A Reporter at Large

April 22, 2019 Issue

Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret

The U.S. military prison’s leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi
to be its highest-value detainee. But his guard suspected otherwise.
By Ben Taub
April 15, 2019

The Guard

In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantánamo Bay, as a member of

the Oregon National Guard. He and his comrades were told that many of
the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity,
would strike again. “I just remember being super excited, because I
thought, I’m going to be doing something important,” Wood told me.
For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men
who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Then a
sergeant major pulled him aside for a brief interview, and assigned him
to work the night shift in Echo Special, a secret, single-occupancy unit
that had been built to house the United States military’s highest-value
detainee. The International Committee of the Red Cross—which has
access to many of the world’s most notorious detention sites, some of
them in countries where there is no rule of law—had recently sent
representatives to Guantánamo, but the base commander, citing
“military necessity,” had refused to allow them into Echo Special. The
man confined there was referred to by his detainee number, 760. When
Wood tried to search for 760 in Guantánamo’s detainee database, he
found nothing.

Wood was the second of three boys. His father died in a plane crash
when he was three years old, and his mother brought him and his
brothers up in Molalla, Oregon, a lumber town about an hour south of
Portland. His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took
the children to an evangelical church on Sundays; Pat Robertson’s
sermons blasted from the living-room TV. In 1999, shortly after
graduating from high school, Wood started a job at the local sawmill.
Several of his co-workers were missing fingers, and the manager took
every opportunity to denigrate the staff. After a few months, he signed
up for the Oregon National Guard, on the military-police track. He
sought structure and discipline—a life of pride, purpose, and clarity of
mission.

After 9/11, patriotism eclipsed restlessness as Wood’s primary

motivation to serve. He had spent the morning of the worst terrorist
attack in American history lying on his mother’s couch, high on
painkillers after a tonsillectomy, but when he emerged from the haze he
was angry, focussed, and longing for deployment. He didn’t harbor any
particular animosity toward Muslims, but he had absorbed his mother’s
belief: “If it’s 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 recalled his
political views as being “whatever Fox News told us.” He didn’t know
the difference between a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslim—he had never
met one.

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 couldn’t issue fatwas against his guards or their families.
“Never turn your back,” the sergeant major warned him. Wood, who
was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant.
He wouldn’t take any chances. “You trust the handcuffs and everything,
but, no matter what, we’d never be with him one on one—there would
always be a partner,” Wood told me. Until recently, the guards and the
interrogators had worn Halloween masks inside the cell. Wood walked
through the camp to Echo Special proud to be part of a serious national-
security operation. He thought, It must be somebody really important—
the most dangerous person in the world, perhaps—to have this special
attention, a guard force just for him.

Echo Special was a trailer that had been divided in two. Wood walked
into the main area, which housed the guards; through a door was the
prisoner’s sleeping space. A government report describes the facility as
having been “modified in such a way as to reduce as much outside
stimuli as possible,” with doors that had been “sealed to a point that
allows no light to enter the room.” Inside, the walls were “covered with
white paint or paper to further eliminate objects the detainee may
concentrate on.” There was an eyebolt for shackling him to the floor,
and speakers for bombarding him with sound.

An M.P. explained to Wood that the current guard force called Detainee
760 “Pillow,” because when they had arrived, several months earlier, a
pillow was the only object in his possession. Then one of them shouted,
“Pillow, you can come out now!” A short man in his mid-thirties stepped
into the guards’ area, unshackled. He wore a broad smile and a white
jumpsuit, and moved cautiously toward Wood. The detainee introduced
himself as Mohamedou Salahi, then reached for a handshake, and said,
“What’s up, dude?”

Wood is six feet three, with a shaved head, a shy, stoic manner, and the
musculature of an élite bodybuilder. Although he towered over Salahi,
he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how
delicate Salahi was. “Nice to meet you,” Wood said. But he thought,
What the fuck is this? This is the exact opposite of what’s supposed to
happen.

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. Other men carried box cutters and explosives; Salahi was
a ghost on the periphery. The evidence against him lacked depth, but
investigators considered its breadth conclusive. His proximity to so
many events and high-level jihadi figures could not be explained by
coincidence, they thought, and only a logistical mastermind could have
left so faint a trail.

The U.S. government gathered that in 1991, when Salahi was twenty, he
swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the following year he learned
to handle weapons at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. 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. A fourth was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the attack
coördinator; while in C.I.A. custody, bin al-Shibh named Salahi as the
man who had arranged his travel to Afghanistan and his introduction to
bin Laden.


In 1998, shortly after Al Qaeda detonated truck bombs outside the U.S.
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Salahi took a call from a phone
number belonging to bin Laden. Then, and on at least one other
occasion, a member of Al Qaeda’s Shura Council—its leadership—
wired some four thousand dollars to Salahi’s bank account in Germany;
Salahi withdrew the cash and handed it to men who were travelling to
West Africa, to facilitate what the Americans assessed to be money-
laundering and telecommunications “projects for al-Qaida.”

In 1999, the Shura member called Salahi, but U.S. intelligence didn’t
know what his instructions were. In November of that year, Salahi
moved to Montreal, where he began leading prayers at a prominent
mosque. Soon afterward, a jihadi who had attended the same mosque—
and who the Americans believed had met Salahi—attempted 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. Canada’s 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 U.S. government concluded
that he was “the leader of the Montreal-based al-Qaida cell.”
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In Guantánamo, Salahi admitted to this and other allegations. “I came to

Canada with a plan to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto,” Salahi wrote,
in one of his many confessions. 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
intelligence—“one of the most valuable sources in detention.” He
described Al Qaeda’s financial involvement in credit-card fraud and
drug smuggling, and also the group’s “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. Owing to his
expertise as an electrical engineer, the dossier concludes, Salahi was also
able to describe Al Qaeda’s elaborate communications systems,
“including radio relay, couriers, encryption, phone boutiques, and
satellite communication links to laptops.” But the U.S. government was
sure there was more to be gleaned from him; the dossier says that he
“still has useful information” on a variety of subjects, including the 9/11
attacks, and lists twenty-two additional “areas of potential exploitation.”
Military officials considered him “the poster child for the intelligence
effort at Guantánamo.”

As a result of Salahi’s coöperation, his private cell was now stocked

with what the government referred to as “comfort items.” After the
pillow came soap, towels, a prayer cap, and prayer beads—by the time
Steve Wood arrived, Salahi also had books, a television, a PlayStation,
and an old laptop, on which he killed time playing chess and watching
DVDs. Eventually, Salahi would be allowed access to a small patch of
soil outside his trailer, where he tended sunflowers, basil, sage, parsley,
and cilantro. “What I was told was that his information had saved
thousands of American lives,” Wood said, “and this is what they’d given
him to keep talking.”

Salahi was taken into custody when he was thirty years old, but he had
already lived on four continents, and spoke fluent Arabic, French, and
German. English was his fourth language. Since he had learned it in
captivity, some of his earliest phrases were “I ain’t done nothing,”
“cavity search,” “fuck this,” and “fuck that.” “My problem is that I had
been picking the language from the ‘wrong’ people—namely, U.S.
Forces recruits who speak grammatically incorrectly,” he wrote on a
scrap of paper inside his cell. “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 Salahi’s past. “It’s hard to
sit there and laugh and chat with the guy, if he’s actually that bad,”
Wood told me. The night shift was twelve hours, and he never saw
Salahi shackled or restrained. Other Guantánamo prisoners threw
punches and feces and urine, but, according to the classified dossier,
Salahi’s only disciplinary infraction was that, on May 11, 2003, he
“possessed an excessive amount of MRE food.”

Salahi often appeared sullen and withdrawn. But, when he wanted to

engage, he spoke with a worldly, provocative humor that Wood found
appealing. 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. 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. Salahi also pushed him to research Western foreign-policy
blunders—for 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. “Have you heard of Nelson Mandela?” Wood recalled Salahi
saying. “Look him up, dude. Look up the prison on Robben Island. See
if you think his captivity was just. See what it did to his family.”

A job posting depicts life as an intelligence officer in Guantánamo Bay

as “a rewarding challenge with incredible surroundings”—sunsets,
beaches, iguanas, pristine Caribbean blue. “After a hustled day of
tackling a myriad of issues and directly contributing to the global war on
terrorism,” it reads, “fun awaits.” Officers could partake in pottery
classes, paintball, rugby, tennis, and softball, or exercise in several pools
and gyms. The local dive shop offered gear and certifications for sailing,
water-skiing, snorkelling, scuba diving, and more: “No experience, no
problem. . . . 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. But Wood spent his days in the
base library, researching topics that Salahi had brought up in the cell. He
devoured volumes on history, foreign affairs, politics, civil rights
—“pretty much any type of book you could think of, other than, like,
romance novels,” he said. “I was educating myself on the world.” But,
because Salahi’s trailer was a national secret, Wood kept a cordial
distance from most of the other guards. “I’d come home and iron my
uniform, and my roommates didn’t know a thing,” he said. “They’d ask
me, ‘Who’s in there?,’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know, probably somebody
famous.’ ”

In time, Wood began to think of everything he had known before

meeting Salahi as a narrow-minded myth of American superiority,
notable for its omissions of overseas misadventures. Meanwhile, the
Bush Administration’s pretext for invading Iraq was collapsing, and so
was Wood’s trust in government. It was the spring of 2004. There were
no weapons of mass destruction. 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. He began to wonder whether the case against
Mohamedou Salahi was as flimsy and politically motivated as that for
the invasion had been. “I was, like, What else have they lied about?” he
said.

Salahi underwent daily interrogations. The sessions Wood witnessed

were calm and courteous, with Salahi attempting to answer everything
asked of him. “It was the pretty blond interrogator bringing in these
disks with footage from Al Qaeda and Taliban training camps in
Afghanistan,” Wood recalled. The videos had been pulled from jihadi
Web sites, or captured by intelligence officers during raids, and Salahi’s
role was to identify the people in them. But sometimes, after
coöperating, “he’d get depressed and anxious, and say, ‘I’m a bad
Muslim,’ ” Wood told me. “And I’d say, ‘No matter what you did in the
past, man, you’ve saved thousands of lives.’ I’d always say that, and
he’d 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 walked into the sleeping area and
found Salahi lying in the fetal position, shaking. No adult in Wood’s life
had ever looked so frightened and so vulnerable. He gently held Salahi’s
shoulder, and said, “Everything’s O.K.” Salahi shook his head, and
clicked his tongue in disagreement, but refused to speak. The next day,
Wood pressed him to talk about the episode, but Salahi wouldn’t
elaborate. He just said, “Dude, they fucked me up.”
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The night terrors kept coming. Salahi was on a diet of Ensure nutrition
shakes and antidepressants. One day, he complained to Wood that the
interrogators were demanding information on events that he couldn’t
possibly know about, because they had taken place while he was in
custody.

