2005 Guantánamo Hunger Strike

The 2005 Guantánamo Hunger Strike appears in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account as a recurring act of protest and a measure of the stalemate at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. He describes fellow detainees continuing to strike despite the risk of lasting harm, while arguing that the government’s failure to address the underlying detention crisis left no solution in sight.

Background and Recurrence

Slahi places the 2005 protest in the context of an earlier hunger strike in September 2002, in which he had personally participated. In his view, that earlier action did not appear to impress the government. The later strike therefore belonged to a repeated pattern: detainees continued to protest over grievances he characterized as both longstanding and new, while the causes of their protest remained unresolved.

At the time of his account, the strike was ongoing. An editorial note records that one of the largest hunger strikes at Guantánamo began in August 2005 and continued through the end of the year. That later chronology gives the appeal in Slahi’s writing a specific moment: he was describing a protest already underway, not recounting one whose outcome was settled.

Conditions and Stakes

Slahi reports that many detainees were striking and determined to continue. He was especially concerned about younger detainees, whom he described as losing their mental stability under detention conditions. Watching them, he felt unable to intervene and feared that some were nearing death, or would suffer irreversible damage even if they eventually resumed eating.

The strike’s stakes in his account were therefore not limited to whether detainees would stop eating. It exposed the human cost of a protest that Slahi saw as continuing because the same grievances had not been answered. His concern for the other detainees also places the event within a collective experience of detention rather than presenting it solely as an individual act of resistance.

Political Impasse

Slahi argues that the government expected U.S. forces at Guantánamo to produce a solution, while those working at the camp understood the situation better than officials in Washington. He identifies the needed response not as a technical fix by the forces at the camp, but as government candor and the release of detainees. In this framing, the hunger strike was a consequence of a political impasse: protest continued because, as he saw it, the government would neither disclose the truth about the operation nor resolve the detention of people he considered innocent.

His appeal extends beyond the camp. Slahi says that the American public had a right to know what was happening and connects secrecy and continued detention to their financial cost. He estimates that his own detention had already cost taxpayers at least one million dollars, with the amount continuing to rise, and notes that other detainees cost roughly as much. The estimate strengthens his argument that the strike and its causes were matters of public responsibility, not only internal camp management.

Chronology and Significance

The manuscript was completed in the fall of 2005; its final page is signed and dated September 28. The editorial chronology places the hunger strike’s beginning in August and its continuation through the end of the year, so the account captures an ongoing crisis before its full duration was known. Slahi’s return to the 2002 strike makes that recurrence central to the event’s meaning: protest had happened before, the government seemed unmoved, and detainees were striking again over unresolved conditions. The episode consequently links individual vulnerability to a wider demand for disclosure and release.