Guantanamo diary /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An unprecedented international publishing event: the first and only diary written by a still-imprisoned Guantv°namo detainee.

Since 2002, Mohamedou Slahi has been imprisoned at the detainee camp at Guantv°namo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United States has never charged him with a crime. Although he was ordered released by a federal judge, the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is no sign that the United States plans to let him go.

Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he disappeared into U.S. custody and daily life as a detainee. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir -- terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Published now for the first time, Guantv°namo Diary is a document of immense historical importance.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• A Timeline of Detention (p. xi)
• Notes on the Text, Redactions, and Annotations (p. xiii)
• Introduction (p. xvii)
• 1 Jordan-Afghamstan-GTMO: July 2002-February 2003 (p. 3)
• Before
• 2 Senegal-Mauritania: January 21, 2000-February 19, 2000 (p. 71)
• 3 Mauritania: September 29, 2001-Novembcr 28, 2001 (p. 107)
• 4 Jordan: November 29, 2001-July 19, 2002 (p. 150)
• GTMO
• 5 GTMO: February 2003-August 2003 (p. 191)
• 6 GTMO: September 2003-December 2003 (p. 264)
• 7 GTMO: 2004-2005 (p. 308)
• Author's Note (p. 373)
• Editor's Acknowledgments (p. 375)
• Notes to Introduction (p. 377)
• About the Authors (p. 379)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A Guantanamo detainee endures a hellish ordeal in this riveting prison diary. Slahi, an electrical engineer, was arrested in his native Mauritania in 2001 at the behest of the U.S. government and has been incarcerated at the American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 13 years. (The memoir was originally written in 2005 but was only recently declassified, with redactions.) There he fought a Kafkaesque battle with interrogators who pressured him to admit involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the failed "millennium plot" to bomb several targets on Jan. 1, 2000, which he insisted he had no part in, and subjected him to vicious beatings, freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation, sexual groping, and threats that his mother would be imprisoned. After months of abuse, Slahi says, he falsely confessed to terrorism charges. The gripping memoir, ably edited by Larry Siems, captures the prisoner's suffering and disorientation, yet has currents of reflectiveness and empathy as Slahi strives to understand his captors and connect with their humane impulses. His case is complicated: he trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, but he was ordered released from Gitmo by a federal judge in 2010 (though Slahi is still imprisoned there), and Siems's introduction makes a cogent case for his innocence. Whatever the truth, this searing narrative exposes the dark side of the "war on terror"-the system of arbitrary imprisonment and "enhanced interrogation" where justice gives way to lawless brutality. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

A harrowing prison memoir, the first to date by an inmate who is behind bars at the Cuban penitentiary that has become a byword for an American gulag.Slahi was caught up early in the post-9/11 sweep, suspected of having played a role. As he admits, he did fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, "but then al Qaida didn't wage Jihad against America.In the mid-90's they wanted to wage Jihad against America, but I personally had nothing to do with that." After turning himself in for questioning in his native Mauritania, Slahi was "rendered" to Jordan and interrogated for eight months before the Jordanians decided he was innocent. A Marine prosecutor recalls that the CIA, managing Slahi's fate, "just kind of threw him over to U.S. military control in Bagram, Afghanistan," from which he was sent to Guantnamo in 2002. There he has remained, yet to be charged with a crime apart from that he "fucked up." Setting aside the question of complicity, it is shockingly clear from Slahi's account that torture was routine: "I heard so many testimonies from detainees who didn't know each other that they couldn't be lies," he writes, and his own experiences bear this out. For all we know, torture still is routine: This account dates to before 2005, when his manuscript entered into the realm of formally classified military material, and it is heavily redacted, so much so that one representative page is a sea of black strike-throughs, the surviving text reading "was accompanied by an Arabic interpreter.He was very weak in the language." Elsewhere, the prison memoir is much like other books of its kind: The guards are infantile brutes, the inmates a cross-section of humanity, and the rules and laws bewildering. Slahi may or may not be a reliable narrator; readers are called on to suspend disbelief. By his account, of course, he is not guilty. His memoir is essential reading for anyone concerned with human rights and the rule of law. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Mohamedou was born in Mauritania in 1970. He attended college in Germany on a scholarship and worked there as an engineer before returning home. In 2001, he was detained and rendered to a prison in Jordan, then to Afghanistan, and finally to the U.S. prison at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, where he was subjected to severe torture. He remains there to this day.
Larry Siems is a writer, human rights activist, and former director of the Freedom to Write program at PEN American Center. He is the author of The Torture Report He lives in New York.