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.”[1]
The phone call and the rendition
Per Kiriakou’s account: Slahi was a medical student in Germany. 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.[2][3]
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.[4][5]
Guantánamo
Slahi was held at Guantánamo for fourteen years, 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.[5][6]
He never finished medical school. He is married to a Dutch woman, has two children, and teaches.[6]
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 Kiriakou’s University of Salamanca history-of-terrorism course every semester.[7][8]
Kiriakou’s 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.”[8]