Book Review: Guantanamo Diary

Author: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Editor: Larry Siems

Publisher: Cannongate

Reviewed by Stephen Keim

Guantanamo Diary is an extraordinary publishing story. It is not a diary in the sense of a record made regularly of recent events in a person’s life. It is more of a memoir written in the northern summer and autumn of 2005 in the author’s cell at Guantanamo Bay.

Guantanamo Diary is more and less than an account of Mohamedou’s time in Guantanamo. It is more because it covers many aspects of his life before he was rendered to Guantanamo. It covers aspects of his life before detention; his travel to Afghanistan at a time when al Qaeda were the allies of the United States and fought against the Soviet Union; his time studying and working in Germany and Canada; and his return to his native Mauritania in January 2000 after 12 years away.

It is less because the 10 years of continuing detention since the memoir was completed are, by necessity, not included.

By the time Mohamedou arrived at Guantanamo, he was a veteran at being monitored and cross-examined by or at the behest of US agencies. He had been aware that he was being monitored while he worked in Canada in the late nineties. He found most distressing that the agents who kept him under surveillance made no attempt to hide either their presence or their activities. His return home in early 2000 resulted in Mohamedou’s being detained and interrogated both in Senegal (where his plane stopped over) and, thereafter, several times, in his home nation of Mauritania .

When nothing could be found during the homecoming interrogation in Mauritania to support the FBI’s suspicion that Mohamedou was connected with the so-called Millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, he was released on 14 February 2000. By then, he was on first name terms with the Mauritanian chief of secret police.

Trained as an engineer and with references from the chief of police, Mohamedou obtained, and retained, employment which, at times, took him inside Mauritania’s Presidential Palace. So much for being a security risk.

After the events in New York and Washington on 11 September 2011, and Congress’s passage of the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force , the United States engaged in a world-wide version of rounding up the usual suspects .

Mohamedou was rounded up on 29 September 2001 and questioned, including by FBI agents. He was released again. The “usual suspects” dictate must have been re-issued as, nearly two months later, on 20 November 2001, Mohamedou was visited by Mauritanian police and requested to attend for more questioning. He drove his own car to the interrogation centre after assuring his Mum that he would be back home, soon. His mum is dead and Mohamedou has not yet returned.

Despairing of Mauritanian interrogation techniques, the US ordered that Mohamedou be transferred to Jordan . Seven and a half months later, on 19 July 2002, Mohamedou was rendered by the CIA to Guantanamo, with a two weeks stopover for questioning at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. He was processed into the Guantanamo facility on 5 August 2002.

Guantanamo Diary deals with Mohamedou’s experiences in and out of custody prior to arriving in Cuba as well as the four years of interrogation including torture at Guantanamo.

The manuscript for Guantanamo Diary is 466 pages of handwriting written in a cramped cell. He wrote it in English, his fourth language which he acquired, for the most part, while he was in United States custody. The editor of the text, Larry Siems, a veteran writer at the PEN Centre , describes the work as displaying a vocabulary about the size of that seen in the Homeric epics. Siems describes the work as worthy of other comparisons to the epics, delivering a similarly enormous range of action and emotion.

Each page of the manuscript became classified upon its coming into existence. As part of a broader course of litigation to shine light into the dark corners of the military base at Guantanamo by obtaining the release of classified documents, lawyers acting on behalf of Mohamedou have litigated and negotiated with government lawyers to allow the manuscript be brought to the reading public.

In preparation, Siems has worked tirelessly as editor of the manuscript. The editor’s role has been unconventional. Although chosen and appointed by Mohamedou, Siems has been prevented from receiving feedback from Mohamedou. He has also had to work around the 2,500 black-bar redactions imposed by government censors. Neither Mohamedou nor anyone else who has seen the uncensored manuscript has been able to assist Siems by commenting on his speculations concerning what the redactions hide.

Nonetheless, the reader obtains the impression that the redaction are largely misguided and pointless. On one occasion, it is obvious that the redaction is the word “tears”, a reference to the fact that Mohamedou had, unexpectedly cried when offered a kind word from a Puerto Rican prisoner escort.

Much of what is in the manuscript has been dealt with in released official documentation of Mohamedou’s imprisonment and interrogation. [1] Many incidents have been covered in the various hearing he has undergone either at the behest of his gaolers or in an attempt to win his freedom. Siems is therefore able, in short but informative footnotes, to assist the reader in knowing what is stated in the redacted text.

One example of the pointlessness of the redactions is that the female pronoun is redacted, most of the time, in order to hide the fact that some of the interrogators were women. The tactic is undone by the fact that male pronouns are not redacted and, on occasion, the female pronoun is left in. The same mistake is made with the attempt to hide the fact that references to a polygraph or lie detector machine is carefully redacted except on one occasion when the prefix “poly” is left untouched. [2]

The harder part of the editing process is that Siems is stuck with the manuscript. Most book editors can send the weaker passages of writing back to the author to be re-written with the benefit of the editor’s advice. No such process was available to Siems. Rather, he was stuck with the debut work of an author writing in a prison cell in his fourth language.

Siems took a minimalist approach. He corrected obvious mistakes. He incorporated some flashbacks from the end of the manuscript into their place in the narrative and he streamlined the text by reducing it from 122,000 to just under 100,000 words. Siems’ obvious intention is to allow Mohamedou’s voice to shine through. Just as obviously, Siems has succeeded in achieving his intention.

