"A long torture trip was being prepared..."

January 17, 2015 12:47 AM

Extracts of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantanamo diary are read by Stephen Fry, Colin Firth and others as part of the Guardian's Guantanamo Diary series. Previously on Metafilter.

Slahi, who is from Mauritania, has been detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay since 2002, and has not been charged with any crime. In 2010, a US federal court ordered his release. He's still there.

The Guardian will be publishing his memoirs as a book.

posted by mandolin conspiracy (17 comments total)

After enduring this, he was subjected to “additional interrogation techniques” personally approved by the then US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld

sigh. surely this?

I mean we all know it won't. But for fuck's sake.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:36 AM on January 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I recently finished reading In the Company of Cowards, the (excellent) book Michael Mori wrote about the years he spent at Guantanamo as David Hicks' military lawyer, and even though I was expecting it to be pretty bad I was still a bit surprised by the picture it painted of the toxic combination of incompetence and malice behind everything that went on there. And it sounds like Slahi was treated considerably worse than Hicks.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 4:24 AM on January 17, 2015

Whenever anyone in the US lectures another country on human rights violations I know that person is a hypocrite. We've not occupied the moral high ground for decades. I don't even think we can see it from where we are.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:38 AM on January 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

The CIA's Willingness To Lie About Our Torture Regime: The Architecture Of Unbelief
posted by homunculus at 9:49 AM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

My country turned me over, short-cutting all kinds of due process of law, like a candy bar to the United States - Amnesty International
Where is justice for the men still abandoned in Guantánamo Bay? - Morris Davis.
posted by adamvasco at 7:36 AM on January 18, 2015

Mark Danner 2004 The Logic of Torture and Dec 2014 Our New Politics of Torture.
posted by adamvasco at 7:48 AM on January 18, 2015

Thank you for posting... I have nothing to way that seems adequate. The entry about smelling the letter from his mom has been sticking with me for days.

I feel at a loss about Guantanamo. The US citizenry elected (twice!) a president who promised prominently to close it . . . but to no avail. I don't know US politics enough to understand how to pressure beyond something already won... Can you sue?

In Canada we have ourselves to blame for repeatedly re-electing a governnent that until forced refused to repatriate a Guantanamo inmate jailed as a minor and I am sure they'd be happy to keep Guantanamo for ever.

It seems unfair we have received similar results for such different outcomes.
posted by chapps at 8:42 PM on January 18, 2015

I feel at a loss about Guantanamo. The US citizenry elected (twice!) a president who promised prominently to close it . . . but to no avail.

Because Congress wouldn't let him. Closing Guantanamo was the first or second (literally speaking; Obama signed two orders about a minute after being sworn in and I don't know the order they were signed in) thing that Obama signed off on within minutes of being President.

Place the blame where it is deserved.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:26 PM on January 18, 2015

Thanks for the clarification, feckless fecal fear mongering. (As I said, I am unfamiliar with the US system).
posted by chapps at 11:22 PM on January 18, 2015

Because Congress wouldn't let him

One has to lead a very rich fantasy life to believe that Obama legitimately tried to close gitmo vs. doing the bare minimum to qualify in the minds of the faithful as having done so.
posted by rr at 10:47 AM on January 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

He signed an executive order closing it. Congress specifically disallowed any funds to be used to do so. Please, by all means, do explain what more he could have done.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:53 AM on January 19, 2015

I am not au fait with US politics either but if I really wanted this done I would have drummed up a storm of negative press for those obstructing the process. Name and shame big time especially those supposedly on my own side of the political fence.
posted by adamvasco at 11:20 AM on January 19, 2015

Please, by all means, do explain what more he could have done.

Opened the cages and let public subscription pay for them to be returned home?
posted by biffa at 8:21 AM on January 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba. The US Navy base in which the prisoners are held is only a few miles from end to end. I presume that if the US and Cubans were willing, the prisoners could literally walk into a different country.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:08 AM on January 22, 2015

I just find it difficult to believe that there is no legal mechanism to free people who haven't been tried or found guilty of any crime or who have even been declared not to have committed a crime. That sounds like bullshit to me.
posted by biffa at 12:31 AM on January 22, 2015

The usual mechanism is called Habeas Corpus, but the US courts have recently taken a surprisingly pro-government line that, in combination with legislative and executive measures, makes the mechanism practically unusable.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:13 AM on January 22, 2015

The book is now Reviewed in the NYT
posted by lalochezia at 7:26 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]