It sucked that I didnt have the freedom to travel, Salahi recalled in the military hearing. One day, Salahi started requesting paper from his guards. Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health problemsincluding a damaged sciatic nervethen led him to a cell. He told me he hated Jews also. Stand the fuck up! an interrogator said. 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. And Jodie Foster, 58, was spotted enjoying some. Instead, the men stripped him naked, strapped a diaper on him, and swapped out his shackles for a heavier set. team left Guantnamo, and the torture began. M Despite the Covid pandemic, which postponed its initial release by one year, the biopic "Designated Guilty" (The Mauritanian), adaptation by director Kevin MacDonald of the memoir "Les carnets de Guantanamo" by Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, has finally been released. Mohamedou Ould Salahi has a net worth of $5.00 million (Estimated) which he earned from his occupation as Writer. Other men carried box cutters and explosives; Salahi was a ghost on the periphery. He wanted no part of a system in which he might have control over another persons liberty. Until recently, the former spy chief Deddahi Ould Abdellahi lived directly across the street. . When he learned that a military review board would consider releasing Salahi, he wrote a letter saying that, based on my interactions with Mr. Slahi in Guantnamo, I would be pleased to welcome him into my home, and offering to testify in person. 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. On March 22, 2010, a U.S. district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahis petition to be released. 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. They said I was bringing shame upon the family, and protecting a terrorist, Wood recalled. His whole reputation rested on this fiction. I want to go to a country where I can enjoy my freedom, he said. 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. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. I really have no questions for you, because I know your case, Abdellahi told him. Salahi was no dirt farmer. Through the window I started to see the sand-covered small villages around Nouakchott, as bleak as their prospects, he wrote. In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and lite Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top officials. (His wife returned to Nouakchott.) Salahi came to think of his interrogators as acting out a Mauritanian folktale in which a blind man is given the gift of a single, fleeting glimpse of the world. 17k Followers, 1,031 Following, 371 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Mohamedou Ould Salahi (@mohamedououldsalahi) 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. The interrogator added that, if Salahi didnt start talking, he would be buried on Christian, sovereign American soil., On August 2nd, military records show, an interrogator told Salahi that he and his colleagues are sick of hearing the same lies over and over and over and are seriously considering washing their hands of him. I went back to my tent and laid down to go to sleep. He just said, Dude, they fucked me up.. That dictatorship was built in Guantnamo Bay.. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, author of "Guantanamo Diary," was released after a review board determined that his continued detention was not necessary to protect against a threat to U.S. security . Wood started sporadically attending prayers. 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. The journey to Nouakchott took roughly an hour, tracing the Mauritanian coastto the left the Atlantic, to the right the Sahara. Popularly known as the Writer of Mauritania. The fragmented image of Mohamedou Salahi that United States military, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies assembled in a classified dossier was that of a highly intelligent Mauritanian electrical engineer, who, as a key al-Qaida member, had played a role in several mass-casualty plots. As two M.P.s dragged him to the holding area, someone tossed his prosthetic leg out of the bus. 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. . 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. In the two and a half years since his return, he has received several professional visitorsSiems, his lawyers, and the filmmaker Michael Bronner, who is adapting Salahis diaryand also personal visits from a lawyer, whom Ill call Amanda. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national, was detained for 14 years at Guantnamo Bay. In 1988, Salahi graduated from high school and won a scholarship to study engineering in Duisburg, Germany. During the next few months, Wood showed up between prayer times, to avoid any pressure to participate. French actor Tahar Rahim is making headlines for his performance in the film The Mauritanian, which chronicles the true life story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. 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. Salahi had spent the morning reviewing a speech he had prepared for events hosted by Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights. I dont have a problem with black peoplehalf my country is black people! But the agent kept using racial slurs. It didnt take my interrogator a whole lot of time to understand the situation. Another American official arrived, and took Salahis photograph and fingerprints. Soon afterward, in a room at the same hotel, the U.S. State Department hosted a training session for Mauritanias security-intelligence apparatus, on Interdiction of Terrorist Activities. Salahi suffered night terrors, and Wood suffered a splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal. agents threatened Salahi with torture, and tried to intimidate him. But a friend helped him find work installing Internet routers for a telecommunications company. (During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso.) He began to notice surveillance everywhere. had raided a hotel in Khartoum. He recalled, I took the pen and paper and wrote all kinds of incriminating lies about a poor person who was just seeking refuge in Canada and trying to make some money so he could start a family. For the next month, he was kept in total darkness; his only way of knowing day from night was to look into the toilet and see if there was brightness at the end of the drain. 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. And now he belongs to the Americans.. Slahi . The next day, Abu Hafs invited me to his house, in one of Nouakchotts most expensive neighborhoods. In 1998, he had travelled to Afghanistan, and spent a year in Al Qaeda training camps, where he learned to handle weapons and explosives. Katja's life collapses after the deaths of her husband and son in a bomb attack. 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. Several Mauritanians had travelled to battlefields in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and Mahfouz Walid had become an important figure in Al Qaeda; he now went by the nom de guerre Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. According to an investigation by Der Spiegel, he preached in gloomy back-yard mosques, and remained in occasional contact with jihadismen whose names and cell-phone numbers would turn up in investigations spanning Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. After. Government officials suggested that Yee was running an elaborate spy ringthat he and other Muslims had infiltrated the military, and represented the gravest insider threat since the Cold War. During interrogations, detainees were forced to perform mock satanic rituals, or were draped in the Israeli flag. The devotion, the routine of the five daily prayersthat kept Mohamedou going, Wood told me. 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. Soon after 9/11 attacks, a call from Slahi's cousin Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, a friend of Osama bin Laden's son, got him arrested in his motherland Mauritania in West Africa and transported to Guantanamo. In 2008, he met a woman named Wendy at a bar. In November of that year, Salahi moved to Montreal, where he began leading prayers at a prominent mosque. I dont remember whether I hit the floor or was caught by the other guards. Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Ladens pamphlets. But by then the Soviet Union had collapsed, and, while Salahi was in training, the Afghan government lost its Russian support. He and Salahi were smitten with the Al Qaeda narrative, that a ragtag group of mujahideen, carrying light weapons and hiding in caves, were taking on a superpower in the defense of all Muslims. Mohamedou Ould Salahi, from Mauritania, was born in 1970.