"It is compelling reading nonetheless, chiefly for its contents but also because of the idiosyncratic command of English that Mr Slahi picked up mainly during his confinement. He vividly describes being deprived of sleep for days on end and chained to the floor of freezing cold rooms. He is force-fed seawater, sexually molested, subjected to a mock execution and repeatedly beaten, kicked and smashed across the face, all spiced with threats that his mother will be brought to Guantánamo and gang-raped. At one point, Mr Slahi admits to his interrogators that he is beginning to hear voices that aren’t there. But the torture, he says, failed—not to make him talk, but to tell the truth. Instead, he writes, he simply admitted to anything he thought his jailers might want to hear.
Their actions are baffling and often contradictory: an interrogator questions him about a suspected terrorist who travelled to Iraq in 2003—even though, as his captors knew full well, Mr Slahi had been in prison since 2001 and could not possibly know the answer. The book is also shot through with thick black “redaction” marks, in which an American censor has deemed certain passages too secret to be published. Yet information that is blacked out on one page is often freely available a few pages later; at other times it is trivially easy to deduce what the missing words must be from the surrounding context.
Fourteen years after his trip to the Mauritanian police station, Mr Slahi remains in Guantánamo Bay. Throughout the book, he protests his innocence, maintaining that he had cut his ties to radical Islamism in the early 1990s. It is impossible for his readers to know whether that is true. But a federal judge reviewed the government’s evidence against him, found it wanting, and in 2010 ordered Mr Slahi’s release. Barack Obama’s government appealed, and the case remains pending. Ten years after penning his diary, and with the world’s most powerful democracy having failed to give him a trial, Mr Slahi remains in jail."
Their actions are baffling and often contradictory: an interrogator questions him about a suspected terrorist who travelled to Iraq in 2003—even though, as his captors knew full well, Mr Slahi had been in prison since 2001 and could not possibly know the answer. The book is also shot through with thick black “redaction” marks, in which an American censor has deemed certain passages too secret to be published. Yet information that is blacked out on one page is often freely available a few pages later; at other times it is trivially easy to deduce what the missing words must be from the surrounding context.
Fourteen years after his trip to the Mauritanian police station, Mr Slahi remains in Guantánamo Bay. Throughout the book, he protests his innocence, maintaining that he had cut his ties to radical Islamism in the early 1990s. It is impossible for his readers to know whether that is true. But a federal judge reviewed the government’s evidence against him, found it wanting, and in 2010 ordered Mr Slahi’s release. Barack Obama’s government appealed, and the case remains pending. Ten years after penning his diary, and with the world’s most powerful democracy having failed to give him a trial, Mr Slahi remains in jail."