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. “The tape would fall off our uniforms,”
Wood recalled. “We’d try to cover it back up, real quick, but eventually
we were, like, fuck it. We knew he wasn’t a threat.” Where once he had
struggled to forgive himself for enjoying Salahi’s company, he now felt
bad about having to lock the door at the end of each shift. 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.
Had Wood remained as a regular guard, in one of the regular cellblocks,
he might have finished his deployment with his understanding of the
global war on terror more or less intact. Instead, he began to wonder
whether what he was actually protecting at Guantánamo was one of the
government’s 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.

One day, Salahi started requesting paper from his guards. As the result
of a recent court ruling, Guantánamo detainees had access to legal
representation, and so, during the next several months, Salahi drafted a
diary of his detention as a series of harrowing letters to his lawyers,
Nancy Hollander, Sylvia Royce, and Theresa Duncan—four hundred
and sixty-six pages, sealed in envelopes and mailed to a classified
facility near Washington, D.C. No guards or interrogators were allowed
to read Salahi’s work. For the first time, he described his experiences
without fear of retribution. On one page, he recalled the day he got his
nickname, when an interrogator brought him a pillow. “I received the
present with a fake overwhelming happiness, and not because I was
dying to get a pillow,” he wrote. “No. I took the pillow as a sign of the
end of the physical torture.”

The Detainee

Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in late December, 1970, the ninth
child of a Mauritanian camel herder and his wife. Like most countries in
West Africa, Mauritania had gained independence from France a decade
earlier. 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. When a nurse, who spoke only
Hassaniya Arabic, filled out Mohamedou’s birth certificate in the Latin
alphabet, she omitted a syllable from his last name. Salahi became
“Slahi.” So began a life in which governments treated Salahi in
accordance with their own mistakes.
Salahi was a precocious student; after school, he used to steal chalk from
the classroom and return to Bouhdida, a dusty, unplanned neighborhood
in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott, to re-create the day’s lessons for
kids who couldn’t afford an education. Mauritania is an Islamic republic,
with rich traditions in poetry and recitation that belie its dismal rates of
literacy and economic growth. As a teen-ager, Salahi memorized the
entire Quran.
Abu Hafs, Salahi’s cousin and a senior Al Qaeda official, evaded capture. Photograph
courtesy Ben Taub

He grew up measuring political eras by military coups—1978, 1979,

1984—changes in power that did little to alter the ways in which
Mauritanians experienced power. 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.

In the eighties, he and a younger cousin, a slender poet named Mahfouz

Ould al-Walid, spent their evenings at a local café, where the owner
showed videos of the Palestinian struggle and the jihad in Afghanistan,
which the Soviet Union had invaded in 1979. In 1988, the Saudi
ideologue Osama bin Laden announced the formation of Al Qaeda.
Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Laden’s pamphlets. 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. They weren’t the only
people taken by this struggle—the C.I.A. was funding and equipping
many of the mujahideen groups.

In 1988, Salahi graduated from high school and won a scholarship to

study engineering in Duisburg, Germany. He was the first person in his
family to attend university. But the call to jihad interrupted his studies.
By 1990, the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, but Al Qaeda
was still fighting against the Communist Afghan government that the
Soviets had installed. 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.

Walid, who was sixteen, stayed behind. But two months later, when
Salahi returned to Mauritania and described his experience of the jihad,
Walid resolved to set off on his own for Afghanistan. Walid was a
prodigious poet—in Nouakchott, he had won several awards—and when
bin Laden met him he was impressed by his eloquence and conviction.
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 Laden’s white Mercedes.

In the spring of 1992, Salahi returned to Afghanistan. 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. But by then the Soviet Union
had collapsed, and, while Salahi was in training, the Afghan government
lost its Russian support. Afghanistan’s civil war entered a new stage,
with rival Islamist groups vying for control, and Salahi wanted no part of
it. After three months, he left Afghanistan and returned to Duisburg,
where he worked in a computer-repair shop while he finished his degree.

Another two years passed before Salahi’s name caught the attention of
Deddahi Ould Abdellahi, the head of Mauritania’s security-intelligence
apparatus. In 1994, as the director of state security, he opened an
investigation into Nouakchott’s jihadi scene. 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. 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. Several young men
mentioned Salahi as a contact in Germany. With the assistance of
German intelligence, Abdellahi told me, “we started collecting the
maximum amount of information. How does he live? How does he
behave? How does he react to world events?” It was unclear to
Abdellahi whether Salahi was still active within Al Qaeda, but he
seemed to be someone whom all the Mauritanian Islamists knew.

Abu Hafs ascended to Al Qaeda’s Shura Council, where he served as bin

Laden’s personal adviser on Sharia law. In 1996, when Abu Hafs was
twenty-one, he drafted bin Laden’s most important fatwa: an eleven-
thousand-word document excoriating the Saudi Kingdom and warning
the U.S. Secretary of Defense that Al Qaeda’s adherents “have no
intention except to enter paradise by killing you.” The fatwa was Al
Qaeda’s declaration of war against the United States. According to “The
Exile,” a comprehensive account of post-9/11 Al Qaeda, by the
investigative journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, who gained
access to Abu Hafs’s diaries, he ghostwrote “most of Osama’s speeches,
religious judgments, and press releases.” In 1998, bin Laden wrote Abu
Hafs into his will.
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Around that time, after a long period without contact, Abu Hafs called
Salahi from bin Laden’s satellite phone. The cousins had married a pair
of sisters, and so they were now also brothers-in-law. But, after Salahi
returned to Germany, they had scarcely been in touch. While Abu Hafs
was handling Al Qaeda’s affairs in East Africa, his father became ill,
and so, as both men remember it, Abu Hafs requested Salahi’s help in
transferring money to care for his family in Mauritania. Salahi agreed,
and Abu Hafs wired around four thousand dollars to his German
account. Salahi withdrew the cash and gave it to friends who were
travelling to Nouakchott, and they delivered it to Abu Hafs’s family.

A similar phone call, followed by a second transaction, took place in

December, 1998. But, after Abu Hafs used bin Laden’s phone to call a
different cousin in Nouakchott, Abdellahi’s subordinates took the cousin
into custody, and tortured him for two months. So, when Abu Hafs
called Salahi for assistance a third time, in early 1999, Salahi refused,
and hung up.

Al Qaeda had by this time transformed into an international terrorist

organization that was launching attacks in East Africa and the Middle
East. The U.S. had fired cruise missiles at Al Qaeda-linked targets in
Sudan and Afghanistan, and, in a bid to capture Abu Hafs, the C.I.A. had
raided a hotel in Khartoum. (He escaped through a kitchen door.) One
night in October, 1999, a friend of Salahi’s asked him to host three
Muslims who were passing through Duisburg. Over dinner, they
explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. The men slept on his
floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. Salahi didn’t know their real
names, and never heard from them again.

By now, Salahi was under surveillance by German intelligence. But the

Germans saw no reason to detain or question him. According to an
investigation by Der Spiegel, “he preached in gloomy back-yard
mosques,” and remained in occasional contact with jihadis—men whose
names and cell-phone numbers would turn up in investigations spanning
Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. But he did not
consider himself a member of Al Qaeda, or a facilitator of its operations.
One day, German officers questioned one of Salahi’s friends. When they
asked whether Salahi was involved in any terrorist activities, the friend
laughed.

But Salahi wanted to live free of surveillance, and he decided to leave

the country. One of Salahi’s friends, who was now living in Canada,
suggested that he move to Montreal. “He said, ‘Canada is amazing—
there is no racism, they speak French, and it is just a very advanced
country,’ ” Salahi said years later, in a U.S. military hearing. “You will
have a job at the snap of a finger,” his friend told him. Ramadan was
approaching—when the men leading prayers read aloud the entire Quran
during the course of a lunar cycle—and, Salahi recalled, “my friend said,
‘We need you here in Canada because we have no Hafez,’ ” the Arabic
word for a man who can recite the Quran from memory. “In Arabic
countries there are oodles, but in Europe and Canada one is very rare.”

Salahi landed in Montreal on November 26, 1999. (His wife returned to

Nouakchott.) His friend, Hosni Mohsen, introduced him to the imam at
the Al Sunnah mosque. The mosque had thousands of attendees, a few
of whom belonged to an Algerian jihadi group that had come to the
attention of the French and Canadian intelligence services. “Bad people
always want to blend into a crowd,” Salahi explained at the military
hearing. Some of Mohsen’s “bad friends,” as Salahi described them,
visited Mohsen’s apartment while he was hosting Salahi.
“So look at me,” Salahi said. “I have contact with Osama bin Laden’s
operative, who was helping launder money. I’m now in Canada,
attending a mosque where we believe a very dangerous group is
attending.” And, because it was Ramadan, Salahi was leading prayers.
“Something is going on.”

“It’s not looking good,” the presiding military officer replied.

“No, it’s not looking good at all,” Salahi said. “It will look worse.”

One of the Algerian jihadis was Ahmed Ressam, a serial thief who was
living in Canada under a false identity. In 1998, he had travelled to
Afghanistan, and spent a year in Al Qaeda training camps, where he
learned to handle weapons and explosives. 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
couldn’t locate him, because he had entered the country on a fake
passport.

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. When the boat reached Port Angeles, near Seattle, customs
officers found in the car more than a hundred pounds of explosives,
along with four timed detonators, each fashioned from a nine-volt
battery, a circuit board, and a Casio watch. Ressam told investigators
that he had planned to detonate suitcases in a crowded terminal at Los
Angeles International Airport.
 “I hope you treasure every minute of strangers telling you to treasure every minute.”


After the failed attack, Canada began to aggressively investigate the

Montreal cell. “They were very jumpy,” Salahi recalled at his hearing.
“They were everywhere in the mosque, in the police car, twenty-four
hours.” Among the targets of the investigation was Mohsen, Salahi’s
friend and host. Upon Mohsen’s arrest, according to a court filing,
investigators found “pocket litter” that included “both Salahi’s name and
Ressam’s phone number.” (Mohsen could not be reached for comment.)

One night, Salahi awoke to the sound of a tiny hole being drilled into his
wall. The next morning, he found two pinhole cameras. Salahi called the
police to report that his neighbors were spying on him, but they told him
that he should just cover the cameras with glue. Soon afterward,
Canadian investigators came to the apartment and questioned him about
the Millennium Plot. “I was scared to hell,” Salahi recalled at his
hearing. “They asked me do I know Ahmed Ressam. I said, ‘No.’ ”
(Investigators later determined that Ressam had left Montreal for a safe
house in Vancouver on November 17th—nine days before Salahi arrived
in Canada.) He began to notice surveillance everywhere. “O.K., screw it,
it is not a problem—they can watch me,” he said. “They were afraid that
I would kill some people.”

