Mohamedou Ould Slahi
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Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a Mauritanian citizen who, per John Kiriakou, is "the Nelson Mandela of our age." He spent fourteen years at Guantánamo Bay detention camp without ever being charged with a crime, on the basis of one phone call he made to a cousin while traveling home for a family wedding. He was eventually released after the CIA, per Kiriakou, conceded "this is probably the wrong guy." Kiriakou says he has become friendly with Slahi, subject of the film The Mauritanian, and holds him up as the example of a Guantanamo prisoner who was "truly" innocent among the roughly dozen genuine "bad guys" left there. In another telling, Kiriakou says he talks with Slahi regularly and likens him to Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King for bearing no grudge over fourteen years of torture at Guantánamo, since dwelling on it would only make him miserable while his torturers felt no guilt at all.

The phone call and the rendition

Per Kiriakou's account: Slahi was a medical student in Germany at the time he was snatched from his cousin's wedding in Nouakchott, Mauritania. A first cousin in Mauritania asked him to call a second cousin in Lebanon, who was in al-Qaeda, to tell him that his father had had a stroke. "Rarely, once a year maybe we talk." Slahi made the call: "Your dad had a stroke. Oh my god, thank you for telling me." He then traveled to Mauritania for another cousin's wedding and planned to check in on the al-Qaeda cousin's ailing father. In a separate telling, Kiriakou describes the trigger simply as a call to the Beirut cousin to relay that "your dad's really sick", a cousin who "was somehow had something to do with al-Qaeda." Elsewhere Kiriakou describes the same seizure as triggered by a cousin, "a low-level nobody in bin Laden's circle", phoning Slahi from a known cell phone to ask him to check on the cousin's sick father in the village.

The CIA's reading, per Kiriakou: "There's this guy in Germany. He's talking to al-Qaeda Lebanon. He's going to Mauritania, which is full of al-Qaeda. Oh my god, it's a giant meeting of al-Qaeda." It was a wedding. The Mauritanians, at U.S. request, grabbed him at the event and turned him over. The conclusion U.S. authorities eventually reached, as Kiriakou puts it: "Wrong guy, let him go."

Guantánamo

Slahi was held at Guantánamo for fourteen years, never charged with a crime, during which time, per Kiriakou, he underwent "merciless torture." After fourteen years the CIA conceded the error and released him. By then he had been publicly identified as a Guantánamo al-Qaeda detainee. No country would take him; Mauritania, per Kiriakou, would have killed him on return. He bounced between Italy and Switzerland before settling in the Netherlands. In another telling, Kiriakou says Italy finally granted him permission to stay for a year, after which he was able to apply for refugee status and ultimately settled in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government granted him citizenship.

He never finished medical school. He is married to a Dutch woman and has children, a young son, per one telling, and now teaches, lectures, and writes.

Friendship with Kiriakou

The day Slahi opened a Twitter account after his release, Kiriakou, himself recently out of prison, sent him a public message: "My country will never apologize for what it did to you, so I will. I'm ashamed at what the CIA did to you, and I'm sorry." Slahi DM'd him back immediately. The two have been friends ever since. Slahi lectures the graduate students in Kiriakou's history-of-terrorism course at the University of Salamanca, Spain, every semester, in person or by Zoom.

Kiriakou has told Slahi he cannot help but compare him to Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, citing that he has never heard him raise his voice, swear, or pity himself; Slahi's response was that this is the life God gave him and there has to be a reason for it. Kiriakou's own measure of him: "His ability to forgive is incredible to me. I've tried to emulate that. I lay in bed at night still fantasizing about the executions of everybody who's wronged me, but he, he's a role model for all the rest of us."

See also

- Guantanamo Bay
- Maher Arar
- Khaled El Masri
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- John Kiriakou
