Guantanamo Bay in the Words of a Prisoner !!!

Written by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary details his life inside the US military prison where he remains to this day.

Imagine you receive a knock on the door one day as you return home from work. It’s the police requesting you visit the local police station to answer some routine questions. You take your own car and leave your house for the station to find the course of your life forever altered. Suddenly, you’re being held in a secret security prison without any contact with the outside world, not even those you hold dear, let alone legal counsel. 

Soon enough you are flown off from one country to another on a world tour of torture, indefinite detention and interrogation. Eventually, you land at your final destination: a military prison. It’s a torture complex that violates all forms of international law and basic human rights. For years, you are held in detention and solitary confinement. You’re tortured and sexually abused. You’re told that you have been designated a dangerous terrorist, Enemy #1, and if you do not cooperate your entire existence will be erased, your family raped, tortured and killed. 

You learn your predicament is due to the commands of the most powerful world governments and intelligence agencies, yet you never learn of the charges against you. Eventually, you are able to record your story in a diary for the entire world to read. After years of a government crusade to silence your story, the world is finally granted the opportunity to be exposed to the darkest reaches of power and state tyranny. 

Life in Guantanamo Bay 

Even though such censorship is a clear attempt to cover up the deplorable injustices committed by the US government and its proxies against Slahi and prisoners of the “War on Terror,” it fails to disguise some of the darkest points of the book that clearly depict the subversive nature of the empire. Such descriptions include the interrogation, brutal torture and rendition of Slahi. He depicts his interrogators as well as the interrogation techniques used on him in the different secret facilities he had been to with emotional and sensory precision. Such varied settings in the diary serve as an international comparative analysis on torture and interrogation tactics, with Slahi tactfully assessing each.

Slahi’s torture and particularly that which he experienced at Guantanamo has been a frequently cited subject, and brought to much attention by previous reports and books on Guantanamo such as Jess Bravin’s The Terror Courts or the Senate Armed Service Committee’s report on the status of detainees in US custody. As cited in Guantanamo Diary and thoroughly documented in the Senate Committee Report, Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized a “special interrogation plan” to extract information from Slahi. The tactics included sensory and sleep deprivation, sexual abuse, denial of adequate and edible food, threats of harm to his family members, as well as beatings, and were based upon the John Yoo “Counter Resistance Techniques” memos of 2003. 

The documentation of such abusive practices is conveyed in a nuanced manner in Guantanamo Diary. Slahi is not the detached voice or passive victim cited in a government report or a media exposé on enhanced interrogation techniques, but rather the active storyteller, embodying a voice of the voiceless still languishing in Guantanamo and black sites around the world. 

One of the most disturbing descriptions in the book is that of a late night boat ride in which Slahi is blindfolded, beaten and threatened with murder while a bag is put on his head and his jacket is filled with ice. The leader of what the interrogators describe as Slahi’s “Birthday Party” is labeled by the author, throughout his narrative, as “Mr. X.” Recalling one of his final interrogation sessions with Mr. X, Slahi states: 
“[The] special team realized that I was not going to cooperate with them as they wished, and so the next level of torture was approved. [Redacted] and another guy with a German shepherd pried open the door of the interrogation room where [redacted] and I were sitting. It was in [redacted] Building. 
“[Redacted] and his colleague kept hitting me, mostly on my ribs and face, and made me drink salt water for about three hours before giving me over to an Arabic team with an Egyptian and a Jordanian interrogator. Those interrogators continued to beat me while covering me in ice cubes, one, to torture me, and two, to make the new, fresh bruises disappear. Then after about three hours Mr. X and his friends took me back and threw me in my present cell. ‘I told you not to fuck with me, Motherfucker!’ was the last thing I heard from [redacted].” 

In light of the degrading and inhumane experiences Slahi endured, one of the most remarkable elements of the story is his resilience, as well as his capability to rationalize and empathize, even with those who categorized him as the enemy. As Siems states in the introduction: 
“[He] recognizes the larger context of fear and confusion in which all these characters interact, and the much more local institutional and social forces that shape those interaction … he tries to understand people, regardless of stations or uniforms or conditions … In doing so he transforms even the most dehumanizing situations into a series of individual, and at times harrowingly intimate human exchanges.” 

Slahi’s grappling with the darkest forms and complexities of the human condition is an approach that manifests elements of a literary classic. That Slahi fails to lose sense of his humanity in the face of subhuman conditions forcing him to the edges of his sanity is truly one of the most significant components of the narrative. On speculating why an individual would choose to become involved in the commission of war crimes, doing a job which “surely is going to haunt him for the rest of his life,” Slahi states: 
“Maybe he had few choices, because many people in the Army come from poor families, and that’s why the army sometimes gives them the dirtiest job. I mean theoretically [redacted] could have refused to commit crimes of war, and he might even get away with it. Later on I discussed with some of the guards why they executed the order to stop me from praying, since it’s an unlawful order. 

“‘I could have refused, but my boss would have given me a shitty job or transferred me to a bad place. I know I can go to hell for what I have done to you’ one of them told me. History repeats itself: during World War II, German soldiers were not executed when they argued that they received orders.” 

Despite Slahi’s persistence in evoking truth throughout his ordeal, and his resilience and dedication to being set free and reunited with his family in his homeland, three months after the publication of Guantanamo Diary, Slahi was once again internally relocated within the camp and had all his possessions of the past 13 years, except his Quran, taken from him. 

Currently, 93 detainees remain at Guantanamo. The Obama administration claims it is attempting to transfer some of them out, while others cleared for release by several federal agencies are allegedly to be set free in the coming months. However, such efforts are likely to be thwarted by congressional action seeking to ban future transfers of imprisoned men outside Guantanamo. 

Mohamedou Ould Slahi continues to wait for his freedom.

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