title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: As Johnston's final troops arrived from the Shenandoah Valley, the Confederates launched a counterattack that routed the Union Army, sending it streaming in disorder back toward Washington. William C. Davis credits Johnston with the majority of the tactical decisions that led to the victory, judging that "Beauregard acted chiefly as a dime novel general, leading the charge of an individual regiment, riding along the line to cheer the troops, accepting the huzzas of the soldiers and complementing them in turn. The closest he came to a major tactical decision was his fleeting intention to withdraw from the Henry Hill line when he briefly mistook the advance of Johnston's reinforcements for the arrival of fresh Union troops." Nonetheless, Beauregard received the bulk of the acclaim from the press and general public. On July 23, Johnston recommended to President Davis that Beauregard be promoted to full general. Davis approved, and Beauregard's date of rank was established as the date of his victory, July 21.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: After Bull Run, Beauregard advocated the use of a standardized battle flag other than the "Stars and Bars" Confederate national flag to avoid visual confusion with the U.S. flag. He worked with Johnston and William Porcher Miles to create the Confederate Battle Flag. Confederate women visiting Beauregard's army contributed silk material from their dresses to create the first three flags, for Beauregard, Johnston, and Earl Van Dorn; thus, the first flags contained more feminine pink than martial red. However, the official battle flag had a red background with white stars. Throughout his career, Beauregard worked to have the flag adopted, and he helped to make it the most popular symbol of the Confederacy.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: As the Army went into winter quarters, Beauregard caused considerable friction with the Confederate high command. He strongly advocated an invasion of Maryland to threaten the flank and rear of Washington. With his plan rebuffed as impractical, he requested reassignment to New Orleans, which he assumed would be under Union attack in the near future, but his request was denied. He quarreled with Commissary General Lucius B. Northrop (a personal friend of Davis) about the inadequate supplies available to his army. He issued public statements challenging the ability of the Confederate Secretary of War to give commands to a full general. And he enraged President Davis when his report about Bull Run was printed in the newspaper, which suggested that Davis's interference with Beauregard's plans prevented the pursuit and full destruction of McDowell's army and the capture of Washington.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Having become a political liability in Virginia, Beauregard was transferred to Tennessee to become second-in-command to General Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation to Joseph E. Johnston) in his Army of Mississippi, effective March 14, 1862. The two generals planned the concentration of Confederate forces to oppose the advance of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant before he could combine his army with that of Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell in a thrust up the Tennessee River toward Corinth, Mississippi. The march from Corinth was plagued by bad weather, which delayed the army's arrival by several days, and during that time, several contacts were made with Union scouts. Because of this, Beauregard felt the element of surprise had been lost and recommended calling off the attack, but Johnston decided to proceed with the plan. In the Battle of Shiloh, which began April 6, 1862, the Confederates launched a surprise attack against Grant's Army of the Tennessee, which despite days of prior reports of Confederate troop movements, were completely unaware that the entire Army of Mississippi was coming right at them. Once again a more senior general named Johnston deferred to the junior Beauregard in planning the attack. The massive frontal assault was marred by Beauregard's improper organization of forces—successive attacks by corps in lines long, rather than assigning each corps a discrete portion of the line for a side-by-side assault. This arrangement caused intermingling of units and confusion of command; it failed to concentrate mass at the appropriate place on the line to affect the overall objectives of the attack. In midafternoon, Johnston, who was near the front of the battle action, was mortally wounded. Beauregard, positioned in the rear of the army to send reinforcements forward, assumed command of the army and Johnston's overall Western department (officially designated "Department Number Two"). As darkness fell, he chose to call off the attack against Grant's final defensive line, which had contracted into a tight semicircle backed up to the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard's decision was one of the most controversial of the Civil War. Numerous veterans and historians have wondered what might have happened if the assault had gone forward into the night. Beauregard believed that the battle was essentially won and his men could finish off Grant in the morning. He knew the terrain to be crossed (a steep ravine containing a creek named Dill Branch) was extremely difficult and Grant's defensive line was heavy with massed artillery and supported by gunboats in the river. Unbeknownst to Beauregard, Buell's Army of the Ohio began arriving that afternoon, and he and Grant launched a massive counterattack on April 7. Overwhelmed, the Confederates retreated to Corinth.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Grant was temporarily disgraced by the surprise attack and near defeat, causing his superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, to assume field command of the combined armies. Halleck cautiously and slowly approached Beauregard's fortifications at Corinth; his action became derisively called the Siege of Corinth. Beauregard withdrew from Corinth on May 29 to Tupelo, Mississippi. He was able to deceive Halleck into thinking the Confederates were about to attack; he ran empty trains back and forth through the town while whistles blew and troops cheered as if massive reinforcements were arriving. Beauregard retreated because of the overwhelming Union force and because of contaminated water supplies in Corinth. In April and May, the Confederates lost almost as many men to death by disease in Corinth as had been killed in battle at Shiloh. Nevertheless, his leaving the critical rail junction at Corinth without a fight was another controversial decision. When Beauregard went on medical leave without requesting permission in advance, President Davis relieved him of command and replaced him with Gen. Braxton Bragg.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: At Beauregard's request, his allies in the Confederate Congress petitioned Davis to restore his command in the West. Davis remained angry at Beauregard's absence and told him he should have stayed at his post even if he had to be carried around in a litter. He wrote, "If the whole world were to ask me to restore General Beauregard to the command which I have already given to General Bragg, I would refuse it." Beauregard was ordered to Charleston and took command of coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, replacing Maj. Gen. John C. Pemberton. The latter was promoted to lieutenant general and transferred to command the defenses of Vicksburg, Mississippi.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard was unhappy with his new assignment, believing that he deserved command of one of the great Confederate field armies. He performed successfully, however, preventing the capture of Charleston by Union naval and land attacks in 1863. On April 7, 1863, Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, led a union ironclad attack against Fort Sumter that was repulsed by highly accurate artillery fire from Beauregard's forces. In July through September 1863, union land forces under Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore launched a series of attacks on Fort Wagner on Morris Island and other fortifications at the mouth of the harbor, while Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren attempted to destroy Fort Sumter. Because the latter operation failed, the successful seizure of Morris Island was not effective in threatening Charleston.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: During this period, Beauregard promoted innovative naval defense strategies, such as early experimentation with submarines, naval mines (called "torpedoes" in the Civil War), and with a small vessel called a torpedo-ram. A swift boat fitted with a torpedo on a pole projecting from its bow under water, it could be used to surprise an enemy vessel and impale it underneath the water line. He was also busy devising strategies for other generals in the Confederacy. He proposed that some of the state governors meet with Union governors of the Western states (what are called the Midwest states today) for a peace conference. The Davis administration rejected the idea, but it caused considerable political maneuvering by Davis's enemies in the Congress. Beauregard also proposed a grand strategy—submitted anonymously through his political allies so that it was not tainted by his reputation—to reinforce the Western armies at the expense of Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia, destroy the Federal army in Tennessee, which would induce Ulysses S. Grant to relieve pressure on Vicksburg and maneuver his army into a place where it could be destroyed. The Confederate Army would continue to Ohio, and induce the Western states to ally with the Confederacy. Meanwhile, a fleet of torpedo-rams built in England could be used to recapture New Orleans, ending the war. There is no record that his plan was ever officially presented to the government.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: While visiting his forces in Florida, which had just repelled a Union advance at Jacksonville, Beauregard received a telegram that his wife had died on March 2, 1864. Living in Union-occupied New Orleans, she had been seriously ill for two years. A Northern-leaning local newspaper printed an opinion that her condition had been exacerbated by the actions of her husband. This so fanned negative popular opinion that 6,000 people attended her funeral. Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks provided a steamer to carry her body upriver for burial in her native parish. Beauregard wrote that he would like to rescue "her hallowed grave" at the head of an army.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In April 1864, Beauregard saw little opportunity for military glory because he foresaw that there would be no more significant assaults against Charleston, and prospects for a major field command were unlikely. He requested a leave to recover from fatigue and a chronic throat ailment, but he instead received an order to report to Weldon, North Carolina, near the Virginia border, to play a key role in the defense of Virginia. His new assignment, the Department of North Carolina and Cape Fear, also included Virginia south of the James River. When he took command on April 18, he renamed it, on his own initiative, the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia. The Confederates were preparing for the spring offensive of Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and were concerned that attacks south of Richmond could interrupt the critical supply lines to Richmond and the army of Robert E. Lee.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: As Grant moved south against Lee in the Overland campaign, Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler launched the surprise Bermuda Hundred Campaign with landings up the James River. Beauregard successfully lobbied with Jefferson Davis's military adviser, Braxton Bragg, to prevent significant units of his small force from being transferred north of Richmond to the aid of Lee. His timely action, coupled with the military incompetence of Butler, bottled up the Union army, nullifying its threat to Petersburg and Lee's supply line. Now that this sector was stable, pressure began to rise to transfer troops from Beauregard's front to Lee's. Beauregard did send a division (Maj. Gen. Robert Hoke's) to Lee for the Battle of Cold Harbor, but Lee urgently wanted more and took the step of offering Beauregard command of the right wing of the Army of Northern Virginia for his cooperation. Beauregard replied in a passive–aggressive manner, "I am willing to do anything for our success, but cannot leave my Department without orders of War Department."


