Torture Report [and Kiriakou cases]

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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 11, 2018 10:44 am

Samantha Bee on Trump CIA pick Gina Haspel: “Man, getting answers out of her is torture!”
The United States has had a rough week, comedian Samantha Bee declared during Wednesday’s episode of “Full Frontal”

1338
SARAH K. BURRIS

MAY 10, 2018 8:00PM (UTC)

This article originally appeared on Raw Story
The United States had a rough week on the world stage, comedian Samantha Bee said during Wednesday’s episode of “Full Frontal.” Whether it was reneging on the Iran Deal or the confirmation hearing of Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s nominee for CIA director, it was all terrible optics.

Bee made the poignant observation that the president is attempting to negotiate a nuclear disarmament deal with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, while simultaneously pulling out of a nuclear disarmament deal with Iran. Bee isn’t sure how it’ll turn out, but she noted that it was remarkably similar to trying to pull a dine-and-dash. An astute analogy given a Trump confidant revealed he only nixed the deal to watch pundits freak out on CNN.




“I can tell you another promise Trump didn’t keep: the one we literally made when America agreed to the Iran deal. To be clear, we’re not withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, we are violating the Iran nuclear deal,” Bee explained. “It’s kind of like when you go to a nice restaurant, if you then flip the table over and run out without paying you are not withdrawing from the Shoney’s. You’re just being an assh*le who broke the law. And by pulling out of the Iran deal, we are those assh*les.”

“So one question I have not heard you answer is, ‘do you believe that the previous interrogation techniques were immoral?’” Harris asked. “It’s a ‘yes or no’ answer.”

Haspel said a lot of things but never answered the question. Harris pressed further but Haspel refused to say that she considered torture to be “immoral.”

“Man, getting answers out of her is torture,” Bee quipped. “I’m sorry. Getting answers out of her is enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The TBS host noted, however, that Haspel promised in her hearing that the CIA would no longer torture anyone.

“Really, cross your heart, no backsis,” Bee said before playing a clip of the answer Haspel really gave to the question.

“I would not start, under any circumstances an interrogation program at the CIA,” she said.

“Which would be a great answer on torture at a parole hearing but not at a government confirmation hearing,” she explained. “So, this week, we basically told the world we don’t keep our promises and we aren’t going to torture people anymore, we promise. Happy Wednesday!”

She went on to say that the whole drubbing failure will ultimately make it increasingly difficult for other countries to trust the United States in the future. “Let alone now when we have to believe the honesty with a man — of a man with raccoon eyes. I can’t believe we did this in the midst of a deal with North Korea.”

It would be like attaching a Sharpie to a hoagie, handing it to Kim Jong Un and asking him to sign, she said. “If he doesn’t like the hoagie, it’s a gamble.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. senate spent the day hammering the president’s nominee oversee the CIA. Calling her the “torture mom,” Bee played the grilling of Haspel by Sen. Kamala Harris, in which the California Democrat repeatedly demanded answers.

“So one question I have not heard you answer is, ‘do you believe that the previous interrogation techniques were immoral?’” Harris asked. “It’s a ‘yes or no’ answer.”

Haspel said a lot of things but never answered the question. Harris pressed further but Haspel refused to say that she considered torture to be “immoral.”

“Man, getting answers out of her is torture,” Bee quipped. “I’m sorry. Getting answers out of her is enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The TBS host noted, however, that Haspel promised in her hearing that the CIA would no longer torture anyone.

“Really, cross your heart , no backsis,” Bee said before playing a clip of the answer Haspel really gave to the question.

“I would not start, under any circumstances an interrogation program at the CIA,” she said.

“Which would be a great answer on torture at a parole hearing but not at a government confirmation hearing,” she explained. “So, this week, we basically told the world we don’t keep our promises and we aren’t going to torture people anymore, we promise. Happy Wednesday!https://www.salon.com/2018/05/10/man-getting-answers-out-of-trumps-cia-nominee-is-torture_partner/


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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 13, 2018 7:25 pm

Why Isn’t Gina Haspel Coming Clean About Torture?

President Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA refuses to declassify the dark underbelly of her involvement in extreme rendition and torture-by-proxy.

Jack Shafer
May 11, 2018

We know that in the early 2000s, Gina Haspel’s CIA was rendering accused terrorists to unfathomable torture in Syria, as well as Egypt and Jordan. And we know that in 2005, Haspel herself was busy ordering the destruction of evidence of her involvement in the waterboarding of prisoners.

What we don’t know is if she was involved in sending Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer, to Syria, where he was tortured by Bashar Assad—the same Assad now condemned for gassing his own people; the same Assad the CIA has been trying to depose for the past six years.

Did Haspel participate or even order Arar and others to be sent to Syria to be tortured? We will likely never know: Haspel, whose nomination for director of the CIA is currently being considered by the Senate, refuses to declassify the dark underbelly of her involvement in extreme rendition and torture-by-proxy.

Jane Mayer recounted Arar’s story in 2005 after interviewing him for The New Yorker:

Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar … was driven to Syria, where interrogators … “just began beating on me.” They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “Not even animals could withstand it,” he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. “You just give up, he said. “You become like an animal.”

A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges. … Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as “extraordinary rendition.” This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture.

Was Haspel simply a loyal dupe, unable to protest an accused man being sent to certain barbaric torture? Or was she an eager participant in this dark chapter in our history?

If she had any criticisms at the time, Haspel, who is currently the acting head of the CIA, has the power to declassify them. And yet all we’ve gotten are select records that don’t address her participation in extraordinary rendition.

Know this: That fact alone should be enough to cause the Senate to reject her nomination.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... aul-218358
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Re: Torture Report

Postby Grizzly » Mon May 14, 2018 1:56 am

Know this: That fact alone should be enough to cause the Senate to reject her nomination.


True. However, I liked it better when these jackals are out in the open because we know what they are... and where they are.

