guardian | The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays
bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme
from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week
after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified.
Guantánamo Diary,
the first book written by a still imprisoned detainee, is being
published in 20 countries and has been serialised by the Guardian amid
renewed calls by civil liberty campaigners for its author’s release.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and
humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago
and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to
US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number
760. US military
officials told the Guardian this week that despite never being
prosecuted and being cleared for release by a judge in 2010, he is
unlikely to be released in the next year.
The journal, which Slahi handwrote in English, details how he was
subjected to sleep deprivation, death threats, sexual humiliation and
intimations that his torturers would go after his mother.
After enduring this, he was subjected to “additional interrogation
techniques” personally approved by the then US defence secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld. He was blindfolded, forced to drink salt water, and then
taken out to sea on a high-speed boat where he was beaten for three
hours while immersed in ice.
The end product of the torture, he writes, was lies. Slahi made a
number of false confessions in an attempt to end the torment, telling
interrogators he planned to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto. Asked if he
was telling the truth, he replied: “I don’t care as long as you are
pleased. So if you want to buy, I am selling.”
