the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 2, 2015
The Guantanamo Memoirs of a prisoner has just been published in twenty countries. Government authorities seized this book, classified it as a military secret and locked it up for six years in a secure Washington, D.C. basement. Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a 44-year-old Mauritanian. His government took him and turned him over to the U.S. Army in 2001, wrongly suspecting him of taking part in a thwarted attack in Los Angeles in 2000. He was sent to Guantanamo in 2002.
His Memoirs recount the hell of daily interrogations to extract false information and force him to admit imaginary plots. He relates physical and mental torture inflicted on a daily basis during his first years of detention: blows and insults, baths of iced and boiling water, being forced to drink salt water, and deprived of sleep and the chance to clean up, deafening music, sexual humiliation, the threat to imprison his mother in Mauritania and make her disappear.
A federal judge ordered his freedom in 2010. But the Obama Administration appealed: Slahi is still a prisoner.
In January 2009 Obama promised to close Guantanamo within a year. But it is still open with 130 prisoners like Slahi who continue to rot in this camp.