Suleiman Abdullah Salim endured beatings, sleep deprivation, water dousing
and other severe measures.
BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of 'The Darkness'
The United States subjected Suleiman Abdullah Salim to harsh tactics in a
secret prison and held him without charge for years. He was found not to be
a terrorist threat, but he pays a deep price to this day.
By JAMES RISEN
October 12, 2016
After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of 'The Darkness'
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Suleiman Abdullah Salim endured beatings, sleep deprivation, water dousing
and other severe measures.
BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By JAMES RISEN
October 12, 2016
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - At first, the Americans seemed confused about
Suleiman Abdullah Salim. They apparently had been expecting a light-skinned
Arab, and instead at a small airport outside Mogadishu that day in March
2003, they had been handed a dark-skinned African.
"They said, 'You changed your face,'" Mr. Salim, a Tanzanian, recalled the
American men telling him when he arrived. "They said: 'You are Yemeni. You
changed your face.'"
That was the beginning of Mr. Salim's strange ordeal in United States
custody. It has been 13 years since he was tortured in a secret prison in
Afghanistan run by the Central Intelligence Agency, a place he calls "The
Darkness." It has been eight years since he was released - no charges, no
explanations - back into the world.
Even after so much time, Mr. Salim, 45, is struggling to move on. Suffering
from depression and post-traumatic stress, according to a medical
assessment, he is withdrawn and wary. He cannot talk about his experiences
with his wife, who he says worries that the Americans will come back to
snatch him. He is fearful of drawing too much attention at home in Stone
Town in Zanzibar, Tanzania, concerned that his neighbors will think he is an
American spy.
When he speaks, not in his native Swahili but in the English he learned from
his jailers, Mr. Salim nearly whispers. "Many times now I feel like I have
something heavy inside my body," he said in an interview. "Sometimes I walk,
and I walk, and I forget, I forget everything, I forget prison, The
Darkness, everything. But it is always there. The Darkness comes."
Mr. Salim was one of 39 men subjected to some of the C.I.A.'s most brutal
techniques - beatings, hanging in chains, sleep deprivation and water
dousing, which creates a sensation of drowning, even though interrogators
had been denied permission to use that last tactic on him, according to a
Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the agency's classified
interrogation program.
In a series of recent interviews in Dubai, Mr. Salim described his
incarceration by the C.I.A. and the United States military as a terrorism
suspect. His account closely parallels those provided by other detainees,
witnesses and court documents, and confirms details in the Senate report
about his treatment.
Today, back in Stone Town, Mr. Salim is trying to support his family, though
some of his attempts at jobs have not worked out. He now breeds pigeons,
raising them for a local market. They are both his livelihood and his
solace.
They help him, Mr. Salim said. They quiet his mind.
<img class="span-asset-img "
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/09/30/world/11suleiman-birds/11suleima
n-birds-articleLarge.jpg" />
Breeding pigeons, like these at an aviary in Johannesburg, offers solace to
Mr. Salim, who has struggled to move on after his release in 2008. He
suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress.
BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Life Interrupted
Exactly why Mr. Salim fell into American hands remains murky; leaks to the
press at the time of his capture suggested that intelligence officials
suspected he had links to Al Qaeda, but the C.I.A. has never publicly
disclosed the reasons. An agency spokesman declined to comment for this
article.
Mr. Salim had been drifting into a nomadic life in one of the world's
poorest regions, where the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had
promised allies cash rewards for terrorism suspects. Governments and
warlords turned over hundreds of men to the United States, in many cases
with little evidence of wrongdoing.
Mr. Salim grew up on Africa's eastern edges, but from boy to man never quite
found himself. One of eight children in a family in Stone Town, a historic
district of Zanzibar City, he apprenticed on the local fishing piers, then
joined the crews going out for kingfish and barracuda in the Indian Ocean.
