The diary of Guantanamo prisoner Mahamedou Ould Slahi

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This was published 9 years ago

The diary of Guantanamo prisoner Mahamedou Ould Slahi

By Jeff Sparrow

Memoir
Guantanamo Diary
MAHAMEDOU OULD SLAHI
Canongate, $29.99

When the authorities in Mauritania asked Mohamedou Ould Slahi to come in for questioning in November 2001, he drove his own car to the prison: the matter would be resolved in a day, they said. Thirteen years later, he remains in US custody in Cuba.

A narrow world: Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay

A narrow world: Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay

In 2005, he wrote the manuscript for Guantanamo Diary, a book that, as its introductory note explains, has been edited twice, once by Larry Siems – who was never permitted contact with the author – and once by the US government.

It thus embodies the regime it chronicles, with the 2500 redactions demanded by the Department of Defence subjecting the reader to a textual version of the arbitrary authority about which Slahi writes.

A document of injustice: <i>Guantanamo Diary</i> by  Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

A document of injustice: Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi.

In places, whole pages disappear beneath the censor's obscuring pen.

For instance, Slahi mentions his creative writing. "One [of] my poems went …" he writes – and we're confronted with a page and half of black redactions: in its own way, the visual poetry of Guantanamo.

Most proper names are excised, though sometimes Siems identifies individuals in the footnotes. Throughout, the government conceals the presence of women at interrogations by obscuring female pronouns, an exercise in bureaucratic arse-covering both typical and idiotic, since gender become immediately apparent from the context – often, the women are sexually humiliating prisoners.

Slahi admits to training with al-Qaeda … but only in Afghanistan in 1990, when the weapons he used were American, supplied in the fight against the Soviet Union. Later, he came under suspicion because he lived and worked in Germany and Canada, and because he knew others who were actively waging jihad.

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Before his final arrest, he had been questioned by Senegalese and Mauritian authorities – as well as the FBI – about involvement in a plot to bomb Los Angeles airport; after each arrest, he'd been released and declared innocent.

But after 9/11, the atmosphere changed.

When he reported to the police in late 2001, the US had him rendered to Jordan – where he was first tortured – and then Bagram in Afghanistan and finally Guantanamo, largely because, in the words of prosecutor Morris Davis, he was seen as a Forrest Gump figure: someone in the background whenever terrorist events occurred.

Slahi wrote Guantanamo Diary in English, his fourth language and a tongue he learned almost entirely from guards. Perhaps as a result, he writes the terror of the American gulag in a simple, colloquial and often humorous prose, strangely reminiscent of Vonnegut or Murakami.

In a letter to his attorney, he compares listing the interrogations to which he'd been subjected to "Charlie Sheen [counting] how many women he dated".

"The investigators were just drowning," he writes elsewhere, "and looking for any straw to grab, and I personally didn't exactly want to be that straw."

Yet that's precisely what happened.

His description of the "special interrogation plan" to which he was subjected in 2003 makes almost unbearable reading: months upon months of sleep deprivation and disorientation through complete silence, interspersed with overwhelming noise. He was entirely isolated from human contact, placed in stress positions, beaten and degraded.

At a certain point, he collapsed entirely and agreed to everything.

"Just tell me the right answer,' 'he says. "Is it good to say yes or to say no?"

The interrogators, desperate for some progress, told him and he repeated their words, confessing to plots that even the US government now acknowledges as outlandish.

In 2010, a US District Court ordered Slahi set free. The decision was immediately appealed and so, five years later, he remains in limbo: clearly not the terrorist mastermind the Americans once thought but detained, at least in part, because the authorities worry what else he might reveal about what they did to him.

In the interim, we have this book, a powerful addition to the canon of prison memoir.

Like the best chroniclers of incarceration – think Berkman, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Serge or Mandela – Slahi conveys the intensity of feeling that the inmate develops about a narrow world: the pleasure of a whispered conversation with another detainee, the joy of secretly learning the date, the despair when an intelligent interrogator gives way to a brutish one.

Though a devout Muslim, Slahi displays an endless curiosity about others and their worlds. He's astonished at the ignorance of his jailers, who seem to think, he says, that the world consists of three places: America, Europe and the Middle East. Yet he likes talking to them about their beliefs and ideas and relationship.

"I enjoyed him being my guard," he says of one man.

Guantanamo, like war, brings out the best and worst in humanity. "[S]ome people try to use the lawlessness to hurt others," Slahi writes, "and some try to reduce the suffering to the minimum."

In one sense, this is a book that never should have been written, for Guantanamo – an inherent affront to democratic values – never should have been opened. Yet we're lucky to have Slahi's diary: a document of injustice, yes, but also testament to the human ability to rise above the unbearable.

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster.

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