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: After Cold Harbor, Lee and the Confederate high command were unable to anticipate Grant's next move, but Beauregard's strategic sense allowed him to make a prophetic prediction: Grant crossed the James River and attempt to seize Petersburg, which was lightly defended, but contained critical rail junctions supporting Richmond and Lee. Despite persistent pleas to reinforce this sector, Beauregard could not convince his colleagues of the danger. On June 15, his weak 5,400-man force—including boys, old men, and patients from military hospitals—resisted an assault by 16,000 Federals, known as the Second Battle of Petersburg. He gambled by withdrawing his Bermuda Hundred defenses to reinforce the city, assuming correctly that Butler would not capitalize on the opening. His gamble succeeded, and he held Petersburg long enough for Lee's army to arrive. It was arguably his finest combat performance of the war.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard continued commanding the defenses of Petersburg in the early days of the siege, but with the loss of the Weldon Railroad in the Battle of Globe Tavern (August 18–21), he was criticized for not attacking more forcefully and he became dissatisfied with the command arrangements under Lee. He hoped for an independent command, but his desires were thwarted in two instances: Lee chose Lt. Gen. Jubal Early to lead an expedition north through the Shenandoah Valley and threaten Washington, and Davis chose Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood to replace the faltering Joseph E. Johnston in the Atlanta campaign.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: After the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, President Davis considered replacing John Bell Hood in command of the Army of Tennessee and he asked Robert E. Lee to find out if Beauregard would be interested. Beauregard was indeed interested, but it is unclear whether Davis seriously considered the appointment, and in the end decided to retain Hood. Davis met with Beauregard in Augusta, Georgia, on October 2 and offered him command of the newly created Department of the West, responsible for the five Southern states from Georgia to the Mississippi River, with the armies of Hood and Richard Taylor under his ostensible command. However, it was a thankless job that was limited to logistical and advisory responsibilities, without true operational control of the armies unless he should join them in person during an emergency. Nevertheless, anxious to return to the field, he accepted the assignment.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: The major field operation of the fall was Hood's Franklin-Nashville Campaign, an invasion of Tennessee, which he undertook under Beauregard and Davis' orders. Beauregard always kept in touch with Hood, despite all the obstacles facing the latter general's way. The two later developed a friendship that lasted until Hood's death in 1879, after which Beauregard became chairman of the Hood Relief Committee; he arranged for the publication of Hood's memoirs, "Advance and Retreat", in order to care for the orphaned Hood children.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: While Hood traveled through Alabama and into Tennessee, Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman began his March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah, which focused Beauregard's attention back to Georgia. He was ineffective in stopping, or even delaying, Sherman's advance. He had inadequate local forces and was reluctant to strip defenses from other locations to concentrate them against Sherman. Furthermore, Sherman did an excellent job of deceiving the Confederates as to the intermediate and final targets of his march. Savannah fell on December 21, and Sherman's army began to march north into South Carolina in January. Also in late December, Beauregard found out that Hood's army had been severely weakened in its defeat at the Battle of Nashville; there were very few men in fighting condition who could oppose Sherman's advance.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard attempted to concentrate his small forces before Sherman could reach Columbia, South Carolina, the state capital. His urgent dispatches to Richmond were treated with disbelief—Davis and Robert E. Lee (now the general in chief of all the Confederate armies) could not believe that Sherman was advancing without a supply line as quickly as Beauregard was observing him do. Also concerned about what he considered Beauregard's "feeble health," Lee recommended to Davis that he be replaced by Joseph E. Johnston. The change of command came on February 22 and Beauregard, although outwardly cooperative and courteous to Johnston, was bitterly disappointed at his replacement. For the remainder of the war, Beauregard was Johnston's subordinate, assigned to routine matters without combat responsibilities. Johnston and Beauregard met with President Davis on April 13, and their assessment of the Confederate situation helped convince Davis that Johnston should meet with Sherman to negotiate a surrender of his army. The two surrendered to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, on April 26, 1865, and were paroled in Greensboro on May 2. Beauregard traveled to Mobile and then took a U.S. naval transport to his hometown of New Orleans. In August that year, Beauregard's house was surrounded by troops who suspected he was harboring Edmund Kirby Smith. All the inhabitants were locked in a cotton press overnight. Beauregard complained to General Philip Sheridan who expressed his annoyance at his erstwhile enemy's treatment.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: After the war, Beauregard was reluctant to seek amnesty as a former Confederate officer by publicly swearing an oath of loyalty, but both Lee and Johnston counseled him to do so, which he did before the mayor of New Orleans on September 16, 1865. He was one of many Confederate officers issued a mass pardon by President Andrew Johnson on July 4, 1868. His final privilege as an American citizen, the right to run for public office, was restored when he petitioned the Congress for relief and the bill on his behalf was signed by President Grant on July 24, 1876.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard pursued a position in the Brazilian Army in 1865, but declined the Brazilians' offer. He claimed that the positive attitude of President Johnson toward the South swayed his decision. "I prefer to live here, poor and forgotten, than to be endowed with honor and riches in a foreign country." He also declined offers to take command of the armies of Romania and Egypt.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard worked to end the harsh penalties levied on Louisiana by Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. His outrage over the perceived excesses of Reconstruction, such as heavy property taxation, was a principal source for his indecision about remaining in the United States and his flirtation with foreign armies, which lasted until 1875. He was active in the Reform Party, an association of conservative New Orleans businessmen, which spoke in favor of black civil rights and voting, and attempted to form alliances between black & white Louisianians to vote out the Radical Republicans in control of the state legislature.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard's first employment following the war was in October 1865 as chief engineer and general superintendent of the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad. In 1866 he was promoted to president, a position he retained until 1870, when he was ousted in a hostile takeover. This job overlapped with that of president of the New Orleans and Carrollton Street Railway (1866–1876), where he invented a system of cable-powered street railway cars. Once again, Beauregard made a financial success of the company, but was fired by stockholders who wished to take direct management of the company.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: After the loss of these two railway executive positions, Beauregard spent time briefly at a variety of companies and civil engineering pursuits, but his personal wealth became assured when he was recruited as a supervisor of the Louisiana State Lottery Company in 1877. He and former Confederate general Jubal Early presided over lottery drawings and made numerous public appearances, lending the effort some respectability. For 15 years the two generals served in these positions, but the public became opposed to government-sponsored gambling and the lottery was closed down by the legislature.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard's military writings include "Principles and Maxims of the Art of War" (1863), "Report on the Defense of Charleston", and "A Commentary on the Campaign and Battle of Manassas" (1891). He was the uncredited co-author of his friend Alfred Roman's "The Military Operations of General Beauregard in the War Between the States" (1884). He contributed the article "The Battle of Bull Run" to "Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine" in November 1884. During these years, Beauregard and Davis published a series of bitter accusations and counter-accusations retrospectively blaming each other for the Confederate defeat.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard served as adjutant general for the Louisiana state militia, 1879–88. During the late nineteenth century the Knights of Labor, an organization for labor advocacy and militancy, organized sugar worker wage strikes. Democratic newspapers began circulating false reports of black-on-white violence from the Knights of Labor, and several states called out militias to break the strikes. In 1887, Democratic Governor John McEnery called for the assistance of ten infantry companies and an artillery company of the state militia. They were to protect black strikebreakers and suppress the wage strikers. A part of the militia arrived to suppress wage strikers in St. Mary Parish, resulting in the Thibodaux Massacre; the Attakapas Rangers led by Captain C. T. Cade joined a sheriff's posse facing down a group of sugar strikers. When one of the wage strikers reached into a pocket, posse members opened fire into the crowd, "as many as twenty people" killed or wounded on November 5 in the black village of Pattersonville.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Ultimately, the militia protected some 800 strikebreakers in Terrebone Parish, and captured and arrested 50 wage strikers, mostly for union activities. The Knights of Labor strike collapsed there, and sugar workers returned to the plantations.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In 1888, he was elected as commissioner of public works in New Orleans. When John Bell Hood and his wife died in 1879, leaving ten destitute orphans, Beauregard used his influence to get Hood's memoirs published, with all proceeds going to the children. He was appointed by the governor of Virginia to be the grand marshal of the festivities associated with the laying of the cornerstone of Robert E. Lee's statue in Richmond. But when Jefferson Davis died in 1889, Beauregard refused the honor of heading the funeral procession, saying "We have always been enemies. I cannot pretend I am sorry he is gone. I am no hypocrite."


