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. Id come home and iron my uniform, and my roommates didnt know a thing, he said. 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. Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. Salahi was led to a small private aircraft. There was no fanfare, no announcement. The Americans learned only that, as a condition for return, he agreed that he would renounce his former association and embark on a message of denouncing terrorism and preaching a more tolerant and pacifist message. I asked whether the United States, after learning of his return, had sought to detain or rendition him. English accepts more curses than any other language, and I soon learned to curse with the commoners., As a matter of professionalism, Wood resolved from the outset to bury in the back of his mind what he had heard of Salahis past. Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. 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. 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. Having accepted his guards, Salahi wrote, the next phase of captivity was getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.. 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. 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. Throughout 2002 and 2003, whenever the foreign minister visited the parliamentary chamber, Badre Eddine demanded to know Salahis whereabouts. The next day, Abu Hafs invited me to his house, in one of Nouakchotts most expensive neighborhoods. You know, when you just fall asleep and the saliva starts to come out of your mouth? Salahi said. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming, Neely recalled. During the Amnesty International live stream, someone on Twitter commented that, of the two of them, Wood looked like the detainee. I have contact with Osama bin Ladens operative, who was helping launder money. Later that summer, Abu Hafs wrote a twelve-page dissent, but bin Laden bristled at his defiance, and the objections of other Al Qaeda leaders, and moved forward. You must be very tough. I really have no questions for you, because I know your case, Abdellahi told him. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up. 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. Medical records indicate that he weighed a hundred and nine poundsaround thirty per cent less than his normal weight. Anyway, he said, I know you are part of the Millennium Plot.. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 50, has never been convicted of any crime or even charged with any offence. He alleges Canadian officials made false claims about him that . Born on 21 December 1970 in a small town in Mauritania, Ould Slahi received a scholarship to study in Germany in 1988. In the spring of 1992, Salahi returned to Afghanistan. lawyer, said, according to the meeting minutes. With the assistance of German intelligence, Abdellahi told me, we started collecting the maximum amount of information. 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 started in on the books he had been too afraid to request in Guantnamoones about Islam. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantnamo Diary is at least the fifth autobiography by a Guantnamo prisoner. Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. 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.. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Slahi . And Mohamedou probably thought I was thinking the same thingthat, to me, he was just a job, and nothing more. So, during one of his final shifts, Wood broke protocol and showed Salahi a photo of Summer. When I visited their house, a real-estate agent had removed all the family photographs and replaced them with catalogue art, to make it easier for prospective buyers to think of the house as a blank slate. Who are these guys? Most of the names were Afghan or Pakistani, and the Arabs who were on the list certainly werent recognizable to me and my colleagues who had been working Al Qaeda for years. A few weeks later, after McFadden visited the detention camp, he concluded that the detainees were essentially nobodies. He told me, There was not anyone approaching even the most liberal interpretation of a high-value detainee., In Afghanistan, the U.S. military was inadvertently presiding over a kidnapping-and-ransom industry. The man confined there was referred to by his detainee number, 760. On one page, he recalled the day he got his nickname, when an interrogator brought him a pillow. When Abu Hafs reached Quetta, in Pakistan, he found the citys private hospital filled with injured Al Qaeda members. Twelve days later, a group of men charged into Salahis cell with a snarling German shepherd. But I changed my mind after Guantnamo, he told me. Amanda, who lives in Europe, was pregnant, and Salahi would miss the birth of his son. A former leader of several provinces explained to me that Abu Hafs, bin Ladens former Sharia adviser, is now an adviser to the President. But with these people you cannot be likable. 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Everyone wants to close Guantnamo, but what will happen to the detainees? But I wasnt the decider. I executed orders. They look like a prison uniform with stripes! 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. Thirty-five years later, the United States government drew inspiration from this experiment in its approach to interrogating terror suspects. During the next few months, Wood showed up between prayer times, to avoid any pressure to participate. He was left for hours in the Caribbean sun. He walked into the sleeping area and found Salahi lying in the fetal position, shaking. Salahi was no dirt farmer. The lead officer couldnt speak Mauritanias Hassaniya Arabic, and Abdellahi hardly understood the Jordanian dialect, so Salahi translated for them. The techniqueswhich government documents identify as omnipotence tactics, degradation tactics, debilitation tactics, and monopolization of perception tacticshad been developed by Communist forces during the Korean War, to coerce prisoners into making false confessions, for propaganda purposes. In that meeting, Abu Hafs challenged bin Laden on Quranic grounds, arguing that the scale of civilian casualties could not be justified in Islam. By the second week of December, it was clear that Kandahar would fall. In September 2003, Couch was assigned to prepare the prosecution of Mohamedou Ould Slahi after he joined the Office of Military Commissions in August 2003. After roughly three weeks, F.B.I. But he thought, What the fuck is this? Salahi was horrified. 