Front Burner - 'The Mauritanian,' Canada, and torture at Gitmo

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Mohamedou Salahi was detained in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years without charge. He was considered one of its most tortured prisoners. The new Hollywood film “The Mauritanian” portrays his detention and his fight for freedom, but does not touch on Canada’s connection to what happened. CBC senior correspondent Adrienne Arsenault spoke to Mohamedou Salahi about that connection, and today, describes what she learned.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. My fourth conversation that was intercepted about me inviting my friend to tea and ask him to get me some sugar, that was the conversation that landed me directly to torture. It was 2002 when Mohamedou Slahi was taken to Guantanamo Bay.

He was held captive there by the American government, suspected of being a terrorist. Because they said, if I don't explain what I meant when I said tea and sugar, they would not let go. And I just kept saying, I meant tea and sugar, actually. And this is like so ridiculous for someone who grew up in the desert, a Mauritanian, a Bedouin. Tea and sugar are part of my life. He was tortured. And when they, like, kept, like, asking me,

I just kept giving the same answer. But when they tortured me, I said, yes, yes, yes, yes. And because of that torture, he confessed to a plot to attack a place he knew next to nothing about. This was my confession, Adrian. My confession was, yes, I meant explosive when I said tea and sugar. And me and my friends were preparing to blow up CN Tower. This is horrible. I never heard of CN Tower. This is horrible. I never heard of CN Tower.

I never been to Toronto. I think it's in Toronto. Mohamedou was kept in Guantanamo until 2016 for 14 years. He was never charged with a crime. Now a Hollywood film has been made telling the story of his imprisonment and his fight for freedom. Called The Mauritanian, it stars Jodie Foster as his lawyer and Tahar Rahim as Mohamedou himself. But there's a part of his story that the film left out.

And Mohamedou spoke with my colleague Adrienne Arsenault about it. And I'm dying, I'm thirsty for Canadian intelligence to come clean and just tell Canadians exactly what they did, how they helped the United States, how they helped the Mauritanian government to kidnap me. I'm Jamie Poisson, and today, Canada's complicity in what happened to Mohamedou Slahi. Hi, Adrienne. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's such a pleasure to have you. Hey there, Jamie. Always great to talk with you. So look, you recently had this interview with Mohamedou, the subject of this big new movie, The Mauritanian. And it struck me that even though he's on this big international press junket right now, he seems particularly keen to talk to you as a Canadian, right?

Yeah, it was really interesting. You know, from the moment we connected, so we had a local crew in Nouakchott, Mauritania. I was on the line, you know, on the phone from here. And one of the first things he said is that, you know, I haven't spoken with a Canadian television crew or really many Canadian journalists at all. And it's like the first time I tell the side of my story myself without, you know,

letting the intelligence like underworld tell my story for me. And I had this feeling that he was like bursting out of, you know, his skin to talk. And to be able, it became very clear, to talk about his own life without the details of it, you know, being sort of distorted through that sick funhouse mirror distortion that was the filter of security or intelligence services and all those unverified claims. And to tell his story, let's go back to the beginning of his road to imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay. And it starts with an old connection to Al-Qaeda, right? Right. So you're talking about a young man.

So let's say it's the late 80s. He's in Mauritania. He graduates high school. He gets a scholarship to go to Germany to study engineering. It's a very big deal for him and his family. When he gets to Germany, though, there's this strong draw to Afghanistan. So what we know is that the Soviets had left Afghanistan at that point, but they'd left this communist government in place.

The Americans wanted it out. Al-Qaeda wanted it out. CIA was funding a lot of the Mujahideen groups, including parts of Al-Qaeda, that wanted it out. Al-Qaeda wanted it out. CIA was funding, you know, a lot of the Mujahideen groups, including parts of Al-Qaeda, that wanted it out. So he went there and joined up, you know, joined up with Al-Qaeda at the time. You know, again, it was on the same side as the United States. And he went back and forth a bit over a few years. Ultimately, he left Al-Qaeda. He left Afghanistan. He renounced the group. His cousin, though, stayed close and stayed very close to bin Laden. So, Slahi goes back to Germany, and then, you know, he's living his life in Germany. And at one point, like this