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard died in his sleep in New Orleans. The cause of death was recorded as "heart disease, aortic insufficiency, and probably myocarditis." Edmund Kirby Smith, the last surviving full general of the Confederacy, served as the "chief mourner" as Beauregard was interred in the vault of the Army of Tennessee in historic Metairie Cemetery.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In 1841, Beauregard married Marie Antoinette Laure Villeré (1823-1850), the daughter of a Louisiana sugarcane planter. The two had three children - Rene (1843-1910), Henri (1845-1915), and Laure (1850-1884). Marie died giving birth to her only daughter. In 1860, Beauregard married Caroline Deslonde (1831-1864), who died in New Orleans following a long illness.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard in his young adult years had lived and served primarily with Anglo-Americans in the US army (a rarity for Louisiana Creoles). For the bloody years of the Civil War he fought almost exclusively with Anglo-American Confederates; the prevailing attitudes of his Anglo-American peers were anti-Catholic and antiforeign, and he was rejected by many of them; they often ignored his opinions during the Civil War, such as his emphasis on the defense of New Orleans and his native Louisiana. In the Confederacy, because he was a Creole Frenchman and seemed different, he was the victim of all kinds of rumors.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: An example of these Confederate rumors is his treatment after he was defeated in the Battle of Shiloh; rumors circulated that during the battle he was lying in a tent crying because of sadness and depression. Another rumor from the Confederate media said that the Frenchman was insane and stayed in his quarters fondling a pheasant. They spun the tale that a soldier found a pheasant cowering in a bush and brought it back to Beauregard as a present, and that Beauregard ordered the soldier to cage it as a present for one of his friends. The media claimed that on the day of the battle, both the hopes of a Confederate victory and the bird disappeared with the Creole.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: The soldiers who served under Beauregard respected him greatly; here is a quote where a Confederate soldier relates to his father the cheer Beauregard's men gave him after the defeat at the Battle of Shiloh:


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Non-Creoles continually judged him as being immoral, especially due to him being a favorite of ladies, constantly receiving letters, flags, scarves, desks, and flowers. His entourage during the war included a black man from South Carolina named Frederick Maginnis whom Beauregard made his confidant and with whom he talked freely of his war plans, and a young Spaniard who acted as his barber and valet. However, due to the constant need to conform to Anglo-American societal pressures, Beauregard always sought to Americanize himself. One such example was his refusal to use his first name 'Pierre', always signing his name 'G.T. Beauregard' in order to not seem foreign to his peers.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: As the Civil War ended, Beauregard went back to his native Louisiana, which in the meantime had been under Federal occupation and had adopted many Anglo-American racial policies and attitudes. Beauregard had not been home for years, and just one week after his return to New Orleans, as he was going down a road in Algiers, he was stopped by an Anglo-American man with anti-Creole sentiments. The man screamed at him "I always did believe you were a nigger. Tell me if you are a nigger or not," and continued his stream of abuse, the result of which caused Beauregard to flee the area.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Reconstruction was a period of great unrest, and resulted in the rise of racial tension and political bipartisanship. Two parties, Republican and Democrat, now controlled the political power in the American Union, and they also had to contend with the lower classes having the right to vote.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In Louisiana, for example, laws had been put in place ever since Louisiana's admission into the Union that restricted the vote to only the elite class, the "grands habitants". These were the aristocratic planters throughout the state; now all men of any class could vote, and the Republicans and Democrats sought supporters.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Republicans served mainly Northern interests such as industrialization, while Democrats served mainly Southern interests such as revitalizing the plantation economy. In the South, poor whites began to vote mostly for Democrats, and freed slaves began to vote mostly for Republicans. Voting and racial tensions were being inflamed in the South, causing public demonstrations, fighting, and riots between the groups. New Orleans was split between Democrats and Republicans.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard was insulted, even ridiculed at his home in New Orleans, Louisiana, and had the threat looming of being arrested, exiled, or executed by the Federal Government for having joined the Confederacy. Indeed, Federal troops surrounded Beauregard's home one night as they were hunting for Confederate fugitives. The Federal soldiers imprisoned Beauregard and all of his family in a cotton press overnight as they ransacked his home.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard was in a very dark place of his life in 1865. As Reconstruction began, Southern Democrats began to blame the newly emancipated black population of their states for the widespread postwar poverty, destruction, and starvation. Beauregard wrote a letter to his brother-in-law John Slidell in regards to the newly freed slaves; His words echoed the ideas of his embittered Democratic Confederate colleagues, that freed slaves were inferior, ignorant, and indolent; freed slaves had not yet voted in the South, and at this time it did not appear to him that they would. In this period, Beauregard was a Democrat.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In the years following the beginning of Reconstruction, Beauregard's opinions changed. Unlike other ex-Confederates, his economic situation improved, and his native home of Louisiana seemed soon to be redeemed from the Reconstruction Period. Beauregard played a prominent vocal role in Louisiana during Reconstruction, and he began writing many letters, gave interviews, and made speeches about almost every issue of that time.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In March 1867, Radical Republicans enforced black suffrage but, when many Southerners became angry and resistant, Beauregard wrote a widely published letter advising Southerners to accept the new situation. He said that the South could either submit or resist, and common sense made it clear that resistance was futile.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard sought to end the bickering between the Democrats and the Republicans; he felt that by encouraging the cooperation of the races through voting, a better future could be created for the South. His pragmatic change of opinion was exemplified when he argued that emancipated blacks were native to the South, and that all they needed was education and property to take an active interest in Southern politics.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In 1868, while Beauregard was vacationing at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Robert E. Lee invited him to a resort, along with other famous Confederates, as well as William S. Rosecrans, a former Union general and politician. The purpose of the meeting was to combat the Republican charge that the mostly-Democratic Southerners could not be trusted to deal justly with emancipated blacks. The result of the meeting was a document, signed by the parties present, including Beauregard, stating that the South would accept the results of the war and emancipation, and that they felt kindly towards emancipated blacks, although there was opposition to their exercising of political power.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Rosecrans gave an interview upon returning to the north and described Lee's efforts as somewhat weak but that Lee was a sincere man. When asked if Beauregard was weak, Rosecrans responded: "By the side of Lee, certainly. Take him alone, however, and he strikes you as quick, ready and incisive—well, a man of the world, a good business character, a smart active Frenchman. But with Lee he dwindles. Lee says shut the door, and Beauregard shuts the door." When asked by the interviewer if the Southern generals would really allow freed slaves to vote, Rosecrans responded: "Lee will not, probably, but Beauregard will. He is in favor of it and so expressed himself to me".


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard became a deep admirer of Abraham Lincoln. In 1889, he was personally invited by the president of the Lincoln Memorial League to participate in ceremonies at Springfield, Illinois that were honoring Abraham Lincoln. Beauregard wanted to go, but he was unfortunately unable to make the trip. He replied regretfully that he would be present in spirit to pay homage. Beauregard wrote the following in regards to Abraham Lincoln:


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard continued voting Republican, but Radical Republicans maintained the heavy taxation of the South; he sought ways to change the economical situation of his state. In a public letter, he endorsed the 1872 Liberal Republican nominee Horace Greeley instead of the Radical Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant. Beauregard "called for peace, reconciliation, a forgetting of old issues, and a union of conservative-minded people to remove corruption and extravagance from the government".


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In 1872, Beauregard resumed an interest in politics. He was one of the guiding leaders to form the Reform Party of Louisiana, a Southern party made up of Louisiana businessmen, advocating an economical state government, and recognized black civil and political rights. The Reform Party demanded that the South acknowledge black political power. It attempted to replace the Democratic party and sought to end Radical Republican taxation.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: In 1873, the Reform Party created a detailed and specific plan to induce cooperation between the races in a political union. The plan called for the creation of the Louisiana Unification Movement. Approving letters and interviews about the movement came flooding into the newspapers. The majority of the communications came from New Orleans businessmen who declared that they were willing to work with blacks, and recognize their political and civil equality if they would agree to cooperate to lower the high taxes and end the inflammation of racial tension. The chant of the Unification movement was "Equal Rights! One Flag! One Country! One People!"


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard approached Lieutenant Governor Caesar Antoine, who was a Creole Republican, and invited fifty leading white and fifty black New Orleanian families to join for a meeting on June 16, 1873. The fifty white sponsors were leaders of the community in business, legal and journalistic affairs, and the presidents of almost every corporation and bank in the city attended. The black sponsors were the wealthy, cultured Creoles of color, who were well-off and had been free before the war. Beauregard was the chairman of the resolutions committee. He spoke at the meeting:


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: The result of the meeting was a report that "advocated complete political equality for blacks, an equal division of state offices between the races, and a plan where blacks would become land owners. It denounced discrimination because of color in hiring laborers or in selecting directors of corporations, and called for the abandonment of segregation in public conveyances, public places, railroads, steams, and public schools." Beauregard argued that blacks "already had equality and the whites had to accept that hard fact".


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard lived a paradoxical life; instead of what he seemed to be and the cause of the South for which he fought, unlike many ex-Confederates, he did not look back on "the planting South and the mellow glories of the ancient regime" but looked toward the future of the international house of Louisiana, to the industrial district of New Orleans, and a bustling delta of a better tomorrow.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard was admired by many because of his work after the war, and when he went to a meeting in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1889, he was given the title by a local reporter of "Sir Galahad of Southern Chivalry". A Northerner at the meeting welcomed Beauregard, commenting on the fact that 25 years ago, the North "did not feel very kindly toward him; but the past was dead and now they admired him". Beauregard responded by saying: "As to my past life, I have always endeavored to do my duty under all circumstances, from the point I entered West Point, a boy of seventeen, up to the present". He was then loudly applauded.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Following Beauregard's death in 1893, Victor E. Rillieux, a Creole of color and poet who wrote poems for many famous contemporary civil rights activists, including Ida B. Wells, was moved by Beauregard's passing to create a poem titled "Dernier Tribut" ().