In Mauritania, Abdellahi’s men detained Salahi’s wife and brothers and

interrogated them about the Millennium Plot. “They didn’t tell me,
because they were scared,” Salahi recalled. But his family members
were eager for Salahi to return, and so they told him that his mother was
ill.
On January 21, 2000, Salahi boarded a flight to Senegal. It was cheaper
to fly to Dakar than to Nouakchott, and his brothers drove three hundred
miles to meet him there. 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. 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.
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Before dawn, Salahi was taken to an interrogation room. 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. Salahi denied knowing Ahmed Ressam, and added that
he thought the entire narrative around the attack had been concocted “to
unlock the terrorism budget and hurt the Muslims.” At the time, he later
wrote, “I believed excessively in Conspiracy Theories—though maybe
not as much as the U.S. government does.”

By the following day, the lead Senegalese officer was convinced that
there was no reason to hold Salahi. “I was happy because the one-ton
stack of paper the U.S. government had provided the Senegalese about
me didn’t seem to impress them,” Salahi wrote. “It didn’t take my
interrogator a whole lot of time to understand the situation.” Another
American official arrived, and took Salahi’s photograph and
fingerprints. Soon afterward, Salahi’s brothers were released with
instructions to return to Mauritania. They were told not to wait for
Salahi.

Several more days of interrogation followed. The Senegalese did the

talking, but the Americans provided the questions and reported back to
D.C. Eventually, one of the interrogators told Salahi that he was going to
be sent to Mauritania for more questioning. He was terrified—he wanted
to go back to Canada, where interrogators behaved within the bounds of
the law.
Salahi was led to a small private aircraft. The journey to Nouakchott
took roughly an hour, tracing the Mauritanian coast—to the left the
Atlantic, to the right the Sahara. Salahi, who hadn’t been home since
1993, was filled with nostalgia and dread. “Through the window I
started to see the sand-covered small villages around Nouakchott, as
bleak as their prospects,” he wrote.

The plane landed at sunset. A security guard handed him a filthy black
turban, to hide his face during the drive to the secret-police headquarters.
There, an intelligence officer named Yacoub confiscated Salahi’s Quran
and left him in a dank cell. He tried to sleep, but his mind was racing
with the expectation of torture at dawn. “I’d read about Muslim heroes
who faced the death penalty, head up,” he wrote. “How did they do it?”

The next morning, Salahi was led to the office of the Mauritanian
intelligence chief, Deddahi Ould Abdellahi. “The room was large and
well-furnished,” Salahi wrote, with a portrait of the President
“conveying the weakness of the law and the strength of the
government.” In the course of the next several days, Abdellahi and his
men, citing the concerns of the American government, interrogated
Salahi about his time in Afghanistan, his contact with his cousin Abu
Hafs, and the Millennium Plot. The men never abused Salahi, but, as the
days became weeks, he wished that they would just turn him over to the
United States, where, he assumed, he could at least challenge the legal
grounds of his detention.

After roughly three weeks, F.B.I. agents visited Salahi’s cell. 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. It was kind of like, ‘We ain’t 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. “We had done all our
investigations, and we found nothing against Salahi,” Abdellahi told me.
Abdellahi’s men confiscated his passport, once again citing a request by
the Americans. But a friend helped him find work installing Internet
routers for a telecommunications company. “It sucked that I didn’t have
the freedom to travel,” Salahi recalled in the military hearing. “But, hey,
I have to cope with it. So far, so good.”

Dry Ice

On a Tuesday afternoon in September, 2001, one of bin Laden’s

messengers sought out Salahi’s cousin, Abu Hafs, and told him to keep
an eye on the news. Abu Hafs was back in Afghanistan, living with his
family in Kandahar. It had been five years since the Taliban had taken
over most of the country, and televisions were banned. He grabbed his
shortwave radio. In the U.S., it was morning. He knew what he expected
to hear.

The first rumors of a “planes operation” began circulating among Al

Qaeda leaders in 1999. But it wasn’t until two years later that bin Laden
shared with the Shura Council the broad outlines of the attack: four
planes; two civilian targets; two government targets. In that meeting,
Abu Hafs challenged bin Laden on Quranic grounds, arguing that the
scale of civilian casualties could not be justified in Islam. He added that
such an attack would be a betrayal of Al Qaeda’s agreement with the
Taliban government, which had provided sanctuary for the group on the
understanding that it would do nothing to provoke a full-scale U.S.
invasion. 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. In July, 2001, according to Scott-Clark and
Levy, the authors of “The Exile,” Abu Hafs handed bin Laden his
resignation letter. Bin Laden, wary of Al Qaeda’s fragility, urged him
not to speak publicly of his departure. For the next two months, Abu
Hafs taught jihadi recruits at a madrassa.

After the attacks, Cofer Black, the head of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism
Center, who had served as the agency’s Khartoum station chief while
bin Laden was in Sudan, assured President George W. Bush that men
like Abu Hafs would soon “have flies walking across their eyeballs.”
The next day, he ordered Gary Schroen, the agency’s former Kabul
station chief, to gather a team for a paramilitary mission. “I want to see
photos of their heads on pikes,” Black said, according to Schroen’s
memoir, “First In,” published in 2005. “I want bin Ladin’s head shipped
back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Ladin’s
head to the President.” Black added that he and Bush wanted to avoid
the spectacle of a courtroom trial. “It was the first time in my thirty-year
CIA career that I had ever heard an order to kill someone,” Schroen
wrote.

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. They took off from Uzbekistan and flew
into northern Afghanistan, over the snow-capped mountains of the
Hindu Kush. There, Schroen contacted the leaders of the Northern
Alliance, an armed group that had spent years fighting the Taliban, with
little external support. Schroen recalled, “When I began to distribute
money—two hundred thousand dollars here, two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars for this—I think that they were convinced that we were
sincere.” In the next few weeks, Schroen’s C.I.A. team and their Afghan
counterparts travelled through much of northern Afghanistan, laying the
groundwork for the U.S. military invasion.

In Nouakchott, Abdellahi’s men detained Salahi again in the fall of

2001, at the request of the Americans. “I really have no questions for
you, because I know your case,” Abdellahi told him. Salahi had deleted
the contents of his phone. “All I had were some numbers of business
partners in Mauritania and Germany,” he later wrote, “but I didn’t 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. Laden”—German for “computer shop”—and he figured that, to
the Americans, “Laden” would be a red flag.


A couple of weeks into his detention, two F.B.I. agents walked into the
cell. “Where is Abu Hafs?” one of them asked.
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“I am not in Afghanistan,” Salahi replied. How could he possibly know?

The interrogations always circled back to the Millennium Plot. 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. “All he saw was a rat,” Salahi wrote. “After that, whenever
anybody tried to explain anything to the guy, he always asked, ‘Compare
it with the rat: Is it bigger? smaller?’ ”

One of the F.B.I. agents threatened Salahi with torture, and tried to
intimidate him. “He said he was going to bring in black people,” Salahi
recalled, in the military hearing. “I don’t have a problem with black
people—half my country is black people!” But the agent kept using
racial slurs. “This was my first time hearing these words,” Salahi said.
“Like, what is a ‘motherfucker’? That is not appropriate language, man.
He was very silly. He told me he hated Jews also. . . . I told him I have
no problem with the Jews, either, man. Anyway, he said, ‘I know you
are part of the Millennium Plot.’ ”

A few days later, Salahi was released. Abdellahi called Salahi’s boss at
the telecommunications company, to assure him that Salahi should be
allowed to resume work. While in custody, Salahi had befriended
Yacoub, the intelligence officer who had been one of his guards. Yacoub
had a large family and a small salary, so, when Salahi was released, he
started paying Yacoub to do occasional tasks. Though Salahi was a
skilled electrician, he hired Yacoub to fix his TV.

Not long afterward, in mid-November, Salahi’s boss sent him to

Mauritania’s Presidential palace, to install Internet routers and update
the phones. “I thought there would be a lot of formalities, especially for
a ‘terrorist suspect’ such as myself, but nothing like that happened,”
Salahi wrote. “After all, only the Americans suspect me of terrorism, no
other country. The irony is that I have never been in the States, and all
the other countries I have been in kept saying, ‘The guy is alright.’ ”

After work, Salahi went to his mother’s house. Two intelligence officers,
including Yacoub, arrived and said that Abdellahi needed to see him
again. One of the arresting agents suggested that Salahi drive his own
car to the station, so that he could drive himself home afterward. Yacoub
climbed into the passenger seat. “Salahi, I wish I were not part of this
shit,” he said.

Neither of them knew that the United States had asked Mauritania’s
President to hand over Salahi to a rendition team. “He was guilty of
nothing,” Abdellahi told me, and he had not been charged with a crime.
“That’s why we had previously let him go.” But, Abdellahi continued,
shrugging, “to refuse a demand from an intelligence agency, in the fight
against terrorism—that would have been impossible.”

On the evening of November 28th—Mauritania’s Independence Day—

Salahi had been in custody for a week. Abdellahi had bought him a new
outfit, but Salahi had refused to eat, and the fabric was loose on his
shoulders. They drove to the airport in silence, in Abdellahi’s black
Mercedes. “He was not happy—he didn’t want to leave,” Abdellahi told
me. “But I wasn’t the decider. I was an agent of the state. I executed
orders. And I knew that the request was justified, because he had
connections in this milieu, these Islamo-terrorist circles, and he might be
able to give his captors some ideas of how to improve security. That was
my thinking—that he was sufficiently intelligent and well informed to
help any intelligence service that might ask him for help.”

It was Ramadan again. “I pictured my family already having prepared

the Iftar fast-breaking food, my mom mumbling her prayers while duly
working the modest delicacies, everybody looking for the sun to take its
last steps and hide beneath the horizon,” Salahi wrote. He and Abdellahi
knelt on the runway, and prayed together.

A private jet landed, and out climbed a Jordanian rendition team. The
lead officer couldn’t speak Mauritania’s Hassaniya Arabic, and
Abdellahi hardly understood the Jordanian dialect, so Salahi translated
for them. “He said he needs fuel,” Salahi explained to Abdellahi. (In his
diary, Salahi wrote, “I was eager to let my predator know, I am, I am.”)
When the conversation was over, the Jordanians blindfolded Salahi and
put a set of soundproof earmuffs on him. Salahi was terrified. “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.
“It was silly, but if you get scared you are not you anymore. You very
much become a child again.”

