“They that give up essential liberty…”

“They that give up essential liberty…” is the liberty-and-safety maxim the book attributes to Ben Franklin. In the Guantánamo narrative, it becomes a measure of the distance between the narrator’s early confidence in American justice and the detention system he later describes: as interrogation methods worsened, the pursuit of security came to threaten the liberties and principles it was supposed to defend.

The Maxim in the Arrival Narrative

On arriving in Cuba, Mohamedou Ould Slahi believed the worst was over. He trusted that the American justice system would recognize that he was not the person its authorities were seeking, and he shared that confidence with detainees from European countries. Other detainees, including men from the Middle East, were more skeptical; they pointed to growing hostility among extremist Americans toward Muslims and Arabs. As time passed, the optimists lost ground and interrogation methods grew harsher. The maxim appears at this turn in the narrative, linking a familiar warning about trading liberty for safety to the narrator’s changing assessment of the system holding him.

The book sets that warning against the detainees’ own experience of time and separation. They spent thirty days in one block listening to one another’s accounts after months of forced silence. When the men were later transferred to a different block, many cried at parting from the friends they had made, and Slahi says that he cried too. The contrast gives the maxim a human scale: the stakes are not only abstract principles, but the lives, speech, and relationships shaped by detention.

Silence, Testimony, and the Record

At a Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing, Slahi declined to answer a question about whether U.S. authorities had abused him, saying he was not willing to answer and did not have to if he was not forced. The exchange places a limit on what the official record could claim to establish: a refusal to answer was not an affirmation that no abuse had occurred.

A year later, at his 2005 Administrative Review Board hearing, Slahi spoke about his experiences with greater freedom. He said he had written the book and asked the board to understand his story, irrespective of whether he would be released. The transcript does not preserve the entire account: as he began describing the summer of 2003 at Guantánamo, the recording equipment malfunctioned, and the record substituted the board’s recollection for the missing section. The change between hearings—first a refusal to answer, later a detailed effort to be heard—makes the maxim’s concern with liberty inseparable from the question of who can speak and whose account survives in the record.

Security Claims and Evidentiary Limits

The later prosecutorial record deepens the contrast between security claims and evidentiary limits. No charge sheet was drawn up against Slahi at Guantánamo, and no military commission defense attorney was appointed to his case. Stuart Couch, who withdrew from the case rather than proceed with a commission prosecution, said Slahi’s intelligence reports did not implicate him in an overt act in the conspiracy to attack the United States on September 11. The reports identified people associated with al-Qaeda, but Couch noted that knowing about those people was not the same as participating in an attack.

When Slahi’s habeas petition reached federal court in 2009, the government’s stated basis for detention was that he had been part of al-Qaeda through an oath of allegiance, associations, and forms of assistance, rather than because he had fought against the United States or taken part in its attack. The maxim does not settle the legal question in his case; it sharpens the tension between a broad security rationale and the evidence needed to justify continued detention.

A Demand for Public Accountability

Slahi’s closing appeal extends the maxim from his own experience to public responsibility. He says he tried to report what he experienced and learned firsthand without exaggerating or understating it, and asks that his account receive the benefit of the doubt. He calls for public opinion to press the U.S. government to open an investigation into torture and war crimes, and says he believes he can prove what he wrote if allowed to call witnesses in a proper judicial proceeding. His emphasis on witnesses and a fair process returns the discussion to the maxim’s central concern: security cannot serve as an unquestioned substitute for liberty, evidence, and accountability.