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard's residence at 1113 Chartres Street in New Orleans is now called the Beauregard-Keyes House, and is operated as a historic house museum. It was previously owned by American author Frances Parkinson Keyes, who wrote a fictional biography of Beauregard in which the house is an important setting.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: Beauregard Parish in western Louisiana is named for him, as is Camp Beauregard, a former U.S. Army base and National Guard camp near Pineville in central Louisiana. The unincorporated community of Beauregard, Alabama, is also named for him, as is Beauregard, Mississippi. Four camps are named after Beauregard in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.


title: P. G. T. Beauregard

text: An equestrian monument by Alexander Doyle in New Orleans depicted him. The monument was removed on May 17, 2017.


title: Heartburn

text: Heartburn, also known as pyrosis, cardialgia or acid indigestion, is a burning sensation in the central chest or upper central abdomen. Heartburn is usually due to regurgitation of gastric acid (gastric reflux) into the esophagus. It is the major symptom of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).


title: Heartburn

text: Other common descriptors for heartburn (besides burning) are belching, nausea, squeezing, stabbing, or a sensation of pressure on the chest. The pain often rises in the chest (directly behind the breastbone) and may radiate to the neck, throat, or angle of the arm. Because the chest houses other important organs besides the esophagus (including the heart and lungs), not all symptoms related to heartburn are esophageal in nature.


title: Heartburn

text: The cause will vary depending on one's family and medical history, genetics, if a person is pregnant or lactating, and age. As a result, the diagnosis will vary depending on the suspected organ and the inciting disease process. Work-up will vary depending on the clinical suspicion of the provider seeing the patient, but generally includes endoscopy and a trial of antacids to assess for relief.


title: Heartburn

text: Treatment for heartburn may include medications and dietary changes. Medication include antacids. Dietary changes may require avoiding foods that are high in fats, spicy, high in artificial flavors, heavily reducing NSAID use, heavy alcohol consumption, and decreasing peppermint consumption. Lifestyle changes may help such as reducing weight.


title: Heartburn

text: The term indigestion includes heartburn along with a number of other symptoms. Indigestion is sometimes defined as a combination of epigastric pain and heartburn. Heartburn is commonly used interchangeably with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) rather than just to describe a symptom of burning in one's chest.


title: Heartburn

text: Heartburn-like symptoms and/or lower chest or upper abdomen may be indicative of much more sinister and/or deadly disease. Of greatest concern is to confuse heartburn (generally related to the esophagus) with a heart attack as these organs share a common nerve supply. Numerous abdominal and thoracic organs are present in that region of the body. Many different organ systems might explain the discomfort called heartburn.


title: Heartburn

text: The most common symptom for a heart attack is chest pain. However, as many as 30% of chest pain patients undergoing cardiac catheterization have findings that do not account for their chest discomfort. These are often defined as having "atypical chest pain" or chest pain of undetermined origin. Women experiencing heart attacks may also deny classic signs and symptoms and instead complain of GI symptoms. One article estimates that ischemic heart disease may appear to be GERD in 0.6% of people.


title: Heartburn

text: Heartburn is common during pregnancy having been reported in as high as 80% of pregnancies. It is most often due to GERD and results from relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter (LES), changes in gastric motility, and/or increasing intra-abdominal pressure. The onset of symptoms can be during any trimester of pregnancy.


title: Heartburn

text: Functional heartburn is heartburn of unknown cause. It is commonly associated with psychiatric conditions like depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. It is also seen with other functional gastrointestinal disorders like irritable bowel syndrome and is the primary cause of lack of improvement post treatment with proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). Despite this, PPIs are still the primary treatment with response rates in about 50% of people. The diagnosis is one of elimination, based upon the Rome III criteria. It was found to be present in 22.3% of Canadians in one survey.


title: Heartburn

text: Heartburn can be caused by several conditions and a preliminary diagnosis of GERD is based on additional signs and symptoms. The chest pain caused by GERD has a distinct 'burning' sensation, occurs after eating or at night, and worsens when a person lies down or bends over. It also is common in pregnant women, and may be triggered by consuming food in large quantities, or specific foods containing certain spices, high fat content, or high acid content. In young persons (typically <40 years) who present with heartburn symptoms consistent with GERD (onset after eating, when laying down, when pregnant), a physician may begin a course of PPIs to assess clinical improvement before additional testing is undergone. Resolution or improvement of symptoms on this course may result in a diagnosis of GERD.


title: Heartburn

text: Relief of symptoms 5 to 10 minutes after the administration of viscous lidocaine and an antacid increases the suspicion that the pain is esophageal in origin. This however does not rule out a potential cardiac cause as 10% of cases of discomfort due to cardiac causes are improved with antacids.


title: Heartburn

text: Esophageal pH monitoring: a probe can be placed via the nose into the esophagus to record the level of acidity in the lower esophagus. Because some degree of variation in acidity is normal, and small reflux events are relatively common, esophageal pH monitoring can be used to document reflux in real-time. Patients are able to record symptom onset to correlate lower esophageal pH with time of symptom onset.


title: Heartburn

text: Manometry: in this test, a pressure sensor (manometer) is passed via the mouth into the esophagus and measures the pressure of the LES directly.


title: Heartburn

text: Endoscopy: the esophageal mucosa can be visualized directly by passing a thin, lighted tube with a tiny camera known as an endoscope attached through the mouth to examine the oesophagus and stomach. In this way, evidence of esophageal inflammation can be detected, and biopsies taken if necessary. Since an endoscopy allows a doctor to visually inspect the upper digestive tract the procedure may help identify any additional damage to the tract that may not have been detected otherwise.


title: Heartburn

text: Biopsy: a small sample of tissue from the oesophagus is removed. It is then studied to check for inflammation, cancer, or other problems.


title: Heartburn

text: Treatment plans are tailored to the specific diagnosis and etiology of the heartburn. Management of heartburn can be sorted into various categories.


title: Heartburn

text: Symptoms of heartburn may not always be the result of an organic cause. Patients may respond better to therapies targeting anxiety and symptoms of hyper-vigilance, through medications aimed towards a psychiatric etiology, osteopathic manipulation and acupuncture.


title: Heartburn

text: In the case of GERD causing heartburn symptoms, surgery may be required if PPI is not effective. Surgery is not undergone if functional heartburn is the leading diagnosis.


title: World Food Programme

text: The World Food Programme (WFP) is an international organization within the United Nations that provides food assistance worldwide. It is the world's largest humanitarian organization and the leading provider of school meals. Founded in 1961, WFP is headquartered in Rome and has offices in 80 countries. As of 2021, it supported over 128 million people across more than 120 countries and territories.


title: World Food Programme

text: In addition to emergency food relief, WFP offers technical and development assistance, such as building capacity for emergency preparedness and response, managing supply chains and logistics, promoting social safety programs, and strengthening resilience against climate change. It also a major provider of direct cash assistance and medical supplies, and provides passenger services for humanitarian workers.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP is an executive member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, a consortium of UN entities that aims to fulfil the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), with a priority on achieving SDG 2 for "zero hunger" by 2030.


title: World Food Programme

text: The World Food Programme was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for its efforts to provide food assistance in areas of conflict, and to prevent the use of food as a weapon of war and conflict.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP was established in 1961 after the 1960 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference, when George McGovern, director of the US Food for Peace Programmes, proposed establishing a multilateral food aid programme. WFP launched its first programmes in 1963 by the FAO and the United Nations General Assembly on a three-year experimental basis, supporting the Nubian population at Wadi Halfa in Sudan. In 1965, the programme was extended to a continuing basis.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP works across a broad spectrum of Sustainable Development Goals, owing to the fact that food shortages, hunger, malnutrition and foodborne illness cause poor health, which subsequently impacts other areas of sustainable development, such as education, employment and poverty (Sustainable Development Goals Four, Eight and One respectively).


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP operations are funded by voluntary donations principally from governments of the world, and also from corporations and private donors. In 2021, funding was a record USD 9.6 billion – 15 percent higher than in 2020 – against a funding need of USD 14.8 billion. That year, the United States was the largest donor.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP is governed by an executive board which consists of representatives from 36 member states, and provides intergovernmental support, direction and supervision of WFP's activities. The European Union is a permanent observer in WFP and, as a major donor, participates in the work of its executive board. WFP is headed by an executive director, who is appointed jointly by the UN Secretary-General and the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The executive director is appointed for fixed five-year terms and is responsible for the administration of the organization as well as the implementation of its programmes, projects and other activities. David Beasley, previously Governor of the U.S. state of South Carolina, was appointed to the role in March 2017. He heads the WFP secretariat, which is headquartered in Rome.


