Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Larry Siems Read Free Book Online

humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody will be prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention.…
    Prisoners must at all times be protected, particularly from acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.
    Measures of reprisal against prisoners of war are prohibited.
    I had proposed a confidential meeting, under strict security protocols, to make sure the edited version of Mohamedou’s work—a work he specifically wrote for a public readership—accurately represents the original content and intent. For years that work itself was withheld, under a censorship regime that has not always served Geneva’s purposes.
    Censorship has been integral to the United States’ post-9/11 detention operations from the start. It has been purposeful, not once but twice: first, to open a space for the abuse of prisoners, and then to conceal that those abuses happened. In Mohamedou’s case, those abuses include enforced disappearance; arbitrary and incommunicado detention; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and torture. We know this thanks to a documentary record that was also, for years, rigorously suppressed.
    I do not know to what extent personal and institutionalinterests in covering up those abuses have contributed to Mohamedou’s continuing imprisonment. I do know that in the five years I have spent reading the record about his case, I have not been persuaded by my government’s vague and shifting explanations for why he is in Guantánamo, or by the assertions of those who defend his now-thirteen-year detention by saying he is almost certainly, or possibly, a this or a that. My own sense of fairness tells me the question of what this or that may be, and of why he must remain in U.S. custody, should long ago have been answered. It would have been, I believe, if his
Guantánamo Diary
had not been kept secret for so long.
    When Mohamedou wrote the manuscript for this book nine years ago, in the same isolated hut where some of the book’s most nightmarish scenes had very recently happened, he set himself a task. “I have only written what I experienced, what I saw, and what I learned first-hand,” he explains near the end. “I have tried not to exaggerate, nor to understate. I have tried to be as fair as possible, to the U.S. government, to my brothers, and to myself.”
    He has, from everything I have seen, done just that. The story he tells is well corroborated by the declassified record; he proves again and again to be a reliable narrator. He certainly does not exaggerate: the record contains torments and humiliations not included in the book, and he renders several of those he does include with considerable discretion. Even when the events he recounts are at their most extreme, his narration is tempered and direct. The horrors of those events speak for themselves.
    That is because his real interest is always in the human dramas of these scenes. “The law of war is harsh,” Mohamedou writes early on.
    If there’s anything good at all in a war, it’s that it brings the best and the worst out of people: some people try to use the lawlessness to hurt others, and some try to reduce the suffering to the minimum.
    In chronicling his journey through the darkest regions of the United States’ post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, his attention remains on his interrogators and guards, on his fellow detainees, and on himself. In his desire “to be fair,” as he puts it, he recognizes the larger context of fear and confusion in which all these characters interact, and the much more local institutional and social forces that shape those interactions. But he also sees the capacity of every character to shape or mitigate the action, and he tries to understand people, regardless of stations or uniforms or conditions, as protagonists in their own