to the dumbest dummies. Salahi underwent daily interrogations. Salahis family wasnt notified of his rendition, and so they were surprised that Abdellahi refused to let them see him. 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. They stripped, and rubbed their bodies all over his, and threatened to rape him. Another officer tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German. Every other week, when Red Cross representatives visited the prison, Salahi and a handful of other C.I.A. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. When a nurse, who spoke only Hassaniya Arabic, filled out Mohamedous birth certificate in the Latin alphabet, she omitted a syllable from his last name. He was a tall, regal businessman, and wore Ted Baker sunglasses and a Rolex. 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. In most movies that dramatize true stories, at the very end, you see the real person. As he was led away for questioning, he said: "Don't worry mom, I'll be back soon." He has been charged with no crime, but Slahi never returned. It was not every day, the tortureI would say maybe twice a week. While other detainees were mercilessly beaten, strung up by their limbs, and sexually assaulted, he added, all they did was strike me at different times in the face, and hit me against the concrete wall.. . with you, and that is to tell me five things that you are grateful for today, he told one of them. The point is to pave, seal, and waterproof it, to preserve its lifespan, he said. He remains locked inside the notorious naval base. 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. An image of bin Ladens face adorned the windshield, and Abu Hafs spent much of the journey to the Iranian border, some four hundred miles, wondering whether it was a Wanted poster or a tribute. Wood walked into the main area, which housed the guards; through a door was the prisoners sleeping space. Thats why we had previously let him go. But, Abdellahi continued, shrugging, to refuse a demand from an intelligence agency, in the fight against terrorismthat would have been impossible., On the evening of November 28thMauritanias Independence DaySalahi had been in custody for a week. The night shift was twelve hours, and he never saw Salahi shackled or restrained. The Pentagon had reported that he was dead. But I wasnt the decider. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. Twenty-hour interrogations. Because he had no experience with weapons, Al Qaeda personnel sent him to the Al Farouq training camp, near Khost, where he learned how to use a Kalashnikov rifle and launch rocket-propelled grenades. He was terrifiedhe wanted to go back to Canada, where interrogators behaved within the bounds of the law. Salahi became Slahi. So began a life in which governments treated Salahi in accordance with their own mistakes. Is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight, human interaction etc???? 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. Eventually, Salahi would be allowed access to a small patch of soil outside his trailer, where he tended sunflowers, basil, sage, parsley, and cilantro. Abdellahis men confiscated his passport, once again citing a request by the Americans. No showers for weeks. agents walked into the cell. Case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Now, as he read, I saw how beautiful the religion was, he said. He couldnt stop talking because he didnt know where he was, nor why, Salahi wrote. The men were dragged out of their cells. (Back in the 80s, during the Afghanistan insurrection, he unwittingly worked with the group. 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. One of the arresting agents suggested that Salahi drive his own car to the station, so that he could drive himself home afterward. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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. Medical records indicate that he weighed a hundred and nine poundsaround thirty per cent less than his normal weight. 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?. Nevertheless, he spent 14 years of captivity in America's notorious Guantanamo Bay prison,. 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. Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health problemsincluding a damaged sciatic nervethen led him to a cell. Katja's life collapses after the deaths of her husband and son in a bomb attack. 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. The Mujahideen are committed to not carry out any military activity in Mauritania, the letter saysas long as the Mauritanian government released imprisoned fighters, abstained from attacking Al Qaeda cells abroad, and paid the group between ten and twenty million euros per year, to compensate and prevent the kidnapping of tourists. (The Mauritanian government has denied that it negotiates with terrorist groups.). 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. 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. 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