title: World Food Programme

text: Since 1992, all executive directors have been American. The following is a chronological list of those who have served as executive director of the World Food Programme:


title: World Food Programme

text: About two-thirds of WFP life-saving food assistance goes to people facing severe food crises, most of them caused by conflict. In September 2022, WFP warned of record numbers of people who were either starving already or facing starvation. The latest Hunger Hotspots report, co-published by WFP and FAO, reported that 970,000 people faced catastrophic levels of hunger in five countries, namely: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. That is a tenfold increase in a decade. Nigeria, with rising violence and restricted humanitarian access, is also highlighted countries of greatest concern. WFP said it had "scaled up direct food and nutrition assistance to prevent famine and aims to reach a record 153 million people in 2022.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP is also a first responder to sudden-onset emergencies. When floods struck Sudan in July 2020, it provided emergency food assistance to nearly 160,000 people. WFP provided food as well as vouchers for people to buy vital supplies, while also planning recovery, reconstruction and resilience-building activities, after Cyclone Idai struck Mozambique and floods washed an estimated 400,000 hectares of crops on early 2019.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP's emergency is also pre-emptive, in offsetting the potential impact of disasters. In the Sahel region of Africa, amidst economic challenges, climate change and armed militancy, WFP's activities included working with communities and partners to harvest water for irrigation and restore degraded land, and supporting livelihoods through skills training. It uses early-warning systems to help communities prepare for disasters. In Bangladesh, weather forecasting led to distributions of cash to vulnerable farmers to pay for measures such as reinforcing their homes or stockpiling food ahead of heavy flooding.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP is the lead agency of the Logistics Cluster, a coordination mechanism established by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC). It also co-leads the Food Security Cluster. The WFP-managed United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) serves over 300 destinations globally. WFP also manages the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD), a global network of hubs that procures, stores and transports emergency supplies for the organization and the wider humanitarian community. WFP logistical support, including its air service and hubs, has enabled staff and supplies from WFP and partner organizations to reach areas where commercial flights have not been available, during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP provided cash to vulnerable groups ahead of torrential rains in Bangladesh in July 2019. WFP's response to Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas in September 2019 was assisted by a regional office in Barbados, which had been set up the previous year to enable better disaster preparedness and response. In advance of Hurricane Dorian, WFP deployed technical experts in food security, logistics and emergency telecommunication, to support a rapid needs assessment. Assessment teams also conducted an initial aerial reconnaissance mission, with the aim of putting teams on the ground as soon as possible.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP works with governments, other UN agencies, NGOs and the private sector, supporting nutrition interventions, policies and programmes that include school meals and food fortification.


title: World Food Programme

text: School meals encourage parents in vulnerable families to send their children to school, rather than work. They have proved highly beneficial in areas including education and gender equality, health and nutrition, social protection, local economies and agriculture. WFP works with partners to ensure school feeding is part of integrated school health and nutrition programmes, which include services such as malaria control, menstrual hygiene and guidance on sanitation and hygiene.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP is a member of a global consortium that forms the , which helps smallholder farmers receive information, investment and support, so they can produce and sell marketable surplus and increase their income. WFP connects smallholder farmers to markets in more than 40 countries.


title: World Food Programme

text: In 2008, WFP coordinated the five-year Purchase for Progress (P4P) pilot project. P4P assists smallholding farmers by offering them opportunities to access agricultural markets and to become competitive players in the marketplace. The project spanned across 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and trained 800,000 farmers in improved agricultural production, post-harvest handling, quality assurance, group marketing, agricultural finance, and contracting with WFP. The project resulted in 366,000 metric tons of food produced and generated more than US$148 million in income for its smallholder farmers.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP's Food Assistance for Assets (FFA) programme provides cash or food-based transfers to address recipients' immediate food needs, while they build or boost assets, such as repairing irrigation systems, bridges, land and water management activities.


title: World Food Programme

text: FFA reflects WFP's drive towards food assistance and development rather than food aid and dependency. It does this by placing a focus on the assets and their impact on people and communities rather than on the work to realize them, representing a shift away from the previous approaches such as Food or Cash for Work programmes and large public works programmes.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP uses cash transfers such as physical banknotes, a debit card or vouchers, aiming to give more choice to aid recipients and encourage the funds to be invested back into local economies. During the first half of 2022, WFP delivered US$1.6 billion in cash to 37 million people in 70 countries to alleviate hunger. A 2022 study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative concluded that the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) cash programme "significantly reduced the incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty" among the people receiving cash transfers.


title: World Food Programme

text: In the most climate disaster-prone provinces of the Philippines, WFP is providing emergency response training and equipment to local government units, and helping set up automated weather stations.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP's digital transformation centres on deploying the latest technologies and data to help achieve zero hunger. WFP's Munich-based Innovation Accelerator has sourced and supported more than 60 projects spanning 45 countries. In 2017, WFP launched the Building Blocks programme. It aims to distribute money-for-food assistance to Syrian refugees in Jordan. The project uses blockchain technology to digitize identities and allow refugees to receive food with eye scanning. WFP's low-tech hydroponics kits allow refugees to grow barley that feed livestock in the Sahara desert.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP works with governments, private sector, UN agencies, international finance groups, academia, and more than 1,000 non-governmental organisations. The WFP, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development reaffirmed their joint efforts to end global hunger, particularly amid the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a joint meeting of their governing bodies in October 2020. In the United States, Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) organization World Food Program USA supports the WFP. The American organisation frequently donates to the WFP, though the two are separate entities for taxation purposes.


title: World Food Programme

text: WFP won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for its "efforts for combating hunger", its "contribution to creating peace in conflicted-affected areas," and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of food as a weapon of war and conflict. Receiving the award, Executive David Beasley called for billionaires to "step up" and help source the US$5 billion WFP needs to save 30 million people from famine.


title: World Food Programme

text: In 2018 the Center for Global Development ranked WFP last in a study of 40 aid programmes, based on indicators grouped into four themes: maximising efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing burdens, and transparency and learning. These indicators relate to aid effectiveness principles developed at the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), the Accra Agenda for Action (2008), and the Busan Partnership Agreement (2011).


title: World Food Programme

text: There is wide general debate on the net effectiveness of aid, including unintended consequences such as increasing the duration of conflicts, and increasing corruption. WFP faces difficult decisions on working with some regimes.


title: ENIC Group

text: ENIC Group (formerly English National Investment Company) is a British investment company. ENIC is owned by Joseph "Joe" Lewis (through Tavistock Group). ENIC is Bahamas-registered subsidiary, ENIC International Limited, currently holds 85.55% of the total issued share capital of English Premier League club, Tottenham Hotspur. Club chairman Daniel Levy and his family own 29.4% of the share capital of ENIC International Limited, while Lewis owns 70.6%.


title: ENIC Group

text: Previously a private investment trust, English National Investment Company was floated on the London stock exchange in 1997 as ENIC plc and became a holding company for sports, media and leisure businesses. During the football investment boom of the mid to late 1990s it began to acquire shares in football clubs around Europe and bought stakes in Tottenham Hotspur (29.9%), Rangers F.C. (25.1%), SK Slavia Prague (96.7%), AEK Athens F.C. (47%), Vicenza Calcio (99.9%) and FC Basel (50%).


title: ENIC Group

text: As well as football clubs, ENIC also invested in other businesses, such as software company Autonomy, retailer Warner Bros. Studio Stores, gambling website ukbetting.com and entertainment complex Church Street Station.


title: ENIC Group

text: In 2001 ENIC bought a controlling stake in Tottenham Hotspur F.C. from Alan Sugar and Levy became chairman of the club. Later in 2001, ENIC's listing was transferred from the main stock exchange to the AIM index.


title: ENIC Group

text: In 2003 Joe Lewis and Daniel Levy, who controlled 52% of ENIC shares, formed Kondar Ltd to buy out the remaining shareholders. A cash offer of £40m was made to take the company back into private ownership. Following the buyout, Lewis and Levy controlled 70.6% and 29.4% respectively of shares in ENIC, which was delisted from AIM and renamed ENIC Group.


title: ENIC Group

text: In May 2006 ENIC transferred 61% stake in SK Slavia Prague to Czech brokerage firm Key Investments. In January 2008 Key Investment breached the contract with ENIC and increased the equity of SK Slavia Prague.


title: ENIC Group

text: Following its purchase of Sugar's remaining shares in Tottenham Hotspur in 2007, ENIC continued to build up its stake, taking its shareholding to 85%. To fund this investment it disposed of its stakes in other football clubs as well as many of its media and entertainment businesses.


title: ENIC Group

text: On the 24 May 2022, Tottenham Hotspur announced a capital increase of up to £150 million from ENIC via the issue of shares. The announcement claimed "the equity injection provides the Premier League club with greater financial flexibility and the ability to further invest on and off the pitch."


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Alija Izetbegović (; ; 8 August 1925 – 19 October 2003) was a Bosnian politician, lawyer, Islamic philosopher and author, who in 1992 became the first president of the Presidency of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He served in this role until 1996, when he became a member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, serving until 2000.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Izetbegović was the founder and first president of the Party of Democratic Action. He was also the author of several books, most notably "Islam Between East and West" and the "Islamic Declaration".


