The Mauritanian (Guantánamo Diary)

This chapter continues to contextualize Slahi’s eventual detention at Guantanamo and highlights the theme of Racism, Islamophobia, and the US War on Terror. The author discusses the relationship between regional geopolitics, the US War on Terror, and his detention. He relies on the motif of Kafkaesque absurdities and arbitrariness during his captivity. This part of the narrative represents an escalation because the author was taken from his homeland and transported to Jordan as a result of US coordination. There, Slahi realized that he was being accused of terrorism, and the interrogation techniques and torture worsened while he was kept in solitary confinement.

In the framework of geopolitics, Slahi suggests that the US pressured several countries to cooperate to meet its goals in the War on Terror:

Arab countries are not friends. On the contrary, they hate each other. They never cooperate; all they do is conspire against each other. To Mauritania, Jordan is worthless, and vice-versa. However, in my case the U.S. compelled them both to work together (168).

His view of the relations among Arab countries is decidedly negative and even pessimistic. The fact that Mauritania and Jordan worked together to extradite Slahi on questionable legal grounds underscores the extent of US power in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In addition, the author continues to assert that the use of third-party countries like Jordan gave the US plausible deniability regarding the use of torture, emphasizing the theme of Depersonalization and Dehumanization: “[T]he fact that Jordanians widely use torture as a means to facilitate interrogation seemed to impress the American authorities” (176). Officer Rami, his interrogator, said, “Look, your country is a good friend of ours, and they turned you over to us. We can do anything we like with you, kill you, arrest you indefinitely, or release you if you admit to your crime” (168). At the same time, the US introduced its “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” at the Guantanamo prison: “As Americans grew hardened in their sins, they started to take the dirty job in their own hands” (176). Slahi also discusses changing allegiances. For instance, he couldn’t understand how members of the Palestinian diaspora in Jordan could work as US interrogators when the US is allied with Israel: “To me, these interrogators just didn’t fit in the vests they were wearing: it didn’t make sense that Palestinians would work for Americans to defeat the people who are supposedly helping them” (162).

The author’s torture involved beatings and being interrogated in the middle of the night: “Yes, Jordanians practice torture on a daily basis, but they need a reasonable suspicion to do so. They don’t just jump on anybody and start to torture him” (164). However, he empathetically found that listening to the cries of other detainees being hurt was worse and couldn’t sleep. Slahi’s interrogators continued to ask him about his cousin Abu Hafs and his friends Mehdi and Ganczarski even though he’d already addressed these questions. Slahi continues to emphasize The Absurdities of Life as a Detainee (one of the book’s main themes), comparing the absurdity of repeatedly answering the same questions to the film Groundhog Day (1993), in which the protagonist is forced to relive the same day over and over again. Extrajudicial methods like torture and absurd questions are also linked to arbitrary detentions—in Slahi’s case, because of his Afghanistan trip and relationships with “bad people.” In the case of others, arbitrary detentions resulted from was simply being in the “wrong place [at the] wrong time” (169). In turn, such arbitrariness was part of the system’s avoiding due process and committing egregious human rights violations.