In Amman, Jordan, Salahi was hooded and taken to a detention facility

in the headquarters of the country’s General Intelligence Directorate.
(After 9/11, the directorate acted as a proxy jailer for the C.I.A.) The
interrogations covered the same topics as before: Abu Hafs; Al Qaeda’s
training camps in 1992; the Millennium Plot. The Americans supplied
the questions, and the Jordanians extracted the responses, often through
coercive means. Salahi was asked about innocuous exchanges from
intercepted e-mails and phone calls, as if they had been conducted in
code. At other times, the questions originated from material on his hard
drive, which the F.B.I. had copied in Nouakchott. 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.
Still, Salahi found his Jordanian interrogators to be highly
knowledgeable, and they developed a kind of mutual respect. “It is a fact
that they understand this whole concept of terrorism much better than
the average American interrogator,” Salahi said, in his military hearing.
“They really know who is who,” and, as a result, “they were very
reluctant to torture me. It was not every day, the torture—I would say
maybe twice a week.” While other detainees were mercilessly beaten,
strung up by their limbs, and sexually assaulted, he added, “all they did
was strike me at different times in the face, and hit me against the
concrete wall.”

The guards, who were officially prohibited from interacting with him,
began asking questions. “Where are you from?” one of them said.

“Mauritania.”

“What are you doing in Jordan?”

“My country turned me over.”

“Are you kidding me?”

 “I ordered my meal more than an hour ago! Since then, I have received it, eaten it, and
paid for it! Thank you for a wonderful evening!”


“No.”

“Your country is fucked up.”

The guards also brought him books from the library, including the Bible,
which he had requested, he wrote, “because I wanted to study the book
that must more or less have shaped the lives of the Americans.”

Every other week, when Red Cross representatives visited the prison,
Salahi and a handful of other C.I.A. detainees were whisked to the
cellar, to be hidden from view. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi waited for
updates from the C.I.A. and the G.I.D., but received none. “I thought
he’d be back in no time,” he told me.

Salahi’s family wasn’t notified of his rendition, and so they were

surprised that Abdellahi refused to let them see him. According to one of
Salahi’s brothers, Abdellahi told the family that Salahi was being kept in
a detention facility in the desert, far from Nouakchott. (Abdellahi says
that, after Salahi disappeared, the family never contacted him.) To insure
Salahi’s upkeep, the family regularly gave Abdellahi’s men money,
food, clothes, and gifts. In return, they passed along messages from
Salahi, which they had invented, and assured the family that Salahi was
well.
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In Kandahar, Abu Hafs felt the Americans closing in. The Taliban was
rapidly losing ground. On October 17, 2001, Abu Hafs’s madrassa took
a direct hit from a missile. One day in November, after burying several
friends, Abu Hafs sought out an Al Jazeera journalist. His turban was
still damp from where his wife had cleaned off other people’s blood.
“The Americans, with their policies, bore the fruit of the events of
September 11th,” Abu Hafs said on camera. “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 agencies—with their “satellites, ground stations, millions of
spies, and huge budgets”—for the fact that the hijackers had “found a
security breach as big as a whole fleet of hijacked civilian aircraft, and
managed to shove America’s nose into the ground.”

By the second week of December, it was clear that Kandahar would fall.
Bin Laden had fled to the mountains, and the remaining Al Qaeda
leaders understood that, as Arabs and North Africans, they could never
blend in with the locals, who spoke Dari, Pashto, Balochi, and other
regional languages. (For the first several weeks of the invasion, Donald
Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, believed that everyone spoke
“Afghan.”) In a rush to leave Kandahar, two dozen senior Al Qaeda
officials boarded a bus, but Abu Hafs, fearful that a single air strike
could decapitate the jihadi movement, urged them to disperse.

During the next several days, Abu Hafs travelled toward the Pakistani
province of Balochistan. 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. 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.

When Abu Hafs reached Quetta, in Pakistan, he found the city’s private
hospital filled with injured Al Qaeda members. Taliban fighters walked
the streets, confident in the support they received from Pakistan’s
intelligence service. Abu Hafs, however, regarded the Pakistanis as
duplicitous. (The C.I.A. came to much the same conclusion.) Bin
Laden’s family was en route to Pakistan, and Abu Hafs needed to make
arrangements for their protection. In deliberations with Al Qaeda
leaders, he decided that the safest place was Iran.

On December 19th, Abu Hafs boarded a bus in Quetta, carrying a fake

passport and a suitcase full of cash. An image of bin Laden’s face
adorned the windshield, and Abu Hafs spent much of the journey to the
Iranian border, some four hundred miles, wondering whether it was a
“Wanted” poster or a tribute. At a Pakistani Army checkpoint, he slipped
a wad of bills into his passport, and went through unquestioned.

In Iran, Abu Hafs was greeted by representatives of a secretive and élite

Revolutionary Guard Corps unit that is responsible for protecting top
officials. A few weeks later, Iranian spies told Abu Hafs to call other Al
Qaeda officials and inform them that they would be welcome in Iran—
although, 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. The decision to simultaneously protect and detain Al Qaeda
members was apparently made by Iran’s spy chief, Qassem Suleimani.
Within a few months, dozens of Al Qaeda members were living in
Tehran, undergoing occasional interrogations, aware that their Iranian
hosts could betray them at any moment. Abu Hafs spent the next decade
in relative luxury, exercising alongside foreign diplomats in one of
Tehran’s swankiest gyms, and looking after bin Laden’s sons along with
his own. The Pentagon had reported that he was dead.

On the night of July 19, 2002, the Jordanians transported Mohamedou

Salahi, blindfolded and in chains, to the airport in Amman, where a new
team took over. At first, Salahi was relieved—he 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. Instead,
the men stripped him naked, strapped a diaper on him, and swapped out
his shackles for a heavier set. One of the men momentarily removed
Salahi’s blindfold, and shined a flashlight into his eyes. Everyone on the
team was dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured by balaclavas.
They drove up to the stairs of an airplane, but, Salahi wrote, he was “so
exhausted, sick, and tired that I couldn’t walk, which compelled the
escort to pull me up the steps like a dead body.”

At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military
base in Afghanistan. For the first time, Salahi was in the custody of
uniformed American soldiers. “Where is Mullah Omar?” they asked.
“Where is Osama bin Laden?” They shouted and threw objects against
the wall. Salahi had been living in a cell practically since the beginning
of the invasion, nine months earlier.

Military personnel took his biometric information, and logged his health
problems—including a damaged sciatic nerve—then led him to a cell.
The punishment for talking to another detainee was to be hung by the
wrists, feet barely touching the ground. Salahi saw a mentally ill old
man subjected to this method. “He couldn’t stop talking because he
didn’t know where he was, nor why,” Salahi wrote.

During interrogations, an intelligence officer, known among the

detainees as William the Torturer, forced Salahi into stress positions that
exacerbated his sciatic-nerve issues. “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. Another officer
tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German.
“Wahrheit macht frei,” the officer said—the truth sets you free. “When I
heard him say that, I knew the truth wouldn’t set me free, because
‘Arbeit ’ didn’t set the Jews free,” Salahi recalled. (The phrase “Work
sets you free” appeared on the gates of Auschwitz and other Nazi
concentration camps.)

Each detainee was given a number, and, on August 4th, thirty-four of

those numbers were called, including Salahi’s. The men were dragged
out of their cells. 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.
Then the men were loaded onto an airplane. “When my turn came, two
guards grabbed me by the hands and feet and threw me toward the
reception team,” Salahi wrote. “I don’t remember whether I hit the floor
or was caught by the other guards. I had started to lose feeling and it
would have made no difference anyway.”

For some thirty hours, Salahi was strapped to a board. Medical records
indicate that he weighed a hundred and nine pounds—around thirty per
cent less than his normal weight. He was belted so tightly that he
struggled to breathe, but he didn’t have the English vocabulary to tell the
guards.

Then, he wrote, the plane landed, the doors opened, and “the warm
Cuban sun hit me gracefully. It was such a good feeling.”

ENEMY COMBATANTS
 “The screen porch makes it a home.”


In the minutes before the first detainees set foot on Guantánamo, “you
could literally hear a pin drop,” Brandon Neely, a military-police officer,
recalled, in an interview with the Guantánamo Testimonials Project, at
the University of California, Davis, in 2008. “Everyone, including
myself, was very nervous,” he said. It was January 11, 2002. The Bush
Administration had decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply
to the war on terror, which meant that the men captured abroad could be
deprived of the rights of prisoners of war. That day, Neely’s job was to
haul captives from a bus to a holding area for processing, and then to
small, outdoor cages, where they would spend nearly four months
sleeping on rocks, and relieving themselves in buckets, while soldiers
constructed more permanent cellblocks. “I keep thinking, Here it comes
—I am fixing to see what a terrorist looks like face to face,” Neely, who
was twenty-one at the time, said.
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The first man off the bus had only one leg. He wore handcuffs, leg
shackles, earmuffs, blackout goggles, a surgical mask, and a bright-
orange jumpsuit. As two M.P.s dragged him to the holding area,
someone tossed his prosthetic leg out of the bus. All afternoon, guards
screamed at the detainees to shut up and walk faster, called them “sand
niggers,” and said that their family members and countries had been
obliterated by nuclear bombs.
Later that day, Neely and his partner brought an elderly detainee to the
holding area and forced him to his knees. When they removed his
shackles, the man, who was shaking with fear, suddenly jerked to the
left. Neely jumped on top of him, and forced his face into the concrete
floor. An officer shouted “Code Red!” into a radio, and the Internal
Reaction Force team raced to the scene and hog-tied him. He was left for
hours in the Caribbean sun.

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. In his home country, Neely said, “this man had seen
some of his friends and family members executed on their knees.” The
man’s response was hardly unique; a military document, drafted ten days
later for the base commander, noted that “the detainees think they are
being taken to be shot.”

Officially, the job of the Internal Reaction Force was to restrain unruly
detainees, to prevent them from injuring themselves or the guards. But,
in practice, “IRFing” was often done as a form of revenge, initiated
liberally—for 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. IRFing typically involved a team
of six or more men dressed in riot gear: the first man would pepper-
spray the detainee, then charge into the cell and, using a heavy shield
and his body weight, tackle the detainee; the rest would jump on top,
shackling or binding the detainee until he was no longer moving.
Although many of the detainees arrived malnourished, with their bodies
marked by bullet wounds and broken bones, some IRF teams punched
them and slammed their heads into the ground until they were bloody
and unconscious. “You could always tell when someone got IRFed, as
the detainees throughout the camp would start chanting and screaming,”
Neely recalled. Once, he watched an IRF team leader beat a detainee so
badly that he had to be sent to the hospital and the floor of his cell was
stained with blood; the next time the team leader was in the cellblock,
another detainee yelled out, “Sergeant, have you come back to finish
him off?”

