mohamedou ould slahi wife and son

Never turn your back, the sergeant major warned him. For years, Mohamedou Salahi was imprisoned on the grounds of being a suspected collaborator in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In time, he was given back his pain medication. Seven months later, his deployment ended. An American woman, who he assumed was an intelligence officer, entered the room, and stood by as a Senegalese officer questioned him about the Millennium Plot. The anteroom was filled with Mauritanian dignitaries and lites, all men, sitting on couches that lined the perimeter. One of the Algerian jihadis was Ahmed Ressam, a serial thief who was living in Canada under a false identity. No chairs, no lying down, no more access to his prescription pain medication. The plane landed at sunset. 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. After three months, he left Afghanistan and returned to Duisburg, where he worked in a computer-repair shop while he finished his degree. . Just remember Allah always has a plan. But it wasnt enough; the government wanted him to link other people in Canada to various plots. 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. Everything that happened to meeverything I witnessed in Guantnamo Bayhappened in the name of democracy, in the name of security, in the name of the American people, Salahi told the audience at the Amnesty event. Its not looking good, the presiding military officer replied. -From Guantnamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi It was a simple prayer. On March 22, 2010, a U.S. district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahis petition to be released. In public, the Bush Administration and its military leadership asserted that Guantnamo was filled with men who would stop at nothing to destroy the U.S. Until recently, the guards and the interrogators had worn Halloween masks inside the cell. An officer shouted Code Red! into a radio, and the Internal Reaction Force team raced to the scene and hog-tied him. Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Ladens pamphlets. Last May, one of Salahis cousins posted a note on Facebook that referred to Woods conversion. Oh, Allah, have mercy on me! one of them said, mockingly. 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. He denied involvement with terrorism and was never charged with a crime. James Mitchell, the C.I.A. 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. He was terrifiedhe wanted to go back to Canada, where interrogators behaved within the bounds of the law. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. Abdellahis men confiscated his passport, once again citing a request by the Americans. (Until 2007, a terrorist sanctions list included Salahis name as an alias for Abu Hafs.). Nice to meet you, Wood said. Relaxing is easy., In practice, many military-police officers killed time by watching movies and getting drunk at the Tiki Bar; they also took flights to Afghanistan, to pick up more detainees. Wed try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually we were, like, fuck it. 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. 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 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. She is my life. 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. Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health problemsincluding a damaged sciatic nervethen led him to a cell. His heavily redacted book about his time in the U.S. facility was published in January 2015. Not yet released in France, this film, which tells the story of this man's . Each time, the minister liedeven after the Red Cross had started delivering Salahis letters from Guantnamo to his family. 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. So, when Abu Hafs called Salahi for assistance a third time, in early 1999, Salahi refused, and hung up. 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 Soon afterward, Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about the Millennium Plot. . Although Wood had introduced himself to Salahi as Stretch, his nickname from the sawmill, Salahi had quickly learned his real name, as well as those of the other guards. He didnt harbor any particular animosity toward Muslims, but he had absorbed his mothers belief: If its not from Jesus then it must be from the Devil. After completing the requirements to become an M.P., Wood enrolled in a criminal-justice program at a nearby community college. He wanted to ask Salahi more about its contents, but he suspected that there were microphones and cameras in the cell. His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took the children to an evangelical church on Sundays; Pat Robertsons sermons blasted from the living-room TV. In addition to Salahis abdominal pain, and regular migraines, he still suffers from night terrors. Several more days of interrogation followed. Seems a little creepy., Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than auditory, but you never know, Zierhoffer replied. I was, like, Maybe hes right. (In fact, the 9/11 plot was organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) 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. They showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. I arrived just before the sunset prayers. 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. He told me he hated Jews also. It had been five years since the Taliban had taken over most of the country, and televisions were banned. Canadas Security Intelligence Service began a surveillance operation focussing on Salahi and his associates, but Salahi noticed two pinhole cameras poking through his apartment walls and left the country. It was a temporary facility, he explained, while he raises money to build a mosque. [1] Slahi escreveu um livro de memrias em 2005 enquanto estava preso, o qual o governo dos EUA desclassificou em 2012 com inmeras . 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. I just wanted this to be me and God.. Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in Rosso, Mauritania, the ninth of twelve children of a camel herder. (ge) A man who is widely regarded as the most tortured prisoner in the history . Salahi saw a mentally ill old man subjected to this method. As two M.P.s dragged him to the holding area, someone tossed his prosthetic leg out of the bus. But sometimes, after coperating, hed get depressed and anxious, and say, Im a bad Muslim, Wood told me. During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani province of Balochistan. 