Mike Block is a detention block at Camp Delta that Mohamedou Ould Slahi identifies as the place from which he was moved to India Block around June 18, 2003. The transfer gives the location its principal significance in the account: it marks a change in his confinement, from a block whose conditions are not detailed here to a destination selected for total isolation. The distinction matters because the manuscript and its accompanying annotations describe a network of detention spaces whose names, conditions, and degrees of access were not interchangeable.

Setting and Identification

The available evidence identifies Mike Block through Slahi’s account of his movement within Camp Delta rather than through a detailed description of the block itself. An editorial note places the transfer at about June 18, 2003, citing Slahi’s statement to an Administrative Review Board that he was taken from Mike Block and put in India Block for total isolation. The note also explains that former detainees described India Block as containing windowless solitary-confinement cells that were often kept at frigid temperatures. Those details describe the destination, not Mike Block, and the evidence does not establish that the two blocks shared the same design or conditions.

Mike Block formed one point in a much longer detention itinerary. The book’s introductory account describes Slahi’s journey through detention and interrogation in four countries over eighteen months, with transfers ultimately bringing him to Guantánamo. Within that larger route, the move from Mike Block to India Block is a change of location inside the camp, but it carries a distinct consequence: the account explicitly characterizes the new placement as total isolation.

Transfer to India Block

The move is presented not as an ordinary change of cell but as a transfer between blocks with different conditions of access to other detainees. The annotation’s reference to Slahi’s Administrative Review Board testimony gives an approximate date and identifies the stated purpose of the new placement. It also helps anchor the first-person account in a later formal record, while leaving the precise circumstances of the transfer and the physical characteristics of Mike Block unspecified.

Descriptions of India Block clarify what the transfer meant without filling in what the record does not say about Mike Block. Slahi’s account elsewhere depicts an isolated block with no signs of life, where he was separated from the other detainees; the editorial annotation associates the India Block account with a Yemeni detainee and reports that the cells were windowless and often frigid. These details make the destination’s isolation legible, but they do not support treating every description of that block as a description of the place Slahi had left.

Camp Delta’s Spatial Regime

The later detention narrative distinguishes several locations within the camp. A staged transfer described in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s inquiry took Slahi by boat, under deceptive circumstances, to Camp Echo. There, the planned isolation hut was to be sealed against light and arranged to limit outside stimuli. Camp Echo was a separate site from Mike Block; the contrast underscores how movement between named spaces could form part of the interrogation regime, rather than merely changing where a detainee slept.

The account also describes an extended period in which Slahi’s location and access to outside visitors were controlled. In September 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross was finally permitted to visit him after a prolonged dispute, having previously been unable to establish where he was. That episode does not identify Mike Block as the site of the restrictions, but it places his movement through Camp Delta within a broader setting where location, contact, and visibility were subject to institutional control.

Documentary Limits and Significance

The account of Mike Block appears within a manuscript extensively affected by government redactions. Its editor explains that annotations draw on contextual reading, information elsewhere in the manuscript, publicly available records, and investigations, while expressly declining to reconstruct classified text or present speculation as recovered fact. The approximate date and route from Mike Block to India Block are therefore more securely stated than any unrecorded architectural or operational description of Mike Block itself.

As a result, Mike Block’s importance is chiefly that of a point of departure in Slahi’s documented movement through Camp Delta. The block becomes legible through the transfer away from it: the next named space is associated with total isolation, while later locations such as Camp Echo show how the camp’s spatial divisions could be incorporated into planned interrogation. Preserving those distinctions keeps the account concrete without assigning Mike Block conditions that the available evidence does not establish.