Also... must see:

https://twitter.com/thepileus/status/994670663960088576
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“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Torture Report

Postby Grizzly » Thu May 17, 2018 5:33 pm

Six Democrats helped Republicans in confirming Haspel:

• Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia,
• Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana,
• Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida,
• Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota,
• Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and
• Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia –

...most of whom are up for re-election this November in states Trump won handily in 2016.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Aug 12, 2018 2:55 pm

Torture of terror suspect at CIA black site operated by current director Gina Haspel detailed in newly declassified cables

Current CIA director Gina Haspel talked in detail about torturing a terror suspect by means of waterboarding and other controversial methods while she was running a secret black site in Thailand, according to previously classified cables.

Heavily redacted documents, many of which are believed to have been written by Ms Haspel, reveal a previously undisclosed level of detail about the methods being employed by the CIA following the 9/11 attacks and after George Bush launched his so-called war on terror.

The cables dating from 2002 detail actions taken against suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who in one interrogation, according to the documents, had his clothes ripped from him as he “whimpered that he would do anything his interrogators required”. He was told if he did not cooperate, he would suffer “in ways he never thought possible”.

“Interrogation escalated rapidly from subject being aggressively debriefed by interrogators while standing at the walling wall, to multiple applications of the walling technique, and ultimately, multiple applications of the watering technique,” reads one document, referring to the use of waterboarding.

Another document refers to how Ms al-Nashiri crawled into “the small box”, in which he was confined, after the torture session was completed. The questioners told the prisoner they did not believe he was telling the truth and threatened more action if he did not cooperated, though it appears they eventually concluded he was not withholding information.

The role of Ms Haspel in overseeing torture methods such as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that was outlawed once Barack Obama became president, was the focus of much of the questioning she faced earlier this year before she was eventually confirmed 54-45 by the Senate as CIA Director.


Given that Donald Trump has often talked of his desire to restart the use of such methods, Ms Haspel, a 30-year-veteran of the agency was asked whether she agreed with the president.

Gina Haspel hearing interrupted by an anti torture protestor yelling bloody gina
In a letter to Democratic senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, she said: “With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation programme is not one the CIA should have undertaken.”

The National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institution located on the campus of George Washington University, said the documents provided details of conditions “the public has only seen in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs from Iraq of detainees hooded and shackled, forced nudity, wall slamming, and box confinement, as well as ‘enhanced techniques’ never photographed such as the simulated drowning of suspects”.

“Release of Gina Haspel’s torture cables shows the power of the Freedom of Information Act to bring accountability even to the highest levels of the CIA,” said archive director Tom Blanton, who obtained the documents following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.


It said although the CIA had redacted Ms Haspel’s name and those of the CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who administered the waterboard, other declassified documents, including the 2004 CIA Inspector General report, had confirmed their leadership role over Mr al-Nashiri at the black site between November 15 and December 4 2002.

The archive said one outstanding question was whether Ms Haspel wrote Cable 11359, from December 1 2002, which used remarkably vivid language to describe the torture sessions.

“[The interrogators] strode, catlike, into the well-lit confines of the cell at 0902 hrs [redacted], deftly removed the subject’s black hood with a swipe, paused, and in a deep, measured voice said that subject – having ‘calmed down’ after his (staged) run-in with his hulking, heavily muscled guards the previous day – should reveal what subject had done to vex his guards to the point of rage,” it read.

Mr al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen, is believed by US intelligence officials to be behind the 2000 bombing attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 US sailors and injured dozens more. He has denied this.

He was seized in 2002 and held for four years on various secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco, and Romania.

He was transferred to the US military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2006 where he was eventually brought before the Guantanamo Military Commission and charged with plotting the attack on the USS Cole. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

A spokesman for the CIA said: “Thank you for reaching out. We do not have a comment on this matter at this time.”

Mr al-Nashiri’s lawyer, Mr Richard Kammen, said that his client was brutally tortured by the CIA and that he hoped the truth came out before he went on trial. He told The New York Times: “Ultimately, the public will be horrified by the level of brutality employed by the CIA.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 87001.html
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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 18, 2018 9:28 pm

Judge Bars Statements Made by Guantánamo Detainees During F.B.I. Interrogations

Aug. 17, 2018

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly after his capture in 2003. He is one of the five detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.United States Department of Justice
In a potentially major setback for the effort to prosecute five Guantánamo Bay detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a military commission judge ruled on Friday that prosecutors may not use a key piece of evidence against the men: statements they made to F.B.I. interrogators shortly after their transfer out of the C.I.A.’s “black site” prisons nearly a dozen years ago.

The decision brought to a head a long-running and potentially irreconcilable tension in the case: Defense lawyers say they need to thoroughly investigate the torture of their clients at the hands of the C.I.A. for there to be a fair death penalty trial. But the government says there is a national security imperative to keep certain facts related to that period — like the identities of C.I.A. personnel who worked at certain prisons — secret.

The ruling centered on a fight over a technique the F.B.I. used to try to get statements out of the detainees — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the attacks — that could be used as courtroom evidence, despite their abuse in C.I.A. custody.

To attenuate that, the bureau sent in a “clean team,” whose agents did not know what the detainees had previously said, to start over with questioning them. But defense lawyers argue that the lingering effects of their clients’ previous torture tainted those interrogation sessions, too.

To make that case, defense lawyers said they needed to investigate what had happened to their clients in C.I.A. custody independently of restrictions the government imposed on their ability to speak to potential witnesses, including forbidding them from directly approaching agency personnel. Prosecutors offered summaries of what guards and doctors had seen and done, saying that was sufficient.

But in a 36-page ruling handed down Friday, the judge, Col. James L. Pohl, said that those summaries were not an adequate substitute. While he upheld the rules the government imposed on the defense lawyers’ ability to investigate the C.I.A. in general, he also suppressed the F.B.I. statements as evidence because the rules were too restrictive for a fair fight over their admissibility.

The summaries, he wrote, “will not provide the defense with substantially the same ability to investigate, prepare and litigate motions to suppress the F.B.I. clean team statements” because the restrictions on defense lawyers’ ability to talk to witnesses “will not allow the defense to develop the particularity and nuance necessary to present a rich and vivid account of the 3-4 year period in C.I.A. custody the defense alleges constituted coercion.”

As a result, he wrote, the government is not allowed to “introduce any F.B.I. clean team statement from any of the accused for any purpose.”

