Living in the Shadow of Guantánamo

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Mohamedou Salahi arrived at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, in August of 2002, he was hopeful. He knew why he had been detained: he had crossed paths with Al Qaeda operatives, and his cousin had once called him from Osama bin Laden’s phone. But Salahi was no terrorist—he held no extremist views—and had no information of any plots. He trusted the American system of justice and thought the authorities would realize their mistake before long. He was wrong. Salahi spent fifteen years at Guantánamo, where he was subjected to some of the worst excesses of America’s war on terror; Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on the orders for his torture. And, under torture, Salahi confessed to everything—even though he had done nothing. “If they would have wanted him to confess to being on the grassy knoll for the J.F.K. assassination, I’m sure we could have got him to confess to that, too,” Mark Fallon, who led an investigation unit at Guantánamo, said. Ben Taub reported Mohamedou Salahi’s story for The New Yorker and tried to understand what had gone wrong in the fight against Al Qaeda. Salahi met Ben in Mauritania, because, when the U.S. released him, it was under the condition that Mauritania would withhold his passport. He would like to go abroad—he needs medical treatment, and he hopes to live in a democracy. But, for an innocent victim of Guantánamo, being released isn’t the same as being free. This episode originally aired August 2, 2019. Ben Taub’s reporting on Mohamedou Salahi won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2020.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:13.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:16.5	When the first terrorist suspects were brought to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this was in
0:21.8	January of 2002, there were 20 men, blindfolded and handcuffed in orange jumpsuits.
0:29.2	They were met by Marines and Humvees. Soldiers were armed with rocket launchers, and a helicopter
0:34.9	gunship patrolled above. After the destruction in the United States on September 11th, we thought these terrorists
0:41.3	were something other than human, like villains from the movies.
0:46.3	They were strapped like cargo into planes because they would gnaw through hydraulic cables
0:50.3	to take the planes down.
0:52.3	And so, you know, people had in their minds envision these people as monsters.
0:58.0	Mark Fallon is a career Navy investigator,
1:01.1	and he was the deputy commander of a task force investigating alleged Al-Qaeda members.
1:06.8	Fallon knew immediately that something wasn't quite right.
1:10.4	When the first prisoners got off the plane, it wasn't the Al-Qaeda members that we were looking for.
1:15.3	It was, we call them dirt farmers, lots and lots of dirt farmers.
1:20.2	But when a man named Mohamedu Salahi arrived at Guantanamo Bay in August 2002,
1:26.5	he seemed somehow like the real deal.
1:29.8	He was no farmer but an electrical engineer who had lived in the West.
1:34.5	The evidence pointed to him being high-level Al-Qaeda with his hands in a number of terrorist plots.
1:40.4	But almost 15 years later, officials let him go, because Salahi hadn't committed any acts of terror
1:47.6	and had no valuable information on people who had. The United States had detained, interrogated,
1:55.0	and tortured, an innocent, very unlucky man. Salahey's experience is the basis of the film The Mauritania, which is just out.
	...

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