The Mauritanian (Guantánamo Diary)

Content Warning: This section references torture, graphic violence, sexual assault, racism, and Islamophobia.

Blindfolded, stripped naked, and in a diaper, Slahi relied on the crisis prayer to get through this humiliating experience. He was put on an airplane wondering whether he was being taken to a US prison and thinking about “the harshness with which they treat their prisoners” (5). Once the plane landed, Slahi couldn’t identify the language he heard and thought he might be in the Philippines or Tajikistan. Later, he realized he was at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

He was given Afghan clothes, his hands and feet were chained, and he was interrogated about his knowledge of the whereabouts of key terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden. CIA agent William nicknamed the Torturer, interrogated Slahi first (through an Arabic interpreter), followed by an agent named Michael, who used German because Slahi knew it well. During the subsequent interrogations, William the Torturer asked Slahi about his membership in terrorist organizations and threatened him with bodily harm in a US prison and never seeing his family again: “In American jails, terrorists like you get raped by multiple men at the same time” (17). Agent Michael interrogated him about the

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