He dropped out of school after ninth or 10th grade and headed for Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania's largest city, where he worked in a clothing shop. He
moved a few years later to Mombasa, on Kenya's coast, where he ferried
cargos of dried fish, rice and oil with a crew of two.
Then the outside world intruded. In August 1998, Qaeda suicide truck bombers
blew up the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr. Salim said a
man whose boat he used for the cargo runs was suspected of involvement in
the plot. (Mr. Salim said that while he was in prison, American officials
told him that the man had died, but he knows no other details.) The boat was
soon seized by a Somali pirate, he said.
Mr. Salim moved on to Kismayu, a Somali port town, and was hired as a harbor
pilot. It was a good job, maybe too good for a foreigner with no ties to
Somalia's powerful clans and militias. "You had to pay off militias every
time you moved a ship," he said. "The clans were trouble, so I left."
By 2000, he was sleeping in a mosque and begging on the streets of
Mogadishu, the Somali capital. Eventually, a shop owner offered him odd jobs
and work as a driver for him and his sister, who Mr. Salim said worked for
Mohammed Dheere, a Somali warlord.
In March 2003, Mr. Salim was driving his employer through the capital when
they pulled over to help a stalled vehicle. Suddenly, three gunmen appeared,
dragged Mr. Salim out and started beating him, he said. He got away, but the
men found him at the hospital where Mr. Salim's boss had taken him.
The men said they worked for Mr. Dheere, and they claimed he owed the
warlord money, Mr. Salim recounted. "I said no, but they kept saying, 'You
stole money from Mohammed Dheere.'"
The men drove him to a small airport outside the city. The Americans were
waiting.
<img class="span-asset-img "
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/09/30/world/11suleiman2/11suleiman2-ar
ticleLarge-v2.jpg" />
Mr. Salim shopping for pigeons in Johannesburg. He breeds and sells exotic
varieties back home in Tanzania.
BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hanging in Chains
They asked him over and over about his appearance, Mr. Salim said. "They
said: 'You are not Suleiman. You changed your face.' I say: 'Go to Tanzania.
Go see my mother and take a picture of me.'"
He was turned over to the Kenyan authorities, who flew him to Nairobi. But
after questioning him, the Kenyans sent him back to Somalia and the
Americans. (Kenyan officials did not respond to a request for comment about
Mr. Salim's case.)
This time the Americans kept him. News accounts, including an article in The
New York Times, soon appeared quoting United States and Kenyan officials
describing the capture of a Qaeda operative from Yemen identified as
Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, who was wanted in connection with the 1998
embassy bombings. Mr. Salim said he never used the name Hemed and had
nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism.
Interactive Feature | Lasting Scars Articles in this series examine the
American legacy of brutal interrogations.
The news reports also said Mr. Dheere, who died in 2012, had agreed to hunt
down suspects, including the man identified in the press as Mr. Hemed, for
the C.I.A. in return for money.
From Somalia, the C.I.A. flew Mr. Salim to a United States base in Djibouti.
He was blindfolded and stripped, and an object was inserted in his rectum
while the Americans photographed him, according to court documents. Just
before he left Djibouti, Mr. Salim recalled, one of the captors told him
that he was going to the "prison of the pharaohs."
He was flown to Afghanistan, not Egypt as he guessed from what his captor
said, and taken to the pitch-black, stinking and cavernous building that Mr.
Salim calls The Darkness.
Music blasted nearly 24 hours a day while he was chained in solitary
confinement so dark that he could not see the shackles on his arms or the
walls of his cell. He said he could no longer listen to any of the songs
that were on the prison playlist.
The Americans routinely hauled him from his cell to a room where, he said,
they hanged him from chains, once for two days. They wrapped a collar around
his neck and pulled it to slam him against a wall, he said. And they shaved
his head, laid him on a plastic tarp and poured gallons of ice water on him,
inducing a feeling of drowning.
"A guy says to me, 'Here the rain doesn't finish,'" Mr. Salim recalled.
