You may not have heard of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. There are a lot of people who would like things to stay that way. That is why this 44 year old Mauritanian engineer is being held in solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay as you are reading this. He has been held there since August 2002, even though US District Court Judge James Robertson granted the writ of habeas corpus and ordered Slahi’s release on March 22, 2010.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Wikipedia)

During his detention Mohamedou learned to speak and write in English, his fourth language. He took pains to learn an educated, professional form of English, not the crude curse-words of many of his captors. He hand wrote what may be one of the most difficult books to read, his “Guantanamo Diary”. The original handwritten text is available at http://guantanamodiary.com/, which also has audio readings of extracts from the published book, which is available from Amazon.

Sample from handwritten original of the Guatanamo Dieary

He writes incredibly well, with humanity and understanding. Much of the book has been redacted, so it is full of black stripes, but it is amazing that this book exists at all, and represents an enormous amount of work on the part of his editor, Larry Siems, and a team of lawyers.

But the thing that makes it so difficult to read is that he was tortured so often and for so long that it becomes banal and repetitive. He was beaten up for praying. He was beaten up because he was not standing when a soldier entered the room, He was forced to drink salt water. He was taken for interrogation at the time he was meant to get his medicine, so he missed out. He was told that he had to keep his blanket neatly folded, which meant he could not use it to keep warm. His told that his family was threatened. He was humiliated, He was sexually assaulted. He was not fed. Or he was fed, but only given a few seconds to eat. Then he was beaten up again.

They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice cubes from my neck to my ankles, and whenever the ice melted, they put in new, hard ice cubes. Moreover, every once in a while, one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face. The ice served both for the pain and for wiping out the bruises I had from that afternoon. Everything seemed to be perfectly prepared. People from cold regions might not understand the extent of the pain when ice cubes get stuck on your body.

He was interrogated, repeatedly, pointlessly, endlessly, by a never ending rotation of interrogators who never seemed to know who he was  or where he had been, so he was asked about people he could never have met, or about what he did in places which he had never been to. Everything he ever did or said was twisted and turned inside out.

“Before 9/11 you called your younger brother in Germany and told him, ‘Concentrate on your school.’ What did you mean with this code?”

“I didn’t use any code. I always advise my brother to concentrate on his school.”

“Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” by Kathleen T. Rhem – http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=25882.     Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

But throughout the text he shows sympathy and understanding for his captors. He understands what a huge shock 9/11 was to Americans. He realizes that for poor Americans the army is perhaps the only way out of poverty, and that soldiers are conditioned to hate their enemies.

Americans should be so embarrassed by his plight. If in 12 years of interrogation they have not been able to get enough evidence to convict him of anything in a fair public trial, isn’t it time to let him go? When is enough, enough?

Obama ran on for president on a pledge to close Guantanamo. Why did that never happen?

After reading this book, my theory is that the captives would have so many stories to tell about their mistreatment in Guantanamo, that they would be able to name so many names, that many members of the US military would be found guilty of so many war crimes, perhaps even going all the way up to the president, that they simply cannot ever be allowed to speak publicly. The only way to prevent that is to keep them all in Guantanamo until they die in jail.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi has created one small chink in the veil of secrecy, and for that he is one of my heroes.

Book Reviews for Guantanamo Diary:

New York Times, New Yorker, The Guardian (UK)