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For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. The man confined there was referred to by his detainee number, 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. In , 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. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. 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. He wore a broad smile and a white jumpsuit, and moved cautiously toward Wood. Although he towered over Salahi, he hesitated before taking his hand, and when he did he noted how delicate Salahi was. But he thought, What the fuck is this? 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. In , shortly after Al Qaeda detonated truck bombs outside the U. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Salahi took a call from a phone number belonging to bin Laden. In , the Shura member called Salahi, but U. 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. Eventually, Salahi would be allowed access to a small patch of soil outside his trailer, where he tended sunflowers, basil, sage, parsley, and cilantro. 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. The night shift was twelve hours, and he never saw Salahi shackled or restrained. 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 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. Look up the prison on Robben Island. See if you think his captivity was just. See what it did to his family. 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. 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. It was the spring of There were no weapons of mass destruction. He began to wonder whether the case against Mohamedou Salahi was as flimsy and politically motivated as that for the invasion had been. Salahi underwent daily interrogations. The sessions Wood witnessed were calm and courteous, with Salahi attempting to answer everything asked of him. 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. The night terrors kept coming. Salahi was on a diet of Ensure nutrition shakes and antidepressants. Although Wood had introduced himself to Salahi as Stretch, his nickname from the sawmill, Salahi had quickly learned his real name, as well as those of the other guards. He 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. One day, Salahi started requesting paper from his guards. 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 took the pillow as a sign of the end of the physical torture. Mohamedou Ould Salahi was born in late December, , 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. 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. He grew up measuring political eras by military coups—, , —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. 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. In , 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 , 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. In the spring of , 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. After three months, he left Afghanistan and returned to Duisburg, where he worked in a computer-repair shop while he finished his degree. 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. How does he live? How does he behave? How does he react to world events? 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. Salahi agreed, and Abu Hafs wired around four thousand dollars to his German account. A similar phone call, followed by a second transaction, took place in December, So, when Abu Hafs called Salahi for assistance a third time, in early , 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. He escaped through a kitchen door. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad. The men slept on his floor and left for Afghanistan at dawn. By now, Salahi was under surveillance by German intelligence. But the Germans saw no reason to detain or question him. But he did not consider himself a member of Al Qaeda, or a facilitator of its operations. 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. Salahi landed in Montreal on November 26, 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. One of the Algerian jihadis was Ahmed Ressam, a serial thief who was living in Canada under a false identity. In , he had travelled to Afghanistan, and spent a year in Al Qaeda training camps, where he learned to handle weapons and explosives. A week after Salahi began leading prayers at the Al Sunnah mosque, Ressam drove a rental car onto a U. 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. After the failed attack, Canada began to aggressively investigate the Montreal cell. 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. He began to notice surveillance everywhere. But his family members were eager for Salahi to return, and so they told him that his mother was ill. On January 21, , 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. 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. By the following day, the lead Senegalese officer was convinced that there was no reason to hold Salahi. 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. 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. 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. He tried to sleep, but his mind was racing with the expectation of torture at dawn. The next morning, Salahi was led to the office of the Mauritanian intelligence chief, Deddahi Ould Abdellahi. 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. On February 19, , Abdellahi let him go home. But a friend helped him find work installing Internet routers for a telecommunications company. So far, so good. 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. He knew what he expected to hear. In that meeting, Abu Hafs challenged bin Laden on Quranic grounds, arguing that the scale of civilian casualties could not be justified in Islam. 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. For the next two months, Abu Hafs taught jihadi recruits at a madrassa. After the attacks, Cofer Black, the head of the C. 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. Salahi had deleted the contents of his phone. A couple of weeks into his detention, two F. 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. One of the F. 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. A few days later, Salahi was released. 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. 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. Abdellahi had bought him a new outfit, but Salahi had refused to eat, and the fabric was loose on his shoulders. 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. He and Abdellahi knelt on the runway, and prayed together. A private jet landed, and out climbed a Jordanian rendition team. Salahi was terrified. You very much become a child again. 