Several men wrapped him in the tarp and kicked him "many times, many times,"
he added. At one point, a cast that a prison doctor had put on his hand - a
finger had been broken by the Somali gunmen - became waterlogged. The doctor
cut it off, and the water dousing continued.
Mr. Salim described other grisly practices by his jailers: placing him in a
coffin-like box, his arms stretched and chained, on top of cleaning
chemicals; strapping him to a gurney and injecting him with drugs that made
him woozy; bringing dogs into a room to threaten him.
The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that Mr. Salim was one
of at least six detainees in 2003 who were "stripped and shackled nude,
placed in the standing position for sleep deprivation, or subjected to other
C.I.A. enhanced interrogation techniques." The report said officials at
C.I.A. headquarters had approved the use of some of the harsh tactics
against Mr. Salim, but rejected interrogators' requests for water dousing.
While 39 men endured the enhanced techniques, they were among at least 119
captives who went through the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons. Many were
later released without charges. A quarter were men who were picked up by
mistake or on evidence that proved unreliable, a Senate inquiry later found.
Others were low-level militants; some were suspected terrorist leaders,
including accused plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Salim said the interrogators had repeatedly questioned him about his
ties in Kenya and Somalia. Among other things, he said, they claimed that he
had falsified cargo documents on his boat, apparently to hide supplies for
terrorists.
"They always asked the same questions. I say I don't know. They say, 'You
know.' Same question, same answer, and two guys would beat you, and same
question, and they beat you."
Desperate, Mr. Salim decided that suicide was his only escape. He hoarded
the ibuprofen pills he sometimes was given, hiding them in the waistband of
his pants. When he thought he had enough - 26 tablets - he tried to take
them all at once. A guard, probably alerted by images from a video camera in
the cell, rushed in and stopped Mr. Salim just as he began swallowing.
As he recounted the episode to a reporter, Mr. Salim began to cry
uncontrollably, placed his arm across his face and rushed from the hotel
room. Two days passed before he agreed to finish telling his story.
Five weeks after arriving in Afghanistan, Mr. Salim said, he was moved to
the "Salt Pit," a secret underground C.I.A. prison. Mr. Salim, who was
blindfolded while being transferred, said that he did not travel far. The
available evidence suggests that The Darkness was most likely a different
section of the same facility.
Conditions improved slightly, though Mr. Salim was still interrogated
regularly. "Every day questions: 'You know him? You know him?'"
After 14 months, the C.I.A. in July 2004 handed Mr. Salim over to the United
States military, which moved him to Bagram prison, outside Kabul. The young
guards there nicknamed him Snoop because of his resemblance to the rapper
Snoop Dogg.
The military held him for four more years. "Many times, they would say, 'We
know you are innocent,'" Mr. Salim said, referring to American personnel at
the prison. "And many times they said that 'you can go home, but it will
take time.' But they didn't do it."
In Bagram, he was kept in a large cage with as many as 22 other prisoners.
Pigeons flew in and out of the large, drafty prison. "I remember one flew
in, and was just outside our cage," he said. "I was thinking, the pigeon was
free and I was in the cage."
<img class="span-asset-img "
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/09/30/world/11suleiman3/11suleiman3-ar
ticleLarge.jpg" />
Mr. Salim looking over pigeons in Johannesburg. He said the birds helped
quiet his mind.
BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
'A Ghost Walking'
In August 2008, Mr. Salim was released. The United States military gave him
a document stating that there were no charges against him and that he had
been "determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its
interests in Afghanistan."
The military freed him with no possessions save the long red trousers and
top that were his prison uniform, and no place to go. Mr. Salim had to
borrow ill-fitting clothes from an International Red Cross representative in
Afghanistan, who arranged for him to fly home to Zanzibar. Mr. Salim has
kept the too-small clothes from the Red Cross man ever since.
