3.5/5

[T]he fact that the Americans didn't provide the Jordanians with any substantial evidence tied the hands of the Jordanians mightily. 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.

How do you rate a work that is primarily concerned with fulfilling the burden of proof that your home country is actively committing at least a handful of war crimes. Had I read this when I first added it back in 2015, I may have had a more concrete answer with regards to justice, progress, the whole shebang of learning from the past in hopes of sanctifying the future. These days, after Trump and perhaps before Trump, after Roe and no idea whether before Roe, during and during and forever during Covid, the fact that this country still hasn't collapsed under the gargantuan weight of its own auto-erotic self-cannibalization serves as sufficient evidence that the time of the turning point, if ever there were one, will not be catalyzed by a single testimony or crying out in the dark. In light of that, what Slahi has achieved is the sustaining of an analysis that first came into being upon the arrival of the first Anglo Saxon on the shores of the continental portion of Turtle Island: an analysis of fear, violence, and opportunity, given permission by the distant patriarch, executed by the scrabbling peon, and sustained by the equivocating middle ground, so desperate for grace, so fearful of the fall. A solution, you ask? Let me know when this country is more willing to feed starving children than it is to let slip the dogs of war, then it won't be pointless to contrive one.

I've read a great deal about the United States and its habit of shooting first and threatening to invade the Hague later. And the way reading works, especially on a site like this, is that you are not likely to read this if you didn't already set yourself on the path of taking Slahi and other detainees in far flung US detention centers at their word: the bullying internationalism, the clowning pontification, the cultish insistence that we are number one, we are the best, and there are no just deserts we will not flatten the cities of hundreds of thousands and upend the lives of millions to hide away from the truth of. If you don't agree with this and insist that Christianity is just, disaster capitalism as participated in by white folks is worth any number of ruined non-Euro countries, and that the terrorists are hiding around the corner just waiting for the next bleeding heart president to open the borders and lay down the arms, nothing Slahi writes is going to get through to you. Hell, you don't even have the guts to trust your next door neighbor enough to ask them to watch your place for you, or your coworker enough to unionize with them, or your local houseless person enough to actually ask them what happened, rather than studiously avoiding the specter of there but for the grace of fickle luck goes you. For that's who Slahi is for so many folks in this country: the child of Omelas that is locked up enough out of sight so as the rest of us never have to really face the question of whether to walk away or not. The fact that I don't give five stars for such signals less towards objectivity than to fatigue.

In terms of the text itself, it is no masterwork of English, and what can be read in between the censored lines is likely of more technical value than it is artistic. Indeed, the worth is likely entirely encompassed by the fact that Slahi was released a year after its publication. And so, eight years after this work's publication, Slahi is free, while the US-run, US funded, US staffed and supported and ultimately sustained Guantánamo Bay detention camp remains open. When will it be closed, you ask? Perhaps when the people regain a voice in their government, when the strong aid the weak in proportion to need rather than to subservience, when the numbers of the stock market are scoffed at like the shadow play for children that they are and the earth is given back its membership in the community by every one of the human species. Until then, we're all just living on borrowed time, and most of us can't even use being imprisoned in a high security detention center as an excuse for our complacency.