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Alija Izetbegović was born on 8 August 1925 in the town of Bosanski Šamac. He was the third of five children—two sons and three daughters—born to Mustafa Izetbegović and Hiba (née Džabija). His family was a distinguished but impoverished family descended from a former aristocrat, Izet-beg Jahić, from Belgrade who moved to the Bosnia Vilayet in 1868, following the withdrawal of the last Ottoman troops from Serbia. The Jahić family lived in Belgrade for hundreds of years. While serving as a soldier in Üsküdar, Izetbegović's paternal grandfather Alija married a Turkish woman named Sıdıka Hanım. The couple eventually moved to Bosanski Šamac and had five children. Izetbegović's grandfather later became the town's mayor, and reportedly saved forty Serbs from execution at the hands of Austro-Hungarian authorities following Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Izetbegović's father, an accountant, had fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Italian Front during World War I and sustained serious injuries which left him in a semi-paralyzed state for at least a decade. He declared bankruptcy in 1927. The following year, the family moved to Sarajevo, where Izetbegović received a secular education.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In 1941, Izetbegović helped to found an Islamist organisation Young Muslims ("Mladi Muslimani"), which was modeled after the Muslim Brotherhood. When the "Young Muslims" became torn between supporting the largely Muslim "Waffen-SS" Handschar Division or the communist Yugoslav Partisans, some claim that Izetbegović joined the SS Handschar, despite a lack of evidence. Izetbegović's family denied the claim and said that he was in the communist partisans. Izetbegović was detained by the Serb royalist Chetniks in mid-1944 but released by Chetnik voivode Dragutin Keserović out of gratitude for his grandfather's role in securing the release of the forty Serb hostages in 1914. He was arrested by the Yugoslav communists following the war and sentenced to three years in prison in 1946 on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. Before incarceration, he had earned a law degree at the University of Sarajevo's Faculty of Law. He remained engaged in politics after serving the sentence.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In 1970, Izetbegović published a manifesto entitled the "Islamic Declaration", expressing his views on relationships between Islam, state and society. The manifesto was banned by the government. In it, he tried to reconcile Western-style progress with Islamic tradition. The work issued a call for "Islamic renewal" without mentioning Yugoslavia specifically. However, he and his supporters were accused by the Communist authorities of reviving the "Young Muslims" organisation and of a conspiracy to set up an "Islamically pure" Bosnia and Herzegovina.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: The declaration designated Pakistan as a model country to be emulated by Muslim revolutionaries worldwide. One of the passages that was in particular picked out by his opponents during the trial was, "There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions...the state should be an expression of religion and should support its moral concepts." The declaration remains a source of controversy. Serbs, who were opposed to Izetbegović, often quoted the declaration as indicative of an intent to create an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Bosnia.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: He himself later insisted many times that the statements about the creation of an Islamic state were hypothetical and were not to be the applied to the situation in Bosnia. Regardless, Bosnia's non-Muslim population were unsettled by several of his statements in his writings. Passages from the declaration were frequently quoted by Izetbegović's opponents during the 1990s, who considered it to be an open statement of Islamic fundamentalism. This opinion is also shared by some Western authors. Izetbegović vigorously denied these accusations.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Izetbegović was first arrested in 1946 at age of twenty-one. He was sentenced to jail in various cases in a total for 8 years for his membership in an organization fighting for human rights and religious rights.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In April 1983, Izetbegović and twelve other Bosniak activists (including Melika Salihbegović, Edhem Bičakčić, Omer Behmen, Mustafa Spahić and Hasan Čengić) were tried before a Sarajevo court for a variety of charges called "offences as principally hostile activity inspired by Bosnian nationalism, association for purposes of hostile activity and hostile propaganda". Izetbegović was further accused of organizing a visit to a Muslim congress in Iran. All of those tried were convicted and Izetbegović was sentenced to fourteen years in prison.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: The verdict was strongly criticised by Western human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch, which claimed the case was based on "communist propaganda", and the accused were not charged with either using or advocating violence. The following May, the Bosnian Supreme Court conceded the point with an announcement that "some of the actions of the accused did not have the characteristics of criminal acts" and reduced Izetbegović's sentence to twelve years. In 1988, as communist rule faltered, he was pardoned and released after almost five years in prison. His health had suffered serious damage.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: The introduction of a multi-party system in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s prompted Izetbegović and other Bosniak activists to establish a political party, the Party of Democratic Action ("Stranka Demokratske Akcije", SDA) in 1989. It had a largely Muslim character; similarly, the other principal ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbs and Croats, also established ethnically based parties (SDS and HDZ BiH). The SDA won the largest share of the vote, 33% of the seats, with the next runners-up being nationalist ethnic parties representing Serbs and Croats. Fikret Abdić won the popular vote for Presidency member among the Bosniak candidates, with 44% of the vote, Izetbegović with 37%. According to the Bosnian constitution, the first two candidates of each of the "three constitutient nations" would be elected to a seven-member multi-ethnic rotating presidency (with two Croats, two Serbs, two Bosniaks and one Yugoslav); a Croat took the post of prime minister and a Serb the presidency of the Assembly. Abdić agreed to stand down as the Bosniak candidate for the Presidency and Izetbegović became Chairman of the Presidency.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Bosnia and Herzegovina's power-sharing arrangements broke down very quickly as ethnic tensions grew after the outbreak of fighting between Serbs and Croats in neighboring Croatia. Although Izetbegović was due to hold the presidency for only one year according to the constitution, this arrangement was initially suspended due to "extraordinary circumstances" and was eventually abandoned altogether during the war as the Serb and Croat nationalistic parties SDS and HDZ BiH abandoned the government. When fighting broke out in Slovenia and Croatia in the summer of 1991, it was immediately apparent that Bosnia and Herzegovina would soon become embroiled in the conflict. Izetbegović initially proposed a loose confederation to preserve a unitary Bosnian state and strongly urged a peaceful solution. He did not subscribe to the "peace at all costs" view and commented in February 1991 that "I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia and Herzegovina ... but for that peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina I would not sacrifice sovereignty." He abandoned the Zulfikarpašić–Karadžić agreement which would see Bosnia as a sovereign state in a confederation with Serbia and Montenegro, with 60% of Sandžak ceded to Bosnia. By the start of 1992, it had become apparent that the rival nationalist demands were fundamentally incompatible: the Bosniaks and Croats sought an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina while the Serbs wanted it to remain in a rump Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia. Izetbegović publicly complained that he was being forced to ally with one side or the other, vividly characterising the dilemma by comparing it to having to choose between leukemia and a brain tumour.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In January 1992, Portuguese diplomat José Cutileiro drafted a plan, later known as the Lisbon Agreement, that would turn Bosnia into a triethnic cantonal state. Initially, all three sides signed up to the agreement; Izetbegović for the Bosniaks, Radovan Karadžić for the Serbs and Mate Boban for the Croats. Some two weeks later, however, Izetbegović withdrew his signature and declared his opposition to any type of partition of Bosnia, supposedly encouraged by Warren Zimmermann, the United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia at the time.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In February 1992, Izetbegović called an independence referendum on the European condition for recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an independent state, despite warnings from the Serb members of the presidency that it was unconstitutional and that any move towards independence would result in the Serb-inhabited areas seceding to remain with the rump Yugoslavia. The referendum achieved a 99.4% vote in favor on a 63% turnout, largely boycotted by the Serbs. Namely, according to the constitution of SR BiH, the change of the state-legal status was not possible without the national consensus of all three nations. This mechanism was incorporated into the constitution due to the genocide committed against Serbs in World War II, which disturbed the ethnic balance. Another possibility was for two-thirds of the citizens to vote in a referendum to leave the Yugoslav federation. The Serbs did not agree with the secession from Yugoslavia. Furthermore, less than two-thirds of the population went to the referendum. Nevertheless, the EU and the US accepted the referendum.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: The Bosnian parliament, already vacated by the Bosnian Serbs, formally declared independence from Yugoslavia on 29 February and Izetbegović announced the country's independence on 3 March. It did not take effect until 7 April 1992, when the European Union and United States recognized the new country. Sporadic fighting between Serbs and government forces occurred across Bosnia in the run-up to international recognition. Izetbegović appears to have gambled that the international community would send a peacekeeping force upon recognising Bosnia in order to prevent a war, but this did not happen. Instead, war immediately broke out across the country as Serb and Yugoslav army forces took control of large areas against the poorly equipped government security forces. Initially, Serb forces attacked the non-Serb civilian population in eastern Bosnia. Once towns and villages were securely in their hands, the Serb forces systematically ransacked or burnt down Bosniak houses and apartments, Bosniak civilians were rounded up or captured, and sometimes beaten or killed in the process. Men and women were separated, with many of the men detained in the camps. The women were kept in various detention centres where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions, including also being raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers or policemen.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Izetbegović consistently promoted the idea of a multi-ethnic Bosnia under central control, which seemed a hopeless strategy under the circumstances. The Bosnian Croats, disillusioned with the Sarajevo government and supported militarily and financially by the Croatian government, increasingly turned to establishing their own ethnically based state of "Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia" in Herzegovina and Central Bosnia. The Croats pulled out of the Sarajevo government and fighting broke out in 1993. In some areas local armistices were signed between the Serbs and Croats. Croat forces launched their first attacks on Bosniaks in central Bosnia in June 1992, but these failed. The Graz agreement caused deep division among Bosnian Croats and strengthened separatist Herzeg-Bosnia, and led to the Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosniak civilians from May 1992 to March 1993.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Adding to the general confusion, Izetbegović's former colleague Fikret Abdić established an "Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia" in parts of Cazin and Velika Kladuša municipalities in opposition to the Sarajevo government and in cooperation with Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman. Abdić's faction was eventually routed by the Bosnian army. By this time, Izetbegović's government controlled only about 25% of the country and represented principally the Bosniak community.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: For three and a half years, Izetbegović lived precariously in a besieged Sarajevo surrounded by Serb forces. He denounced the failure of Western countries to reverse Serbian aggression and turned instead to the Muslim world, with which he had already established relations during his days as a dissident. The Bosnian government received money and arms. Osama bin Laden was given a Bosnian passport during Izetbegović's presidency and went on to visit Bosnia and Kosovo several times. Bin Laden stated to a German reporter that he planned to bring Muslim volunteers to Bosnia. Following massacres on Bosnian Muslims by Serb and, to a lesser extent, Croat forces, foreign Muslim volunteers joined the Bosnian army in the so-called Bosnian mujahideen, numbering between 300 and 1,500. They quickly attracted heavy criticism amplified by Serb and Croat propaganda, who considered their presence to be evidence of "violent Islamic fundamentalism" at the heart of Europe. However, the foreign volunteers became unpopular even with many of the Bosniak population, because the Bosnian army had thousands of troops and no need for more soldiers, but for arms. Many Bosnian army officers and intellectuals were suspicious regarding foreign volunteers' arrival in the central part of the country, because they came from Split and Zagreb in Croatia, and were passed through the self-proclaimed Herzeg-Bosnia unlike Bosnian army soldiers who were regularly arrested by Croat forces. According to general Stjepan Šiber, the highest-ranking ethnic Croat in the Bosnian army, the key roles in the foreign volunteers' arrival were played by Franjo Tuđman and Croatian counter-intelligence underground with the aim to justify the involvement of Croatia in the Bosnian War and mass crimes committed by Croat forces. Although Izetbegović regarded them as symbolically valuable as a sign of the Muslim world's support for Bosnia, they appear to have made little military difference and became a major political liability.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In 1993, Izetbegović agreed to a peace plan that would divide Bosnia along ethnic lines but continued to insist on a unitary Bosnia government from Sarajevo and on the allocation to the Bosniaks of a large percentage of Bosnia's territory. The war between the Bosniaks and Croats was eventually ended by a truce brokered with the aid of the Americans in March 1994, following which the two sides collaborated more closely against the Serbs. NATO then became increasingly involved in the conflict with occasional "pinprick" bombings conducted against the Bosnian Serbs, generally following violations of ceasefires and the no-fly zone over Bosnia. The Bosnian Croat forces benefited indirectly from US military training given to the Croatian Army. In addition, the Croatians provided considerable quantities of weaponry to the Bosnian Croats and much smaller amounts to the Bosnian army, despite a UN weapons embargo. Most of the Bosnian army's supply of weapons was airlifted from the Muslim world, specifically Iran – an issue which became the subject of some controversy and a US congressional investigation in 1996. In September 1993, the Second Bosniak Congress officially re-introduced the historical ethnic name Bosniaks. The Yugoslav "Muslims by nationality" policy was considered by Bosniaks to be neglecting and opposing their Bosnian identity because the term tried to describe Bosniaks as a religious group, not an ethnic one.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: The Washington Agreement in March 1994 ended the Croat-Bosniak War and divided the combined ARBiH and HVO territory into ten autonomous cantons, establishing the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: In August 1995, following the Srebrenica massacre and the 2nd Markale massacre, NATO launched an intensive bombing campaign which destroyed the Bosnian Serb command and control system. This allowed the Croatian and Bosniak forces to overrun many Serb-held areas of the country, producing a roughly 50/50 split of the territory between the two sides. The offensive came to a halt not far from the de facto Serb capital of Banja Luka.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: When the Croat and Bosniak forces stopped their advance they had captured the power plants supplying Banja Luka's electricity and used that control to pressure the Serb leadership into accepting a ceasefire. The parties agreed to meet at Dayton, Ohio to negotiate a peace treaty under the supervision of the United States. Serb and Croat interests were represented by Milošević and Tuđman, respectively. Izetbegović represented the internationally recognized Bosnian government.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: After the Bosnian War was formally ended by the Dayton peace accord in November 1995, Izetbegović became a Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. His party's power declined after the international community installed a High Representative to oversee affairs of state, with more power than the Presidency or parliaments of either the Bosniak-Croat or Serb entities. He stepped down in October 2000 at the age of 74, citing his bad health. However, Izetbegović remained popular with the Bosniak public, who nicknamed him "Dedo" (which in Bosnian means "grandfather"). His endorsement helped his party to bounce back in the 2002 general election. Some observers have described his rule as authoritarian with nationalist positions.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Izetbegović died on 19 October 2003 of heart disease complicated by injuries suffered from a fall at home. An ICTY investigation of Izetbegović was in progress, but ended with his death. His funeral, held three days after his death, on 22 October, drew many Bosnian officials, dignitaries from 44 foreign countries, 105 members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and between 100,000 and 150,000 people, with his family receiving over 4,000 telegrams. Over 400 journalists attended the funeral as it was broadcast live on TV with 37 cameras.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: Following Izetbegović's death there was an initiative to rename a part of the main street of Sarajevo from Ulica Maršala Tita (Marshal Tito Street) and the Sarajevo International Airport in his honor. Following objections from politicians from Republika Srpska, the international community, and UN envoy Paddy Ashdown, both initiatives failed.


