Guantánamo Bay is the location where Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s journey through a sequence of detentions ended and his prolonged imprisonment by the United States continued. Situated on a U.S. naval base in Cuba, the camp was both a physical destination thousands of miles from his home and a place whose distance and restricted access kept his whereabouts from his family and the outside world.

Setting and route

The account frames Guantánamo Bay as the endpoint of an “endless world tour” of detention and interrogation spanning twenty thousand miles over eighteen months. Slahi had expected his January 2000 flight from Canada to Senegal to begin a homecoming. Instead, he was questioned in Mauritania, secretly transferred to Jordan, taken by the United States to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and eventually brought to Guantánamo Bay. The route turned a return toward home into confinement on a Caribbean island about four thousand miles away.

The location’s institutional setting is distinct from the detention camp itself: the camp is on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and is run by a U.S. military joint task force under the command of U.S. Southern Command. Slahi’s account describes the base as the final point in a chain of transfers, while the book’s concluding biographical note records his arrival there on August 5, 2002. He remained imprisoned there despite a federal judge’s 2010 order for his release, which the government appealed; the United States never charged him with a crime.

Distance and concealment

Guantánamo Bay’s remoteness was compounded by uncertainty about Slahi’s whereabouts. For nearly a year, his family believed he was in Mauritanian custody. His oldest brother, Hamoud, brought clean clothes and money for his meals to a prison in Nouakchott, unaware that a CIA flight had taken Slahi to Jordan and that he had subsequently been transferred through Bagram to Guantánamo. Prison officials accepted the family’s payments without disclosing that he was no longer there.

On October 28, 2002, Slahi’s youngest brother, Yahdih, learned from Der Spiegel that Slahi had been held for months at Guantánamo. The revelation redirected the family’s anger toward the local authorities who had assured them he was safe in Mauritania. The separation was also a severing of communication: Slahi later recorded that 815 days had passed since his abduction and the forced end of contact with his family when he received their first letter, sent through the International Committee of the Red Cross. Letters he had sent from Cuba had not reached them, and in Jordan he had not been allowed to write.

Enclosure within the base

The account distinguishes the camp’s large-scale isolation from the smaller spaces within it. At one point Slahi was placed in an otherwise empty block, with other detainees at a distance and no opportunity for interaction. After they were transferred elsewhere, the block was reserved for him alone. Later, during a period of isolation, he contrasted a cell where he could see daylight and which was warmer with an earlier, colder cell. These changes in immediate surroundings altered the conditions of confinement without ending his separation from other detainees.

The book presents control over movement and contact as central features of the location. Slahi’s access to other detainees, daylight, books, and religious materials changed with his placement inside the camp. His account of these spaces makes the base more than a fixed point on a map: its internal divisions governed what he could see, whom he could meet, and what information could reach him.

Visits and public knowledge

Access by the International Committee of the Red Cross was also restricted. In September 2004, after a prolonged dispute with the government, the organization was finally permitted to visit Slahi. Its representatives had previously been unable to establish where he was or see him, even as they sought access. Slahi understood that he was the last detainee they had had to fight to visit. He did not disclose his mistreatment when questioned, because he feared retaliation and doubted that the organization could compel the United States to change course.

The gap between the camp’s controlled access and its eventual visibility shapes Guantánamo Bay’s significance in the book. Slahi says that he knew from the beginning where he was, while the wider world did not know where the U.S. government was holding him; a later disclosure by an interrogator made the location officially acknowledged to him. Guantánamo Bay thus appears both as a real, administered detention site and as a place made difficult to verify from outside. Its geography, internal separations, and limits on visitation sustained that distance even after Slahi had reached his final destination.