The Guantánamo hunger strike of 2005 was a renewed protest by detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, beginning in August and extending through the end of the year. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account presents it as a response to the conditions of detention and the perceived failure of authorities to address detainees’ situation; he had also taken part in an earlier strike in September 2002.

Background and Renewed Protest

Slahi describes many detainees as losing their mental stability under the conditions of confinement, with younger men especially affected. As he wrote, detainees were again refusing food for familiar as well as new reasons, and he saw no solution in sight. The 2005 protest thus appears in his account not as an isolated act, but as a recurrence after the earlier strike had failed, in his view, to move the government.

Slahi feared that those continuing the strike might suffer lasting harm, even if they later resumed eating. He presents his concern as that of a fellow detainee watching others persist while feeling unable to help them. The account records both their determination to continue and his anxiety about the consequences.

Slahi’s Account of the Stakes

For Slahi, the protest was bound up with the continuing detention of people he regarded as innocent and with the government’s unwillingness to disclose the truth about Guantánamo. He argued that the American public had a right to know what was happening and noted the financial cost of holding detainees, including the expense he said his own detention had imposed on taxpayers.

He considered the forces at Guantánamo more familiar with the situation than officials in Washington, but wrote that they could not resolve it on their own. In his assessment, the government had to be forthcoming and release people. The hunger strike therefore registers both as a protest by detainees and as part of Slahi’s larger appeal for public accountability and release.

Duration and Documentary Record

An editorial note states that one of the largest Guantánamo hunger strikes began in August 2005 and continued through the end of the year. It also dates the manuscript’s final page to September 28, 2005. Slahi’s description was therefore written while the wider strike was still underway, rather than as a retrospective account of its conclusion.

The published account and the editorial note offer distinct kinds of information: Slahi conveys the detainees’ immediate concerns, while the note supplies the strike’s broader dates. The book’s annotations are presented as contextual work based on the manuscript, public records, and other available sources; they do not claim to reconstruct text concealed by redactions.

Significance

The strike’s recurrence links the 2005 protest to Slahi’s participation in September 2002, while the expanded duration recorded in the editorial note gives the later action a scale that his account alone does not establish. His focus remains on detainees’ continuing distress, the risk of lasting consequences, and the lack of a remedy he believed could be supplied without government action. The account ends without reporting a resolution to the strike; its immediate emphasis is on persistence and uncertainty.