One evening in November 2001, an electrical engineer was appointed Mohamedou Ould Salahi he was visited at his home in Mauritania by plainclothes intelligence agents. They wanted him to question him. Salahi was transferred from Mauritania first to Jordan, then to Afghanistan, and finally to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, where he would be detained without charge for 14 years; Diary of Guantanamo, which has now been adapted into a film, The Mauritanian.
In the first of the two episodes about his story, Salahi explains Anushka asthana about the torture he experienced in detention and the series of events that provoked him in the first instance on suspicion. Former Salahi guard Steve Wood he describes how he formed an unlikely friendship with the most valuable Guantanamo detainee 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 Guardian documentary, My Brother’s Keeper.
File: Paramount, Wind-Up, AP, ABC7NY, US National Archives, Decca
Photography: Laurence Topham / The Guardian
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