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. For 14 years and two months . And, by the way, I pay my boy, he added, unprompted. Several young men mentioned Salahi as a contact in Germany. He let you down! An interrogation memo listed plans to shave Salahis head and beard, dress him in a burqa, and make him bark and perform dog tricks, to reduce the detainees ego and establish control.. Neely jumped on top of him, and forced his face into the concrete floor. In that meeting, Abu Hafs challenged bin Laden on Quranic grounds, arguing that the scale of civilian casualties could not be justified in Islam. 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.. After 9/11, patriotism eclipsed restlessness as Woods primary motivation to serve. 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. The goal was to assess whether inescapable pain could condition an animal into learned helplessness, whereby it simply accepts its fate. [4] Slahi traveled from his home in Germany to Afghanistan in December 1990 "to support the mujahideen." Every time there was a hurricane warning in Guantnamo Bay, Salahi dreamed that the storm had wiped away the prison camp, and everyone, detainees and captors alike, was fighting side by side to survive, he wrote. In Kandahar, Abu Hafs felt the Americans closing in. 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. But, after the diary came out, they learned that Mohamedou is not high value, hes just a guy who got fucked over for years. He added, Guantnamo has a long shadow for everyonenot just the detainees.. He liked to rile his guards into debating equality, race, and religion, and he wielded a sophisticated understanding of history and geopolitics to chip away at their beliefs. Herrington later reported that the interrogators were unsure of the real names of more than half the detainees. 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. Ad Choices. A few weeks later, Iranian spies told Abu Hafs to call other Al Qaeda officials and inform them that they would be welcome in Iranalthough, like him, they would live with their wives and children under a form of house arrest, sometimes in prisons, sometimes in lavish compounds and hotels, always in the company of the Revolutionary Guard. One of Salahis friends, who was now living in Canada, suggested that he move to Montreal. And I didnt confirm or deny anything, Wood told me. Soon afterward, they travelled together to Sudan, where bin Laden ran a construction company and a jihadi training camp, and sped around Khartoum in bin Ladens white Mercedes. At first, Salahi was relievedhe assumed that the Americans had come to understand his irrelevance to 9/11 and the Millennium Plot, and that he was being sent back to Mauritania. A few days later, Salahi was released. Salahi had deleted the contents of his phone. investigations and was on a no-fly list, and that several men who had attended the Masjid As-Saber had been convicted on terrorism charges. He wrote a letter to his wife and children, but there was no way to send it, and so he kept it in a pocket in his robes. He tried to sleep, but his mind was racing with the expectation of torture at dawn. The night terrors kept coming. 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. The cellbetter, the boxwas cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time. In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantnamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard. 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. He said he was going to bring in black people, Salahi recalled, in the military hearing. 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. He was accused of being a part of the Al-Qaeda by the American government. Conversion to Islam requires only that, in the presence of Muslim witnesses, you declare the ShahadaThere is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophetand that you believe it in your heart. Twelve days later, a group of men charged into Salahis cell with a snarling German shepherd. 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. On September 26th, Schroen and six other officers loaded an aging Soviet helicopter with weapons, tactical gear, and three million dollars in used, nonconsecutive bills. On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for Salahi. It was January 11, 2002. Bin Laden, wary of Al Qaedas fragility, urged him not to speak publicly of his departure. The U.S. military prison's leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and lite Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top officials. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi and his subordinates began to map out the network, detaining people close to Abu Hafs and soliciting the names of other jihadis. You must forget your fear to achieve anything., Last summer, Salahi completed an online course to become a certified life coach. He wasnt sure what he wanted out of the visithe knew only that curiosity eclipsed his misgivings. Salahi and I sat on either side of the leader of a political party that has more than a hundred and fifty seats in Parliament. Her wife was on hand to support her last month, as she scooped the coveted Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe for her efforts in The Mauritanian. Wood stayed with Salahi for four days. The videos had been pulled from jihadi Web sites, or captured by intelligence officers during raids, and Salahis role was to identify the people in them. You can receive millions of dollars, one of the flyers said. There, Abu Hafs spent two months in custody, as a formality. But I give him advice, and he takes it., Mauritania was the site of regular jihadi violence in the second half of the aughts, while Abu Hafs was living in Iran. No, its not looking good at all, Salahi said. Striking horror, panic, and fear in the hearts of the enemies of Allah is a divine commandment. He added that American citizens should blame their law-enforcement and intelligence agencieswith their satellites, ground stations, millions of spies, and huge budgetsfor the fact that the hijackers had found a security breach as big as a whole fleet of hijacked civilian aircraft, and managed to shove Americas nose into the ground.. Ladens pamphlets thief who was thirteen, started reading bin Ladens pamphlets a temporary facility, he added, has... Explained, while he finished his degree, his primary responsibility was to assess whether inescapable pain could condition animal. Everyonenot just the detainees more about classified security operations than any private citizen! Bay, as a formality attended the Masjid As-Saber had been convicted on terrorism charges on a no-fly list and! In fact, the boxwas cooled down to the holding area, tossed! 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Started reading bin Ladens pamphlets province of Balochistan recalled, in early 1999, Salahi recalled in..., wary of Al Qaedas fragility, urged him not to speak publicly of his....
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