A prisoner at Guantánamo for 14 years without ever being charged, Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells Brut why he's fighting to free the remaining detainees.
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00:00Mohamed Oul Slahi is a Mauritanian citizen
00:05who was arrested the day after September 11th
00:08and suspected of being the organizer of the September 11th attacks.
00:12He spent 14 years of his life locked up in Guantanamo,
00:16without charge against him.
00:30How many people get to write a book?
00:33How many people get to write a best-selling book?
00:37How many people get to get their books adapted to a movie
00:41and with A-list actors?
00:43It's all like...
00:46I don't know, I'm very thankful, very grateful.
00:49How was your family when you were arrested?
00:57My family was very poor.
01:00When I tell you very poor, not French standard,
01:04I'm telling you African standard.
01:07That is, my family did not have money to buy me shoes.
01:11I used to go to school without shoes.
01:14So blessed in that,
01:16you know, when I finished high school,
01:18I had this scholarship from Germany.
01:21His family hoped he would go to Europe
01:23and he would learn engineering and be able to support them.
01:26And he did that.
01:27So he went to school, he learned.
01:29And in the early 1990s, about 1990-1991,
01:34like a lot of young Arab men,
01:36Mohamed went to Afghanistan to fight against
01:39the Soviet-backed communist government,
01:41which was at that time prohibiting the practice of religion in Afghanistan.
01:45He went for training there at an al-Qaeda camp.
02:45What was the most important person in your family?
02:56I was the most important person, it turns out.
02:59Not in a positive way, in a negative way.
03:02And they always treat me the very last person.
03:06What is the most important thing in your family?
03:10When you are inside the cell,
03:13they take everything.
03:15They decide what you eat.
03:17They decide what you drink.
03:18They decide when you wake up.
03:20They decide when to move you.
03:22They can move you at 3 o'clock in the morning.
03:25That, you know, as it is, is bad enough.
03:29It's torturous.
03:30Add to that, when you're being sexually assaulted,
03:33if you are in shackles, in chains,
03:35you cannot defend yourself.
03:37This is very horrible stuff.
03:39And I can even say that it's even more horrible for men.
03:44At least I can say it was very horrible.
03:47It's not about sexual pleasure.
03:49It's about humiliation.
03:52And beating.
03:55And sleep deprivation.
03:57You know, you cannot sleep.
04:00The first 70 days.
04:0370 days, the first 70 days.
04:06Straight, no sleep.
04:0924-hour interrogation.
04:25What annoyed Mouamedou a lot,
04:27and he had a lot of trouble with that,
04:29was that for her,
04:30the important thing was not that he was innocent or not,
04:32but that he had the right to a defense.
04:34And he was dying to make them understand
04:37that he was innocent.
04:38So they had a lot of conflicts,
04:40a bit of a muscular exchange,
04:42until they revealed everything that had happened.
04:46And that changed things.
05:38When the book came out,
05:40you know, I was at one of the detainees' class.
05:45And it was Spanish.
05:48And, you know, I just went to the class to fit in.
05:52Because I want to be a good detainee.
05:55And there was like a TV channel playing Russia Today.
06:01And the headline, the first headline,
06:03was my picture with the book.
06:06And I'm not a spoiled person.
06:09I'm not used to my picture on TV
06:12with good stuff being said.
06:15I felt like I'm a free person.
06:17I didn't care about anything anymore.
06:21Guantanamo, Mauritania
06:33He left Guantanamo, he left prison.
06:36He left a concrete prison
06:39to end up in an open-air prison in Mauritania.
06:43Blocked.
06:44That is, his passport had been recovered by the Mauritanian authorities.
06:48He was not allowed to travel.
06:50Even now, when he tries to get a visa in a European country,
06:54especially Germany, where his wife and child live,
06:58his wife, who is an American lawyer,
07:00he doesn't get a visa.
07:19Guantanamo, Mauritania
07:30He certainly doesn't have the notoriety of the two heroes I'm going to mention.
07:35But he's made of the same wood.
07:38They have the same greatness and the same wisdom.
07:40For me, it's a mix between Mohamed Ali and Nelson Mandela.
07:48Guantanamo, Mauritania