“One day in paradise, and the next in hell”

“One day in paradise, and the next in hell” is a phrase for the sudden collapse of apparent security in detention. In the account of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s transfer into the Guantánamo system, it marks the gap between a detainee’s expectation of ordinary treatment and his dependence on interrogators who can change the terms of his confinement.

A phrase in the transfer narrative

The phrase appears in a sequence spanning July 2002 to February 2003, whose headings trace the American team’s arrival, the arrival at Bagram, the transfer from Bagram to Guantánamo, and Guantánamo becoming a new home. Set at the end of that progression, the phrase recasts arrival not as a stable conclusion to the journey but as the beginning of another reversal.

The reversal of apparent security

In the surrounding passage, Slahi describes a radical, hateful figure as having changed detention policies at Guantánamo in every respect. The phrase follows that account of a policy shift and the observation that detainees at this level were entirely at the mercy of their interrogators. Its paradise is therefore precarious: even a detainee who has not been in trouble with guards and is answering and cooperating with interrogators can discover that cooperation means telling them whatever they want to hear.

Significance

The paired images compress a change in power into a single turn from one extreme to another. What seemed like relief cannot be relied upon, because the interrogators control both the conditions and the meaning of cooperation. The phrase captures the instability of Slahi’s detention experience without suggesting that the apparent paradise was secure or lasting.