“Ana Bari’a”

“Ana Bari’a” is Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s declaration of innocence, repeated as his sole answer during an interrogation at Guantánamo. In the scene, the phrase marks a refusal to provide the answers his interrogator demands; its significance lies in that insistence, set against an interrogation regime that sought information through coercion.

The Phrase in the Interrogation

Slahi recounts that, after telling the interrogator he would not speak, he was pushed against a wall and struck while questions were put to him. He says he cannot remember those questions but remembers giving only one answer: “Ana Bari’a,” which the diary translates as an assertion that he was innocent. The exchange ends without the interrogator obtaining further answers from him in that moment; the interrogator leaves after threatening that Slahi would suffer the following day.

The episode continues in the cell rather than resolving with the exchange. Around midnight, Slahi returns to his prayer mat, reads the Koran, and prays, though he says he can hardly concentrate. His thoughts turn to what might happen next. The phrase therefore appears not as a detached slogan but as a brief, repeated answer within a night of interrogation, uncertainty, and continued confinement.

The Larger Interrogation Context

The manuscript’s account of Slahi’s treatment is accompanied by records that help establish the broader circumstances of his interrogation, though they do not independently verify this particular utterance. An investigator working for Stuart Couch obtained access to interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda describing both what was said in sessions and how information was extracted. The files remain classified, but the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Justice Department summarized relevant records in their 2008 investigations.

Those summaries describe a second, Rumsfeld-approved special interrogation plan. They include a fictitious letter exploiting Slahi’s relationship with his mother and an October 2003 exchange in which an interrogator reported that Slahi was hearing voices and a military psychiatrist discussed hallucinations associated with sensory deprivation. These records corroborate the coercive and isolating conditions surrounding the diary’s account; they should not be treated as direct confirmation of the wording or precise circumstances of the “Ana Bari’a” episode.

The documented plan also included a staged transfer intended to make Slahi believe he had been taken away from Guantánamo. On August 25, 2003, he was removed from his cell in Camp Delta wearing blackout goggles and taken on a disorienting boat ride, with deceptive conversations arranged among the passengers. The plan then called for confinement at Camp Echo in a room modified to reduce outside stimuli, including by preventing light from entering. This documented sequence supplies context for the atmosphere of control surrounding the interrogation narrative without establishing that the phrase was spoken during that staged transfer.

Editorial Caution and Significance

The editor’s notes explain that annotations concerning redactions are informed by context, other material in the manuscript, and public sources such as declassified documents and official investigations. They explicitly decline to reconstruct the original censored text or uncover classified material, and characterize proposed connections as informed speculation rather than recovered wording. The editor also notes that attorneys with security clearances and others with access to the unredacted manuscript did not review or confirm those introductory materials and footnotes.

That distinction matters to the reading of “Ana Bari’a.” The phrase is presented in Slahi’s own account, while the surrounding documentary record supports the wider reality of a planned special interrogation without proving every detail of an individual exchange. Read within those limits, the words condense a conflict between the demand for cooperation and Slahi’s insistence on his innocence. Their repetition gives the account a point of resistance, but the records and editorial caveats also preserve the difference between testimony, corroboration, and what remains unknown.