mohamedou ould slahi wife and son

Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay prison. Abu Hafs walked into the house ahead of us, and disappeared into the crowd. When I visited Wood, last August, he and his team were layering the surface of a bridge near Dayton, Oregon, with epoxy, rocks, and primer. The first man off the bus had only one leg. See if you think his captivity was just. Cole, and hoped that some of the men who were being shipped to Guantnamo would have information about the case. Salahi figured that this was how bin al-Shibh had ended up naming him as a high-level Al Qaeda recruiter. 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. So that scared me away, he said. Based on a misreading of materials in his possession, and the vague aspersions of Islamophobic military officers, prosecutors accused him of treason and aiding the enemy, and threatened to pursue the death penalty. 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. They showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack cordinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. In the spring of 1999, French intelligence officers asked their Canadian counterparts if they could question Ressam about jihadi activities in Europe, but the Canadians couldnt locate him, because he had entered the country on a fake passport. Other Guantnamo prisoners threw punches and feces and urine, but, according to the classified dossier, Salahis only disciplinary infraction was that, on May 11, 2003, he possessed an excessive amount of MRE food., Salahi often appeared sullen and withdrawn. El delito por el que Mohamedou es acusado es haber sido un miembro activo de al Qaeda, haber recibido entrenamiento en Afganistn a principios de los 90, reclutar a tres de los . Mohamedou Salahi spent more than fourteen years in detention at Guantnamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured. 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. He had spent the morning of the worst terrorist attack in American history lying on his mothers couch, high on painkillers after a tonsillectomy, but when he emerged from the haze he was angry, focussed, and longing for deployment. Abdellahis men confiscated his passport, once again citing a request by the Americans. He and Abdellahi knelt on the runway, and prayed together. Man, youve had a really tough time of it, he said. Guantanamo Diary Revisited recounts the experience of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a citizen of Mauritania, who was imprisoned at the Guantnamo Bay facility from 2002 to 2016, accused by American. Mohamedou Ould Slahi: I always told myself, at the end of the day, I didn't do wrong to anyone. One day, Zuley walked into Salahis cell, carrying a pillow. 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 began to notice surveillance everywhere. I think we all became friends. But he wasnt sure that Salahi believed him. For many years, Mohamedou Slahi was considered one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. 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. 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. It was the first time in my thirty-year CIA career that I had ever heard an order to kill someone, Schroen wrote. Where is Mullah Omar? they asked. Salahi was terrified. Later that day, Neely and his partner brought an elderly detainee to the holding area and forced him to his knees. In October 2016 he made it home after 14 years in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. government had imprisoned and tortured him as a suspected terrorist. He identified himself as Captain Collins, a Navy officer who had been sent to Guantnamo by the White House. 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. 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. 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. They took off from Uzbekistan and flew into northern Afghanistan, over the snow-capped mountains of the Hindu Kush. had been torturing detainees at black sites for several months; now the Guantnamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. Afghanistans civil war entered a new stage, with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of it. She told me that she thought he was doing something really dangerousthat people might think Steve was sympathetic to someone who was involved in 9/11, and go after him, her, and their baby daughter. He alleges Canadian officials made false claims about him that . I am denied my freedom because I was denied my freedom, Salahi said. 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. 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. In July, 2001, according to Scott-Clark and Levy, the authors of The Exile, Abu Hafs handed bin Laden his resignation letter. In deliberations with Al Qaeda leaders, he decided that the safest place was Iran. The Taliban was rapidly losing ground. . The U.S. military prisons leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. In all this time, his family had had no official confirmation of his whereabouts. 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 was the first person in his family to attend university. The cousins had married a pair of sisters, and so they were now also brothers-in-law. So far, so good.. The Mauritanian tells the story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a man of Mauritanian origin who spent 14 years in the notorious American military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. By now, Wood was no longer dating Summers mother. Look up the prison on Robben Island. He stopped praying in public. He bolted through the changing room and into the street, dressed in his gym clothes, and hailed a taxi to the Mauritanian Embassy in Tehran. 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. When the ice melted, they punched him, then repacked the ice to freeze him again. ), Each detainee was given a number, and, on August 4th, thirty-four of those numbers were called, including Salahis. Before his deployment, he had aspired to become a police officer. Salahi agreed, and Abu Hafs wired around four thousand dollars to his German account. They kept him in alternately hot and cold cells, blasted him with strobe lights and heavy-metal music, and poured ice water on him. He signed it. 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. In the military hearing, Salahi described the torture program in vivid detail. International . The Ambassador drove him to Tehrans international airport in a diplomatic vehicle, and accompanied him through the diplomatic channel, through airport security and immigration, right up until the moment he got on the plane. Salahis detainee dossier lists his reasons for transfer to Guantnamo: to provide information on the Al Qaeda training camp he had attended in 1992; a separate Afghan militia, which had received substantial backing from the C.I.A. Oct. 17, 2016. agents walked into the cell. He had spent much of the past fifteen months in Yemen, investigating Al Qaedas bombing of the U.S.S. What if he is, like, I hate these sons of bitches for locking me up? Guantnamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi waited for updates from the C.I.A. Thirty-five years later, the United States government drew inspiration from this experiment in its approach to interrogating terror suspects. The document he signed listed one aim of the abuse as to replicate and exploit the Stockholm Syndrome, in which kidnapping victims come to trust and feel affection for their captors. 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. The prosecutor assigned to Salahis case was a lieutenant colonel named Stuart Couch, who had retired from the military before 9/11. Its so empty, now that Steve left, he said to me. The lesson seemed to be that the right mix of atonement and seniority in a terrorist organization can give the kind of leverage that is unavailable to men like Salahi. . 2023 Cond Nast. 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. 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. He said he needs fuel, Salahi explained to Abdellahi. Since then, I have received it, eaten it, and paid for it! The cellbetter, the boxwas cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time. They look like a prison uniform with stripes! By Ben Taub April 15, 2019 Mohamedou Salahi spent more. Instead, he began to wonder whether what he was actually protecting at Guantnamo was one of the governments darkest secrets: that its highest-value military detainee was being held essentially by mistake, and that his isolation in Echo Special was intended to cover up the hell that had been inflicted upon him. In 1994, as the director of state security, he opened an investigation into Nouakchotts jihadi scene. I was living literally in terror. On the other end of the line was a man whose voice he hadnt heard in more than eleven years. When Yee went on leave, he flew to Jacksonville, Florida, where he was interrogated and arrested, then blindfolded, earmuffed, and driven to a Navy brig in South Carolina. Like, what is a motherfucker? 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. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 50, has never been convicted of any crime or even charged with any offence. When Salahis lawyers wrote to him, asking that he inform them of everything he had told the government, he wrote back, Are you out of your mind! In Kandahar, Abu Hafs felt the Americans closing in. After 9/11, patriotism eclipsed restlessness as Woods primary motivation to serve. 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. For the next two months, Abu Hafs taught jihadi recruits at a madrassa. 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. Mohamedou Ould Sah es uno de tantos casos que estn sufriendo en una prisin, acusados de delitos que no cometieron. Every time a good member of my present family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.. Yacoub climbed into the passenger seat. 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 grabbed his shortwave radio. . 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,. It was silly, but if you get scared you are not you anymore. The next day, Abu Hafs invited me to his house, in one of Nouakchotts most expensive neighborhoods. Before meeting Salahi, Wood had never heard of Mauritania; Salahi told him that, to his great embarrassment, slavery was still practiced there, even among people close to him. At the time, Slahi had been in captivity for two years, accused of acts of terrorism. The man confined there was referred to by his detainee number, 760. Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which would be his home for several years. 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. 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