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. 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 was not every day, the torture—I would say maybe twice a week. The guards, who were officially prohibited from interacting with him, began asking questions. Every other week, when Red Cross representatives visited the prison, Salahi and a handful of other C. In Nouakchott, Abdellahi waited for updates from the C. Abdellahi says that, after Salahi disappeared, the family never contacted him. In return, they passed along messages from Salahi, which they had invented, and assured the family that Salahi was well. In Kandahar, Abu Hafs felt the Americans closing in. The Taliban was rapidly losing 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. 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. Abu Hafs, however, regarded the Pakistanis as duplicitous. The C. 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. At a Pakistani Army checkpoint, he slipped a wad of bills into his passport, and went through unquestioned. 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. 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. The Pentagon had reported that he was dead. On the night of July 19, , the Jordanians transported Mohamedou Salahi, blindfolded and in chains, to the airport in Amman, where a new team took over. Instead, the men stripped him naked, strapped a diaper on him, and swapped out his shackles for a heavier set. Everyone on the team was dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured by balaclavas. At sunrise, the plane landed at Bagram Airfield, the largest U. For the first time, Salahi was in the custody of uniformed American soldiers. 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. During interrogations, an intelligence officer, known among the detainees as William the Torturer, forced Salahi into stress positions that exacerbated his sciatic-nerve issues. Another officer tried to build rapport with Salahi by speaking to him in German. 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. 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. It was such a good feeling. It was January 11, 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. 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. 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. 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. Officially, the job of the Internal Reaction Force was to restrain unruly detainees, to prevent them from injuring themselves or the guards. IRF ing 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. 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. One day, after an interrogator kicked a Quran across the floor, detainees organized a mass suicide attempt. 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. During interrogations, detainees were forced to perform mock satanic rituals, or were draped in the Israeli flag. 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. Who are these guys? In Afghanistan, the U. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. Salahi was no dirt farmer. But the C. 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. 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. 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. The gulf between the U. In , Martin Seligman, a twenty-four-year-old Ph. 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. Since then, the U. 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. He signed it. Now bin al-Shibh, who was being tortured in C. Salahi was horrified. For the rest of the interrogation session, he was forced to look at photos of corpses from the aftermath of the attacks. The F. 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. Twenty-hour interrogations. 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. 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. But Salahi was shackled to the floor, so he could do so only hunched over. He stayed that way for hours. Female interrogators groped him. They stripped, and rubbed their bodies all over his, and threatened to rape him. Oh, Allah, have mercy on me! There is no Allah. He let you down! 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. 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. Once they do, he will disappear and never be heard from again. 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. 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. On August 13th, Donald Rumsfeld authorized the interrogation plan for Salahi. 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. 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. Seems a little creepy. 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. Zuley walked in, and Salahi started lying. Salahi figured that this was how bin al-Shibh had ended up naming him as a high-level Al Qaeda recruiter. Moreover, he is handicapped. James Mitchell, the C. In time, he was given back his pain medication. Then he was prescribed antidepressants. In mid-November, Salahi voluntarily sat for a polygraph test. In all this time, his family had had no official confirmation of his whereabouts. 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. In , Mauritania had a military coup—the typical way in which power has changed hands since independence. And now he belongs to the Americans. 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 unaware of everything that had happened before. Outside of the political discussions, he and Salahi passed the hours playing rummy, Risk, and chess. So, completely different goals in life. 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. 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. 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. All charges were later dropped, and Yee was honorably discharged. Seven months later, his deployment ended. I hope you think of us as more than just guards. I think we all became friends. And Mohamedou probably thought I was thinking the same thing—that, to me, he was just a job, and nothing more. This is my daughter. She is my life. This friendship is real. 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. 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. Before his deployment, he had aspired to become a police officer. 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. As he read about Islamic history, he began to seek clarity in the Quran itself. 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. 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. 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. He stopped praying in public. In , he met a woman named Wendy at a bar. They married in , and had a child six years later. He never told Wendy about his conversion. 