At the airport in Zanzibar, he was met by a half-dozen members of his family
and Tanzanian security officials. "They asked me the same questions the
Americans had always asked me," he said. But after two days, the Tanzanian
government left him alone, with no restrictions on his activities. Tanzanian
officials did not respond to a request for comment on his case.
In late 2008 or early 2009, two F.B.I. agents came to Tanzania to check up
on him, Mr. Salim said. One agent said he had a gift: a T-shirt that said
"Hakuna Matata" - no worries - from "The Lion King." Mr. Salim angrily
tossed it back. An F.B.I. spokesman said he had no information about the
episode.
Mr. Salim returned to the world a stranger. He had gotten married just two
weeks before he was taken captive in Mogadishu, but his wife disappeared
while he was gone and he could not find her.
Back in Stone Town, Mr. Salim found simple tasks difficult. He was depressed
and experienced nightmares and flashbacks about his time in prison, he said.
They felt so real that he could not understand what was happening to his
mind.
His attempts to work proved frustrating. His sister offered to pay him to
drive his niece to school, but he got lost on the first day. He wanted to go
back to sea, but local fishermen thought they might get in trouble
associating with him.
In 2009 or 2010, Mr. Salim went to Dar es Salaam seeking a license to become
a merchant seaman, but he did not pass the test. He briefly worked for a
cargo shipping company in Japan, but he said that loading containers hurt
his back, already injured in prison.
He listed other chronic physical problems from his time in custody:
headaches, neck and shoulder pain, and severe gastrointestinal problems,
common among detainees. Without a job, he lived with his mother and his
sister at different times, humiliated that he was having so much trouble
supporting himself.
In 2010, Dr. Sondra Crosby of the Boston University School of Medicine, a
physician, a Navy reservist and an expert on torture, was asked by
Physicians for Human Rights, a New York-based group, to evaluate Mr. Salim.
She was shocked by what she found. Mr. Salim, who is 6-foot-2, was emaciated
"like a skeleton," Dr. Crosby said in an interview. In her assessment, she
wrote that "he is plagued by profound distress, inability to eat and
inability to sleep."
"He describes himself as a ghost walking around the town," she added. She
noted other symptoms: flashbacks, short- and long-term memory loss, distress
at seeing anyone in a military uniform, hopelessness about the future and a
strong avoidance of noise. "He reports that his head feels empty - like an
empty box," she said.
Dr. Crosby concluded that Mr. Salim showed many symptoms of post-traumatic
stress disorder and major depression. He appears, she wrote, "to have
suffered severe and lasting physical and psychological injuries as a result
of his arrest and incarceration by U.S. forces."
He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit against two C.I.A. contractors who helped
devise and run the brutal interrogation program of which he was a part. "I
want the people who did this to be judged," he said.
Mr. Salim remarried and has a 5-year-old daughter, but he finds it
impossible to talk to his wife about what happened to him, or how it still
haunts him. He says others around him do not understand what he went
through.
He lives in a three-room house owned by a relative in a poor neighborhood
outside Stone Town. Until recently, he made some money by taking tourists
fishing on a boat owned by his brother-in-law. But it was swamped in a storm
several months ago.
<img class="span-asset-img span-asset-img-vertical"
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/09/30/world/suleiman-coop1/suleiman-co
op1-articleLarge.jpg" />
Mr. Salim's pigeon coop in Zanzibar. It is larger than most of the cells in
which the Americans kept him.
SULEIMAN ABDULLAH SALIM
His pigeons now help him get by. He has shopped at bird markets in Dubai and
Johannesburg for exotic varieties - Jacobin pigeons, Dutch pigeons, Chinese
owl fancy pigeons, Moorhead pigeons. He breeds and sells them in Zanzibar.
In the yard outside his house, he built a block and wire pigeon cage, 26
feet by 10 feet, larger than most of the cells in which the Americans kept
him. When he needs to be alone, he goes there.
"I like to sit with the pigeons. I like to get away from people," Mr. Salim
said. "I sit there a long time."
