One night in November 2001, an electrical engineer named Mohamedou Ould Salahi was visited at his home in Mauritania by plainclothes intelligence officers. They wanted him for questioning. Salahi was taken from Mauritania first to Jordan, then to Afghanistan and finally to the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, where he would be held without charge for 14 years – an experience about which he wrote in his 2015 memoirs. Guantanamo Journal, which has now been adapted into a film, The Mauritanian.
In the first of two episodes about his story, Salahi tells Anushka Asthana about the torture he suffered in detention and the series of events that put him under suspicion. Ex-guard of Salahi Steve Wood describes how he formed an unlikely friendship with the most valuable detainee in Guantánamo and reflects on how that friendship led him to question his work and the entire “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
Photograph: Laurence Topham / The Guardian
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