Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a Mauritanian engineer and memoirist whose detention without criminal charge became the subject of Guantánamo Diary. His story moves from study and work abroad to repeated questioning, secret transfers, and imprisonment at Guantánamo. There, he turned the conditions of confinement into the circumstances of authorship: he wrote a habeas petition and a 466-page manuscript by hand, addressing a public he could not meet. His long detention continued even after a federal judge ordered his release and the United States government appealed.

Identity and Background

Born in Mauritania in 1970, Slahi won a scholarship to attend college in Germany, where he later worked for several years as an engineer. After twelve years studying, living, and working abroad, primarily in Germany and briefly in Canada, he decided to return home in 2000. His return was interrupted by detention first in Senegal and then in Mauritania, at the behest of the United States, and questioning by American Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about the Millennium Plot targeting Los Angeles International Airport. Authorities released him on February 19, 2000, having found no basis to believe he had taken part in the plot.

Slahi then lived with his family and worked as an electrical engineer in Mauritania. On September 29, 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained him again for two weeks, and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents again questioned him about the plot. He was released once more, with Mauritanian authorities publicly affirming his innocence. The return to ordinary life was therefore brief: the repeated investigation continued to shape his circumstances despite those releases.

Detention and Its Consequences

In 2001, Slahi was transferred to a prison in Jordan, then to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and ultimately to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. After two weeks of interrogation at Bagram, he was placed on a military transport with thirty-four other prisoners. The group arrived at Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. In 2003 and 2004, military interrogators subjected him to a special interrogation plan approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The documented measures included prolonged isolation, humiliation, threats against him and his family, and a staged kidnapping and transfer.

The effects of detention reached beyond the interrogation sessions. Slahi remained separated from other detainees, and medical care came only after a delay. Around March 2004, doctors were permitted to see him; the following month he received psychological assistance for the first time. He later described taking Paxil and Klonopin to address depression and sleep problems, as well as a multivitamin for a condition attributed to lack of sun exposure. Though he met with psychologists who helped him, fear of retaliation kept him from telling them the real reason for his illness.

His account also records moments of human connection within the custodial relationship. A guard who began working with him in July 2004 spoke with him regularly about history, culture, politics, and religion, while avoiding current events. Slahi said he was not trying to obtain news from the guards. Before leaving, the guard brought him souvenirs and, with other guards, dedicated a copy of Steve Martin’s The Pleasure of My Company to him. Notes from guards addressed him by the nicknames Pill and Pillow, wished him luck, and referred to a friendship that had developed despite the formal detainee-guard relationship. Their messages did not end his imprisonment, but they reveal relationships that exceeded the roles the institution assigned them.

Writing in Confinement

On March 3, 2005, Slahi handwrote a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. That summer, in his segregation cell at Guantánamo, he wrote the 466 pages that became Guantánamo Diary. The manuscript was composed in English, his fourth language, which he had acquired largely while in United States custody. Its limited vocabulary, estimated at fewer than seven thousand words, nevertheless carries a wide range of events and feeling. Repeated verbal formulas give recurring experiences a recognizable shape, while the prose shifts between comparatively polished passages and sections that feel urgent and sprawling.

The manuscript’s form bears the marks of its circumstances. It is incomplete and sometimes fragmentary; its treatment of recent events is less linear, and its overall organization was unresolved, with flashbacks appended at the end. Larry Siems, the editor who prepared it for publication, incorporated those flashbacks into the main narrative, regularized wording and tense, and streamlined a draft of about 122,000 words to just under 100,000. The United States government had already edited the text, adding more than 2,500 black-bar redactions. Slahi could not participate in either round of editing, although he had hoped the manuscript would reach readers and authorized publication in its edited form.

Publication thus extended the conditions of his confinement into the book’s visible surface. The black bars conceal passages while also reminding readers that Slahi remained under government control. Siems sought to preserve the manuscript’s direct voice and its account of events, but could not consult Slahi about the final edits. He had sent an introductory letter, without knowing whether Slahi received it, and his request to meet before completing the work was denied. The separation between writer and editor is not incidental to the text’s history: Slahi wrote for a public readership, yet those entrusted with bringing the manuscript to that readership could not confirm its final form with him.

Legal Challenge and Narrative Significance

Slahi’s habeas petition belonged to a larger legal struggle over whether Guantánamo detainees could challenge their detention. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that they had that right. From August through December 2009, Judge James Robertson heard Slahi’s petition, and in 2010 a federal judge ordered him immediately released. The government appealed. The United States had never charged Slahi with a crime, and he remained imprisoned at Guantánamo.

Slahi presents his account as a record grounded in what he experienced, saw, and learned firsthand. The editor later judged the narrative reliable and well corroborated by declassified records, while noting that the documentary record contained additional abuses not included in the memoir. The restraint of the writing and its attention to human exchanges sit alongside the scale of the allegations and the many passages removed by censorship. His account is therefore both personal testimony and a contested public record: its composition, editing, and delayed circulation all reflect the struggle over who can speak, who can verify the story, and what the public is permitted to read.

The book’s dedication also locates its author within relationships beyond detention. Slahi dedicated his writing to the memory of his late mother, Maryem Mint El Wadia, and acknowledged that the support of his lawyers, including Nancy Hollander, made that dedication possible. In a later conversation with a lawyer, he said he held no grudge against the people named in the book and hoped they would read it and correct any errors. He imagined eventually sitting with them over tea, having learned from one another. That wish does not erase the imbalance between prisoner and captors; it gives the memoir’s appeal to readers a distinct form, combining an insistence on accuracy with an invitation to answer him as a person.