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: He had a son, Bakir, who also entered politics, as well as two granddaughters (Jasmina and Mirzela Izetbegović).


title: Alija Izetbegović

text: On 11 August 2006, Izetbegović's grave at the Kovači cemetery in Sarajevo was badly damaged by a bomb. The identity of the bomber or bombers has never been determined.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Mohamedou Ould Slahi () (born December 21, 1970) is a Mauritanian citizen who was detained at Guantánamo Bay detention camp without charge from 2002 until his release on October 17, 2016.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi traveled from his home in Germany to Afghanistan in December 1990 "to support the mujahideen." Slahi trained in an al Qaeda camp and swore allegiance to the organization in March 1991. He returned to Germany soon after, but traveled back to Afghanistan for two months in early 1992. Slahi said that, after leaving Afghanistan the second time, he "severed all ties with ... al-Qaeda." The U.S. government maintains that Slahi "recruited for al-Qaeda and provided it with other support" since then. He lived in Montreal, Quebec, Canada from November 1999 to January 2000. Slahi was suspected of involvement in the attempted LAX bombing and was investigated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Due to the scrutiny, Slahi returned to live in Mauritania where he was questioned and cleared of involvement.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. again was interested in Slahi. He was brought in for questioning by Mauritanian authorities on November 20, 2001, after which he was detained for seven days and questioned by Mauritanian officers and by agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The CIA then transported Slahi to a Jordanian prison through its extraordinary rendition program; he was held for eight months. Slahi said he was tortured by the Jordanians. After being flown to Afghanistan and held for two weeks, he was transferred to military custody and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba on August 4, 2002, under the authority of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Slahi was subjected to sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature extremes, beatings and sexual humiliation at Guantánamo. In one documented incident, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea in a boat for a mock execution. Lt. Col Stuart Couch refused to prosecute Slahi in a Military Commission in 2003. He said that "Salahi's incriminating statements—the core of the government's case—had been taken through torture, rendering them inadmissible under U.S. and international law."