Colonel Pohl’s ruling was not yet available on the tribunal’s website, but a copy was obtained by The New York Times.

[Read the ruling.]

The defense lawyers’ larger strategy has been to argue that because the United States government tortured their clients, it should not be permitted to execute them as mitigation — an issue that would come to a head during the sentencing phase after a trial and conviction.

It is not clear how the reasoning behind Colonel Pohl’s decision to suppress the F.B.I. statements, if it stands, will affect that question.

While Colonel Pohl also ruled that the summaries were adequate for mitigation purposes, the defense is likely to argue on any appeal that death sentences should be off the table for the same reasons.

Asked for a comment on behalf of the prosecution, Cmdr. Sarah Higgins of the Navy, a spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions, said officials would “let the rulings speak for themselves when they post” on the tribunal’s website.

But James Connell, a lawyer for another Sept. 11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, hailed the ruling.

“Witnesses are the foundation of the American criminal justice system,” Mr. Connell said. “If the government prohibits the defense from investigating witnesses, the proceeding becomes more like a play than a trial.”

Still, an appeal by prosecutors seemed likely.

The chief prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins of the Army, and his team had argued that the law permitted some concessions to national security imperatives in such a case, while playing up how much information the government had turned over in discovery about the black-site program, including summaries about what agency employees and contractors who served as guards, doctors and interrogators at the prisons saw and did. Most of those people are described using code names.

After providing that information, the prosecution told defense lawyers last year that they were not allowed to directly approach people they believed might be such witnesses or to travel to countries they believed might have hosted prisons to ask questions. Rather, the defense has to go through the government to request interviews, prosecutors said, and the government in turn approaches witnesses and asks if they want to talk to defense lawyers while also telling them what they can and cannot discuss.

In practice, Colonel Pohl wrote, only a few of the dozens of witnesses the defense asked to speak with agreed to talk under those conditions.

The Sept. 11 case defendants offered to plead guilty in late 2008, but after the Obama administration took office, it tried to move the case to civilian court. After Congress blocked that option, the defendants were rearraigned before a Guantánamo tribunal in 2012 and pleaded not guilty. Years of pretrial hearings and delays have ensued.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/us/p ... tions.html
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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 14, 2019 5:11 pm

Turns Out There Were Two Separate CIA Torture Programs

Gina Haspel
CIA Director Gina Haspel testifies before the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Photo credit: © Martin H. Simon / CNP via Zuma Wire
By scouring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report and some declassified CIA documents, retired Psychologist Dr. Jeff Kaye has confirmed that there were two separate rendition, detention, and interrogation programs run by separate branches of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center.

The first, which we refer to as “Program A” in this podcast, is already known. Consultants James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were paid over $80 million to reverse-engineer torture techniques from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program designed to train troops and spies to resist torture.

Kaye builds a strong case that this effort amounted to human experimentation — for the purpose of identifying the most effective torture techniques.

“Program B” relied on “standard” interrogation tactics that included some forms of coercive interrogation, and it was not subject to the management and monitoring systems of the first one.

Kaye says the separate programs were “stovepiped” so that front-line personnel assigned to one program didn’t know about the other. But top CIA management — including current director Gina Haspel, former director George Tenet, and top lieutenants Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez — had to have known about both programs.

Dr. Jeff Kaye is a retired psychologist who has been practicing journalism for 15 years. His report on the two programs is here, and the article on Gina Haspel’s role at three CIA “black” sites is here.

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Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to time constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like. Should you spot any errors, we’d be grateful if you would notify us.

Peter B. Collins: Welcome to another radio whowhatwhypodcast. I’m Peter B. Collins in San Francisco. Back in December, Dr. Jeff Kaye broke a story that is still, pretty much, undercover in terms of mainstream media coverage. Dr. Jeff Kaye is a retired psychologist, who’s been practicing journalism over the last 10 or 15 years, and he’s covered a lot of fascinating stories, and he does deep dives into archive documents and things of that nature. And in December of 2018, at his medium blog, he published an article with a pretty astounding claim that there was not a single CIA torture program. There were, in fact, two that emerged after the events of 9/11. Dr. Jeff Kaye, it’s always good to talk with you. Thanks for being with me today.

Jeff Kaye: Hey Peter. Thanks very much for asking me on.

Peter B. Collins: And before we dive into your important reporting here, I want to note for our listeners that there is a feature film that Netflix will be releasing in the near future. It’s called The Torture Report and it stars Annette Benning playing the role of senator Dianne Feinstein; Adam Driver, Jon Hamm and other major stars are in the film. It’s written and directed by Scott Z. Burns. And I’m very curious to see how this portrays the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee under Senator Feinstein laboring for years and finally producing but not releasing a 6,500 page report on the use of torture by the US government in the early years of the Bush administration.
And I point this out, Jeff, because I’m concerned that the movie will push out a narrative that many people will find credible and it will Hollywoodize the actual facts and kind of lock them in the way the film Zero Dark 30 did about seven or eight years ago.

Jeff Kaye: Yes. Well, Peter, I share your concern although the Zero Dark 30 was meant to promote CIA torture and the idea that you could advance your career in the CIA by being a torturer, which turned out to be true as we saw with Gina Haspel. But this new movie, for the record, I don’t want to say too much because until I see it, I don’t want to condemn it; it should be very good. But I suspect with the participation of the primary author of the Senate Report, which was Daniel Jones as the main character and his collaboration with the film makers, that his narrative is what will be presented. And it is really a partial narrative.
Now, whether that’s due to … well, in my articles as we may go into here, it became clear to me that the CIA did in fact lie to Congress or withhold information from Congress so that the kind of narrative that they built had to be partial in any case. Now yet, they present a narrative that shows that we’re in the dark but we’re trying and this is what we did. I could respect that. There’s certainly a lot of things that were revealed in that document, in that work. But if they say this is the truth, and leave it as that’s it, that’s the narrative, then we’re going to be frozen out in the dark about a lot of things that really happened.

Peter B. Collins: And, Jeff, I share your concern. At the same time, as an optimist, I hope that the film called The Torture Report may be a point of embarkation for people who’ve never paid attention to the issue, to delve into it; and maybe the film will peak their interest to the point they’d say, “Well, I want to know what the real story is.” And did the CIA spy on the Senate Intelligence staffers illegally? Was it a constitutional crisis? And Dan Jones was clearly at the center of that fight. And so I hope that we will see accurate depictions of the events and the parties and that it might be a film that provokes people to challenge the history of torture.
And if only to bring out issues related to the current CIA director, Gina Haspel, whose confirmation process did not expose her full biography. And we’ll talk about your subsequent report following the December report on Gina Haspel’s being identified as being at three different CIA black sites where torture did occur. With that, let’s dive into your report because you took a look at various documents, including some that were released by the ACLU in 2018, and information about the Chief Of Medical Services at the CIA’s office of MS; I get lost in the acronym.

Jeff Kaye: Office of Medical Services.

Peter B. Collins: Thank you. And you have been able to piece together enough information to substantiate your observation that there was not a single rendition and torture program. To help our listeners, we’re going to refer to the one that people know about as program A. That’s the rendition, detention and interrogation program and then program B, which we’ll detail in a little bit, came out of a separate office at the CIA. First explain to our listeners the source of the documents that led you to this reporting.

Jeff Kaye: Well, the primary documents that I… well, I’ve been reading for a long time and there are so many documents but the primary documents in this case would be the Senate’s. In fact, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report or rather its executive summary, which is what we have made public that was released a few years ago, that is the matter for the background for this movie that’s coming out by Netflix. And this other memoir, really, by the director, we don’t know his name, of the Office of Medical Services of his years – it was written in 2007 – of his experience up to that point in the CIA Rendition and Detention and Interrogation or Torture Program.
And the memoir is amazing because, of course, the doctors think very highly of themselves and this guy obviously felt very highly of himself and he was going to defend himself against those … Because by 2007, certain amount of information had leaked to the press and there were a lot of people writing in the mainstream media, New York Times, The Washington Post and McClatchy about torture. And this was a defense that sorts his work and the work of his team in the OMS, defending their work in that program and trying to make clear what he felt were incorrect assumptions being made about what these doctors, CIA doctors did.
And the key event that they talk about … Well, although he goes a lot into the initial origins of the program we’ll call program A with Abu Zubaydah and talks about … This report, by the way, made the press when it was revealed that for a time they were considering the use of truth drugs as part of the program. That did break through the press although the discussion of it in the press was very limited. And the death of Gul Rahman, some of you may think it’s Rahman but it’s pronounced Rockman R-A-H-M-A-N, who died at a prison called, sometimes, The Dark Prison or The Salt Pit or in documents that have been released it’s called Detention Site, Cobalt. And in this-

Peter B. Collins: It was in Afghanistan adjacent to the Bagram Air Base.

Jeff Kaye: Yes, yes. And he died there in November, 2002. Now I was perturbed when this report first came out, the Senate report, because in it I like to skip to the footnotes in the appendices where I find the real information usually comes out. And in a very late appendix in the Senate release of their torture report is a back and forth between Senator Carl Levin and CIA director Hayden. And Levin is incredulous. He’s talking to Hayden and they’re talking about Gul Rahman and he says, “Well, all right, so you have this program going on, did anybody die in this program?”
He thinks he knows the answer so he asks it and Hayden says, “No.” And he goes, “Not even one person died? Come on and tell us about Gul Rahman, he was terrible.” He goes, “No, nobody died. We are aware that somebody did die while in CIA custody but not our program. Our program was the very highly disciplined and this was undisciplined behavior. Rahman was not even part of the program but I do understand he was in CIA custody.” And so if you hear this or read this and you think, “What in the world is he talking about? It just sounds like double talk.” And I’m sure that’s how the senators thought of it. But, in fact, he was telling the truth, kind of.
He was keeping a card up his sleeve which was, “We had this other program,” program B, we’ll call it, as you say, which wasn’t highly regulated, which did not have doctors present, which used so called standard interrogation techniques instead of enhanced interrogation techniques and which has hardly ever been discussed. And if it hadn’t been for the death of Gul Rahman, which has kept a focus and the lawsuit that’s been done by his family and the works of groups like the ACLU to keep Rahman’s story alive, because even still to this day it’s not clear. We don’t know the whole truth about it. His body has disappeared so it cannot even be autopsied.
His family never even got the body from the CIA. Anyway, when this new document came out from the Chief of the Office of Medical Services explaining the origins of the Enhanced Interrogation Program, which we call program A today, and then revealed that there was another program while it illuminated much that had been obscure in the discussions and the documents around CIA torture. I’m not going to say that it totally explains everything because there’s a lot of new questions that arise around it but it’s an aspect of how the CIA program operated that’s very important and needs to be out there.

Peter B. Collins: Jeff, let me try to understand this with a quote from your article.

Jeff Kaye: Mm-Hmm [Affirmative].

Peter B. Collins: The program known as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program, we’re calling it Program A for our discussion today, operated as a special mission or special access program within the special mission division of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center. What we’re calling program B was run out of the Counter-Terrorism Center but, apparently, under a completely different silo. To the extent you’re able to divine, are there people who were at the top of the organizational chart at the Counter-Terrorism Center who would have known about both programs but kept them separate and stove-piped, in terms of the compartmentalization of the people who actually participated in the delivery of rendition and torture?

Jeff Kaye: Well, yes. The special mission division which we mentioned, which was in fact the … it’s a division within the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, sometimes called CTC. I try to stay away from acronyms as much as I can.

Peter B. Collins: Well, you do a better job than I do.

