One evening in November 2001, an electrical engineer was mentioned Mohamedou Ould Salahi was visited at his home in Mauritania by plainclothes intelligence officers. They wanted to question him. Salahi was taken first from Mauritania to Jordan, then to Afghanistan, and finally to Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, where he would be held without charge for 14 years – an experience he wrote about in his 2015 memoir. Guantánamo Diary, which has now been adapted into a movie, The Mauritanian.
In the first of two episodes, Salahi tells about his story Anushka asthana about the torture he experienced in detention and the series of events that brought him under suspicion in the first place. Salahi’s former security guard Steve Wood describes how he made an unlikely friendship with Guantánamo’s most valuable prisoner, and reflects on how that friendship led him to question his job and the whole “war on terror”. Wood’s friendship with Salahi is the subject of a new Bafter longlisted Guardian documentary, My Brother’s Keeper.
Archive: Paramount, Wind-Up, AP, ABC7NY, US National Archives, Decca
Photo: Laurence Topham / The Guardian
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