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Suleiman Abdullah Salim endured beatings, sleep deprivation, water dousing
and other severe measures.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
After Torture, Ex-Detainee Is Still Captive of 'The Darkness'
The United States subjected Suleiman Abdullah Salim to harsh tactics in a
secret prison and held him without charge for years. He was found not to be
a terrorist threat, but he pays a deep price to this day.
By JAMES RISEN
October 12, 2016
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - At first, the Americans seemed confused about
Suleiman Abdullah Salim. They apparently had been expecting a light-skinned
Arab, and instead at a small airport outside Mogadishu that day in March
2003, they had been handed a dark-skinned African.
"They said, 'You changed your face,'" Mr. Salim, a Tanzanian, recalled the
American men telling him when he arrived. "They said: 'You are Yemeni. You
changed your face.'"
That was the beginning of Mr. Salim's strange ordeal in United States
custody. It has been 13 years since he was tortured in a secret prison in
Afghanistan run by the Central Intelligence Agency, a place he calls "The
Darkness." It has been eight years since he was released - no charges, no
explanations - back into the world.
Even after so much time, Mr. Salim, 45, is struggling to move on. Suffering
from depression and post-traumatic stress, according to a medical
assessment, he is withdrawn and wary. He cannot talk about his experiences
with his wife, who he says worries that the Americans will come back to
snatch him. He is fearful of drawing too much attention at home in Stone
Town in Zanzibar, Tanzania, concerned that his neighbors will think he is an
American spy.
When he speaks, not in his native Swahili but in the English he learned from
his jailers, Mr. Salim nearly whispers. "Many times now I feel like I have
something heavy inside my body," he said in an interview. "Sometimes I walk,
and I walk, and I forget, I forget everything, I forget prison, The
Darkness, everything. But it is always there. The Darkness comes."
Mr. Salim was one of 39 men subjected to some of the C.I.A.'s most brutal
techniques - beatings, hanging in chains, sleep deprivation and water
dousing, which creates a sensation of drowning, even though interrogators
had been denied permission to use that last tactic on him, according to a
Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the agency's classified
interrogation program.
In a series of recent interviews in Dubai, Mr. Salim described his
incarceration by the C.I.A. and the United States military as a terrorism
suspect. His account closely parallels those provided by other detainees,
witnesses and court documents, and confirms details in the Senate report
about his treatment.
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Today, back in Stone Town, Mr. Salim is trying to support his family, though
some of his attempts at jobs have not worked out. He now breeds pigeons,
raising them for a local market. They are both his livelihood and his
solace.
They help him, Mr. Salim said. They quiet his mind.
modal-lightboxmodal-lightbox
Breeding pigeons, like these at an aviary in Johannesburg, offers solace to
Mr. Salim, who has struggled to move on after his release in 2008. He
suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
A Life Interrupted
Exactly why Mr. Salim fell into American hands remains murky; leaks to the
press at the time of his capture suggested that intelligence officials
suspected he had links to Al Qaeda, but the C.I.A. has never publicly
disclosed the reasons. An agency spokesman declined to comment for this
article.
Mr. Salim had been drifting into a nomadic life in one of the world's
poorest regions, where the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had
promised allies cash rewards for terrorism suspects. Governments and
warlords turned over hundreds of men to the United States, in many cases
with little evidence of wrongdoing.
Mr. Salim grew up on Africa's eastern edges, but from boy to man never quite
found himself. One of eight children in a family in Stone Town, a historic
district of Zanzibar City, he apprenticed on the local fishing piers, then
joined the crews going out for kingfish and barracuda in the Indian Ocean.
He dropped out of school after ninth or 10th grade and headed for Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania's largest city, where he worked in a clothing shop. He
moved a few years later to Mombasa, on Kenya's coast, where he ferried
cargos of dried fish, rice and oil with a crew of two.