Jeff Kaye: We’ll see. This, oftentimes, is not clear. It was highly compartmentalized so a lot of people at CTC and within CIA didn’t even know about this program. They could honestly, of course, report things that they thought were the truth when in fact it wasn’t the whole truth. The program A, the Enhanced Interrogation Program, originated out of a totally different office. Its authority and its management, day to day management, fell under the Special Mission Division, but it heavily relied for staffing and apparently for even the ideas of how to proceed from a totally different office than the CIA, very important, known as the Office of Technical Services, the OTS. And that is an acronym everyone should know.
In fact, they may know if they read because there have been articles over the years highlighting this aspect of the CIA because it’s the gee-whiz James Bond, high-tech device, dart and guns, race cars with canons, perhaps, out of the headlights, assassination devices. It’s a gee-whiz kind of division as it’s presented to the public who even celebrated publicly its 50th anniversary in the press and everything. But it also was otherwise known for being the part of the CIA that for many years ran the MK Ultra program, the CIA’s mind control program that spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on how to control human behavior. It was the same one that famously used LSD drugs on people and brainwashing and all of this.
And a group of psychologists within the CIA with this OMS or this chief of OMS report made clear was that the part of the CIA that created the enhanced interrogation program, program A, were people who were super keyed into MK Ultra. I will read to you this myself where he says, “The antecedents of this unit,” meaning the unit that created the enhanced interrogation techniques, “had overseen much of the Mk Ultra interrogation research in the 1950s and 60s published still relevant classified papers on the merits of various interrogation techniques and contributed heavily to a 1963 KUBARK counter-intelligence interrogation manual and its derivative 1983 human resources manual and they assisted directly in early interrogations.”
When they say interrogations, we mean interrogations with torture. The KUBARK manual, which is K-U-B-<A>-R-K. What does that name mean? It’s just the CIA’s own name for itself. It’s an acronym for itself.

Peter B. Collins: Jeff, you’ve touched on something that has puzzled me for a long time. We know that the CIA paid, over the years, some $80 million to Mitchell and Jessen. You report that Mitchell was actually hired to produce a monograph before 9/11, which I find pretty fascinating.

Jeff Kaye: Yes.

Peter B. Collins: The accounts that we have or that Mitchell and Jessen took the established SERE program that stands for survival, evasion, resistance, escape; the way we train our troops, we try to harden them to be able to resist torture and interrogation. And the narrative is that Mitchell and Jessen reverse engineered the SERE programs to find the vulnerabilities that would work to crack jihadis and get them to tell us about the next terror attack. But I’ve always been suspicious of that narrative because the CIA has a long history of torture and of producing educational materials through the School of the Americas on how to help regimes that we are friendly with develop torture programs.
And so I don’t understand why the CIA felt the need to spend 80 million plus to reverse engineer SERE when in their own archives, as you point out, the KUBARK memos and documents going back decades were right there.

Jeff Kaye: Yes. And including, as you say … Yes, exactly. Of course, they were there. And I don’t believe that narrative and I haven’t for a long time. In fact, the more I think about it, Mitchell and Jessen were ops guys, Mitchell in particular. These are guys who went out and did ops. They would go out with special forces; they got training in interrogation techniques which, by the way, also came out. All this time, the Senate report, James Mitchell has no experience, no experience in interrogations and yet the report reveals, and I’ve talked to some various people about this and they had never heard of this before. The report reveals a lot. This report is maybe one of the most important.
The OMS released by this doctor gives us far greater insight into the internal workings of the CIA around torture than any document I believe that’s ever been released this far. One of the things that it reveals is that at psychology conferences, which happened annually for the joint personnel recovery agency which was people who ran SERE, SERE being the military survival training torture survival test that was given to many, many people in the military and intelligence services and State Department; secret agents and pilots, all sorts of things that at these annual psychology conferences there would be training done or at least some of them in interrogation.
That the SERE psychologist and any other medical or psychological personnel were not just trained to help people who were released from incarceration by your enemies of the United States, which is its stated purpose. But, in fact, it had also been used to train people to participate <in> interrogations. And how far back this … In fact, if you go back to the Vietnam War there were… I could go into this but special forces personnel, high ranking, testified at the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, for instance, at the time that in fact, yes, SERE Survival training, this torture training was used to tell people how to torture people. It was there to, in fact, give them advice on training.
Yes, this story falls apart and it also falls apart for a long time. I’d read the documents and it would say, “Yes, Mitchell and Jessen did reverse engineering along with other OTS personnel.” All right?

Peter B. Collins: Mm-Hmm [Affirmative].

Jeff Kaye: Who are these other OTS personnel or psychologists? Well, one of them might be Kirk Hubbard, Mitchell and Jessen’s boss who ran them through the Operational Assessments Division of the Special Missions Division of the CIA. And they showed up at a lot of different places that I’ve documented in various articles that I’ve done. It’s not just one article that I’m relying on, I want your audience to know, but I read long and deep into the reports, the documents surrounding this. And just as the CIA interrogators themselves use what they call a mosaic development, where they piece together the puzzle, the mosaic of different things, that’s what I’ve been doing.
You can put together and, of course, you have to test the reliability and validity of each piece of information that you get just as the interrogators do. And I think I do a better job than they do. And I think…

Peter B. Collins: Let me test your mosaic this way, Jeff.

Jeff Kaye: Okay.

Peter B. Collins: And let me just acknowledge, for our listeners’ benefit, that you’re dealing in a whole arena where you have to expose secrets. And so the fact that you may not be able to piece together everything doesn’t mean that what you have pieced together is not relevant or significant. But I want to just reference the two most egregious renditions that we are aware of and I want to stress that we may not be aware of things that went even further astray or awry. But the case of El-Masri which was a mistaken identity case; and the other one is Abu Omar who was plucked in a botched raid in Milan, Italy, in broad daylight where the CIA had 25 people on the ground and they violated their agreements with the Italians in terms of surveillance of Abu Omar.
And they popped him and renditioned him to Egypt where they knew he would be tortured. Are you able to figure out if El-Masri and Abu Omar were the targets of Program A or Program B?