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. Instead, they are tried by secret military commissions—if they are tried at all. Couch never met Salahi, but, while Zuley was torturing him, Couch received summaries of each new confession. 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. How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been lasting the last 7 years. In the military hearing, Salahi described the torture program in vivid detail. 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, , a U. Steve Wood was elated when he heard the news. But he subsequently forgot the log-in information, and so he never saw a reply. 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. Government censors redacted names, dates, locations, and other sensitive or embarrassing information. 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. Another year passed. He also contacted another guard from Echo Special. According to Wood, the guard drafted a note, but he decided not to submit it. 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. One was a self-help book about finding happiness in a hopeless place. The hours were unpredictable, with long drives and arduous shifts. 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. We got to the site at sunrise; the sky was a hazy, muted orange, from wildfires burning to the south. Wood became secretive about his calls with Salahi; Wendy began to suspect that he was having an affair. When he refused to back out of the interview, Wendy insisted that he wear an on-camera disguise. Soon afterward, Steve and Wendy separated. When Wendy saw the post, she was outraged—but also somewhat relieved, since it partly explained his secretive behavior. 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. Larry Siems visited Salahi in Mauritania, and they set about filling in the redactions in the book. 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. 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. Near the airport parking lot, Salahi stood in a light-blue boubou, the traditional Mauritanian robe, with a turban to obscure his identity. 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. After she converted to Islam, they married in a religious ceremony. Salahi and Wood sat in front of a laptop, with the Webcam on, and Skyped into a room in Washington. 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. In , Salahi collapsed in his cell and was rushed to an operating room for emergency gallbladder 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. According to a senior U. He often wakes up shaking, crying, and grinding his teeth. Another liberty Salahi identified as having been taken from him is that of expressing the full range of human feelings. As we walked to the house, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani came out of a nearby mosque, dressed in a white turban and long robes. 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. It was a grand compound, white stone decorated with lavish carpets and chandeliers. 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. 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. Until recently, the former spy chief Deddahi Ould Abdellahi lived directly across the street. I arrived just before the sunset prayers. It was a temporary facility, he explained, while he raises money to build a mosque. 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 , which raised questions about whether he was cutting deals with Al Qaeda. That May, U. Around that time, Abu Hafs explained, it became clear to him that the Mauritanian President would be open to his return from Iran. 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 , 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. 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. 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. 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. Soon afterward, in a room at the same hotel, the U. During the layover in Casablanca, he had drunk a Red Bull and twenty-two shots of espresso. For Wood, the trip became something more complicated than a visit to a friend. 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. Although slavery was criminalized in , 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. In , during the military hearing, Salahi had urged the presiding officer not to send him back to Mauritania. Wood left for the airport at 4 A. Amanda, who lives in Europe, was pregnant, and Salahi would miss the birth of his son. I think he still sees any baby in my family as a future inmate. 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. Earlier this month, Amanda gave birth to a son. They named him Ahmed, and Salahi asked Wood to be the godfather. 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. Save this story Save this story. Cartoon by Roz Chast. Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon. Link copied. Photograph courtesy Ben Taub. Since then, I have received it, eaten it, and paid for it! Thank you for a wonderful evening! Special Projects The cell—better, the box—was cooled down to the point that I was shaking most of the time. Steve Wood with Salahi, his former prisoner, in Mauritania, in January. Photograph courtesy Mohamedou Salahi. More: Detainees Prisoners. By Scott Korb. Annals of Law. Camp Justice. By Jeffrey Toobin. News Desk. The Pursuit of Gender Justice. For the first time, the International Criminal Court has concluded that an armed group specifically targeted women. By Jina Moore Ngarambe. Annals of Psychology. By Eren Orbey. A Reporter at Large. Four daughters in the royal family were kept drugged and imprisoned for almost two decades. A physician who tried to free them speaks out for the first time. By Heidi Blake. Is It Time to Torch the Constitution? By Louis Menand. War Comes to Beirut. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has erupted, displacing more than a million people. Many in Lebanon fear a Gaza-like campaign of violence. By Rania Abouzeid. The Weekend Essay. In and around Kyiv, war has become part of daily life, even as the public grows weary of its costs. By Keith Gessen. By Adam Gopnik. The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian. This year, I learned the difference between a traveller and a refugee. By Mosab Abu Toha. The Political Scene. Among the Gaza Protest Voters. Will their tactics persuade her, or risk throwing the election to Trump? By Andrew Marantz. Three months ago, the Vice-President was fighting for respect in Washington. Can she defy her doubters—and end the Trump era? By Evan Osnos.

Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret

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On a daily basis, Marines from the Minefield Maintenance MFM section entered the minefields surrounding the base to locate, dig up, and replace the live explosives. Their uniquely hazardous job offered the only place a Marine could obtain a combat fitness report for some of the time the unit existed. Those who passed advanced on to Cuba, where MFM Marines put them through two more weeks of rigorous testing in a practice field. In one exam, students were required to use their mine detector to locate the head of a nail with accuracy and consistency. Engineers who could not make the cut received assignments to other duties or returned to the States. Evaluation continued throughout their tour. Marines who exhibited traits such as overconfidence or reckless actions could be permanently pulled from the fields. In order to enter the minefields, an orchestrated series of puzzle pieces must fit together perfectly. Depending on the size of the field being worked, one or more two-man teams prepared to cross the wire for the day. Back up teams geared up as well, in the event that anything went wrong with the primary teams. Prior to beginning work on a new field, the engineers burned off the vegetation. They circled the perimeter standing on top of a tanker truck, armed with a fire hose, dousing the earth with aviation fuel. For a section limited to only 20 to 25 Marines at a time, daily operations involved nearly every Marine present. If at any time the chopper was unable to arrive within 20 minutes, operations halted until the helicopter again became available. When the Marines crossed the wire, rank ceased to exist. The ear advanced first with a metal detector. He walked the strip line until he arrived where a mine cluster should be located. Once located, he called up the finger and identified the location. The finger dug out and removed the mine to the strip line. Next, the ear returned to locate the antipersonnel mines. Standing in the hole left by the antitank mine, the ear swept slowly around in a circle. Each smaller mine should have been buried within two paces. Once identified, the ear placed a wooden dowel on the ground pointing to the three-pronged fuse. The finger then returned to disarm and dig up the four remaining explosives. Their goal each day was to complete 10 mine clusters, whether removing or replacing. Some went quickly and easily. Others proved more difficult. Uncovering that antipersonnel mine was the most dangerous part. Bob Fitta arrived at Gitmo in He entered his first live minefield as a finger. He looked on with expected nerves as his ear located the antitank mine on their first cluster of the day. Fitta popped the mine out of the ground effortlessly, feeling his confidence swell; his first live mine in the books. The ear marked the locations of the four antipersonnel mines. Fitta returned and discovered the mines were nowhere in sight. He drew his pocket knife, knelt in the antitank mine hole, and began digging. Keep in mind, this was my first cluster ever. I gotta go get another one. He adjusted the markers over to the locations identified by the new detector. Fitta knelt in the hole and scanned the dirt. His adrenaline and anxiety peaked. I was covered in dirt and sweat and after it was done, I had to go out and take a break. In , five U. Navy Sailors on liberty from their ship wandered into a minefield after dark. Several Cuban defectors also lost their lives, either escaping Cuba for sanctuary within the American base, or escaping U. On several occasions, Cubans knowingly entered the minefields in their effort to escape communism. One man lost a foot to an exploding mine but regarded the injury as a small sacrifice to pay to have reached the American base with his life. Another time, Americans found a Cuban wandering through base housing. He explained his crossing of the minefields and turned over a detailed map of the minefield he successfully navigated. Three more were killed in Officers overseeing the program banned junior Marines from the section, hoping a higher level of rank and maturity would decrease the number of accidents and close calls. Each incident initiated SOP changes for working in a minefield. They served as poignant case studies and reminders for newly arrived Marines on the difficulty they faced and absolute focus required to do the job safely. Each heard the story of one Marine who sat on an antitank mine for a smoke break, believing the explosive to be disarmed. Another story told of an ear who stepped on an antipersonnel mine while sweeping back and forth with a mine detector, searching for the mine where he believed it should be rather than where it actually was. Whenever an accident occurred, the Marines did their best to identify what went wrong and ensure it would not happen again. The equipment MFM carried or wore accounted for numerous close calls or even deaths. Early on, the Marines stopped wearing helmets in the fields after several of them fell off and detonated a mine or nearly triggered one. The steel pots offered virtually no protection in the first place, and Marines replaced them with bandanas or boonie covers to combat the heat. In later years, Marines clipped their pocket knives and other gear to their flak jackets, rather than simply placing them in a pocket, after a Marine died when his knife apparently fell from his pocket and detonated a mine when he bent over. Extreme weather and growing vegetation moved the