His very existence will become erased. Upon Mohsens arrest, according to a court filing, investigators found pocket litter that included both Salahis name and Ressams phone number. (Mohsen could not be reached for comment. It was the first time Wood had encountered the Quran. As they walked to the car, Salahi dug into Woods personal life. Now, in a phone call, Amanda suggested edits for Salahis speechthat he take out lynching, for example, and make his remarks more graciousand Salahi accepted all of them. You must forget your fear to achieve anything., Last summer, Salahi completed an online course to become a certified life coach. Because detainees are not in U.S. territory, the government has not allowed them to be tried in U.S. courts. 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. 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. Salahis freedom became a strain on Woods marriage. 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. . I want to be able to show bin Ladins head to the President. Black added that he and Bush wanted to avoid the spectacle of a courtroom trial. But the problem is that you cannot just admit to something you havent done; you need to deliver the details, which you cant when you hadnt done anything. Soon afterward, a jihadi who had attended the same mosqueand who the Americans believed had met Salahiattempted to smuggle explosives in the trunk of a car across the U.S. border; his plan was to detonate suitcases inside Los Angeles International Airport, in what became known as the Millennium Plot. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantnamo Diary is at least the fifth autobiography by a Guantnamo prisoner. He now has two American clients, whom he helps to navigate personal and professional woes through weekly Skype meetings. (He escaped through a kitchen door.) Eventually, Salahi understood that bin al-Shibh was one of the three men who had stayed at his apartment in Germany for a night, in October, 1999; the other two had become 9/11 hijackers. The cousins had married a pair of sisters, and so they were now also brothers-in-law. with you, and that is to tell me five things that you are grateful for today, he told one of them. 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. Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. In the restored edition, Salahi added, I want to repeat and affirm this message here, and to say that now that I am home, that dream is also an invitation. 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 wore handcuffs, leg shackles, earmuffs, blackout goggles, a surgical mask, and a bright-orange jumpsuit. 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. His whole reputation rested on this fiction. The interrogators head-butted him, and made degrading remarks about his religion and his family. The host, who was a government official, grew agitated, pulled me aside, and urged me not to mention that I had ever been to his house. But, on the base, Fallon and his colleagues referred to most detainees as dirt farmers. Lehnert lamented, It takes an Army captain to send someone to Gitmo, and the President of the United States to get them out.. During the next few months, Wood showed up between prayer times, to avoid any pressure to participate. It is basically subject to perception. The Americans supplied the questions, and the Jordanians extracted the responses, often through coercive means. Twelve days later, a group of men charged into Salahis cell with a snarling German shepherd. That dictatorship was built in Guantnamo Bay.. He recalled his political views as being whatever Fox News told us. He didnt know the difference between a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslimhe had never met one. And Jodie Foster, 58, was spotted enjoying some. 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. 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. There, Schroen contacted the leaders of the Northern Alliance, an armed group that had spent years fighting the Taliban, with little external support. 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. Abu Hafs, Salahis cousin and a senior Al Qaeda official, evaded capture. 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. Have you heard of Nelson Mandela? Wood recalled Salahi saying. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. One night in October, 1999, a friend of Salahis asked him to host three Muslims who were passing through Duisburg. Not yet released in France, this film, which tells the story of this man's . The next morning, Salahi was led to the office of the Mauritanian intelligence chief, Deddahi Ould Abdellahi. He slept in remote villages, and entrusted his life to Afghan sheepherders who were presumably unaware of the twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head. . It was silly, but if you get scared you are not you anymore. 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. This was my first time hearing these words, Salahi said. On February 14, 2004, Salahi received a short letter from his mother in Mauritania, informing him that her health situation is OK. It had been eight hundred and fifteen days since he had seen heran ailing woman in the rearview mirror, waving from the street as he drove to Deddahi Abdellahis intelligence headquarters. Once they do, he will disappear and never be heard from again. Salahi was told to imagine the worst possible scenario he could end up in, and that he would soon disappear down a very dark hole. But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave the country. The mission had not been accomplished. When Wood watched the evening news, he saw photographs of American M.P.s torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. No showers for weeks. Soon afterward, Wood learned that the imam, a Somali immigrant who practiced a conservative strain of Islam known as Salafism, had been the subject of F.B.I. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch truly believed Mohamedou Ould Slahi was guilty. Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch received summaries of each new confession. Amna Nawaz: He was tortured by his American interrogators, subjected to solitary confinement,. ), The government no longer attempted to prosecute Salahinobody had touched the criminal case since Couch withdrewbut it argued that he should nevertheless be detained indefinitely. He stopped praying in public. Salahi figured that this was how bin al-Shibh had ended up naming him as a high-level Al Qaeda recruiter. 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. Salahi was horrified. What would we tell the Mauritanians? the diplomat replied. He walked into the sleeping area and found Salahi lying in the fetal position, shaking. Salahi was a precocious student; after school, he used to steal chalk from the classroom and return to Bouhdida, a dusty, unplanned neighborhood in Mauritanias capital, Nouakchott, to re-create the days lessons for kids who couldnt afford an education. Salahis brother, who is a German citizen, had read in Der Spiegel that he was in Guantnamo, but Abdellahi insisted that it wasnt truethat he was looking after Salahi in a Mauritanian prison. He listed his accomplices and added, thanks to Canadian Intel, the plan was discovered and sentenced to failure. After years of holding out in interrogations, he had become what the classified dossier described as a highly cooperative font of intelligenceone of the most valuable sources in detention. He described Al Qaedas financial involvement in credit-card fraud and drug smuggling, and also the groups investment in unwitting companies in Bosnia, Canada, Chechnya, Denmark, England, Germany, Mauritania, and Spain. He drew organizational charts, with the names and operational roles of key figures, and supplied intelligence on jihadi cells and safe houses all over Europe and West Africa. Salahi, who hadnt been home since 1993, was filled with nostalgia and dread. I keep thinking, Here it comesI am fixing to see what a terrorist looks like face to face, Neely, who was twenty-one at the time, said. The lack of progress, development, and freedom in Mauritanian society inspired in Salahi a righteous anger toward autocracy and corruption, and a desire to fight for something bigger than himself. The proceeds from his book were paying for a nieces studies in Dubai and a nephews masters degree in applied mathematics at a university in Kuala Lumpur. As they left baggage claim, Salahi later wrote in his diary, my hands were shackled behind my back and I was encircled by a bunch of ghosts who cut me off from the rest of my company. -From Guantnamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi It was a simple prayer. His friend, Hosni Mohsen, introduced him to the imam at the Al Sunnah mosque. Salahi had been living in a cell practically since the beginning of the invasion, nine months earlier. We knew he wasnt a threat. Where once he had struggled to forgive himself for enjoying Salahis company, he now felt bad about having to lock the door at the end of each shift. The tape would fall off our uniforms, Wood recalled. custody, bin al-Shibh named Salahi as the man who had arranged his travel to Afghanistan and his introduction to bin Laden. 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. 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.