Jeff Kaye: Well, I don’t know about Abu Omar since he was renditioned and sent to a foreign …. That’s one of the questions we have. It’s exactly what the agreements were with the foreign intelligence agencies, which of them were read into this highly classified Program A, which was about … Its basis, the article talks about adding information, about testing integrity and these kinds of interrogation techniques, testing them in a scientific way, looking at both psychological variables and physiological variables so that they could understand more about torture; for their own purposes to gain generalizable knowledge about torture.
It’s science but it’s what you might call black science. Right? In the case of El Masri though, we do know because he was sent to the Salt Pit. He was sent to Afghanistan. He was part of Program B. Interestingly, just the other day I was re-looking again at the January 2003 set of instructions about interrogation techniques, guidelines on interrogations conducted pursuant to this presidential memorandum back in September 2001 after 9/11. And I was looking at the most recently declassified version but there was an earlier classified version, that the declassified version released, which had more redacted.
And what they were redacting was that in what we call Program B, they redacted that this certain so called standard not enhanced techniques were also used during transportation meaning during rendition. The rendition program could take people, so called high value detainees, into the enhanced interrogation program, Program A, where they were subjected to highly structured torture, highly structured interrogation, which utilized torture techniques which were constantly monitored by medical personnel on the scene who kept a record of all of this. Or they could be sent to the other Program B detention center, in this case the Salt Pit in Afghanistan where they were subjected not to enhanced techniques but to so-called standard techniques which supposedly did not incorporate significant ‘physical or psychological pressures’.
But which used … besides all forms of questioning allowed by military interrogators. Otherwise you would use isolation, sleep deprivation, reduced caloric intake, meaning they partially starved them, use of loud music or white noise, not enough to damage their eardrums but enough to drive a person crazy, and strangely the use of diapers for certain periods of time not to exceed 72 hours. Meaning that we’re going to humiliate you, they were going to … And these are just the ones we know of. We know from other reports of detainees that, of course, there were beatings. We suspect there was use of drugs. There was the rectal rehydration. In his book, James Mitchell says, “I don’t know what this rectal rehydration stuff is. I never did it. That was not part of the program.
Look for it. You won’t find it. It’s not in there. I didn’t do it. It’s ridiculous.” It may be but that’s what was done. Now he could, of course, be lying, but I do believe that many of the more egregious forms of … well they’re all egregious, but of the new egregious forms that were revealed, were part of the so-called Program B standard techniques.

Peter B. Collins: Now, Jeff, it occurs to me that there had to be somebody who had the authority to direct traffic and this would be at the top of the ranks of the counter-terrorism center and it would be somebody who gets a report from the field; “We’re about to grab this guy, where are we going to send him?” And somebody had to make that decision whether they go to door number A or door number B. And it occurs to me that that very well could be Gina Haspel.

Jeff Kaye: Gina Haspel, Jose Rodriguez, Coffer Black and George Tenet who of course isn’t per se CTC but who was the director of Central Intelligence. These people would be the top that I know of at the moment. Oh, another guy because I’m still … my research is ongoing, but who I believe was probably involved was … Oh God, what’s his name? Now I’m blacking out on his name, the guy who some researchers identified as being involved. Blees or Bees, involved in the hiding some of the stuff.

Peter B. Collins: Rich Blees, I think, is the name.

Jeff Kaye: Yes, he’s another guy. I would throw him in with that other group.

Peter B. Collins: Okay. In a subsequent report you are able to piece together, from different sources, strong evidence that Gina Haspel was at a black site at Guantanamo and described as Chief of Base so she was the boss. And this was around 2003 or 2004. We have previous reports that she was at the black site in Thailand and the reports indicate that she was there after waterboarding occurred. Perhaps, more waterboarding did occur, that was Alan Ashiri. And then the third siting places her in Poland, is that correct?

Jeff Kaye: Yes. Well, the stuff about Gina Haspel in Thailand, I’m not sure who first reported on that but it came out prior to the hearings, the congressional hearings. It was already clear to the people, to the Senate inquisitors, that they knew that she was involved in torture and they just took her word. Now, how much do they really knew about … While she was just there, it was less than a month. She was sent, what was she’s supposed to do? She actually was against it, whatever … I’ll never torture again. But, in fact, they were hiding, as you say, some of her other activities around this.
It was Carol Rosenberg, I believe, a reporter at the Miami Herald who first saw that, in a document that was released as part of the military commissions during a hearing, highly redacted and yet it came out in the discussion that Gina Haspel had been Chief of Base at the CIA black site at Guantanamo, which was shut down in 2003 or 04, it’s unclear to me. Well, no one knows exactly when it was shut down and people were moved out. People like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and others … and Abu Zubaydah. But also overlooked in that document, I was very pleased that this was released and that this kind of work was done.
And, of course, unlike most people I went and actually read the document, the whole document that it came from and was surprised to see that not only had she had been at the Guantanamo black site but she would have also been at black site, according to this document, in Poland. And that furthermore the attorneys, the military commissions’ defense attorneys, involved and who were quoted to this effect in the document, which is still highly redacted, were trying to get this information to Congress and were being denied. Because, of course, the attorneys can’t say anything that the different military commissions defense attorneys can’t really say anything for fear of releasing classified information and getting into a whole lot of trouble, legal trouble; so they don’t.
But in this document that was declassified … And while the fact that … It’s kind of a curse I have lately, I’ve noticed that despite the fact that her presence at the Guantanamo black site was reported widely, it just says it’s been widely reported, that she was at the Thailand Cat’s Eye CIA black site prison. Nobody else, but myself, has reported that she also was at the Poland black site. That’s three; sort of like three strikes and you’re out. This woman was a major player in the torture program which is not how she was presented at the congressional hearings and as you’re inferring, perhaps, as well was involved from some other evidence.
And I think one reason the Poland site is not being talked about is because it brings up a lot of questions about legal culpability as it presently exists in this world because Poland is, unlike the United States, a member of the International Criminal Court, the ICC. And they are mandated as such to prosecute people for things like this. And just recently the European Court of Human Rights legitimated the fact that Abu Zubaydah and El-Masri who’s attorneys had filed suit about their imprisonment in the black sites in Poland and Lithuania, were awarded special status for being torture victims.
And the states of Poland with Lithuanian were supposed to pay them €100,000 each for what they suffered as their liability for their participation in the torture program, by allowing the CIA to set up these spaces. If Gina Haspel was at the site in Poland … see Guantanamo is outside the law, just to quote a book that was written about Guantanamo. In Thailand, for all intents and purposes is to … because it’s run by a puppet government for the United States. But Poland is not supposed to be that way. But why other press wouldn’t report this, and I tried to make it known as widely as possible, is disturbing to me. It means there’s a wider collaboration in withholding information about the CIA program than I would like to imagine there should be.

