Guantanamo Diary

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

Starred review from February 9, 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 âmillennium 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 âwar on terror"âthe system of arbitrary imprisonment and âenhanced interrogation" where justice gives way to lawless brutality.