Mohamedou Ould SlahiCreditInternational Committee of the Red Cross That was Nov. 20, 2001. Slahi’s mother has since died. Her son has never returned. He had begun, that fall day two months after 9/11, what he calls his “endless world tour,” courtesy of the various American national security bureaucracies, traveling, after a week of interrogation in Mauritania, via “extraordinary rendition” to a black site in Jordan, where he was interrogated, sometimes brutally, for eight months; thence he is flown, blindfolded, shackled and diapered, to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, for two weeks of interrogation; and finally, to Guantánamo, where he suffered months of strictest isolation, weeks of sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and sound, and other elaborate tortures set out in a “special plan” approved personally by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — and where he remains to this day. He composed these memoirs in his isolation cell in the summer of 2005, and a six-year legal battle has finally brought them to us. Written in the colloquial if limited English he 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. Blindfolded, earmuffed and shackled, Slahi is rendered to a secret prison in Jordan (though he is supposed to have no idea where on the globe he is) and interviewed on arrival by two dim clerks straight out of a Beckett play: