WE ARE NO BETTER THAN OUR ACTIONS, AND THE ACTIONS OF OUR AGENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary, edited by Larry Siems (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("'You are not a man! I am going to make you lick the dirty floor and tell me your story, beginning from the point when you got out your mother's vagina,' he continued. 'You haven't seen nothing yet.' He was correct, although he was the biggest liar I ever met. He lied so much that he contradicted himself because he would forget what he had said the last time about a specific topic. In order to give himself credibility, he kept swearing and taking the Lord's name in vain. I always wondered whether he thought I believed his garbage, though I always acted as if I did; he would have been angry if I called him a liar. He arrested big al Qaeda guys who talked about me being the bad guy, and he released them a thousand and one times from prison when they told the truth. The funny thing was he always forgot that he arrested and released them already." Id. at 181. From the book jacket" "Since 2002, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United Stats has never charged him with a crime. A federal judge ordered his release in March 2010, but the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is still no sign that the United States plans to let him go." "Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he left his home on November 28, 2001, and disappeared into U.S. custody, his 'endess world tour' of imprisonment and interrogation, and his daily life as a Guantanamo prisoner. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice but a deeply personal memoir--terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Published now for the first time, Guantanamo Diary is both a document of immense historical importance and a riveting and profoundly revealing read." Also see Mark Danner, "No Exit," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/1/2015.).