critical moment in October of 99, he gets asked, hey, listen, would you let a couple guys stay the night in your apartment? They're going to jihad in the east. They'll be gone by dawn. He says, yeah, sure. He maintains he didn't ever really know their real names. That decision would come back to haunt him. They would find out years later that two of those men were the 9-11 hijackers. The third was an attack coordinator, but no one knew that then. Okay. And I want to talk about

another instance that sort of ties into his eventual fate here. So, you know, as you mentioned, he's living in Germany, but I know at some point his visa is running out there and he decides to move to Montreal. And when he comes to Montreal, he joins a mosque. And what happens there? So that's November of 99, right? So Mohamedou is someone who knows how to recite the Quran from heart. That's pretty striking. And so his friends in Canada were saying, hey, listen, come. Our mosque in Montreal doesn't have a hafiz, someone who can, you know, recite the Quran from heart.

It's a big mosque. Thousands of people go. Come. You can lead some of the prayers. So he came to Canada. He had a residency status in Canada. He goes to this mosque. He starts leading prayers. Turns out a few of the people at that mosque were in the sites, you know, of

intelligence services linked to an Algerian jihadist group. One of the men was a man named Ahmed Rassam. There is, of course, another Canadian connection to that Millennium Bomb plot. He's Ahmed Rassam, the man who was caught trying to smuggle a carload of explosives into the U.S. from British Columbia. trying to smuggle a carload of explosives into the U.S. from British Columbia. The story there is that like a week after Mohamedou started leading prayers, Ahmed Rassam is at the other end of the country. He's trying to drive into the U.S. from B.C. He's in a car. The car is on a ferry.

A border guard stops him in the U.S. just on a hunch, it seems, like something doesn't seem right. Opens up the trunk, explosives, detonators, suitcases, and out comes this plan, that his plan was to blow up those suitcases at LAX airport. And this is when Mohamedou starts to think that he's on Canadian intelligence's radar, and why? Oh, absolutely. So a couple things happen. Mohamedou says that his time in Canada was a nightmare, that he was sort of followed and photographed all the time. And then one morning... My roommate, Murad, he woke me up.

You know, it was like around 9 a.m. and I was still asleep. He woke me up and said, Mohamedou, Mohamedou, someone is drilling in my wall next to your neighbor. And then we were like in different rooms in the apartment. And then I said, dude, I heard the same thing, but I thought it was a dream. And then he said, okay, okay, okay, don't, be careful. And then I moved slowly, and I made a place between the bed and wall, and there you are. I saw actually someone did the same hole. You know, one of the things he learned in Germany is that if you aren't afraid of something,

and you haven't done anything wrong, then the police are your friends. So he picked up the phone in Montreal and called the cops and said, Someone from the next apartment has drilled in our room. So the policeman said, OK, give me a minute and so on. And then he consulted with his friend, his colleague, and he came back and said, you know what, I talked to your neighbor, and he was hanging Christmas-like decoration and then pictures on the wall. My bed was about, I would say, 20 centimeters off the ground. 20 centimeters, and my neighbor wanted to hang his frame.

And I know he was lying to me, and I know this was a very evil plan. The cops eventually leave. He and his friend look in the hallway very carefully, and they see someone rushing out with, like, armfuls of equipment. And the penny drops for him that he said, Aha, I think I know what this was. I think somebody was trying to drill into the wall to install cameras and microphones and spy on us. And this is such a weird story. It's totally weird. It's a totally weird story.

So he leaves Montreal to see his mother in Mauritania. And then 9-11 happens. And then shortly after, he's scooped up there. And he's eventually brought to Guantanamo Bay. And Adrienne, what do we know about his experience in Guantanamo Bay? Wow. So we know it was long. I mean, 14 years. We know that it wasn't about prosecuting him for real or imagined crimes.

It was about harvesting intelligence. It's not on American soil. There's lots of things that go on in Guantanamo Bay that have horrified the world for a long time. We know from him he spent 30 days in a freezing isolation cell at the very beginning. They consider that, according to Mohamedou, fundamental to the way you begin to soften detainees. No light, no sleeping. Guantanamo Bay is much worse than what you could see. I mean, 70 days, 70 days without sleeping, with incessant interrogation. You

cannot put that in a movie. 70 days without sleeping. No sleep. They kept saying, no sleep for terrorists. He saw interrogators from Canada, from Germany, lots of U.S. government agencies constantly pushing the link between Slahi and 9-11. We know that the questioning got harder and harder with time and that one of the tactics was Mohamedou had issues with sciatica.

