Al Qaeda Declares War by Hoffman Tod;

Author:Hoffman, Tod;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

[13] SALIM

Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was forty years old when he was arrested by German police, acting on a request from the FBI and CIA, on September 16, 1998, near Munich. Though he denied any association with bin Laden, Bavaria’s Interior Ministry was prepared to extradite him.1 On September 29, charges were filed against him in New York for conspiracy to attack U.S. military sites abroad, conspiracy to commit murder, and use of weapons of mass destruction.2 He was alleged to have made false statements to German law enforcement officials and FBI agents over the course of several days’ questioning. On December 20, he was returned to the United States.

Salim was to have been the fifth codefendant at trial. However, the need to recuse his attorneys for having witnessed the assault against Officer Pepe at the MCC would have resulted in an inordinately burdensome delay. It would have been extremely costly, have caused significant hardship for witnesses who had traveled a great distance to testify, and left the other defendants in an extended limbo. Consequently, the government chose to drop him from the bombing case in favor of charging him with conspiracy to murder and the attempted murder of the CO. Since he wasn’t facing the death penalty in any event, the consequences, should he be found guilty, promised to be the same—life imprisonment.

His initial defense strategy was to claim temporary insanity. Prior to the attack, Salim had experienced progressive weight loss, dropping from 185 pounds when he was arrested in 1998 to 155 by November 2000. He reported feeling increasingly “hateful, angry and humiliated” during his incarceration. In particular, he was enraged by the strip searches to which he was regularly subjected. He felt “sad all day” and was no longer, he said, a “very cheerful person.” He worried constantly about his family.

According to an evaluation prepared by a government psychiatrist who spent nearly thirteen hours examining him, Salim claimed to have “lost his ability to freely forgive others for transgressions and he felt extremely lonely and he thought about ending his life, but never made any effort toward doing so because Islam forbids such action.” Nonetheless, “he had been battling for control of himself, with a part of himself which wants to violate his ‘principles,’ including to act violently.” Asked to describe his mental/emotional state, Salim said he felt “hopeless, grieving, angry,” “no control over myself,” “doing things against my will,” “anything I did that day, I was not the same person, maybe it was my body.”

Asked specifically to explain his actions on November 1, Salim said, “I wanted to escape this ridiculous condition,” and, “Since I did nothing, I have the right to be with my family.” He was convinced that he had a chance to escape from the MCC.

On June 26, 2001, Barry Rosenfeld, a clinical psychologist, examined Salim. He concluded that “several factors limit the conclusiveness of the evaluation, including Mr. Salim’s apparent lack of candor in both reporting his psychiatric symptoms (i.e., apparently exaggerating his psychological problems) and refusing to discuss many aspects of the instant offense.

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