The New York Times - Scott Shane
…gripping and depressing…[an] extraordinary memoir…Mr. Slahi emerges from the pages of his diary, handwritten in 2005, as a curious and generous personality, observant, witty and devout, but by no means fanatical…What if Mr. Slahi is simply a clever liar who has successfully hidden his past crimes for 12 years? His book quite effectively undercuts that notion. More important, Guantánamo Diary forces us to consider why the United States has set aside the cherished idea that a timely trial is the best way to determine who deserves to be in prison.
The New York Times Book Review - Mark Danner
Written in the colloquial if limited English [Slahi] picked up during his captivity, its pages disfigured with thousands of pitch-black "redactions" courtesy of the American intelligence agents who play such major parts, the work is a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain, anguish and bitter humor that the Dostoyevsky of The House of the Dead would have recognized and embraced. At its root is a maddening ambiguity born of a system governed not by any recognizable rules of evidence or due process but by suspicion, paranoia and violence.
Publishers Weekly
★ 02/09/2015
A Guantanamo detainee endures a hellish ordeal in this riveting prison diary. Slahi, an electrical engineer, was arrested in his native Mauritania in 2001 at the behest of the U.S. government and has been incarcerated at the American military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 13 years. (The memoir was originally written in 2005 but was only recently declassified, with redactions.) There he fought a Kafkaesque battle with interrogators who pressured him to admit involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the failed “millennium plot" to bomb several targets on Jan. 1, 2000, which he insisted he had no part in, and subjected him to vicious beatings, freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation, sexual groping, and threats that his mother would be imprisoned. After months of abuse, Slahi says, he falsely confessed to terrorism charges. The gripping memoir, ably edited by Larry Siems, captures the prisoner's suffering and disorientation, yet has currents of reflectiveness and empathy as Slahi strives to understand his captors and connect with their humane impulses. His case is complicated: he trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, but he was ordered released from Gitmo by a federal judge in 2010 (though Slahi is still imprisoned there), and Siems's introduction makes a cogent case for his innocence. Whatever the truth, this searing narrative exposes the dark side of the “war on terror"—the system of arbitrary imprisonment and “enhanced interrogation" where justice gives way to lawless brutality. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"A longtime captive has written the most profound and disturbing account yet of what it's like to be collateral damage in the war against terror."—Mark Danner, NYTBR, & Editors' Choice
"Slahi is a fluent, engaging and at times eloquent writer, even in his fourth language, English....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."—Deborah Pearlstein, Washington Post
"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....You don't have to be convinced of Slahi's innocence to be appalled by the incidents he describes."—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle
"Guantánamo Diary will leave you shell-shocked."—Vanity Fair
"Slahi emerges from the pages of his diary...as a curious and generous personality, observant, witty and devout, but by no means fanatical....Guantánamo Diary forces us to consider why the United States has set aside the cherished idea that a timely trial is the best way to determine who deserves to be in prison.—Scott Shane, New York Times
"An historical watershed and a literary triumph....The diary is as close as most of us will ever get to understanding the living hell this man—who has never been charged with a crime, and whom a judge ordered released in 2010—continues to suffer."—Elias Isquith, Salon
"Everyone should read Guantánamo Diary....Just by virtue of having been written inside Guantánamo, Slahi's book would be a triumph of humanity over chaos. But Guantánamo Diary turns out to be especially human. Slahi doesn't just humanize himself; he also humanizes his guards and interrogators. That's not to say that he excuses them. Just the opposite: he presents them as complex individuals who know kindness from cruelty and right from wrong."—Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
"The tragedy of Slahi's memoir is not just his grave abuse at the hands of U.S. officials. It is that....Slahi's account of life—if it can be called that—at Guantánamo is not the exception. It is the rule, and it continues today."—Alka Pradhan, Reuters
"Guantánamo Diary stands as perhaps the most human depiction of an entire post-9/11 system."—Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail
"Literary history was made today with the publication of the first-ever book by a still-imprisoned Guantánamo detainee....As astonishing as the scope of the abuse is Slahi's enduring warmth, even for his torturers and jailers."—Noa Yachot, Huffington Post
"A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka: perpetual torture prescribed by the mad doctors of Washington."—John le Carré
"This is an incredible document, and a hell of a story."—Steve Kroft, correspondent for 60 Minutes
"Anyone who reads Guantanamo Diary—and every American with a shred of conscience should do so, now—will be ashamed and appalled. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's demand for simple justice should be our call to action. Because what's at stake in this case is not just the fate of one man who managed, against all odds, to tell his story, but the future of our democracy."—Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
"Here, finally, is the disturbing and stirring story the United States government tried for years to conceal. Mohamedou Ould Slahi's ordeal shocks the conscience, to be sure. But on display in these pages is something much deeper as well: an enduring faith in our common humanity, and in the power of truth to leap prison walls and bridge divides. With devastating clarity and considerable wit, Guantánamo Diary reminds us why we call certain things human rights."—Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
"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
APRIL 2015 - AudioFile
This diary, the first to be published by a detainee still in Guantanamo, makes for an unusual listening experience. Author Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned in the controversial detention facility since 2002. Narrator Peter Ganim's accent enables the listener to imagine the Mauritanian author himself telling his story and helps to separate the author’s passages from the editor’s speculative and explanatory footnotes. Ganim narrates the latter in his natural American-accented voice. A large amount of material that was evidently redacted by the U.S. Government prior to the book's publication is denoted by rote recitations of the word “redacted’ in a woman's voice. While this repetition emphasizes the amount of text that was eliminated, it ultimately proves to be a distraction from what remains. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Review
2015-01-20
A harrowing prison memoir, the first to date by an inmate who is behind bars at the Cuban penitentiary that has become a byword for an American gulag.Slahi was caught up early in the post-9/11 sweep, suspected of having played a role. As he admits, he did fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, "but then al Qaida didn't wage Jihad against America….In the mid-90's they wanted to wage Jihad against America, but I personally had nothing to do with that." After turning himself in for questioning in his native Mauritania, Slahi was "rendered" to Jordan and interrogated for eight months before the Jordanians decided he was innocent. A Marine prosecutor recalls that the CIA, managing Slahi's fate, "just kind of threw him over to U.S. military control in Bagram, Afghanistan," from which he was sent to Guantánamo in 2002. There he has remained, yet to be charged with a crime apart from that he "fucked up." Setting aside the question of complicity, it is shockingly clear from Slahi's account that torture was routine: "I heard so many testimonies from detainees who didn't know each other that they couldn't be lies," he writes, and his own experiences bear this out. For all we know, torture still is routine: This account dates to before 2005, when his manuscript entered into the realm of formally classified military material, and it is heavily redacted, so much so that one representative page is a sea of black strike-throughs, the surviving text reading "was accompanied by an Arabic interpreter….He was very weak in the language." Elsewhere, the prison memoir is much like other books of its kind: The guards are infantile brutes, the inmates a cross-section of humanity, and the rules and laws bewildering. Slahi may or may not be a reliable narrator; readers are called on to suspend disbelief. By his account, of course, he is not guilty. His memoir is essential reading for anyone concerned with human rights and the rule of law.
