Guantánamo hunger strikes

Guantánamo hunger strikes recur in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account as protests against detention conditions and confinement without trial, rather than as isolated episodes. He took part in a September 2002 strike; by the time he was completing his manuscript in 2005, another large protest was underway. His writing links the repeated acts of refusal to detainees’ worsening circumstances and to a government that, in his view, had not addressed the reasons behind them.

The September 2002 strike

A hunger strike in late September and October 2002 took place amid continuing detention without trial or legal process. The notes accompanying the manuscript cite an FBI document attributing the protest to anger over treatment by guards and the absence of legal process. Slahi later states that he personally participated in a September 2002 strike, placing his own experience within a protest that extended beyond him.

The protest fell toward the end of Major General Michael E. Dunlavey’s command of Joint Task Force 170, the intelligence operations at the camp. Major General Geoffrey Miller succeeded him in November 2002. The accompanying account situates the strike within a broader shift toward more abusive interrogation practices in October and November, including the development of a special interrogation plan for another detainee. On December 2, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld authorized methods that included forced standing, stress positions, nudity, and interrogations lasting twenty hours. The sequence supplies a wider institutional context for the protest without establishing that any one later policy caused it.

The renewed protest in 2005

As Slahi wrote near the end of 2005, he described many fellow detainees as hunger-striking and determined to continue. He feared that some were close to death and might suffer lasting harm even if they resumed eating. His concern gives the protest a personal and collective dimension: he was not only recalling his own participation three years earlier but watching other detainees persist in a familiar form of dissent.

The manuscript’s last page is dated September 28, 2005. An accompanying note places the beginning of one of the largest Guantánamo strikes in August 2005 and says it continued through the end of the year. The timing connects Slahi’s account of an ongoing protest to a wider, sustained episode, while the dated manuscript fixes what he could report as he wrote: the strike was underway, and its eventual duration lay beyond the moment of composition.

Repetition without resolution

Slahi says that the government did not appear impressed by the 2002 strike and that detainees continued striking for old and new reasons. In his account, recurrence is itself consequential: a protest repeated after an earlier one failed to secure a response signals that the underlying grievances remain unresolved. He presents the detainees’ situation as one in which the authorities expect solutions from the forces at the camp, while those forces, as he sees it, understand that meaningful change requires the government to be forthcoming and to release people.

His appeal widens from the detainees to the American public. He argues that the public has a right to know what is happening at Guantánamo and questions the expense of holding people he considers innocent. The hunger strikes therefore appear within a larger argument about secrecy, accountability, and the costs of prolonged detention, not merely as episodes within prison life.

Documentation and limits

The account combines Slahi’s recollection with editorial notes that compare the manuscript with publicly available sources, including declassified records and government investigations. The notes identify an FBI document as evidence about the 2002 strike’s timing and reported grievances, and cite contemporary reporting to establish the 2005 strike’s extended course. This cross-checking supports the broad chronology while keeping distinct what Slahi experienced, what he argued, and what the notes say other records document.

That distinction matters because the manuscript was subject to government redactions, and its editor explicitly declined to reconstruct censored text or present speculation as recovered fact. The strikes emerge through both the narrative and its documentary framing: Slahi’s participation and alarm are recorded in his account, while the notes supply external context. Together they make repetition visible without claiming that every detainee shared the same reasons or that the protests produced a resolution.