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. Were gonna feed you up your ass, an interrogator said. Some guards saw an opportunity to torment the detaineesby tossing the Quran into the toilet, for example, or by breaking the binding under the guise of searching for weapons. Desecration of the Quran provoked riots in the cellblocks, which resulted in IRF teams storming into the cells and beating up detainees. 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. Peace be upon you. They shook hands. Not yet released in France, this film, which tells the story of this man's . Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born on 21 December, 1970, is a Writer. 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. 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. 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. The governments case, essentially, is that Salahi was so connected to al-Qaida for a decade beginning in 1990 that he must have been part of al-Qaida at the time of his capture, Robertson wrote. (Back in the 80s, during the Afghanistan insurrection, he unwittingly worked with the group. Neely later found out that the elderly detainee had jerked because, when he was forced to his knees, he thought he was about to be shot in the back of the head. 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. Each government claims that it has come to the rescue of the population, which had been neglected and abused by the previous government, Badre Eddine told me. Bin Ladens family was en route to Pakistan, and Abu Hafs needed to make arrangements for their protection. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Its so empty, now that Steve left, he said to me. I petitioned the Defense Department to allow me to show him the edited manuscript, but they turned me down. In 2015, it was published, by Little, Brown, as Guantnamo Diary.. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. One was a self-help book about finding happiness in a hopeless place. It had been five years since the Taliban had taken over most of the country, and televisions were banned. During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani province of Balochistan. He wore a broad smile and a white jumpsuit, and moved cautiously toward Wood. Abu Hafs walked into the house ahead of us, and disappeared into the crowd. They drove up to the stairs of an airplane, but, Salahi wrote, he was so exhausted, sick, and tired that I couldnt walk, which compelled the escort to pull me up the steps like a dead body.. I asked Abu Hafs to tell me the name printed in his diplomatic passport, assuming that the identity was no longer valid. They showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. No prayers, no information about the direction of Mecca. with you, and that is to tell me five things that you are grateful for today, he told one of them. Salahi was on a publicity campaign, to draw attention to the injustice of his withheld passport, and at times it seemed to Wood as if he were a propthe former guard who recognized Salahis innocence. Btihal Remli for The New York. All I had were some numbers of business partners in Mauritania and Germany, he later wrote, but I didnt want the U.S. government harassing those peaceful people just because I had their numbers in my phone. One of the contacts was listed as P.C. 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. Oct. 17, 2016. 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. Wood, then a member of the. Few locals spoke French, but since the country had been arbitrarily drawn up as a vast, mostly desert territory, populated by numerous ethnic groups who spoke different languages, there was no alternative for official documentation. I figured Ive seen the guy, but where and when? Salahi wrote in his diary. Wood stayed with Salahi for four days. interrogator told him that the military would take over his interrogation. 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. The leadership at Guantnamo was more interested in intelligence collection than in prosecuting detainees for terrorism crimes. In June, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantnamo detainees could challenge the grounds for their detention. I had started to lose feeling and it would have made no difference anyway.. It was the first time in my thirty-year CIA career that I had ever heard an order to kill someone, Schroen wrote. Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay prison. The doors of my house are open.. 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.). 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 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. Eventually, one of the interrogators told Salahi that he was going to be sent to Mauritania for more questioning. Bet youll think twice next time about saying you know me, he said, laughing. What would we tell the Mauritanians? the diplomat replied. Now bin al-Shibh, who was being tortured in C.I.A. 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. Salahi was asked about innocuous exchanges from intercepted e-mails and phone calls, as if they had been conducted in code. In 2012, Salahis lawyers won a seven-year legal battle to declassify his diary. 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. In Nouakchott, Abdellahis men detained Salahi again in the fall of 2001, at the request of the Americans. His order for release in 2010 was appealed by the Obama administration, and resulted in another six years in the camp. Eventually, one of them shouted, pillow, you can come out now number 760. 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