Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who languishes in Guantanamo Bay, hand-wrote a 120,000-word diary describing the conditions of his rendition, imprisonment and often brutal treatment at the hands of his captors.
For the better part of a year, Mohamedou Ould Slahi's family in Mauritania made regular visits to a local prison to deliver clothing and money for a man who, unbeknownst to them, was no longer there. He was thousands of miles away, being shuttled from one secret detention camp to another on his way to Guantanamo Bay.
So the Mauritanian guards pocketed the money and kept the clothing. It was a small indignity – over the coming decade, Mr. Slahi would endure far worse than petty theft.
For the better part of 14 years, Mr. Slahi has been locked up in Guantanamo Bay. He faces no charges, and has been ordered released by a U.S. judge. Yet he languishes, a member of the famed detention facility's Kafkaesque demographic of men deemed too innocent to charge but too guilty to release.
This month, however, Mr. Slahi also became something else – the singular voice of Guantanamo's remaining prisoners. In the summer of 2005, when he was 35 and had spent five years in detention, he hand-wrote a 120,000-word diary describing the conditions of his rendition, imprisonment and often brutal treatment at the hands of his captors.
Like anything a Guantanamo detainee says or writes, the diary was immediately deemed classified. It was only after much of what Mr. Slahi described had been confirmed in other documents – many of them made public as a result of freedom-of-information requests or lawsuits – that the U.S. government released a redacted version of his manuscript.
This month, that manuscript has been published under the title Guantanamo Diary. It is the only first-hand account of the world's most notorious detention facility written by someone still imprisoned there.
"What's amazing is how closely it tracks the documentary record," says Larry Siems, a writer and long-time free-expression activist who edited the text for publication. "What he describes in quite careful detail is fully corroborated by the records released by the government."
For years, Mr. Slahi was one of the shining success stories of the vast detention and interrogation system undertaken by the U.S. government following Sept. 11, 2001. The German-educated electrical engineer had pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, and was alleged to have been a key player in the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Proponents of indefinite detention and "enhanced interrogation techniques" could point to Mr. Slahi as an example of why such programs were not only necessary, but useful.
But like so much of the initial justification for the systems and newly created legal frameworks that helped to create Guantanamo, the allegations against Mr. Slahi have not held up well to scrutiny. It turned out his stint with al-Qaeda ended when the various mujahedeen groups stopped fighting the communists and began to fight one another – at which point Mr. Slahi lost interest and moved on. The allegation that he played an integral role in 9/11 was found underwhelming by a U.S. district court judge, who ruled that Mr. Slahi likely didn't know anything about the attacks – indeed, after inspecting the facts of the case, the judge ordered Mr. Slahi released.
And yet, 14 years after he was flown on a Central Intelligence Agency rendition flight to a Jordanian prison, then to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and eventually Guantanamo Bay, he remains imprisoned – his case stalled in a byzantine molasses of appeals and retrials. Once touted as the sort of big fish the facility was designed to house, he is today a symbol of its slow, painful unravelling.
What Guantanamo Diary describes is the minutiae of 14 years of detention – from the sometimes daily interrogations to other measures, both passive and active, taken by Mr. Slahi's captors to induce a confession.
For obvious reasons, the book has a nearly pre-emptive sense of historical importance about it. As the jacket blurb is quick to point out, it is "an unprecedented international publishing event" – the first diary by someone still confined. It is, in book-selling terms, a tremendous hook, and has drummed up enormous public interest.
But more than that, the conditions under which Guantanamo Diary came to be written and published are themselves an indictment of the post-9/11 military-detention and tribunal system. This is a book that both tells a story and is one.
Even though they are echoed in other documents released over the years, the portions of the diary that will likely garner the most attention have to do with the so-called "enhanced" interrogations to which Mr. Slahi and others were subjected. And there is no shortage of examples, from the relatively tame to the terrifying – instances of Mr. Slahi and others being kept in bitterly cold cells, taken to round-the-clock interrogations, blasted with loud music, sexually humiliated and made to look at photos of body parts recovered after 9/11.
Time and again, the descriptions offered by Mr. Slahi paint a picture of interrogators looking for any psychological leverage they can get – a popular tactic, according to the detainee's account, involved making prisoners watch as their captors smashed copies of the Koran against the floor.
Some of the truly fascinating parts of Guantanamo Diary describe the individuals charged with carrying out the interrogations. Despite undergoing frequent and prolonged mistreatment, Mr. Slahi tends to present an almost unemotional retelling of his experiences with them. For example, he describes a conversation in 2003, in which he asks if his interrogator really thinks he can get a confession through torture.
"Look," the man replies. "If a mom asks her kid whether he's done something wrong, he might lie. But if she hits him, he's gonna admit it."
Mr. Slahi writes: "I had no answer to this analogy."
The diary is written in English, which the author learned largely while in captivity. There's plenty of linguistic idiosyncrasy – both a result of his command of the language and his sense of humour, which is readily on display despite the darkness of the subject matter. But the author rarely fails to make his point, especially when describing the psychological toll his ordeal has taken.
"Had I done what they accused me of, I would have relieved myself on day one," he writes. "But the problem is that you cannot just admit to something you haven't done; you need to deliver the details. … It's not just, 'Yes, I did!' No, it doesn't work that way: you have to make up a complete story that makes sense to the dumbest dummies."
There are, of course, numerous gaps in the diary – the result of about 2,600 government redactions that appear as black bars throughout the text. They mostly shield the identities, and sometimes the gender, of the guards and interrogators. As such, there is an unpleasant abruptness to the account, akin to swallowing a bite of food insufficiently chewed. Using a vast array of sources and documents, Mr. Siems, the editor, makes a number of educated guesses about what's behind many of those black bars, appended in footnotes throughout the book. The result is two distinct reading experiences – that of what Mr. Slahi has to say, and that of Mr. Siems trying to solve a puzzle that has thousands of pieces missing.
But despite the myriad challenges of publishing such a book, Guantanamo Diary stands as perhaps the most human depiction of an entire post-9/11 system – one whose minute and grand brutalities have so far largely been described only in the cold, removed language of formal investigations.
"Even when you know these things, it's really impossible to imagine what they mean on a human level, unless you read an account like this," Mr. Siems says.
"Torture dehumanizes, that's what it's meant to do."
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said one interrogation technique involved making prisoners watch as their captors tore up copies of the Koran. In fact, the technique involved the captors smashing the Koran against the floor.