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. To dispel notions that the United States was at war with Islam,
detainees were allowed to have private meetings with a Muslim military
chaplain, and were given copies of the Quran. Some guards saw an
opportunity to torment the detainees—by 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.

One day, after an interrogator kicked a Quran across the floor, detainees
organized a mass suicide attempt. “Once every fifteen minutes, a
prisoner tried to hang himself by tying his sheet around his neck and
fastening it through the mesh of the cage wall,” James Yee, an Army
captain who served as the Muslim chaplain in Guantánamo, recalled in
his memoir, “For God and Country,” from 2005. “As soon as the
prisoner was taken to the hospital, another detainee would be found—his
sheet wound around his neck and tied to his cage wall. The guards
would rush in to save him and the chaos would start again. The protest
lasted for several days as twenty-three prisoners tried to hang
themselves.”

Military-police officers so frequently abused the Quran during cell

searches that detainees demanded that the books be kept in the library,
where they would be safe. Yee, who had converted to Islam in the early
nineties, sent a request up the chain of command, but was rebuffed. “I
felt this decision stemmed from the command’s desire to be able to tell
the media that we gave all detainees a Quran out of sensitivity to their
religious needs,” he wrote. The detainees protested, and so “it was
decided that every detainee who refused the Quran would be IRFed.”
While the detainees were receiving medical treatment for their post-
IRF injuries, the Qurans were placed back in their cells.

In time, Yee came to believe that “Islam was systematically used as a

weapon against the prisoners.” Guards mocked the call to prayer, and
manipulated Islamic principles of modesty—by having female guards
watch naked detainees in the showers, for example—to create tension as
an excuse to exact violence. During interrogations, detainees were
forced to perform mock satanic rituals, or were draped in the Israeli flag.

Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the men in Guantánamo were

“among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of
the earth.” But after Brandon Neely’s first shift, on the day the detention
camp opened, “no one really spoke much,” he recalled. “I went back to
my tent and laid down to go to sleep. I was thinking, Those were the
worst people the world had to offer?”

Investigators had the same question. Shortly before the first detainees
arrived, Robert McFadden, an N.C.I.S. special agent, was eager to
receive the flight manifest. “I just couldn’t wait to see who the detainees
were,” he told me. He had spent much of the past fifteen months in
Yemen, investigating Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and
hoped that some of the men who were being shipped to Guantánamo
would have information about the case. But, when the list of detainees
finally arrived, he recalled, “my reaction was, What the fuck? Who are
these guys?” Most of the names were Afghan or Pakistani, “and the
Arabs who were on the list certainly weren’t 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. 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. “You can
receive millions of dollars,” one of the flyers said. “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 dollars—far more
money than most Afghans earned in a year—and “the result was an
explosion of human trafficking” by various armed groups, Mark Fallon,
the deputy commander of Guantánamo’s Criminal Investigation Task
Force, wrote in his memoir, “Unjustifiable Means,” which was heavily
redacted before being published, in 2017. As Michael Lehnert, a Marine
Corps major general who briefly served as the detention camp’s first
commander, later testified to Congress, “What better way to enrich
yourself, while resolving old grudges, than to finger a neighbor who was
your enemy, regardless of his support for either Al Qaeda or the
Taliban?”
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According to Fallon, “The Northern Alliance would jam so many

detainees into Conex shipping containers that they started to die of
suffocation. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the
tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. A lot of
these prisoners were actually looking forward to being handed over to
the Americans, figuring it would be pretty obvious they weren’t Al
Qaeda.” Yet hundreds of them were sent to Guantánamo Bay, which
ended up housing seven hundred and eighty people.

In public, the Bush Administration and its military leadership asserted

that Guantánamo was filled with men who would stop at nothing to
destroy the U.S. 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.”

Salahi was no dirt farmer. But the C.I.A., which spent the next few years
shuffling its “high-value detainees” among so-called black sites in
Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, had seen fit to transfer him into
military custody. By the time Salahi arrived at Guantánamo, on August
5, 2002, Fallon’s élite interagency criminal-investigation task force had
been sidelined, and Lehnert had been replaced.

The leadership at Guantánamo was more interested in intelligence

collection than in prosecuting detainees for terrorism crimes. But, when
the new commander asked Stuart Herrington, a retired colonel and Army
intelligence officer, to assess operations at the facility, Herrington found
that most interrogators lacked the training and the experience required to
be effective. Only one of the twenty-six interrogators was capable of
working without an interpreter. Herrington later reported that the
interrogators were unsure of the real names of more than half the
detainees.
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According to Fallon, most of the interrogators were “basically

conscripts” who would “walk into a room for the first time thinking the
detainee was just waiting to be cracked open and they were the next Jack
Bauer,” the fictional protagonist of “24,” who used abusive tactics to
elicit information and save his city from terrorist attacks. They went
through checklists of questions that had been developed by their
superiors, and seemed impervious to nuance, or to the notion that some
detainees may have been sent there in error. In response, detainees
would stop coöperating and start chanting or praying; in an attempt to
reassert control, Fallon wrote, “the interrogators would duct-tape their
mouths, further guaranteeing that they wouldn’t get any information—
and so it would go.” Nevertheless, he recalled, each failed interrogation
“was taken as proof that the detainees were both Al Qaeda and trained to
resist these methods.” In 2000, investigators in northern England had
discovered a jihadi field manual that included advice on lying to captors.
Now, faced with their own incompetence, Fallon wrote, interrogators
“were quick to blame ‘classic Manchester resistance tactics!’ ”
 “I’ve done it, Igor! I’ve finally found a way to reuse all our wine corks!”


Salahi’s detainee dossier lists his “reasons for transfer” to Guantánamo:

“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.; mosques in Duisburg; and his cousin Abu Hafs
al-Mauritani. (They were no longer brothers-in-law, as Salahi and his
wife had divorced.) Notably absent is any mention of the Millennium
Plot, or any allegation that Salahi had committed a crime.

After Salahi was processed, he spent thirty days in a cold isolation cell, a
practice that the U.S. government considered “a main building block of
the exploitation process,” as it “allows the captor total control over
personal inputs.” When the isolation period was over, Salahi learned
from other detainees that there was a difference in opinion between
those who had lived in European democracies and those who had lived
only in Muslim countries, with the latter group arguing that America’s
war on terror was an anti-Muslim crusade. Salahi tried to convince the
skeptics that their arrival in Cuba was “a blessing,” and that they would
be treated fairly and exonerated by the American justice system. But,
“with every day going by, the optimists lost ground,” he wrote. 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. The gulf between the U.S. government’s public
disclosures and its secret practices was etched into his body and his
mind.

In 1967, Martin Seligman, a twenty-four-year-old Ph.D. student in

psychology, conducted an experiment that involved delivering electric
shocks to dogs in various states of restraint. The goal was to assess
whether inescapable pain could condition an animal into “learned
helplessness,” whereby it simply accepts its fate. Thirty-five years later,
the United States government drew inspiration from this experiment in
its approach to interrogating terror suspects.

The plan, conceived by James Mitchell, a psychologist working on

contract for the C.I.A., was to induce learned helplessness in humans by
combining an individually tailored regimen of torture techniques with
environmental manipulation. The techniques—which government
documents identify as “omnipotence tactics,” “degradation tactics,”
“debilitation tactics,” and “monopolization of perception tactics”—had
been developed by Communist forces during the Korean War, to coerce
prisoners into making false confessions, for propaganda purposes. Since
then, the U.S. military has exposed some élite 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 don’t abide by the
Geneva Conventions. Mitchell argued that, by reverse-engineering this
program, interrogators could overwhelm whatever resistance training a
detainee might have absorbed from the Manchester manual. What
followed was a period of experimentation—overseen by psychologists,
lawyers, and medical personnel—at C.I.A. black sites and military
facilities. In September, 2002, Army officers started referring to
Guantánamo as “America’s Battle Lab.”

Early in the afternoon of October 2, 2002, a group of interagency

lawyers and psychologists met to come up with a framework that used
“psychological stressors” and environmental manipulation to “foster
dependence and compliance.” The C.I.A. had been torturing detainees at
black sites for several months; now the Guantánamo leadership wanted
to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement
a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international
law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” Jonathan
Fredman, a senior C.I.A. lawyer, said, according to the meeting minutes.
“It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you’re doing it
wrong.” (Fredman has disputed the accuracy of the meeting minutes.)

Later that month, a military lawyer named Diane Beaver drafted a legal
justification—described later by a congressional inquiry on torture as
“profoundly in error and legally insufficient”—for a set of abusive
interrogation techniques. Among such methods as forced nakedness,
dietary manipulation, daily twenty-hour interrogations, waterboarding,
exposure to freezing temperatures, and the withholding of medical care,
Beaver endorsed “the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee
that death” was “imminent.” (She later expressed surprise that her legal
opinion had become “the final word on interrogation policies and
practices within the Department of Defense.”) An accompanying memo,
drafted by a military psychologist and a psychiatrist, explained that “all
aspects of the environment should enhance capture shock, dislocate
expectations, foster dependence, and support exploitation to the fullest
extent possible.”
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In November, 2002, the set of proposed techniques landed on Donald

Rumsfeld’s desk. He signed it. “Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” he
wrote in the margin, referring to a proposed stress position. “I stand for
8-10.”

By the spring of 2003, Salahi had been visited in Guantánamo by

investigators from Canada and Germany, and questioned by various U.S.
government agencies. He had come to think of himself as “a dead camel
in the desert, when all kinds of bugs start to eat it.” Most of the
interrogations were conducted by the F.B.I., whose questions now
centered on establishing a connection between Salahi and 9/11. They
showed him photos of various hijackers, and one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
the attack coördinator, who had been captured in Pakistan. “I figured
I’ve seen the guy, but where and when?” Salahi wrote in his diary.

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. Now bin al-Shibh, who
was being tortured in C.I.A. custody, claimed that Salahi had recruited
him into Al Qaeda. “In fact, I’d say, without you, September 11th would
never have happened,” one of Salahi’s interrogators told him. Salahi was
horrified. “I was, like, Maybe he’s right.” (In fact, the 9/11 plot was
organized more than a year before bin al-Shibh visited Duisburg.) For
the rest of the interrogation session, he was forced to look at photos of
corpses from the aftermath of the attacks.

On May 22nd, Salahi’s lead F.B.I. interrogator told him that the military
would take over his interrogation. “I wish you good luck,” the agent
said. “All I can tell you is to tell the truth.” They hugged. The F.B.I.
team left Guantánamo, and the torture began.