Then the outside world intruded. In August 1998, Qaeda suicide truck bombers
blew up the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr. Salim said a
man whose boat he used for the cargo runs was suspected of involvement in
the plot. (Mr. Salim said that while he was in prison, American officials
told him that the man had died, but he knows no other details.) The boat was
soon seized by a Somali pirate, he said.
Mr. Salim moved on to Kismayu, a Somali port town, and was hired as a harbor
pilot. It was a good job, maybe too good for a foreigner with no ties to
Somalia's powerful clans and militias. "You had to pay off militias every
time you moved a ship," he said. "The clans were trouble, so I left."
By 2000, he was sleeping in a mosque and begging on the streets of
Mogadishu, the Somali capital. Eventually, a shop owner offered him odd jobs
and work as a driver for him and his sister, who Mr. Salim said worked for
Mohammed Dheere, a Somali warlord.
In March 2003, Mr. Salim was driving his employer through the capital when
they pulled over to help a stalled vehicle. Suddenly, three gunmen appeared,
dragged Mr. Salim out and started beating him, he said. He got away, but the
men found him at the hospital where Mr. Salim's boss had taken him.
The men said they worked for Mr. Dheere, and they claimed he owed the
warlord money, Mr. Salim recounted. "I said no, but they kept saying, 'You
stole money from Mohammed Dheere.'"
The men drove him to a small airport outside the city. The Americans were
waiting.
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Mr. Salim shopping for pigeons in Johannesburg. He breeds and sells exotic
varieties back home in Tanzania.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Hanging in Chains
They asked him over and over about his appearance, Mr. Salim said. "They
said: 'You are not Suleiman. You changed your face.' I say: 'Go to Tanzania.
Go see my mother and take a picture of me.'"
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He was turned over to the Kenyan authorities, who flew him to Nairobi. But
after questioning him, the Kenyans sent him back to Somalia and the
Americans. (Kenyan officials did not respond to a request for comment about
Mr. Salim's case.)
This time the Americans kept him. News accounts, including an article in The
New York Times, soon appeared quoting United States and Kenyan officials
describing the capture of a Qaeda operative from Yemen identified as
Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed, who was wanted in connection with the 1998
embassy bombings. Mr. Salim said he never used the name Hemed and had
nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism.
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The news reports also said Mr. Dheere, who died in 2012, had agreed to hunt
down suspects, including the man identified in the press as Mr. Hemed, for
the C.I.A. in return for money.
From Somalia, the C.I.A. flew Mr. Salim to a United States base in Djibouti.
He was blindfolded and stripped, and an object was inserted in his rectum
while the Americans photographed him, according to court documents. Just
before he left Djibouti, Mr. Salim recalled, one of the captors told him
that he was going to the "prison of the pharaohs."
He was flown to Afghanistan, not Egypt as he guessed from what his captor
said, and taken to the pitch-black, stinking and cavernous building that Mr.
Salim calls The Darkness.
Music blasted nearly 24 hours a day while he was chained in solitary
confinement so dark that he could not see the shackles on his arms or the
walls of his cell. He said he could no longer listen to any of the songs
that were on the prison playlist.
The Americans routinely hauled him from his cell to a room where, he said,
they hanged him from chains, once for two days. They wrapped a collar around
his neck and pulled it to slam him against a wall, he said. And they shaved
his head, laid him on a plastic tarp and poured gallons of ice water on him,
inducing a feeling of drowning.
"A guy says to me, 'Here the rain doesn't finish,'" Mr. Salim recalled.
Several men wrapped him in the tarp and kicked him "many times, many times,"
he added. At one point, a cast that a prison doctor had put on his hand - a
finger had been broken by the Somali gunmen - became waterlogged. The doctor
cut it off, and the water dousing continued.
Mr. Salim described other grisly practices by his jailers: placing him in a
coffin-like box, his arms stretched and chained, on top of cleaning
chemicals; strapping him to a gurney and injecting him with drugs that made
him woozy; bringing dogs into a room to threaten him.