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In 2005, the internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer Nancy Hollander got involved in Slahi’s case, together with lawyer Theresa Duncan. They argued Slahi’s rights to a fair trial, despite criticism for defending a terrorist suspect. In 2010, Judge James Robertson granted a writ of "habeas corpus", ordering Slahi to be released on March 22. In his unclassified opinion, Judge Robertson wrote: "... associations alone are not enough, of course, to make detention lawful." The Department of Justice appealed the decision. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the ruling and remanded the case to the District Court on November 5, 2010, for further factual findings. The District Court never held the second habeas hearing.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: On July 14, 2016, Slahi was approved by a Periodic Review Board for release from detention. Slahi was freed and returned to Mauritania on October 17, 2016; he was imprisoned at Guantánamo for over fourteen years.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi wrote a memoir in 2005 while imprisoned, which the U.S. government declassified in 2012 with numerous redactions. The memoir was published as "Guantánamo Diary" in January 2015 and became an international bestseller. Slahi is the first Guantánamo detainee to publish a memoir while imprisoned. Slahi wrote four other books whilst in detention, but he has not been allowed to access these books since being removed from Guantanamo.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi was an exceptional student in high school in Mauritania. In 1988, he received a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Society to study in West Germany, where he earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Duisburg. In 1991, Slahi travelled to Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen fighting against the communist central government. The United States had supported the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation starting in 1979, and funnelled billions of dollars of weapons and aid to the "freedom fighters". After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, there was a civil war between Mohammad Najibullah's government and the Mujahideen. Slahi trained for several weeks at the al Farouq training camp near Khost, which was run by al Qaeda, one of many Mujahideen groups in the civil war. At the end of his training in March 1991, he swore "bayat" to al Qaeda and was given the "kunya" (nom de guerre) of "Abu Musab." However, he did not participate in the civil war, instead returning to Germany.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In February 1992, Slahi travelled again to Afghanistan and was assigned to a mortar battery in Gardez. Six weeks later, the Najibullah regime fell and he returned to Germany. In hearings in Guantanamo, Slahi has stated that he travelled to Afghanistan twice, attended the al Farouq training camp, and fought against the Afghan central government in 1992, but that he was never an enemy combatant against the United States. In fact, he was fighting on the same side as the United States, which in 1992 supported the Mujahideen fight against the communist government in Afghanistan.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi's cousin and former brother-in-law is Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, also known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. Before the September 11 attacks in the United States, Al-Walid was a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden, was on the Shura council of al Qaeda, and headed the sharia council. However, two months before the attacks, al-Walid, along with several other al Qaeda members, wrote a letter to bin Laden opposing the planned attacks. Al-Walid left al Qaeda after the attacks.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: While al-Walid was in Sudan, where al Qaeda was based in the mid-1990s, he twice asked Slahi to help him get money to his family in Mauritania, about $4,000 in December 1997 and another $4,000 in December 1998. In the 2010 "habeas corpus" opinion for Slahi, the judge wrote: "the government relies on nothing but Slahi's uncorroborated, coerced statements to conclude that the money transfers were done on behalf of and in support of al-Qa'ida." In 1998, Slahi was heard by U.S. intelligence talking to al-Walid on a satellite phone traced to bin Laden.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: The 9/11 Commission Report, based on the interrogations of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, claimed that in 1999, Slahi advised three members of the Hamburg Cell to travel to Afghanistan to obtain training before waging jihad in Chechnya. However, the federal District Court in 2010 that reviewed Slahi's case found that Slahi "provided lodging for three men for one night at his home in Germany [in November 1999], that one of them was Ramzi bin al-Shibh and that there was discussion of jihad and Afghanistan." Besides Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mr. Slahi's other two houseguests were future September 11 hijackers. Slahi claims it was merely a matter of hospitality to fellow Muslims.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada in November 1999 because German immigration authorities would not extend his visa for residence in Germany. Since he was a "hafiz," he was invited by the imam of a large mosque to lead Ramadan prayers. Ahmed Ressam, who was caught with explosives crossing the Canada–US border in December 1999 as part of the 2000 millennium attack plot, had attended the same mosque. Since Slahi was known to U.S. intelligence through contact with his cousin Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, he was suspected by them of activating Ressam.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) put Slahi under surveillance for several weeks but did not find any grounds to arrest him. According to a classified report of German intelligence, "there is not only no evidence of any involvement by Ould Slahi in the planning and preparation of the attacks, but also no indication that Ressam and Slahi knew each other." Slahi left Canada on January 21, 2000, to return to Mauritania.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: During his trip home, Slahi was arrested in Senegal at the request of United States authorities and questioned about the millennium plot. He was transferred to Mauritania to be interrogated by local authorities and United States FBI agents. After three weeks in custody, during which Slahi was accused of being involved in the millennium plot, he was released.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi worked at various companies in Mauritania as an electrical engineer starting in May 2000. After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. renewed scrutiny of everyone suspected of having ties to al Qaeda. On September 29, he was again detained by the Mauritanian authorities for questioning. He cooperated with the authorities several more times and then for the last time starting on November 20, 2001. Slahi was interrogated by both Mauritanian officials and the FBI for seven days.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Then the CIA transported him to Jordan using extraordinary rendition. The CIA supervised his interrogation at a Jordanian prison for eight months. Slahi claims he was tortured and forced to confess to involvement with the millennium plot. On July 19, 2002, the CIA transported Slahi to Bagram, Afghanistan, where he was transferred to military custody and held at the detention facility. The US military flew Slahi to Guantanamo Bay detention camp on August 4, 2002.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi was assigned detainee ID number 760 and was initially held in Camp Delta. Officials belonging to the CSIS interviewed Slahi in February 2003. He was among 14 men classified as high-value detainees, for whom United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized use of what were called enhanced interrogation methods, which have since been classified as torture. By January 2003, US military interrogators pressed to make Slahi their second "Special Project," drawing up an interrogation plan like that used against Mohammed al-Qahtani. Declassified documents show that Slahi was transferred to an isolation cell near the end of May and abusive interrogation started. He was subjected to extreme cold and noise, extended sleeplessness, forced standing or other postures for extended periods of time, threats against his family, sexual humiliation and other abuses.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In February 2015, a series in "The Guardian" reported that one of his interrogators was Richard Zuley, a career homicide detective with the Chicago Police Department, who was called in on assignment with the United States Navy Reserve. In Chicago, Zuley has been the subject of civil suits by inmates attributing similar abuse, including shackling, threats and coerced confessions.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In September 2003, Slahi was moved to Camp Echo. Memos summarizing meetings held on October 9, 2003 and February 2, 2004 between General Geoffrey Miller and Vincent Cassard of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) acknowledged that camp authorities were not permitting the ICRC to have access to Slahi, due to "military necessity."


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Lt. Col V. Stuart Couch, a Marine Corps lawyer, was appointed as Slahi's prosecutor at Guantanamo. He withdrew from the case in May 2004 after reviewing it in depth. Couch said that he believed that Slahi "had blood on his hands," but he "could no longer continue the case in good conscience" because of the alleged torture, which tainted all confessions Slahi had made. Couch said that "the evidence is not believable because of the methods used to obtain it and the fact that it has not been independently corroborated."


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: The "Wall Street Journal" published a letter that Slahi wrote to his lawyers on November 9, 2006. In the letter, Slahi said all his confessions of crimes were the result of torture. He laughed at being asked to recount "everything" that he had said during interrogations, joking that it was "like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated."


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: According to Peter Finn of "The Washington Post" in 2010, Slahi, along with Tariq al-Sawah, were "two of the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantanamo. Today, they are housed in a little fenced-in compound at the military prison, where they live a life of relative privilege – gardening, writing and painting – separated from other detainees in a cocoon designed to reward and protect."


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi started writing a memoir of his experiences in 2005, continuing into the next year. The more than 400-page manuscript was declassified by government censors in 2012 after numerous redactions. Excerpts were serialized in "Slate" magazine beginning in April 2013. It was published as a book, "Guantánamo Diary," in January 2015.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: When he assumed office in January 2009, President Barack Obama repeated his commitment to close Guantanamo. He convened a six-agency task force to review the detainees and recommend those who could be released.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In its 2010 report, the Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended Salahi be considered for prosecution in a military commission. The task force recommended that detainees deemed too dangerous to release, but without sufficient evidence for prosecution, receive a Periodic Review Board hearing. In 2013, Slahi was listed as one of 71 detainees eligible for a review.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: US District Court Judge James Robertson had issued an order to the Department of Defense barring them from interrogating Slahi while his habeas corpus case was under consideration. Guantánamo authorities in October 2014 seized all of Slahi's privileged legal papers and all his personal belongings, including a computer. They also stripped Slahi of his "comfort items," including letters from his late mother, in an attempt to force him to agree to interrogations. Slahi wrote in an unclassified letter to his attorneys in April 2015 that officials had offered to return these items if he agreed to interrogations, which had been barred for six years. Prosecutors in the case of Ahmed al-Darbi wanted to interrogate Slahi about him.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Slahi was last interrogated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on May 22, 2003. He claimed an FBI interrogator warned him "this was our last session; he told me that I was not going to enjoy the time to come." Three months later Defense Secretary Rumsfeld approved the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which are well known as torture. Slahi was subjected to isolation, temperature extremes, beatings and sexual humiliation by military interrogators. In one incident, he was blindfolded and taken out to sea for a mock execution.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: A 2007 "Wall Street Journal" report paraphrased an incident described in the 2005 Schmidt-Furlow Report, an investigation by the Department of Defense into detainee treatment at Guantanamo following FBI allegations of torture used by DOD interrogators in the early years of Guantanamo:


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: On July 17, 2003, a masked interrogator told Mr. Slahi he had dreamed of watching detainees dig a grave... The interrogator said he saw "a plain, pine casket with [Mr. Slahi's] identification number painted in orange lowered into the ground."


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In the summer of 2003, Slahi was repeatedly subjected to the use of an interrogation technique which the Schmidt-Furlow Report stated had been prohibited by the Secretary of Defense on December 2, 2002.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: What was not revealed until 2008 was that in a March 14, 2003, legal opinion memo issued by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Yoo advised that federal laws related to torture and other abuses did not apply to interrogations overseas. At that point the Bush administration contended that Guantanamo Bay was outside US jurisdiction. The Defense Department used this memo to authorize the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo and in Iraq. Also, by 2005, the "New York Times" reported that by an April 2003 memo from Rumsfeld to General James T. Hill, commander of United States Southern Command, responsible for Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld authorized 24 specific permitted interrogation techniques to be used. Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, withdrew the Yoo Torture Memos in June 2004 and advised federal agencies not to rely on them.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: The United States Senate Committee on Armed Services produced a report titled "Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody" on November 20, 2008. It contains information about the treatment of Slahi and others at Guantanamo before 2005.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: In "Rasul v. Bush" (2004), the United States Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantánamo Bay detention camp had the right of "habeas corpus" to challenge their detention. Slahi had "habeas" petitions submitted on his behalf. In response, the Department of Defense published 27 pages of unclassified documents from his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) on July 14, 2005.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) mandated that Guantánamo detainees were no longer entitled access to the U.S. federal courts, so all pending "habeas" petitions were stayed. However, in June 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in "Boumediene v. Bush" that the MCA of 2006 could not remove detainees' right to "habeas" and access to the federal court system. All previous "habeas" petitions were eligible to be re-instated.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: Before submitting briefs in the "habeas" case, the U.S. government dropped its previous allegations that Slahi had participated in the Millennium Plot and that he knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened.


title: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

text: After review of the case, US District Court Judge James Robertson granted the writ of "habeas corpus" and ordered Slahi's release on March 22, 2010. Robertson's ruling was criticized by several Republican Party politicians. Slahi was the 34th detainee whose release was ordered by a federal district court judge reviewing government materials associated with his habeas petition. The unclassified decision was filed on April 9, 2010.