Special Projects
The cell—better, the box—was cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of
the time. I was forbidden from seeing the light of the day; every once in a while they
gave me a rec-time at night to keep me from seeing or interacting with any detainees.
I was living literally in terror. For the next seventy days I wouldn’t know the
sweetness of sleeping.

Twenty-hour interrogations. “You know, when you just fall asleep and
the saliva starts to come out of your mouth?” Salahi said. No prayers, no
information about the direction of Mecca. No showers for weeks. Force-
feeding during the daylight hours of Ramadan, when Muslims are
supposed to fast. “We’re gonna feed you up your ass,” an interrogator
said.
Medical personnel had noted that Salahi had sciatic-nerve issues; now
interrogators kept him in stress positions that exacerbated them. No
chairs, no lying down, no more access to his prescription pain
medication. “Stand the fuck up!” an interrogator said. But Salahi was
shackled to the floor, so he could do so only hunched over. He stayed
that way for hours. The next time the Red Cross delegation visited
Guantánamo, a representative reported that “medical files are being used
by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation
plan.”

Female interrogators groped him. They stripped, and rubbed their bodies
all over his, and threatened to rape him. “Oh, Allah, help me! Oh, Allah,
have mercy on me!” one of them said, mockingly. “Allah! Allah! There
is no Allah. He let you down!” An interrogation memo listed plans to
shave Salahi’s head and beard, dress him in a burqa, and make him bark
and perform dog tricks, “to reduce the detainee’s ego and establish
control.”

The interrogators head-butted him, and made degrading remarks about

his religion and his family. They kept him in alternately hot and cold
cells, blasted him with strobe lights and heavy-metal music, and poured
ice water on him. One day they would deprive him of food, and the next
they’d force him to drink water until he vomited. 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.

On July 17, 2003, a masked interrogator told Salahi that he had dreamed
that he saw other detainees digging a grave and tossing a pine casket
with Salahi’s detainee number into it. The interrogator added that, if
Salahi didn’t 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. 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. His very existence
will become erased. His electronic files will be deleted from the
computer, his paper files will be packed up. . . . No one will know what
happened to him, and eventually, no one will care.”

That day, the leader of Salahi’s interrogation came in. He identified

himself as Captain Collins, a Navy officer who had been sent to
Guantánamo by the White House. (His name was actually Richard
Zuley; he was a Chicago police detective, working as a military
contractor, who has an extensive record of abusing suspects until they
confessed to crimes that they hadn’t committed. He did not respond to
requests for comment.) Zuley read Salahi a letter, later shown to be
forged, stating that his mother was in U.S. custody and might soon be
transferred to Guantánamo. According to government records, “the letter
referred to ‘the administrative and logistical difficulties her presence
would present in this previously all-male prison environment,’ ”
implying that she would be raped.


On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for

Salahi. 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.

Twelve days later, a group of men charged into Salahi’s cell with a
snarling German shepherd. They punched Salahi in the face and the ribs,
then covered his eyes with blackout goggles, his ears with earmuffs, and
his head with a bag. They tightened the chains on his ankles and wrists,
then threw him into the back of a truck, drove to the water, and loaded
him into a speedboat. “I thought they were going to execute me,” Salahi
wrote.
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He was driven around for three hours, to make him think that he was
being transported to a different facility. He was forced to swallow salt
water, and, every few minutes, the men packed ice cubes between his
clothes and his skin. When the ice melted, they punched him, then
repacked the ice to freeze him again. By the end of the boat ride, Salahi
was bleeding from his ankles, mouth, and wrists. Seven or eight of his
ribs were broken.

Back on land, Salahi was carried to Echo Special, the trailer, which
would be his home for several years. 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. “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 Salahi’s mental health. “Slahi told me
he is ‘hearing voices’ now,” the interrogator wrote. “Is this something
that happens to people who have little external stimulus such as daylight,
human interaction etc???? Seems a little creepy.”

“Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than

auditory, but you never know,” Zierhoffer replied. “In the dark you
create things out of what little you have.”

“Had I done what they accused me of, I would have relieved myself on
day one,” Salahi wrote in his diary. “But the problem is that you cannot
just admit to something you haven’t done; you need to deliver the
details, which you can’t when you hadn’t done anything. It’s not just,
‘Yes, I did!’ No, it doesn’t work that way: you have to make up a
complete story that makes sense to the dumbest dummies. One of the
hardest things to do is to tell an untruthful story and maintain it, and that
is exactly where I was stuck.”

On September 8th, Salahi asked to speak to Zuley. By now, he had

enough information about the kind of story he had to craft, because, he
wrote, “through my conversations with the FBI and the DoD, I had a
good idea as to what wild theories the government had about me.”

Zuley walked in, and Salahi started lying. But it wasn’t enough; the
government wanted him to link other people in Canada to various plots.
Salahi figured that this was how bin al-Shibh had ended up naming him
as a high-level Al Qaeda recruiter. 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. Moreover, he is handicapped. I felt so bad, and kept
praying silently, ‘Nothing’s gonna happen to you dear brother.’ ”
The abuse wound down slowly—no more hitting, but no “comfort
items,” either, and no uninterrupted periods of rest. James Mitchell, the
C.I.A. contract psychologist who devised the enhanced-interrogation
program, describes this period as an element of “Pavlovian
conditioning,” in which the detainee sees his situation improve or
deteriorate in direct accordance with his level of compliance.

One day, Zuley walked into Salahi’s cell, carrying a pillow. In time, he
was given back his pain medication. Then he was prescribed
antidepressants.

In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. 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.”

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 her—an ailing woman
in the rearview mirror, waving from the street as he drove to Deddahi
Abdellahi’s intelligence headquarters. In all this time, his family had had
no official confirmation of his whereabouts. Salahi’s brother, who is a
German citizen, had read in Der Spiegel that he was in Guantánamo, but
Abdellahi insisted that it wasn’t true—that he was looking after Salahi in
a Mauritanian prison. Meanwhile, his subordinates continued to collect
bribes from Salahi’s family.

Mohamed Elmoustapha Ould Badre Eddine, a left-wing member of the

Mauritanian Parliament, conducted inquiries of his own, but made no
progress. Badre Eddine had spent some four decades organizing
grassroots campaigns against the practice of slavery and other human-
rights violations, and for this he had spent years in remote detention
sites, under a succession of authoritarian regimes. Throughout 2002 and
2003, whenever the foreign minister visited the parliamentary chamber,
Badre Eddine demanded to know Salahi’s whereabouts. Each time, the
minister lied—even after the Red Cross had started delivering Salahi’s
letters from Guantánamo to his family.

In 2005, Mauritania had a military coup—the typical way in which

power has changed hands since independence. “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. “And then it behaves the same way as the last.” When he asked the
new regime about Salahi, he said, “they just replied, ‘We didn’t kidnap
him—it was the previous government that did it. And now he belongs to
the Americans.’ ”

From the floor of Parliament, Badre Eddine noted that Mauritania has no
extradition treaty with the United States. “He was a victim of an
extremely rare crime: that a country had kidnapped its own citizen and
handed it over to a foreign country, outside of the justice system, outside
of all legal processes,” Brahim Ebety, the Salahi family’s lawyer in
Nouakchott, told me. Under the new regime, Abdellahi, the spy chief,
was demoted, and given the task of investigating corruption and
malfeasance within the security services; the standard path for
accountability required Abdellahi to investigate himself.

Steve Wood walked into Echo Special in the spring of 2004 unaware of
everything that had happened before. His was the first guard force that
didn’t wear masks, that allowed Salahi to pray. Outside of the political
discussions, he and Salahi passed the hours playing rummy, Risk, and
chess. When Salahi’s female interrogators came in for a game of
Monopoly, Salahi always threw the match. “My interest is not to be
tortured,” he said. “And Steve’s interest is to impress the girls. So,
completely different goals in life.”

Sometimes Wood opened Salahi’s Quran to a random page and told him
the verse number, and Salahi would recite it aloud from memory, first in
Arabic, then in English. It was the first time Wood had encountered the
Quran. He wanted to ask Salahi more about its contents, but he
suspected that there were microphones and cameras in the cell. Outside
Echo Special, Wood started reading about Guantánamo on activist Web
sites, but a colleague warned him that Internet traffic was monitored on
the base. 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. “I tried to make my time there
morally neutral, without being called a traitor,” he told me. “I was scared
to ask too many questions, I was scared to read a book on Islam while I
was in there, or show too much interest.”
 “If you’d like, I can set you up with a bullet I dodged.”


Wood’s concerns were not unjustified. While Salahi was being tortured,
James Yee, the Muslim military chaplain, discovered that he and the
interpreters at Guantánamo—many of whom were Muslim Americans,
with Middle Eastern backgrounds—were being spied on by law-
enforcement and intelligence officers. 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. For
seventy-six days, he lived in solitary confinement, in a cold cell with
surveillance cameras and the lights always on. Government officials
suggested that Yee was running an elaborate spy ring—that he and other
Muslims had “infiltrated” the military, and represented the gravest
insider threat since the Cold War. 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. (All charges were later
dropped, and Yee was honorably discharged.)
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In October, 2004, Wood’s girlfriend gave birth to a daughter, Summer.

Seven months later, his deployment ended. Before leaving Guantánamo,
he gave Salahi a novel by Steve Martin, “The Pleasure of My
Company.” “Pillow, good luck with your situation,” he wrote inside.
“Just remember Allah always has a plan. I hope you think of us as more
than just guards. I think we all became friends.” But he wasn’t sure that
Salahi believed him. “The whole time I was thinking, you know, What
does he really think of us?” he recalled. “What if he is, like, ‘I hate these
sons of bitches for locking me up’? And Mohamedou probably thought I
was thinking the same thing—that, 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. “It was my way of telling him, ‘Man,
I trust you. This is my daughter. She is my life. This friendship is real.’ ”

Salahi saw no path out of Guantánamo. 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. By the time Wood left, he had
come to accept his guards and interrogators as family. “True, you didn’t
choose this family, nor did you grow up with it, but it’s a family all the
same,” he wrote in his diary. “Every time a good member of my present
family leaves it feels as if a piece of my heart is being chopped off.”

He often turned to a verse by the Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar:

I stood in my cell
Wondering about my situation
Am I the prisoner, or is it that guard standing nearby?
Between me and him stood a wall
In the wall, there was a hole
Through which I see light, and he sees darkness
Just like me he has a wife, kids, a house
Just like me he came here on orders from above.

Having accepted his guards, Salahi wrote, the next phase of captivity
was “getting used to the prison, and being afraid of the outside world.”

