A prison like no other
A riveting new book has emerged from one of the most contentious places in the world, and the U.S. government doesn’t want you to read it. Apologies if this sounds like an overheated marketing tagline. The thing is, it’s demonstrably true.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi wrote “Guantánamo Diary” in a cell at the American military prison in Cuba. The Mauritanian national’s urgent memoir is being released only after a thorough going-over by government censors, who have rendered portions of the text unreadable via thousands of black-bar redactions.
Slahi, 44, has been held at Guantanamo for almost 13 years without being charged with a crime. He wrote the text in 2005, and his lawyers have been working since then to get it published.
As he tells it, guards and interrogators used ceaseless brutality in an effort to get him to confess that he recruited key figures in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, among other offenses. Slahi was taken into custody in Mauritania in 2001, and after being held and questioned for several months in Jordan, he was transferred to Guantanamo at the CIA’s behest in 2002. He admits that he was briefly an al Qaeda member in the early 1990s, but says he had nothing to do with 9/11.
After reviewing his case, a federal judge ordered Slahi released in 2010, noting in a written opinion that he “probably did not even know about the 9/11 attacks.” The Obama administration has appealed the ruling, and Slahi is still a prisoner at Guantanamo.
Nonetheless, you don’t have to be convinced of Slahi’s innocence to be appalled by the incidents he describes.
Slahi says that during interrogations in 2003-04 he was shackled in positions that excruciatingly contorted his body for hours at a time, deprived of food and sleep for extended periods, subjected to extreme temperatures, sexually abused and beaten, severely and repeatedly.
Here’s his recollection of a violent (but not atypically so) grilling: A guard or interrogator “kept punching me everywhere, mainly on my face and my ribs. ... One of them hit me hard across the face, and quickly put the goggles on my eyes, ear muffs on my ears, and a small bag over my head. ... Thanks to the beating I wasn’t able to stand. ... The beating party would go on for the next three or four hours before they turned me over to another team that was going to use different torture techniques.”
Consumed by “unbearable pain” and fearing that he “had nothing to lose,” Slahi says he eventually “yessed every accusation my interrogators made”: “During this period I wrote more than a thousand pages about my friends with false information. I had to wear the suit the U.S. Intel tailored for me.”
The government’s ostensible position is that the many redactions in “Guantanamo Diary” are necessary for national security purposes, and to protect the identities of Slahi’s interrogators. But as Larry Siems, the book’s editor, points out in a series of helpful annotations, some of the redactions appear wholly arbitrary. “It seems possible, if incredible, that the U.S. government may have here redacted the word ‘tears,’ ” Siems writes, referring to a paragraph in which Slahi cries.
Anyone who doubts the veracity of Slahi’s account should consult the inhumanities cataloged in the Senate’s recently released report on the CIA’s detention and torture methods — and after that, spend some time with “Murder at Camp Delta,” by Joseph Hickman, an ex-Guantanamo guard who was on duty at the prison on June 9, 2006, when three prisoners died.
The official story was that the men — Ali Abdullah Ahmed of Yemen and Mani AlUtaybi and Yasser Al-Zahrani, both from Saudi Arabia — hanged themselves in their cells. Hickman, however, says that Col. Michael Bumgarner, then a high-ranking base officer, told him and fellow guards that the three prisoners took their lives by forcing sheets into their own throats.
The hanging story, Hickman says, was fed to the press as part of a “cover-up,” and the discrepancy between the two versions of what happened that night inspired him to start digging for the truth. With help from a Seton Hall law professor and a team of student-investigators, Hickman has compiled a compelling case that suggests the government’s account of the deaths is deeply flawed.
Hickman’s book includes ghoulish scientific evidence (he says the prisoners’ necks were removed during autopsies and were not with the bodies returned to their families) and eyewitness details: He and several other guards were assigned “to watch the very block where the detainees” died, and if the deaths had occurred as reported by the base’s top officers, he writes, “(i)t would have been impossible for us not to see the detainee’s movements or hear the medics’ voices.”
“Murder at Camp Delta” doesn’t quite live up to its billing, however. Near the end of the book, Hickman writes, “I suspect that the deaths of the three detainees were accidental — the result of a punishment session that went too far — but they occurred in the midst of operations that were routine for Gitmo.”
Then why sensationalize the title? Hickman’s book is plenty compelling without the hyperbole — and it’s clear from his version of events, and from Slahi’s, that there’s still plenty we don’t know about Guantanamo, a prison in which horrifying acts were carried out in the name of every American citizen.