Peter B. Collins: Well, Jeff, I’m happy to amplify the story that you have broken here but it is a shameful note that the corporate media in this country has not picked up on it at all and appears to have no interest in digging into the grizzly history of torture, Guantanamo and the related matters. And as we wrap up, Jeff, I want to note another important thread in this article that you’ve published. You establish, again, by comparing Program A to Program B, that Program A essentially involved very tightly orchestrated scientific based experimentation on human beings. And that we have a historic parallel here to Dr. Joseph Mengele and the experiments that he conducted on Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
And I think it’s really important to underscore this because, as you point out, at a certain point the inspector general is saying, “Hey, we want to know if these torture techniques work.” And then they drew back saying, “Well, gosh, if we do that we’re creating a record of human experimentation.” And so, then, they adopted a third way by calling it “quality control”. And this bends the mind in a very dark direction that we would have doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists who were there taking notes as we inflict pain and humiliation and torture on a subject. And then they would file reports and figure out ways to do it even better on the next victim.
And this sorted exploitation of science and knowledge and systems is something that, I think, needs to be sharply repudiated. And we have to acknowledge that President Obama took no steps to expose or prevent a repeat of this dark cycle of American history.

Jeff Kaye: Yes. Yes, I’m so glad that you brought that up. It is really the core argument that I’m making and that I believe that it’s important. It’s that the way to understand this torture program, Program B, the standard interrogation program, is something done by many countries around the world, the CIA as part of it. It’s not extraordinary in that sense but only, and of course, in the sense that the United States puts itself forward to something better and it’s not. But the other program, and this is what speaks to the upcoming Netflix movie, is it going to reveal that really at the core of this program was a diabolical research program to look at torcument; to study, in fact, torture and to do experiments about torture on individuals.
It goes against the Nuremberg principles; it goes against law, international and domestic. And it’s frightening to think that this is what’s at the heart of our government are these Nazi-like secret research programs. It sounds like something out of a wild conspiracy fantasy but then so did MK Ultra and it’s all true. And the discussion breaks forth once in a while around this issue of the effectiveness of torture techniques and one of the interesting findings in this document that I found was that, oddly enough, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen argued against these kinds of research because they felt you couldn’t do it; that it’s impossible really to research.
And actually the only thing I agree with them on is this, it’s impossible to research torture for various reasons and not the reasons they said although the ones they said are also true which had to do with the methodology of it not the morality of it or the legality of it. But it’s important that … Obviously we don’t have time to go into all the reasons and facts to back up why I’m saying there was a research program but it is there in the article. I’ve reported on it elsewhere and at other times where I’ve found scattered references to like being read into the program for research for detainees as I found in another spot, not reported in this article, but in other writings that I’ve had.
And also The Washington Post as I do note in my article @medium.com is on Program A and Program B that the contracts that Mitchell and Justin had were not to do interrogation. They were to conduct research. Those contracts were revealed by The Washington Post just last year, I believe. That’s what we have here and it’s really… A challenge is, what is the society going to do about it? And I thank you very much for giving me a platform and taking on yourself this issue because it’s very, very important to our democracy and to our culture.

Peter B. Collins: Well, there’s no pleasure in it but I appreciate your comment and I want to thank you for staying with us. Most people have moved on and they consider Guantanamo and these egregious practices as part of a past chapter. But with the current president these could be resuscitated at any time and perhaps they already have and we don’t know it. With Gina Haspel at the helm of the CIA, we have to remain vigilant and skeptical. Jeffrey Kaye, I do appreciate your in-depth research and reporting on these issues and I look forward to your future dispatches.

Jeff Kaye: Thank you very much, Peter.

Peter B. Collins: Thanks for listening to this podcast interview with Dr. Jeff Kaye. Send your comments to Peter at peterbcollins.com and I’d appreciate it if you could make a contribution to support the great investigative journalism work here at whowhatwhy.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Torture Report

Postby Grizzly » Sat Feb 16, 2019 5:43 pm




From the comments:
"When a U.S. citizen heard he was on his own country’s drone target list, he wasn’t sure he believed it. After five near-misses, he does – and is suing the United States to contest his own execution...[After 5 bombing attempts on his life while working as a reporter in Syria, meanwhile getting a tip from someone in Turkey that he was being targeted by drones launched at the US Incirlik Air Base, with one drone bombing aimed at him but killing 3 bystanders] Kareem now had no doubt he was on America’s infamous “Kill List.” Most Americans don’t even know we have such a thing. We do. Officially, it goes by the ghoulish bureaucratic euphemism “Disposition Matrix.” Seemingly conceived in the Obama years, the lethal list – about which little is known outside a few leaks and court pleadings – appears to sort people into targeting for capture, interrogation, or assassination by drone. It was run by a star-chamber of two-dozen security officials and the president. According to a 2012 New York Times report, they met once a week to decide which targets around the world lived or died. These meetings became known as “Terror Tuesdays.” As Obama was preparing to leave office, candidate Donald Trump was promising to jack up the number of bombings in the Middle East. “You have to take out their families,” he said... we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets...[Kareem] sued, filing a complaint in district court in Washington, D.C., on March 30th, 2017, asking the U.S. government to take him off the Kill List, at least until he had a chance to challenge the evidence against him.,,""


How to Survive America's Kill List
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 15, 2019 7:53 am

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.

Ben Taub
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 Secret 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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?”

“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.

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

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.

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?”

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.

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!’ ”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.)