As mentioned, Guantanamo Diary, having been completed in 2005, does not contain Mohamedou’s recollections of the last ten years. This information has to be attained from other sources. In 2010, he was successful before the trial judge, James Robertson , in his habeas corpus petition. The government appealed and was successful . A re-hearing has been ordered.

An ACLU petition seeks Mohamedou’s release rather than the government’s contest of the habeas re-hearing.

News reports indicated that, three months before Guantanamo Diary was published in January 2015, camp authorities stripped Mohamedou of all his privileged possessions and all his personal belongings including a computer and comfort items including a letter from his mother who had died subsequent to Mohamedou’s incarceration in Guantanamo. It was suggested that the action was taken to coerce Mohamedou into agreeing to resume participation in interrogations which had been prevented from taking place by an order of the habeas corpus court soon after the proceedings commenced.

Authorities declined to comment.

In the meantime, Guantanamo Diary has become an international best seller .

Guantanamo Diary is extraordinary for many reasons.

It is indeed beautifully written. Mohamedou manages to convey the narrative of extraordinary events without rancour or bitterness. He allows the action at a fast pace without the narrative bogging down in excessive detail or the author’s concern with what is happening to him.

Yet, there is enough colour and movement to allow the reader to feel the immediacy of events and the uniqueness of the time and place in which those events happen. The reader feels the humidity of tropical places and smells the scents of places of detention.

Without focusing on himself, Mohamedou conveys his emotional and physical reactions to both interrogation, per se, and, when it happens, the torture which is inflicted upon him. In the early stages of his numerous confinements, he is almost unable to eat and his body takes on the appearance of the starving. In the early days at Guantanamo, he agrees with fellow detainees to take part in a hunger strike but only for two days because he has no reserves to spare.

The whole of Guantanamo Diary might be summarised, in terms of narrative; Mohamedou’s relating of the effects of torture upon him; and the sense of humour that he never loses, in a short note of instructions given to his newly appointed lawyers who had been prevented access to the manuscript he had written:

“You asked me to write you everything I told my interrogators. Are you out of your mind? How can I render uninterrupted interrogation that has been going on for the last 7 years? That’s like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated.

Yet I provided you everything (almost) in my book, which the government denies you access to. I was going to go deeper in details, but I figured it was futile.

To make a long story short, you may divide my time in two big steps.

(1) Pre-torture (I mean that I couldn’t resist): I told them the truth about me having done nothing against your country. It lasted until May 22, 2003.

(2) Post-torture era: where my brake broke loose. I yessed every accusation my interrogators made. I even wrote the infamous confession about me planning to hit the CN Tower in Toronto, based on SCG [redacted] advice. I just wanted to get the monkeys off my back. I don’t care how long I stay in jail. My belief comforts me.”

Perhaps, Mohamedou’s greatest strength as a writer is a combination of characterisation and forgiveness. The various guards, interrogators and administrators are portrayed as human beings throughout Guantanamo Diary. Even the cruellest and most aggressive guard or interrogator has humorous and likeable aspects portrayed by the author. And a large section towards the end of the book is devoted to profiling the various guards and interrogators.

Mohamedou, indeed, portrays his own experience of the Stockholm syndrome . He concludes that a later stage of incarceration is realising that your captors are your new family and he describes the sadness he experienced on a number of occasions when certain guards and interrogators were transferred away from Guantanamo.

And the relationships were not all one sided as some of the gifts and messages of endearment left by guards who were leaving make clear.

The torture suffered by Mohamedou is not dwelled upon in the pages of Guantanamo Diary but neither does the author shirk describing what happened to him. Assaults, the use of loud noise, the repeated use of cold including putting large volumes of ice down his clothes and a form of water boarding with salt water are all described. Sexual assaults by female interrogators are indicated though not described in detail.

In one sense, Guantanamo Diary is not ground breaking because the enhanced interrogation or torture methods used on Mohamedou have been documented through the FOI releases referred to above as relied upon by Siems to fill in the redacted passages.

What Guantanamo Diary does do is to personalise those events which, because of their horrific and shameful nature, we try to remove from our consciousness. Mohamedou is a man of compassion and humour and his writing engages the reader directly. It is impossible not to like him. It is impossible not to suffer with him as he relates the traumas to which he has been subjected.

Ironically, since Guantanamo Diary is written in a language learned from guards who are American soldiers, Mohamedou’s humour, as his letter of instructions to his lawyers exemplifies, has much of the American street about it. Since, Guantanamo Diary was written to speak to Americans and the rest of us in the west, it is useful that it is expressed in an idiom to which we can all relate.

Guantanamo Diary is great writing: great reading: great literature.

There are many reasons why one should read Guantanamo Diary. The best reason is that the reader will be rewarded for her trouble by the fact that she is reading a wonderful piece of writing.

Stephen Keim

[1] For example, an inquiry by the Office of the Inspector-General of the Department of Justice has resulted into a report detailing part of the treatment of Mohamedou: http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimony-of-the-department-of-justice/allegations-of-mistreatment-of-specific-prisoners/mohamedou-ould-skahi-760 and

[2] The reference to polygraphs is obviously very sensitive as the largest multi-page redaction is an account of an administration of the polygraph test.