And so medical issues like that were seen as a way in for the interrogators. So, okay, that's something that we can use. So they would emphasize stress positions to make that hurt more. You can't lie down. You can't lie down, you can't sit. Your sort of arms and legs shackled to the floor, kind of hunched over, hours and hours groped, assaulted, beaten, forced to drink salt water, taken out into a boat, blindfolded, told you're going to die out there. They put ice between your skin and your clothes, went on and on and on for years. And he came to understand that what they were trying to do is say 9-11 would not have happened without you. They were essentially accusing him of being a recruiter, right?

Absolutely, like flat out. And at one point they showed him some photographs. And Mohamedou says he looked at them and thought, God, one of these people is really familiar. Well, it turns out that photographs were of some of the people who stayed with him that one night in Germany. One of those people who had been actively tortured had ended up naming Mohamedou as a very important person in Al-Qaeda and in the plot. And that this is ultimately what was driving them. But throughout this whole time, it became really, really clear to him that he was there because of something the Canadians must have said.

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In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. We heard Mohamedou describe being interrogated about this phone call he had with a friend, an innocuous call about having tea. And he says after being tortured, he gave a false confession where he said that tea and sugar, it actually meant explosives.

And this call took on such importance in his detention. How does he believe Americans got it in the first place? Oh, he says hands, he remembers the call. And it was in Montreal, and it was to a friend. And he says, look, the Americans didn't come to Montreal on top of my phones. Americans did not come to Canadian street and took my picture. Americans did not come to a Sunna mosque and took my pictures. American did not come to the downtown Montreal and took my pictures. Everywhere I went, you know,

and did not intercept my phone conversation. This all was done by Canadians and with no court orders. And I was a landed immigrant, almost a citizen. You know, when he was in Germany and the Germans were curious about him, they never questioned him. They never detained him. They determined that, you know, he had a really weird set of associations, uncomfortable to be sure.

I mean, if you look at it, Mohamedou, yes, he was part of al-Qaeda, the caveat being back in the day when al-Qaeda was a different beast. Yes, his cousin stayed close to bin Laden. Yes, his cousin used bin Laden's phone to call Mohamedou. Yes, he had these men stay with him that night. Yes, he went to a mosque that was also in the sites of intelligence services because of Algerian jihadists. mosque that was also in the sites of intelligence services because of Algerian jihadists. Mohamedou has existed on the margins of all sorts of things that he says quite openly, look at me, like that, all of that put together, no wonder they were suspicious. But I didn't do anything. I wasn't officially ever accused of anything, charged with anything. I never got a chance to face my accusations and defend them or explain them.

And for 14 years, I had the life beaten out of me. It's hard to process. And I was telling the truth when I said I meant only tea and sugar. And this conversation was intercepted in Canada, in Montreal, and I was not convicted and I didn't do any crimes. There is no reason to interfere in my private life, you know, when there is just no reason. This is not dictatorship, this is Canada. This is a liberal democracy. This is a place where people seek refuge. You mentioned that he had been interrogated by Canadians in Guantanamo.

What did he tell you about that? Well, to be clear, he says they never laid a hand on him. Yes, they interrogated him. He believes it was some of the same interrogators who came to interrogate Omar Khadr. He felt like they were ceding information for the Americans. He was excited initially to see them. He said there was a man named Christian that he was keen to see because he thought, oh, good, you're a Canadian. Okay, look, tell me what you think is happening.