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

A year 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 22, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Prisoner of Echo Special.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019 ... est-secret
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 22, 2019 12:26 pm

Image


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x79Gf4cJDDE
Amazon Prime Video
Published on Aug 22, 2019
SUBSCRIBE 376K
The Report is a riveting thriller based on actual events. Idealistic staffer Daniel J. Jones (Adam Driver) is tasked by his boss Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) to lead an investigation of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which was created in the aftermath of 9/11. Jones’ relentless pursuit of the truth leads to explosive findings that uncover the lengths to which the nation’s top intelligence agency went to destroy evidence, subvert the law, and hide a brutal secret from the American public. The Report is written and directed by Scott Z. Burns and features outstanding performances by a powerful cast led by Adam Driver, Annette Bening, and Jon Hamm. Sarah Goldberg, Michael C. Hall, Douglas Hodge, Fajer Kaisi, Ted Levine, Jennifer Morrison, Tim Blake Nelson, Linda Powell, Matthew Rhys, T. Ryder Smith, Corey Stoll, and Maura Tierney complete the powerful ensemble that brings this essential story to life.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Torture Report

Postby Grizzly » Thu Aug 22, 2019 1:22 pm

American Gulag Death Of Jeffrey Epstein: Will Julian Assange Be Next?
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/american-gulag-death-of-jeffrey-epstein-will-julian-assange-be-next_08202019


Do not forget Julian #Assange. Or you will lose him.
I saw him in Belmarsh prison and his health has deteriorated. Treated worse than a murderer, he is isolated, medicated and denied the tools to fight the bogus charges of a US extradition. I now fear for him. Do not forget him.

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) August 7, 2019

John Pilger has been attempting to alert the public to what several governments are attempting to do to Assange for the crime of publishing the truth.

Visiting Julian #Assange in prison I glimpsed his barbaric treatment. Isolated, denied proper exercise, access to the library, a laptop, he cannot prepare his defence. He is even denied calls to his US lawyers. His UK lawyer wrote to the governor on 4 June. Silence. How lawless.

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) August 11, 2019

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Torture Report

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 22, 2019 1:48 pm

1. this OP is about THE TORTURE REPORT

2. there are at least 20 Assange OP's to chose from

3. this OP is 6 years old and not one off topic reply..until now :?

4. The Deep State’s Plan ‘C’: Murder Donald Trump
by Mac Slavo :roll:


http://prn.fm/mac-slavo-government-want ... ked-chips/[/quote]
The Deep State’s Plan ‘C’: Murder Donald Trump
socioecohistory (7) in illuminati • 2 years ago


The Deep State’s Plan ‘C’: Murder Donald Trump
by Mac Slavo, January 3rd, 2018, SHTFplan.com
Longtime Donald Trump advisor and confidante Roger Stone is warning once again about the deep state. This time, he said that the deep state’s “plan C” is to simply murder the president, since plans A and B won’t work out.\https://steemit.com/illuminati/@socioecohistory/the-deep-state-s-plan-c-murder-donald-trump

Roger Stone isn’t the first person to see Trump as a target of the deep state. Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has said he feels that the deep state isn’t afraid to nuke a city in the United States in order to kill Trump and blame North Korea for the result.


:backtotopic:


of course you do as always...actually today was very informative ..thanks for posting

Grizzly » Wed Aug 21, 2019 4:18 pm wrote:
Don't know if this is the offical DC Madam thread. Maybe mods can move it, if not?


I know ....I know I am no Uncle $cam :P

off topic

and since we are here I'll continue off topic....I mean why not?


and I will continue to point it out ....The Daily Coin :lol:

I wonder if Mac knows about trump's concentration camps?
I wonder if Mac knows about the women trump has raped?
I wonder if Mac knows about all the women trump has assaulted?
I wonder if Mac knows about trump's anti-semitic rants...you'd think he would be upset about that going to school in Jerusalem, Israel
I wonder if Mac knows about trump's believing that he is the messiah?
I wonder if Mac knows about Falun Gong thinking trump is their savior?
I wonder if Mac knows trump is a racist?

how much silver are we buying today?

Liberty & Freedom. Ron Paul :puke:

About Mac Slavo
EDUCATION

School of Life
Class of 1994 · Jerusalem, Israel
Favorites
Other
We Will Not Comply with Obamacare, Jake's Health Solutions, SHTFplan.com, Ready Gardens


Mac Slavo
July 21, 2017 ·
Leaked Obama Plan To Fight Election-Day Meddling Included ‘Martial Law’
https://www.facebook.com/mac.slavo



that's why we have this

:threadhijacked:

and that's why we name threads so there is some order to what RI members post...shall we do away with naming threads now?
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Thu Aug 22, 2019 11:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Torture Report

Postby Grizzly » Thu Aug 22, 2019 2:21 pm

I post what I want where I want. Thank you. As stated before by slad...
Last edited by Grizzly on Thu Aug 22, 2019 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Torture Report [and Kiriakou cases]

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jun 18, 2020 9:23 am


NORTHROP GRUMMAN ACCUSED OF FUELING FALSE ‘REVENGE PORN’ ALLEGATIONS AGAINST CIA WHISTLEBLOWER JOHN KIRIAKOU

16 JUN 2020
Kevin Gosztola

https://shadowproof.com/2020/06/16/nort ... tleblower/

Northrop Grumman, the third largest military contractor in the world, was allegedly involved in falsely accusing CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou of “revenge porn.”

The false accusation allegedly resulted in his arrest, improper charges, and a police raid that violated his privacy rights.

A civil lawsuit further claims the false accusation contributed to the “loss of contact” with his three children, who are eight, 13, and 15 years old.

He seeks damages from Northrop, John Bamford, an Arlington County police detective, and his ex-wife Heather Kiriakou.

In 2007, Kiriakou was one of the first CIA officers to publicly acknowledge that torture was official United States policy under President George W. Bush. His outspokenness on torture led the government to target him with a leak prosecution under the Espionage Act.

He pled guilty in 2012 to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), when he confirmed the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter.

Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. He was incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution Loretto in Pennsylvania, nearly 200 miles away from his children.

He is currently a co-host of the “Loud and Clear” radio program on Sputnik, a writer whose work is regularly featured at Consortium News, and an author of four books, including his most recent book, The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis.

Much of his commentary involves advocacy that is critical of United States foreign policy, which may directly challenge Northrop’s business interests.

According to the complaint [PDF], Heather was allegedly involved in an affair with a Northrop executive. John contacted Northrop’s ethics office in July 2018 to inform them that he “possessed documents” showing Heather, a director of global business development at Northrop, and an executive “fraudulently billed” the company for “business travel.” However, they were engaged in “tens of thousands of dollars” of “personal travel” that involved cheating on him.

[...]

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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