Ongoing torture

Ongoing torture at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp appears not as one exceptional session but as a continuous regime: detainees were repeatedly interrogated, isolated, deprived of ordinary comforts and religious practice, and subjected to physical and psychological pressure. In Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account, the methods formed a system whose effects accumulated across days and months; public investigations later corroborated important elements of that account, even as censorship left parts of the record inaccessible.

A regime that extended beyond one detainee

Slahi describes torture as a recurring practice affecting people around him as well as himself. During the months before his own transfer into an intensified program, he saw another detainee taken away almost every night and returned in the morning. That prisoner was exposed to loud music and frightening images, sexually harassed, and forbidden to pray during interrogation. Slahi sought guidance from other detainees about how to respond when prayer was prohibited. The answer—that he could pray inwardly when prevented from performing the ritual—became relevant to his own treatment, which also included restrictions on prayer. He recalled other detainees being subjected to similar practices, while making clear that his account concentrated on his own experience rather than attempting a complete record of every case.

When Slahi learned that an interrogation team intended to work on him, fear produced immediate physical symptoms, and he later developed hypertension. He understood the team’s assurances that it would avoid physical torture as misleading. His response was to maintain that he did not care what the interrogators intended, but the episode marks the start of a more concentrated phase of coercion, not a resolution of the threat.

Isolation and round-the-clock interrogation

After his transfer to a block reserved for detainees considered especially difficult, Slahi found himself without meaningful contact with the other prisoners. The block was eventually left for his use alone. His ordinary belongings were removed: books, soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and the Quran he had possessed. He was left with a thin mat and a worn, lightweight blanket. Daylight was withheld, and recreation took place at night so that he would not encounter or interact with other detainees.

For the next seventy days, interrogation continued around the clock, organized into three and sometimes four shifts. Slahi rarely had a day off and did not recall a quiet night of sleep. Rest and hot meals were offered conditionally, as rewards for cooperation. The schedule made the interrogation more than a series of interviews: it governed his sleep, access to food, contact with other people, and sense of time. The sustained routine is central to the account’s meaning of ongoing torture, because pressure came from the unbroken structure as well as from particular acts within it.

The physical environment was also manipulated. Slahi says the cell was cooled to a level that left him shaking much of the time; elsewhere he describes an interrogation room cooled to 49 degrees Fahrenheit, about 9.4 degrees Celsius. He was kept there for more than twelve hours in a thin uniform, without underwear, while interrogators could leave for a separate monitoring room and remain adequately dressed. Slahi understood the cold as a deliberate method and described the practice as established at the camp since at least August 2002. His account emphasizes the imbalance built into the arrangement: the interrogators controlled the temperature and the duration, while he had no comparable means to escape the exposure.

Humiliation, religious control, and disrupted routines

Interrogation also involved threats, degrading treatment, and physical punishment. In one session, Slahi refused to answer questions. Guards required him to remain in a painful bent position; afterward, he endured pain for the rest of the day and continued praying. He describes the interrogators using humiliation and threats to make ordinary necessities conditional on obedience. Food and warm meals could be withheld, and requests to use the bathroom were made subject to degrading rules. When he refused food or water during torture sessions, interrogators continued to control what was offered and when.

Sexualized abuse was another element of the coercion. Slahi recounts being made to endure degrading sexualized treatment during an interrogation, while maintaining that he kept praying. The account does not present this as an isolated violation: it shows the assault on bodily autonomy being joined to the deliberate targeting of religious identity. After one such session, he was prohibited from performing ritual prayers for about a year and barred from fasting during the Ramadan fasting month in October 2003. He was also force-fed. Religious practice, food, sleep, privacy, and bodily control thus became linked points of pressure rather than separate aspects of detention.

Several days later, the plan Slahi describes expanded into a staged secret detention. He was to be made to believe that he had been taken to a distant island, while being told that his mother had been captured and placed in a special facility. In the concealed location, he could not distinguish day from night or reliably tell how much time had passed. Meals were deliberately irregular: at times food was taken away after only a brief interval; at other times he was required to consume more than he wanted. The shifting extremes made even basic routines unpredictable and reinforced the sense that the interrogators controlled the boundaries of his daily life.

Documentation, corroboration, and the limits of the record

A visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross briefly interrupted the isolation. Within a few days of the transfer, a representative offered Slahi paper to write a letter to his mother. After that encounter, he did not see the organization for more than a year, although it tried to visit him. The short exchange provided a narrow channel to the outside world, but it did not end the regime or restore continuing access to independent visitors.

The account has support beyond Slahi’s own recollection. In 2003, Stuart Couch received intelligence reports from the interrogation and was told that Slahi was on Special Projects. His investigator later obtained the Special Projects Team’s memoranda, which recorded both what was said in interrogation sessions and how information was extracted. Those records remain classified, but the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2008 review summarized the program and described a special interrogation conducted under an approved plan. The reports, as presented in the book’s introductory material, found that the interrogation unfolded almost exactly as Slahi described it.

The same introductory material explains how censorship affects what readers can verify. The black bars interrupt the narrative and conceal parts of its cast and events. The editor’s annotations offer cautious interpretations based on context within the manuscript and on public sources, including declassified documents and government investigations; they do not claim to reconstruct the original redacted wording or reveal classified material. The distinction matters: public records corroborate significant features of the interrogation, but the censored text still limits what can be stated with certainty. The gaps are therefore part of the documented condition of the account, not permission to treat conjecture as fact.

Significance

The recurring pattern links isolation, sleep deprivation, cold exposure, humiliation, religious restrictions, and control of basic necessities. Slahi’s narrative shows how these practices reinforced one another over time: the altered schedule erased reliable rest, separation removed ordinary human contact, and unpredictability made food and time themselves instruments of pressure. His descriptions also place his experience within a wider environment in which other detainees were subjected to comparable forms of abuse.

The evidentiary structure sharpens that account rather than closing every gap. Slahi’s detailed recollection, the classified interrogation memoranda, and the public summaries converge on the existence and general shape of the special interrogation, while redactions and unavailable records preserve important uncertainty. Ongoing torture is thus both the condition the narrative describes and a continuing problem of knowledge: the book records what Slahi endured while showing how censorship restricts the public’s ability to see the full record.