Repetitive. Boring. Although it did provide (typical) insight when it comes to torture and what he endured. He leaves a lot out because he said he doesn't want to "offend the reader." Gitmo is a horror show and needs to be closed. What he experienced should not be done to American prisoners and those who did it to him should be in jail. All this being said, after reading the book I am not 100%convinced that this guy is totally innocent. ( )

It's a hard but necessary book to read. Contains descriptions of numerous forms of physical, sexual, emotional and psychological torture. Finishing it after having been reading it for so long kind of has me at a loss for words beyond why. ( )

I'm recommending this to everyone -- Slahi is the first and so far only person to have been held in Guantánamo and tortured by the US to have written about and published a memoir. Mark Danner in the New York Times wrote that the diary "is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be that collateral damage" mentioned by our torturer in chief Dick Cheney. This harrowing tale is but one of what will someday be many direct accounts by victims.
Originally from Mauritius, Slahi, 45, was detained on a journey home in January 2000 and questioned about the so-called Millennium plot to bomb the Los Angeles airport. Slahi admitted that he'd fought against Afghanistan's communist government with the mujahedin, at that time supported by the US. But he never opposed the United States. Authorities released him. A year later, the young engineer was again detained and again released. Months later, Slahi drove himself to a local police station to answer questions. This time, Americans forced him onto a CIA plane bound for Jordan, where he claims he was tortured. On August 5, 2002, Americans brought him to Guantánamo. Slahi is among the detainees whose horrific torture there is the centerpiece of the Senate report. None other than then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed the "special interrogation plan" authorizing his brutal ordeal. Slahi divides his imprisonment into pre-torture, when he truthfully denied any involvement in terrorism; and post-torture, "where my brake broke loose. I yessed every accusation my interrogators made. I even wrote the infamous confession about me planning to hit the CN tower in Toronto, based on SSG [redacted] advice. I just wanted to get the monkeys off my back."
His captors beat and threatened him, subjected him to bitter cold and sleep deprivation, stress positions and repulsive sexual abuse by female interrogators. Yet with astonishing grace, Slahi seems more traumatized by the torture he witnessed. He saw teenagers who could barely lift their heads, confused old men and others like him who said anything to get the pain to stop. Slahi taught himself English so he could write his 466-page memoir, long kept secret. Once his lawyers got his manuscript released, authorities refused to let Slahi’s editor, journalist Larry Siems, meet him. Siems calls the memoir "a journey through the darkest regions of the United States' post-9/11 detention and interrogation program." ( )

It's amazing that this book even exists. I learned a lot even from the introduction, but I just couldn't make it very far into the diary itself. The style the blacked out text made for tough reading. The content is rough, too.

I'd recommend getting it from the library and reading the beginning, even if you can't finish it either. ( )

I spent a lot of time processing this book, as it was very dark but yet not nearly as dark as I'd feared. After having followed some of the coverage of the big federal torture report, I was pretty familiar with what a lot of the possibilities were. The fact that I didn't find this book more shocking was disturbing to me.

Of course, Slahi was also deliberately trying to not be salacious, to report just what happened to him, as accurately as he could. And his ability to find, and sometimes successfully connect to the humanity in his torturers also undercut the depravity of what was being done to him.

My overall impression after finishing this book, and reading several reviews and essays about the book, was to be impressed less by the cruelty of the CIA torture program, but more by its ineptitude. That they captured, held, and tortured a man all based on such tenuous evidence. That when they finally committed to full-blown torture, it resulted in nothing more helpful than a man prepared to confess to absolutely anything that they asked him to write down, which is almost exactly what he told them, and they seemed happy with that result. But the most ridiculous was the redaction of Slahi's manuscript, which was often laughable. Such as the oft-remarked case that all pronouns related to a guard/torturer were redacted only when that person was female. Or the number of times that what was redacted was easily reconstructed by its context, and the number of times those redactions were publicly-known facts.

If you want to bear witness to the cruelty of the CIA's torture program, read the torture report. If you want to be struck by how misguided it is, or be impressed by someone who could retain their full humanity in the face of it, read this book. ( )