Mohamedou Slahi was wearing black-out goggles. A guard dragged him onto a boat and someone forced him to drink seawater.
“It was so nasty I threw up…They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice cubes from my neck to my ankles…every once in a while one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face.”
In a new book Guantánamo Diary, Slahi paints a horrifying picture of life at the hands of interrogators in the notorious U.S. military prison in Cuba. The book depicts long days in isolation, sometimes chained to the floor in agonizing positions, held in extreme temperatures, often deprived of food and sleep. On multiple occasions he describes being beaten and humiliated by his questioners. He says he was left “shaking like a Parkinson’s patient” and felt one of his interrogators “was literally executing me but in a slow way.”
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When U.S. President Barack Obama took office in 2008 he promised to close Guantánamo, but as he enters his seventh year in the White House 122 prisoners remain. At its peak there were more than 700. In Tuesday’s State of the Union address Obama said his administration will work to finally “finish the job” and close it down.
“As Americans, we have a profound commitment to justice – so it makes no sense to spend $3M per prisoner to keep open a prison that the world condemns and terrorists use to recruit,” Obama said. “I will not relent in my determination to shut it down. It’s not who we are. It’s time to close Gitmo.”
