A Guantanamo Detainee’s Diary
On Tuesday, one of those detainees, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was sent to Guantánamo in 2002 and remains there to this day, is poised to offer a powerful rejoinder. Three years into his detention — years during which he was isolated, tortured, beaten, sexually abused and humiliated — Slahi wrote a 466-page, 122,000-word account of what had happened to him up to that point.
His manuscript was immediately classified, and it took years of litigation and negotiation by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force the military to declassify a redacted version. Even with the redactions, “Guantánamo Diary” is an extraordinary document — “A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka,” as John le Carré aptly describes it in a back cover blurb — that every American should read.
.. But the quote that sticks with me most is something that one of his guards told him, something that could stand as a fitting epitaph for Guantánamo itself: “I know I can go to hell for what I did to you.”