Mohamedou Slahi

Mohamedou Slahi was born in a small town in Mauritania in 1970. He won a scholarship to attend college in Germany and worked there for several years as an engineer. He returned to Mauritania in 2000. The following year, at the behest of the United States, he was detained by Mauritanian authorities and rendered to a prison in Jordan. He was rendered again, first to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and finally, on August 5, 2002, to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was subjected to severe torture. He was cleared and released on October 16th of 2016 and repatriated to his native country of Mauritania. No charges were filed against him during or after this ordeal. Larry Siems is a writer and human rights activist. He is the author of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post-9/11 Torture Program. Detained in his native Mauritania at the behest of the United States, Slahi was eventually taken to the detainee camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in 2002. Until his release in 2016, the United States never charged him with a crime. Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he disappeared into U.S. custody and daily life as a detainee. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice, but a deeply personal memoir — terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Published now for the first time, Guantanamo Diary (Back Bay Books) is a document of immense historical importance. Writing in The Washington Post, Deborah Pearlstein noted that “Slahi’s book offers a first-person account of the experience of torture. For that reason alone, the book is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the dangers that Guantánamo’s continued existence poses to Americans in the world.”