Biographical note:

Mohamedou Slahi was born in Mauritania. He left the country at the age of 18, on a scholarship to study in Germany. In the early 1990s, he interrupted his studies and went to Afghanistan to join al-Qaida units fighting (with American support) the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. He returned to Germany in 1992, completing his engineering degree and living and working first in Germany and then, for a few months, in Montreal, Canada. After his November 2001 apprehension by a Jordanian commando team, he was held in isolation and interrogated for the next seven and a half months before the Jordanians concluded he had had no involvement with the Millennium plot. Nevertheless, a CIA rendition team captured him and on August 5, 2002, he was incarcerated at Guantanamo. Despite being cleared by multiple courts and foreign governments, he remained imprisoned. He has never been charged with a crime.

Larry Siems is director of the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center and the author of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America's Post-9/11 Torture Program. He lives in New York.

Main description:

An unprecedented international publishing event: the first and only diary written by a still-imprisoned Guantánamo detainee.

Since 2002, Mohamedou Slahi has been imprisoned at the detainee camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United States has never charged him with a crime. Although he was ordered released by a federal judge, the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is no sign that the United States plans to let him go.

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, GUANTÁNAMO DIARY is a document of immense historical importance.

Review quote:

"A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka: perpetual torture prescribed by the mad doctors of Washington."—John le Carré

Review quote:

"Mr. Slahi's detention for more than [fourteen] years without charge or trial embodies the most egregious abuses of Guantanamo."
---ACLU

Review quote:

"Once considered such a high-value detainee that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld designated him for 'special interrogation techniques'....Slahi had been subjected to sleep deprivation, exposed to extremes of heat and cold, moved around the base blindfolded, and at one point taken into the bay on a boat and threatened with death....Slahi faces no criminal charges."
---Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald