Guantánamo Diary

Starred review from February 9, 2015
A Guantanamo detainee endures a hellish ordeal in this riveting prison diary. Slahi, an electrical engineer, was arrested in his native Mauritania in 2001 at the behest of the U.S. government and has been incarcerated at the American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 13 years. (The memoir was originally written in 2005 but was only recently declassified, with redactions.) There he fought a Kafkaesque battle with interrogators who pressured him to admit involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the failed âmillennium plot" to bomb several targets on Jan. 1, 2000, which he insisted he had no part in, and subjected him to vicious beatings, freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation, sexual groping, and threats that his mother would be imprisoned. After months of abuse, Slahi says, he falsely confessed to terrorism charges. The gripping memoir, ably edited by Larry Siems, captures the prisoner's suffering and disorientation, yet has currents of reflectiveness and empathy as Slahi strives to understand his captors and connect with their humane impulses. His case is complicated: he trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, but he was ordered released from Gitmo by a federal judge in 2010 (though Slahi is still imprisoned there), and Siems's introduction makes a cogent case for his innocence. Whatever the truth, this searing narrative exposes the dark side of the âwar on terror"âthe system of arbitrary imprisonment and âenhanced interrogation" where justice gives way to lawless brutality.

August 1, 2014

Born in Mauritania and educated in Germany, Slahi briefly fought with al-Qaeda units battling the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan with America's blessing. After working in both Germany and Canada, he was detained by a Jordanian commando team but cleared of wrongdoing. Later, capture by the CIA brought him to Guantanamo, where he has remained since 2002 without being charged; the government has ignored a federal judge's release order. Begun three years after he was imprisoned, this is the only diary available by someone still at Gitmo; 2013 excerpts on Slate generated a huge online debate.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2015
A harrowing prison memoir, the first to date by an inmate who is behind bars at the Cuban penitentiary that has become a byword for an American gulag.Slahi was caught up early in the post-9/11 sweep, suspected of having played a role. As he admits, he did fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, "but then al Qaida didn't wage Jihad against America....In the mid-90's they wanted to wage Jihad against America, but I personally had nothing to do with that." After turning himself in for questioning in his native Mauritania, Slahi was "rendered" to Jordan and interrogated for eight months before the Jordanians decided he was innocent. A Marine prosecutor recalls that the CIA, managing Slahi's fate, "just kind of threw him over to U.S. military control in Bagram, Afghanistan," from which he was sent to Guantanamo in 2002. There he has remained, yet to be charged with a crime apart from that he "fucked up." Setting aside the question of complicity, it is shockingly clear from Slahi's account that torture was routine: "I heard so many testimonies from detainees who didn't know each other that they couldn't be lies," he writes, and his own experiences bear this out. For all we know, torture still is routine: This account dates to before 2005, when his manuscript entered into the realm of formally classified military material, and it is heavily redacted, so much so that one representative page is a sea of black strike-throughs, the surviving text reading "was accompanied by an Arabic interpreter....He was very weak in the language." Elsewhere, the prison memoir is much like other books of its kind: The guards are infantile brutes, the inmates a cross-section of humanity, and the rules and laws bewildering. Slahi may or may not be a reliable narrator; readers are called on to suspend disbelief. By his account, of course, he is not guilty. His memoir is essential reading for anyone concerned with human rights and the rule of law.

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