The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that Mr. Salim was one
of at least six detainees in 2003 who were "stripped and shackled nude,
placed in the standing position for sleep deprivation, or subjected to other
C.I.A. enhanced interrogation techniques." The report said officials at
C.I.A. headquarters had approved the use of some of the harsh tactics
against Mr. Salim, but rejected interrogators' requests for water dousing.
While 39 men endured the enhanced techniques, they were among at least 119
captives who went through the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons. Many were
later released without charges. A quarter were men who were picked up by
mistake or on evidence that proved unreliable, a Senate inquiry later found.
Others were low-level militants; some were suspected terrorist leaders,
including accused plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Salim said the interrogators had repeatedly questioned him about his
ties in Kenya and Somalia. Among other things, he said, they claimed that he
had falsified cargo documents on his boat, apparently to hide supplies for
terrorists.
"They always asked the same questions. I say I don't know. They say, 'You
know.' Same question, same answer, and two guys would beat you, and same
question, and they beat you."
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Desperate, Mr. Salim decided that suicide was his only escape. He hoarded
the ibuprofen pills he sometimes was given, hiding them in the waistband of
his pants. When he thought he had enough - 26 tablets - he tried to take
them all at once. A guard, probably alerted by images from a video camera in
the cell, rushed in and stopped Mr. Salim just as he began swallowing.
As he recounted the episode to a reporter, Mr. Salim began to cry
uncontrollably, placed his arm across his face and rushed from the hotel
room. Two days passed before he agreed to finish telling his story.
Five weeks after arriving in Afghanistan, Mr. Salim said, he was moved to
the "Salt Pit," a secret underground C.I.A. prison. Mr. Salim, who was
blindfolded while being transferred, said that he did not travel far. The
available evidence suggests that The Darkness was most likely a different
section of the same facility.
Conditions improved slightly, though Mr. Salim was still interrogated
regularly. "Every day questions: 'You know him? You know him?'"
After 14 months, the C.I.A. in July 2004 handed Mr. Salim over to the United
States military, which moved him to Bagram prison, outside Kabul. The young
guards there nicknamed him Snoop because of his resemblance to the rapper
Snoop Dogg.
The military held him for four more years. "Many times, they would say, 'We
know you are innocent,'" Mr. Salim said, referring to American personnel at
the prison. "And many times they said that 'you can go home, but it will
take time.' But they didn't do it."
In Bagram, he was kept in a large cage with as many as 22 other prisoners.
Pigeons flew in and out of the large, drafty prison. "I remember one flew
in, and was just outside our cage," he said. "I was thinking, the pigeon was
free and I was in the cage."
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Mr. Salim looking over pigeons in Johannesburg. He said the birds helped
quiet his mind.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
'A Ghost Walking'
In August 2008, Mr. Salim was released. The United States military gave him
a document stating that there were no charges against him and that he had
been "determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its
interests in Afghanistan."
The military freed him with no possessions save the long red trousers and
top that were his prison uniform, and no place to go. Mr. Salim had to
borrow ill-fitting clothes from an International Red Cross representative in
Afghanistan, who arranged for him to fly home to Zanzibar. Mr. Salim has
kept the too-small clothes from the Red Cross man ever since.
At the airport in Zanzibar, he was met by a half-dozen members of his family
and Tanzanian security officials. "They asked me the same questions the
Americans had always asked me," he said. But after two days, the Tanzanian
government left him alone, with no restrictions on his activities. Tanzanian
officials did not respond to a request for comment on his case.
In late 2008 or early 2009, two F.B.I. agents came to Tanzania to check up
on him, Mr. Salim said. One agent said he had a gift: a T-shirt that said
"Hakuna Matata" - no worries - from "The Lion King." Mr. Salim angrily
tossed it back. An F.B.I. spokesman said he had no information about the
episode.
Mr. Salim returned to the world a stranger. He had gotten married just two
weeks before he was taken captive in Mogadishu, but his wife disappeared
while he was gone and he could not find her.
