'I Almost Lost My Mind': Guantanamo Prisoner's Diary

Sexual abuse, beatings, force-feedings: 12-year inmate's book describes torture
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 20, 2015 2:21 PM CST
'I Almost Lost My Mind': Guantanamo Prisoner's Diary
"Guantanamo Diary" is Mohamedou Ould Slahi's story of how he says he was tortured in the American prison in Cuba.   (nwshp)

For 12 years, Mauritania native Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been Prisoner No. 760 at Guantanamo, accused of aiding and abetting the 9/11 terrorists and involvement in a halted attack at LAX, der Spiegel reports. He's since confessed to multiple crimes, but he now says those admissions were only because of prolonged torture at the American prison, and he's documented that alleged torture in Guantanamo Diary, a book released today based on the manuscript he wrote in prison, RT.com reports. Excerpts in Spiegel and shown on the Guardian in their original handwritten form claim he was made to engage in sexual threesomes, force-fed during Ramadan (then starved), deprived of comfort items, beaten, made to drink salt water until he vomited, forced to drink so much regular water he couldn't sleep, and dragged to watch a mock execution, among other things.

"I almost lost my mind," he wrote after one session he said used "physical and psychological suffering … at their highest extremes." Although Slahi was involved with al-Qaeda in the early 1990s to help battle the Soviet-backed Afghani government, he says he broke away from the group in 1992, RT.com notes. He was whisked away from home in November 2001 and detained in Jordan and Afghanistan before coming to Guantanamo in August 2002, Spiegel reports. US District Court Judge James Robertson ordered his release in 2010 based on lack of evidence, but that order was appealed by the feds and is now sitting in US District Court. Slahi was able to publish his notes after fighting with the US government for six years to declassify them. "Slahi provides us with a glimpse of life there," his lawyer tells Spiegel. "I hope this book will change some things and that he will finally be released." (More Guantanamo Bay stories.)

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