Guantánamo Diary
The Fully Restored Text
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- €8.99
-
- €8.99
Publisher Description
Now a major motion picture called The Mauritanian
'A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka' JOHN LE CARRÉ
The first and only diary written by a Guantánamo detainee during his imprisonment, now with previous censored material restored.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay in 2002.
There he suffered the worst of what the prison had to offer, including months of sensory deprivation, torture and sexual assault.
In October 2016 he was released without charge.
This is his extraordinary story.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Heartbreak doesn’t begin to describe what you feel reading Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account of being detained and interrogated by the CIA and its allies since 2001 without a trial. To know that the electrical engineer from the African nation of Mauritania remains a prisoner in Guantánamo to this day amplifies the urgency, rage and (amazingly) barbed humour of his diary, presented with heavy edits made by the U.S. government. This isn't easy reading. But it’s an important historical achievement—a book that offers a harsh glimpse into a hidden world and humanises a grave injustice that should concern us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