dirt and buried mines or submerged them in water. After burning a field, the fuse of some mines would melt, leaving it nearly impossible to disarm. Those who experienced them firsthand were left stunned by their brush with death. In the late s, one Marine finger worked a cluster on the side of a steep hill. He inadvertently dislodged a rock that rolled away down the slope. The rock landed in a cluster at the base of the hill and triggered an antipersonnel mine. The charge exploded from the ground and soared up the hill, landing just feet away from the Marine. The faulty popper mercifully failed to detonate the primary charge. The Marine returned as one of the very few who survived a detonation in a minefield. If everything worked properly, every procedure perfectly followed, and every mine cooperated as it should, the Marines could still easily die. MFM investigated every explosion. No amount of mine explosions or hunting could adequately combat the deer population. Indeed, the abundance of deer at Gitmo created one of the most dangerous conditions for MFM. Before entering a field each morning, Marines drove a vehicle around the perimeter with a siren blaring, hoping to startle any deer in hiding and oust them from the field. In later years, a Marine carried a shotgun as the designated hunter and would open fire as soon as the deer crossed out of the wire. Despite the counter measures, almost every MFM veteran has a story of a deer encountered in a minefield. Miller advanced down a strip line into a field as the finger laying new mines in the ground. With four clusters installed behind him and working on his fifth, a horn suddenly blasted from the road behind him. The deer sprinted parallel to the strip line, straight through the four clusters Miller had just put down. Somehow, the deer dodged all 20 mines and veered away out of sight. A special breed of Navy corpsmen joined MFM in the fields. In order to work with the section, corpsmen endured the same minefield training as the Marines. They also received advanced medical training. We had to learn about the ears and the fingers, the mine clusters and the strip lines, everything learned in the practice field before we actually got to go into a live minefield. These hyper realistic exercises included evacuating the simulated casualty from a live minefield and loading him onto a helicopter for transport to the hospital. The event ended after the Marine was evaluated by hospital staff and rushed into an operating room. I usually tell them about six hours of the day I just sat playing spades with the Marines praying no one would get hurt. Ritter understood this sentiment better than most minefield corpsmen. Twice a week, Marines drove truckloads to the EOD range where antitank mines were stacked in neat piles with anti-personnel mines lining both sides of the stack. The explosions knocked open the door to his room in the bachelor officer quarters. His wife ran out to the balcony, expecting to see a mushroom cloud billowing in the sky or communist tanks rolling down the street. Another Marine sat on the balcony next door, casually smoking a cigarette. The Marine glanced her way, unaffected by the commotion. By the mids, MFM transitioned from placing new mines to only pulling old ones after the Clinton administration ordered the fields removed in favor of other security measures. Marines worked for several years, painstakingly clearing each field one mine at a time. They swept the fields again with detectors once the work was complete. The section packed its gear, boxed its records, and shipped its Marines elsewhere. After nearly 40 years of performing their hazardous duty, the section was deactivated. Whether counting on each other with their lives in the minefields, or roasting a deer together off duty, the minefield Marines of Gitmo shared an entirely unique set of stories that could only have been experienced inside the section. The veterans who served there hope the section will be included in a future display at the museum to recognize their work and sacrifice. In the meantime, MFM lives on through their memories. He served on active duty in the Marine Corps as a communications officer from Award for Marine Corps History. He lives in Richmond, Va. A combat engineer with MFM exposes and removes an old mine. Each Marine carried a pocketknife to dig out the dirt surrounding each explosive. For the majority of the time MFM existed, Marines deactivated and removed old mines, then replaced them with new ones. In these photos, taken on days spent replacing new mines, disarmed antitank mines above and antipersonnel mines left are prepared to be humped into the minefield and placed in the ground. Note that the antitank mines are staged upside down, identifying them as new, and the antitank mines are missing the three-pronged fuse typically extending from the top. George Van Orden On several occasions, Cubans knowingly entered the minefields in their effort to escape communism. Left: A wooden dowel marks the fuse of an antipersonnel mine. Note the differing landscapes throughout the background. The Marines encountered live mines on many various types of terrain and slopes. George Van Orden The deer sprinted parallel to the strip line, straight through the four clusters Miller had just put down. Kyle Watts By the mids, MFM transitioned from placing new mines to only pulling old ones after the Clinton administration ordered the fields removed in favor of other security measures. Share this:.

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