GUANTÁNAMO DIARY
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born in a small town in Mauritania in 1970. He won a scholarship to attend college in Germany and worked there for several years as an engineer. He returned to Mauritania in 2000. The following year, at the behest of the United States, he was detained by Mauritanian authorities and rendered to a prison in Jordan; later he was rendered again, first to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and finally, on August 5, 2002, to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was subjected to severe torture. In 2010, a federal judge ordered him immediately released, but the government appealed that decision. He was cleared and released on October 16, 2016, and repatriated to his native country of Mauritania. No charges were filed against him during or after this ordeal.
Larry Siems is a writer and human rights activist and for many years directed the Freedom to Write Program at PEN American Center. He is the author, most recently, of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say about America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program. He lives in New York.
‘This Guantánamo detainee’s harrowing memoir is a tremendous achievement – and a grave warning against ignoring the rule of law’
Observer
‘This is a necessary book. It reminds us that the evil we’re fighting can be found in ourselves as well as our enemies’
Daily Telegraph
‘A sobering, often chilling, read. Slahi’s story deserves to be widely read’
Independent
‘An extraordinary account . . . the global war on terror has found in a Mauritanian captive its true and complete witness’
Guardian
‘Slahi’s book offers a reminders that the struggles we face in these difficult times involve real individuals, not faceless creatures who are to be characterised as members as one or other hated group. That he has resorted to words, the mightiest of weapons . . . makes his experience all the more relevant today’
Financial Times
‘Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s demand for simple justice should be our call to action. Because what’s at stake in this case is not just the fate of one man who managed, against all odds, to tell his story, but the future of our democracy’
Glenn Greenwald
‘Compelling’
Economist
‘Slahi is an intelligent and sensitive writer whose sense of irony somehow survived along with his sanity’
London Review of Books
‘A kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish, and bitter humour . . . The process, which has never been described more intimately or more convincingly, resembles nothing so much as a postmodern globalized version of the Salem witch trials’
New York Times Book Review
‘The big surprise about Slahi’s book . . . is that, in addition to being appalling and sad, it’s funny . . . The diary’s tone is friendly, exasperated, curious, and ironic . . . Slahi doesn’t just humanize himself; he also humanizes his guards and interrogators. That’s not to say that he excuses them. Just the opposite: he presents them as complex individuals who know kindness from cruelty and right from wrong’
New Yorker
‘Necessary reading for those seeking to understand the dangers that Guantanamo’s continued existence poses to Americans in the world . . . a fluent, engaging and at times eloquent writer even in his fourth language of English’
Washington Post
‘Gripping . . . Extraordinary . . . Mr. Slahi emerges from the pages of his diary . . . as a curious and generous personality, observant, witty, and devout, but by no means fanatical . . . Guantánamo Diary forces us to consider why the United States has set aside the cherished idea that a timely trial is the best way to determine who deserves to be in prison’
The New York Times
GUANTÁNAMO
DIARY THE FULLY RESTORED TEXT
MOHAMEDOU OULD SLAHI
Edited by LARRY SIEMS
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR
CANONGATE
This Canons edition published by Canongate Books in 2017
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Diary, restored diary and introduction to the restored edition
copyright © 2015, 2017 by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
Notes and introduction to the original edition
copyright © 2015, 2017 by Larry Siems
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First published in the United States by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, Inc, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
First Back Bay trade paperback edition, December 2015
Restored edition, October 2017
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 185 3
eISBN 978 1 78211 286 0
To my late mother, Maryem Mint El Wadia
Contents