The Outside World

Ayear in Echo Special shattered Wood’s ideas about his post-military

future. Before his deployment, he had aspired to become a police officer.
“But I changed my mind after Guantánamo,” he told me. He wanted no
part of a system in which he might have control over another person’s
liberty. “I don’t like power,” he said. He left the Oregon National Guard,
and started working night shifts at a twenty-four-hour gym near
Portland. Few people worked out at two or three in the morning, so he
had plenty of time to continue his self-education on global affairs. He
started in on the books he had been too afraid to request in Guantánamo
—ones about Islam.

Wood had come to see Islam in much the same way that many of the
detainees did: as the only thing that couldn’t be stripped from them. The
devotion, the routine of the five daily prayers—“that kept Mohamedou
going,” Wood told me. Now, as he read, “I saw how beautiful the
religion was,” he said. On most days, he searched Salahi’s name online,
hoping to learn more about the case, and to make sense of his own
deployment to Echo Special, to no avail. He found it almost impossible
to reconcile the news coverage of Guantánamo Bay with what he had
witnessed there. As he read about Islamic history, he began to seek
clarity in the Quran itself.

In 2006, Wood removed his shoes at the entrance to the Masjid As-
Saber, Portland’s largest mosque. He wasn’t sure what he wanted out of
the visit—he knew only that curiosity eclipsed his misgivings. During
the next few months, Wood showed up between prayer times, to avoid
any pressure to participate. On his third visit, he told two Saudi students
that he wanted to become a Muslim. Conversion to Islam requires only
that, in the presence of Muslim witnesses, you declare the Shahada
—“There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet”—and that
you believe it in your heart. The students acted as Wood’s witnesses.

Wood started sporadically attending prayers. 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.
When Wood told the old man that he had worked at Guantánamo Bay,
the man suggested that he keep it to himself. 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.
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.
“So that scared me away,” he said. He stopped praying in public. “I just
wanted this to be me and God.”

By now, Wood was no longer dating Summer’s mother. In 2008, he met

a woman named Wendy at a bar. They married in 2010, and had a child
six years later. He never told Wendy about his conversion.

The United States leases the land beneath the Guantánamo Bay
detention facility from Cuba, for four thousand and eighty-five dollars a
year, under an agreement signed after the Spanish-American War. (For
the past sixty years, the Cuban government has sought to nullify the
agreement, and it refuses to cash the checks.) Because detainees are not
in U.S. territory, the government has not allowed them to be tried in U.S.
courts. Instead, they are tried by secret military commissions—if they
are tried at all. More detainees have died at Guantánamo than have been
convicted of a crime.

The prosecutor assigned to Salahi’s case was a lieutenant colonel named

Stuart Couch, who had retired from the military before 9/11. 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 reënlisted because he wanted “to get a crack at the guys who
attacked the United States.” When he saw the government’s file on
Salahi, he considered pursuing the death penalty.

Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch
received summaries of each new confession. In late 2003—a period that
Salahi described in a letter as “where my brake broke loose”—Couch
struggled to keep up with the constant stream of information. In time, he
became suspicious that Salahi’s confessions had been elicited through
torture, and were therefore tainted evidence. When he discovered the
forged letter from Zuley’s team, saying that the United States had
captured Salahi’s mother, he resigned from the case.
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In June, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees

could challenge the grounds for their detention. It became fashionable
for high-profile corporate-law firms to represent Guantánamo clients,
pro bono, but many detainees rejected representation, because they
thought it was a ploy to lend legitimacy to an unjust detention. Defense
attorneys have accused the government of denying them access to
evidence, leaving secret recording equipment in client meeting rooms,
and infiltrating their legal teams; a few years ago, Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
who may face the death penalty, recognized a linguist on his own
defense team from a C.I.A. black site.

When Salahi’s 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! How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been
lasting the last 7 years. That’s 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.

In the military hearing, Salahi described the torture program in vivid

detail. The transcript omits much of his testimony, noting that, at the
moment he started to describe the abuse, “the recording equipment
began to malfunction” and that the tapes were “distorted.” The transcript
continues, “The Detainee wanted to show the Board his scars and
location of injuries, but the board declined the viewing.” (By now, the
U.S. government was rolling back authorizations for torture techniques,
and the military and the C.I.A. were entering a period of self-reflection;
during the next several years, internal and congressional investigations
would expose many of the worst abuses that had been inflicted on Salahi
and other men in custody.)

The government no longer attempted to prosecute Salahi—nobody had

touched the criminal case since Couch withdrew—but it argued that he
should nevertheless be detained indefinitely. On March 22, 2010, a U.S.
district-court judge named James Robertson ruled on Salahi’s petition to
be released. “The government’s 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. But
the government had “abandoned the theory” that Salahi knew about 9/11
before it happened. As for his jihadi connections, Robertson continued,
the government’s classified filings “tend to support Salahi’s submission
that he was attempting to find the appropriate balance—avoiding close
relationships with al-Qaida members, but also trying to avoid making
himself an enemy” of the group. In Robertson’s assessment, the
government’s evidence about Salahi was “so attenuated, or so tainted by
coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a
successful criminal prosecution.” He concluded, “Salahi must be
released from custody.”

Steve Wood was elated when he heard the news. But the government
appealed, and Salahi stayed in Guantánamo. Wood contacted one of
Salahi’s lawyers, using a made-up name and a new e-mail address, to
inquire about Salahi’s well-being and the status of his case. But he
subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply.
A couple of years later, he considered visiting Mauritania, to track down
Salahi’s family and apologize for his role in Salahi’s detention. He no
longer derived much solace from Islam, and rarely prayed. 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.

In 2012, Salahi’s lawyers won a seven-year legal battle to declassify his

diary. Government censors redacted names, dates, locations, and other
sensitive or embarrassing information. When they finished, Salahi’s
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. “There was a really
profound sense of responsibility and ethical risk which came with
editing the manuscript of someone who was alive but unable to
participate in that process,” Siems told 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
“Guantánamo Diary.”

Soon afterward, in Guantánamo Bay, Salahi saw his own face on a TV

screen. Siems was doing an interview about the diary, and in that
moment Salahi finally felt as if he was beginning to take back the
narrative of his life. “My cell expanded, the lights became brighter,
colors more colorful, the sun shone warmer and gentler, and everyone
around me looked friendlier,” he wrote.

Another year passed. Every time there was a hurricane warning in

Guantánamo 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 some versions I saved many lives,
in others I was saved, but somehow we all managed to escape, unharmed
and free.”

Wood reconnected with Salahi’s lawyers, this time using his real name.
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 Guantánamo, I would be pleased to welcome him into my
home,” and offering to testify in person. He also contacted another guard
from Echo Special. According to Wood, the guard drafted a note, but he
decided not to submit it. “All his friends and family knew him as the guy
who was guarding a high-value detainee, and really proud of it,” Wood
told me. “His whole reputation rested on this fiction. But, after the diary
came out, they learned that Mohamedou is not high value, he’s just a
guy who got fucked over for years.” He added, “Guantánamo has a long
shadow for everyone—not just the detainees.”

One night in October, 2016, Wood’s phone rang while he was in a

Safeway in Portland. On the other end of the line was a man whose
voice he hadn’t heard in more than eleven years. Salahi told him that he
was now home. So much had changed since he had been taken into
custody, more than fifty-four hundred days earlier. His mother was dead,
and so was one of his brothers, but there were teen-age nieces and
nephews whom he was meeting for the first time. The proceeds from his
book were paying for a niece’s studies in Dubai and a nephew’s master’s
degree in applied mathematics at a university in Kuala Lumpur. Salahi
told Wood that he had written four more books in detention, but he
hadn’t been allowed to take them out of Guantánamo. One was a self-
help book about finding happiness in a hopeless place.

Wood told Salahi that he was working for his brother’s construction
company, repairing bridges. The hours were unpredictable, with long
drives and arduous shifts. As at Guantánamo, he often worked at night.
But he derived immense satisfaction from the work, and saw in it the
kind of moral clarity that Guantánamo had lacked. 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 point is to pave,
seal, and waterproof it, to preserve its lifespan,” he said. We got to the
site at sunrise; the sky was a hazy, muted orange, from wildfires burning
to the south. “It takes a lot of prep to start the job, but, when you’ve
done your bit, you’re leaving things better than when you arrived,” he
said.
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Salahi’s freedom became a strain on Wood’s marriage. Wood became

secretive about his calls with Salahi; Wendy began to suspect that he
was having an affair. When Wood agreed to talk about Salahi for a TV
documentary, Wendy’s parents staged an intervention. “They said I was
bringing shame upon the family, and protecting a terrorist,” Wood
recalled. When he refused to back out of the interview, Wendy insisted
that he wear an on-camera disguise. She told me that she thought he was
doing something really dangerous—that people might think Steve was
sympathetic to someone who was involved in 9/11, and go after him,
her, and their baby daughter. Soon afterward, Steve and Wendy
separated.

Last May, one of Salahi’s cousins posted a note on Facebook that

referred to Wood’s conversion. When Wendy saw the post, she was
outraged—but also somewhat relieved, since it partly explained his
secretive behavior. “And I didn’t confirm or deny anything,” Wood told
me. “I just kind of shrugged it off, like, What does it matter?” They
decided to get a divorce. 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.

Dissonance

Larry Siems visited Salahi in Mauritania, and they set about filling in the
redactions in the book. In the first edition of “Guantánamo Diary,”
Siems had included an author’s note:

In a recent conversation with one of his lawyers, Mohamedou said that he holds no
grudge against any of the people he mentions in this book, that he appeals to them to
read it and correct it if they think it contains any errors, and that he dreams to one day
sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after having learned so much from one
another.

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 doors of my house are open.”

This winter, Steve Wood set off for Mauritania. The journey to
Nouakchott took almost three days, with long layovers in New York and
Casablanca. Mauritanian immigration officials detained him for an hour
—here was a giant American, all muscle and veins, saying that he had
met Salahi in Guantánamo Bay—but eventually one of Salahi’s nephews
persuaded them to let Wood in.

Near the airport parking lot, Salahi stood in a light-blue boubou, the
traditional Mauritanian robe, with a turban to obscure his identity. “Bet
you’ll think twice next time about saying you know me,” he said,
laughing. As they walked to the car, Salahi dug into Wood’s personal
life. “Man, you’ve had a really tough time of it,” he said. “Like, really
stressful.” They slept under mosquito nets in Salahi’s bedroom, and
woke up to the sound of a bleating sheep. Salahi noted that “Steve
snores like—how do you call it?—a steam train.”
Steve Wood with Salahi, his former prisoner, in Mauritania, in January. Photograph
courtesy Mohamedou Salahi

It was January 11, 2019—exactly seventeen years since the first

detainees had arrived at Guantánamo Bay. (Forty people remain in the
camp, at an annual cost of some ten million dollars a detainee.) Salahi
had spent the morning reviewing a speech he had prepared for events
hosted by Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights. In
the two and a half years since his return, he has received several
professional visitors—Siems, his lawyers, and the filmmaker Michael
Bronner, who is adapting Salahi’s diary—and also personal visits from a
lawyer, whom I’ll call Amanda. “We met like any decent person these
days—on social media,” Salahi said. After she converted to Islam, they
married in a religious ceremony. Now, in a phone call, Amanda
suggested edits for Salahi’s speech—that he take out “lynching,” for
example, and make his remarks more “gracious”—and Salahi accepted
all of them.

