“The worst of the worst”

“The worst of the worst” was a public characterization of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay detention camp that cast them as exceptionally dangerous before their individual accounts could be heard. In the book, the phrase becomes a point of conflict between official descriptions of the detainees and testimony that challenged those descriptions, as well as a reminder that the public record was shaped by what authorities chose to release or withhold.

A label made public

The phrase appears in an account of the first transcripts released from the prisoners’ secret hearings. The military’s presiding general had described the men arriving at the camp in 2002 as so dangerous they might sabotage the aircraft carrying them. The transcripts, by contrast, included accounts that undercut the claim that the camp held “the worst of the worst.” Several prisoners discussed their treatment in U.S. custody; Mohamedou Ould Slahi was among them.

The transcripts became available in the spring of 2006, after a federal judge hearing an Associated Press lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act ordered their release. The same lawsuit compelled the Pentagon, four years after Guantánamo opened, to publish an official list of the men it held. For the first time, the prisoners had names in the public record, and their hearing testimony gave those names voices. The phrase’s force depended on a broad judgment about the prisoners; the transcripts brought forward particular people describing particular experiences.

Testimony and rebuttal

The release did not settle the dispute over how the prisoners should be understood. When the transcripts became public, a military spokesman reiterated that Guantánamo detainees were dangerous and asserted that they were trained to lie, elicit sympathy, and pressure the U.S. government. That response framed testimony about mistreatment not simply as an account to assess, but as a possible tactic by the speaker.

The contrast is central to the phrase’s role in the book. The transcripts offered evidence that detainees had raised questions about their treatment, but the official response treated their accounts with suspicion. The resulting contest was over both the prisoners’ supposed danger and their credibility: a sweeping public characterization met testimony from people whose ability to speak publicly, and to have their words accepted, remained constrained.

An incomplete public record

The limits of the record are part of the story. When the military released records of the 2006 Administrative Review Board hearings a year later, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s transcript was missing altogether and remained classified. The book therefore sets the publicly released hearing transcripts alongside continuing gaps in access; disclosure made some testimony audible without making the underlying record complete.

The manuscript itself also reached readers through layers of control. Mohamedou Ould Slahi wrote it by hand in his Guantánamo cell in 2005, and the U.S. government added more than 2,500 black-bar redactions before publication. The editor’s annotations draw on context, other manuscript passages, and public sources, but explicitly do not claim to reconstruct classified text. This distinction matters to the reading of official labels as well as detainee testimony: what can be established, what remains withheld, and what is only a plausible interpretation are not the same thing.

Significance

“The worst of the worst” condenses a public narrative that the released transcripts put under pressure. The phrase grouped prisoners together as a class, while their testimony restored individual voices and raised questions about U.S. custody. Yet the Pentagon’s insistence that detainees were trained to lie, and the continued classification of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s later hearing transcript, show how quickly those voices could be discounted or kept from public view.

The expression thus marks more than a disagreement over a description. It points to the unequal conditions under which the competing accounts reached readers: an official characterization circulated publicly, while testimony, hearing records, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s own manuscript were delayed, redacted, or withheld. The transcripts challenged the label, but the continuing gaps in the record left that challenge incomplete.