We can explain to the Americans that this is like some crazy misunderstanding. But it didn't turn out like that for him. When they came to me, this guy by the name of Christian, you know, he spoke to me. I was like, oh my God, I'm so happy you come here to Guantanamo Bay because I want you to tell American in front of me what wrong did I do in Canada. Please share it with me and them and we solve this problem once and for all. This must be a misunderstanding. And I was naive to expect him to share what he thought

and what information he handed over to the Americans. What does Canadian intelligence have to say about all of this? Nothing. We wrote to the RCMP and CSIS and got, you know, similar language back for them along the lines of, we cannot confirm, deny, comment. Um, we, we can't talk about it. And this is what we, I've spoken with, uh, Mohamedou's, uh, lawyers in, in Toronto, one in particular, who said that she's been trying for a very long time to get a handle on the reports and get some accurate information in terms of what they had on him and

what they gave to the Americans and what they thought happened and what they still think is the story. And it's not working. We know some of Omar Khadr's lawyers have tried to get some of the transcripts of the interrogations on Mohamedou's behalf. Lots of people have been trying. No one's had any luck. This is the thing for Mohamedou now. He's out of there. I don't think in Guantanamo Bay they ever use the terminology of being free. I think they talk about it as being transferred or released. of being free. I think they talk about it as being transferred or released. So he's back in Mauritania. He's starting to get his travel documents back. He hasn't been able to travel yet. I don't know if that's a matter of being on a no-fly list, or I don't think it's about the pandemic. I think this is him getting on a plane is an issue at this point, although he is trying very, very hard. And he is out, but is he free? You know, he knows that there is still this cloud and this stain of this unspoken stuff that he isn't able to answer to, and that it just doesn't go away. You know, watching this movie based on his life and what he went through,

it's just shocking, you know, as we've talked about what he endured and to think that Canada had a hand in it. What does he want from Canada now? Did he talk about that? Yeah, that was a crucial question. I wanted to know where he was at. He said he wants to hear an apology from the Canadian government. And I wish, I wish like Canadian intelligence would apologize and invite me, you know, to Montreal, where I can, you know, just go around the street, sign my books and talk to people. I have hold no grudge against anyone. I know Canadian intelligence.

They did this to protect Canadian people, mostly to protect American people. But that's good, too. I have nothing against them. He says he's not looking for money. He's not looking for, you know, for that. He wants to be able to come back to Canada. He wrote, you know, he wrote books in Gitmo.

The movie is based on the diaries he wrote that were held back from him for a very long time, but were finally released and were turned into a book. He'd like to be able to talk about his book. He'd like to be able to talk about his book. He'd like to be able to meet people in person and do interviews and feel free to do that and sit down with intelligence services and find out what happened.

I mean, there are clearly people who probably still think he's guilty. And do we know if he was involved in anything? I asked the director and the actors, Jodie Foster and Tahar Rahim, did they have to make up their minds about guilt or innocence with Mohamedou before they took on this project? And they said, no, I don't wonder about the guilt or innocence of Mohamedou. I believe that he is innocent. I believe that he if he's guilty of anything, it's of meeting with the wrong people before they did anything wrong. And is that a crime? You know, it really took the ACLU about 15 minutes to debunk every quote unquote fact that the government had on Mohamedou.

Yes, but I didn't need to go through the shooting to make up my mind. I think it's innocent. I mean, we live in democracies. We have a justice system. He won his case. There was no charge against him. You see? And plus, if some lawyers had said that if they have found any proof after 16 years, we would know it.

The bottom line is that he never got a chance to face accusations, to answer for them, to speak up for himself, and was just beaten for so long that he is owed more justice than he's getting. And he certainly wants some of that justice from Canada. I understand he'd also like to see Guantanamo closed. Absolutely. So he has, you know, this is a process, I think, of finding your voice after being away for so long. And I think it's a bit slow, and he is working up to this. So he signed a letter recently, you know, with the new administration, there remain new hopes for people who want Gitmo closed, that it will happen. Obama said he would try, it didn't happen. It certainly didn't happen under Donald Trump. There is this feeling Mohamedou has that he hopes that as the movie gets more attention and more traction and the

conversation gets louder about closing Gitmo, that he won't be forgotten in that conversation, that what happened to him won't be forgotten. And that certainly in this country, that we'll have a conversation about Canada's role in it too. Okay. Adrienne Arsenault, thank you so much. Thank you, Jane. All right, that is all for this week. Front Burner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced this week by Ali Janes, Shannon Higgins, Elaine Chow, Imogen Burchard, and Ebion Abdigir.

Our sound design was by Derek Vanderwyk and Mackenzie Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Chavison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner is Nick McKay-Blocos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you on Monday. talk to you on Monday.