Guantanamo Diary: The horrors of notorious US detention camp
It has taken 10 years to reach the public, but a new memoir has again exposed the horrors of the notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay.
The account, entitled Guantanamo Diary, is written by Mohamedou Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen who has been detained since 2001 without charge.
His compelling firsthand account of Kafkaesque mistreatment and torture was written back in 2005. But it took a decade and more than 2,000 redactions for the manuscript to get past US government censors, and into the hands of editor Larry Siems.
Speaking to the ABC's PM program, Mr Siems said the book was an extraordinary achievement for Mr Slahi.
"His story is epic in terms of just the sheer journey through this kind of global gulag of detention facilities," he said.
Mr Slahi's story began when he left his home in Mauritania at age 18 to travel to Germany to study engineering.
He was the ninth of 12 children in a very poor family and had just lost his father.
"A lot of the family's hopes came to rest on Mohamedou," Mr Siems said.
"He was an excellent student and he won a scholarship, remarkably enough, to study engineering in Germany. So at 18 he became the first member of his family to leave Mauritania."
But during his time in Europe, Mr Slahi travelled briefly to Afghanistan to join mujahedeen units that were fighting the communist backed government in Kabul. During that time he trained in an Al Qaeda camp.
"He did what many young men at the time were doing," Mr Siems said.
"And he trained in an Al Qaeda camp in 1991 well before Al Qaeda declared war on the United States."
"It's obliviously clear that he did join Al Qaeda, but the Al Qaeda that he joined at the time was one that the US was actually backing in the fight against this communist government in Afghanistan."
He then returned to Germany to finish his electrical engineering degree, after which he moved to Canada.
Slahi comes under suspicion for association with terrorist
During his time in Canada Mr Slahi came under intense suspicion for an association with a terrorist linked to a serious bomb plot.
"[Slahi] moved to Montreal thinking he would get a job, take a graduate program and get a job as an engineer in Canada," Mr Siems said.
"And he arrived just after a guy named Ahmed Ressam left Montreal and in the beginning of what was to become known as the millenium bomb plot."
Ahmed Ressam was arrested about a month after Mr Slahi moved to Canada, after trying to enter the US with a car full of explosives supposedly to try to blow up LAX airport.
"Everybody who attended the mosque in Montreal that Ressam had gone to immediately came under suspicion, and Mohamedou was attending that mosque," Mr Siems said.
"So he was questioned in January of 2000 by Canadian intelligence. Everybody was under pretty intense suspicion."
But at that time Mr Slahi got a call from his family saying his mother was sick.
"So he just decided in February of 2000, after a decade of living and working overseas and supporting his family, that he would return home, get work in Mauritania and live with his family," Mr Siems said.
"But after 9/11 he got called in again. I think anybody who had been questioned about terrorism ties before was being questioned everywhere around the world.
"He was held for about a month in Mauritania, again cleared of any connection to the millennium plot."
But in 2001 Mauritanian intelligence agents showed up again and said the US wanted to ask him more questions.
"The Mauritanians held him for a week, long enough for the US to arrange for a Jordanian rendition plane to come pick him up and he was flown to Amman, Jordan, and then begins this kind of nightmarish odyssey through intelligence prisons that ultimately lands in Guantanamo."
Slahi tortured during special interrogation
In 2003 Mr Slahi was the subject of a special interrogation. It was personally approved by the then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
"It began with extreme isolation, removing him from the general population, keeping him isolated, subjecting him to extremely cold cells, cold temperatures, sometimes naked, sometimes doused with water, extended sleep deprivation that lasted weeks," Mr Siems said.
"[The investigation entailed] 20-hour a day interrogations where they had three shifts of interrogators working on him, giving him just four hours of sleep and pulling him back to interrogations."
He also was the subject of a fake kidnapping, in which Mr Siems said he was dragged from his cell, put in a speed boat that was driven out in to the Caribbean, beaten by Egyptian and Jordanian interrogators and then hauled into an isolation cell that had been blacked out so he could not tell the time of day.
"It included a moment where his special interrogation chief handed him a letter and said 'Mohamedou we've captured your mother and we're going to bring her to Guantanamo' and the implication was that she would be raped and abused in Guantanamo," he said.
Mr Siems said the extraordinary physical and psychological tortures that Mr Slahi endured during the investigation had a profound effect on his mental health.
"It took him to the very brink. There's a harrowing moment in the book where, after he's been dragged into this isolation hut and this relentless sleep deprivation interrogation continues, he begins to hallucinate and hear the voices of his family and hear voices of a heavenly chorus singing Koranic voices."
Despite being subjected to such poor treatment, Mr Siems said Mr Slahi remained resilient throughout the ordeal.
Siems and Slahi never met during editing process
Mr Siems never met Mr Slahi throughout the editing process.
"It's impossible. No writer, journalist has ever communicated with a Guantanamo detainee," Mr Siems said.
"I did actually officially petition to visit him when I had prepared the first edit of the manuscript.
"[What] I got was essentially the same response that they've delivered to every journalist who's asked to see a Guantanamo prisoner, which is they cite a Geneva conventions prohibition against parading prisoners and making them into public spectacles."