Salahi and Wood sat in front of a laptop, with the Webcam on, and
Skyped into a room in Washington. “Everything that happened to me—
everything I witnessed in Guantánamo Bay—happened 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. He added that,
as the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States had “the
means to uphold and pressure other countries to uphold human rights.
But instead the United States is stating to the world very clear and loud
that democracy does not work—that when you need to get down and
dirty, you need a dictatorship. That dictatorship was built in
Guantánamo Bay.”
 “You’ve still got, like, a solid eight inches.”


In 2014, Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating

room for emergency gallbladder surgery. But the procedure wasn’t
carried out properly—he continued to be in pain—and by the summer of
2016 it was clear that he required corrective laparoscopic surgery.
Military doctors offered to take care of it, but Salahi declined; his release
date was only a couple of months away, and he wanted to get the surgery
on his own terms, once he was free. Mauritanian hospitals don’t have the
capacity—they typically send such patients to France—but what Salahi
didn’t know was that his repatriation would not amount to the restitution
of his rights. 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.

In addition to Salahi’s abdominal pain, and regular migraines, he still

suffers from night terrors. He often wakes up shaking, crying, and
grinding his teeth. A private hospital in Germany has offered to cover
the costs of Salahi’s gallbladder surgery, plus a year of physical and
psychological rehabilitation, but without a passport he cannot travel to
Europe. “I am denied my freedom because I was denied my freedom,”
Salahi said. “A lot of wise people tell me, ‘Mohamedou, shut the fuck
up, don’t ask for papers, don’t ask. Mauritania is much bigger than
Guantánamo Bay—you can move around.’ But I insist on freedom.”

Another liberty Salahi identified as having been taken from him is that
of expressing the full range of human feelings. “If you say that you are
angry, it is understood as an emotion,” he said. “If I say that I am angry,
it is seen as a threat to national security.”
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The next day, Salahi brought Wood and me to a friend’s wedding party,
hosted by Mauritania’s best radiologist. As we walked to the house, Abu
Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white
turban and long robes. “Assalaamu alaikum,” he said to Mohamedou.
“Peace be upon you.” They shook hands. Then Abu Hafs greeted Wood,
who, appearing paralyzed by confusion, coldly took his hand. Abu Hafs
walked into the house ahead of us, and disappeared into the crowd.
Salahi generally avoids Abu Hafs—they have fundamentally different
views of Islam, and he worries that any association could further
complicate his life. (Until 2007, a terrorist sanctions list included
Salahi’s name as an alias for Abu Hafs.)

It was a grand compound, white stone decorated with lavish carpets and
chandeliers. The anteroom was filled with Mauritanian dignitaries and
élites, all men, sitting on couches that lined the perimeter. Salahi and
Wood went around the room shaking hands with bankers, merchants,
prefects, doctors. There was a famous Mauritanian poet named Taki, the
former minister of communications, the current Mauritanian
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

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. He was a tall, regal
businessman, and wore Ted Baker sunglasses and a Rolex. During a lull
in conversation, he turned to Salahi and, gesturing toward Wood and me,
said, “So, you studied in the United States?”
“No, I’m an ex-prisoner of Guantánamo Bay,” Salahi replied, instantly
ending the conversation.

After lunch, I stood in the reception area, watching Mauritanian

politicians and tribal leaders kiss Abu Hafs on both cheeks and thank
him for coming. A former leader of several provinces explained to me
that Abu Hafs, bin Laden’s former Sharia adviser, is now an adviser to
the President.

The next day, Abu Hafs invited me to his house, in one of Nouakchott’s
most expensive neighborhoods. Until recently, the former spy chief
Deddahi Ould Abdellahi lived directly across the street. I arrived just
before the sunset prayers. Thirty or forty of Abu Hafs’s followers filled a
small wooden shack next to his home, spilling into the street, while he
led prayers through a microphone. It was a temporary facility, he
explained, while he raises money to build a mosque.

After the prayer session, Abu Hafs led me into his living room, and for
four hours he detailed his falling-out with bin Laden, his whereabouts
and activities in the aftermath of 9/11, and his relationship with
Mauritania’s President. “It’s not a formal position—there is no
contract,” he said. “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. But it stopped abruptly
after a failed assassination attempt against the President, in 2011, which
raised questions about whether he was cutting deals with Al Qaeda. That
May, U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, and collected more than a
million documents from his compound in northern Pakistan; among
them was a letter from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, seeking the
central leadership’s blessing to enter into a “secret agreement” with the
Mauritanian government. “The Mujahideen are committed to not carry
out any military activity in Mauritania,” the letter says—as 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.)

Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the
Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. He and his
family had spent almost ten years under the protection of the
Revolutionary Guard, but, with talk of the Obama Administration’s thaw
in relations with Iran, Abu Hafs began to worry that he could be traded
into U.S. custody. His wife and children left first; once they had settled
in Nouakchott, Abu Hafs said, the challenge was to transport himself
thousands of miles without being detected, arrested, or subjected to
rendition.

One day in the spring of 2012, Abu Hafs slipped out of custody during a
visit to the gym. 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. The Ambassador called Nouakchott, and the foreign
minister ordered the Embassy to fabricate a passport, using a fake name.

When the documents were complete, Abu Hafs said, the Mauritanian
government booked him on a commercial route that connected through
three countries. The Ambassador drove him to Tehran’s 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.

Abu Hafs wouldn’t say which countries he had travelled through—only

that, in the first two, the Mauritanian Ambassador met him on the
tarmac, walked him through the airport, and stayed with him until he got
on the next plane. In the third country, the Mauritanian foreign minister
greeted Abu Hafs, and accompanied him on the flight to Nouakchott.
There, Abu Hafs spent two months in custody, as a formality.

When I shared Abu Hafs’s account of his return with the senior U.S.
diplomat, she replied, “It’s the first I’m hearing any of it.” The
Mauritanians didn’t inform the United States of his return until
“probably weeks later,” she said. “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. “What
would we tell the Mauritanians?” the diplomat replied. “It’s their citizen,
and it’s their country.”

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. I asked Abu Hafs to tell me the name printed in his
diplomatic passport, assuming that the identity was no longer valid. He
refused, saying that he didn’t want to jeopardize his future travel.

Wood stayed with Salahi for four days. They prayed together, ate
together, and enjoyed a picnic of bread and tea in the dunes of the
Sahara. One day, they had coffee at a hotel, by the pool, with the legal
team of a current Guantánamo detainee. Soon afterward, in a room at the
same hotel, the U.S. State Department hosted a training session for
Mauritania’s security-intelligence apparatus, on “Interdiction of
Terrorist Activities.” Salahi suffered night terrors, and Wood suffered a
splitting headache from caffeine withdrawal. “Out here, I’m probably
only drinking seven or eight coffees per day,” he told me. (During the
layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of
espresso.) Salahi handed him some leftover ibuprofen from the
Guantánamo pharmacy.

For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a
friend. 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 prop—the former guard who recognized Salahi’s innocence.
TV crews were present at meals, and an interviewer showed up at
Salahi’s apartment, recorder in hand, and asked Wood, who still hadn’t
told his brothers that he is a Muslim, to comment on his favorite Quranic
passages, and to share his thoughts on the legacy of the Prophet
Muhammad. Wood complied—he felt that it was the least he could do
for Salahi. During the Amnesty International live stream, someone on
Twitter commented that, of the two of them, Wood looked like the
detainee.
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Another dissonance was that Salahi’s eloquent orations on fundamental

human rights stopped short of confronting a reality that Wood noticed on
the second day: as guests of Mauritanian élites, they were served lavish
meals by people who appeared to be slaves. Although slavery was
criminalized in 2007, Mauritanian human-rights advocates told me that
the law was drafted to appease international organizations—that
virtually nothing has changed. At an event, I exchanged phone numbers
with an extremely submissive server who was dressed in ragged clothes
and had a cloudy, damaged eye. 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. “And, by the way, I pay my boy,” he
added, unprompted.

I tried to press the topic with Salahi, but it was as if his transfer from
Guantánamo had carried with it a kind of transposition of restraint, from
shackles to self-policing. In 2005, during the military hearing, Salahi had
urged the presiding officer not to send him back to Mauritania. “I want
to go to a country where I can enjoy my freedom,” he said.

Wood left for the airport at 4 A.M. Salahi spent much of the day
watching YouTube compilations of the worst “American Idol” auditions.
“It’s so empty, now that Steve left,” he said to me. “So empty.”

In recent months, the push for Salahi’s passport has taken on new
urgency. Amanda, who lives in Europe, was pregnant, and Salahi would
miss the birth of his son. “Did you see what Steve brought me?” Salahi
said, pointing to some baby clothes. “They look like a prison uniform
with stripes! I think he still sees any baby in my family as a future
inmate.” Brahim Ebety, Salahi’s Mauritanian lawyer, told me that he is
considering a lawsuit against the Mauritanian government. “At the
beginning, Mohamedou wanted to be docile and sweet,” he said. “But
with these people you cannot be likable. You must be very tough. You
must forget your fear to achieve anything.”

Last summer, Salahi completed an online course to become a certified

life coach. He now has two American clients, whom he helps to navigate
personal and professional woes through weekly Skype meetings. “I want
to ask you a favor, if it is O.K. with you, and that is to tell me five things
that you are grateful for today,” he told one of them. Sometimes the
sessions veer into his own coping mechanisms—the routines he made up
to fill his days in Guantánamo, for example, “when we had nothing to
look forward to except the world we created inside my cell.”

Earlier this month, Amanda gave birth to a son. They named him
Ahmed, and Salahi asked Wood to be the godfather. “There are so many
Ahmeds that it’ll be difficult for them to put him on the no-fly list,”
Salahi joked. On paper, Salahi is not listed as the father. But Amanda is
an American, and so their son is now a citizen of the country whose
purported values Salahi wants to believe in but has never seen. ♦

An earlier version of this story misidentified Canada’s Security

Intelligence Service.

Published in the print edition of the April 22, 2019, issue, with the
headline “The Prisoner of Echo Special.”
Ben Taub, a staff writer, is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for
feature writing. His 2018 reporting on Iraq won a National Magazine
Award and a George Polk Award.