In If This Is a Man, Primo Levi describes the “Muselmann”, or Muslim, as the “true”, the “complete” witness of the Nazi death camps. The “Muselmann” was the term for the inmate who, utterly depleted of the will to live, awaited his murder at the lowest level of racial degradation: a “staggering corpse”, in Jean Améry’s words, “a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions”. Indeed, as Levi wrote, “if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.”
During the 19th century, the virile Arab and Turk who had once provoked paranoia in Christendom morphed into the sick man of Europe – the will-less Muselmann. However, anticolonial resistance after 1945 soon resurrected an older demonology. In The Question, Henri Alleg’s memoir of torture in French-ruled Algeria, the Muslim is a proudly defiant insurrectionary with political will and zeal: a menacing spectre that the French seek to exorcise by sodomising their Algerian prisoners with bottles and delivering electric shocks to their genitals. The torture was an instance of what Levi had called “useless violence”. But it had its own logic: it was essential to rebuilding a masculine identity profoundly damaged by France’s abject capitulation to Nazi Germany and then to the Viet Cong at Dien Bien Phu.
Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s extraordinary account of rendition, captivity and torture reveals, more vividly than any book in the previous decade of shock-and-awe ferocity, how he and countless other men became victims of a profound sense of individual and collective emasculation. His captors tried to re-establish their full-spectrum dominance in a variety of ways. There is among them the permissive libertarian who announces, “Today, we’re gonna teach you about great American sex”, as two topless women rub themselves against Slahi’s shackled body, and play with his penis. “William the Torturer” threatens to have Slahi’s entire family sexually assaulted and to send him to an American prison where “terrorists like you get raped by multiple men at the same time”. A more thoughtful supremacist believes that “there are two kinds of people in the world: white Americans and the rest of the world. White Americans are smart and better than anybody.” Slahi’s casual use of the phrase “If I were you” incites a blistering reproof: “Don’t you ever dare to compare me with you, or compare any American with you.” There is the cultural nationalist who informs Slahi, “We don’t like you to speak English. We want you to die slowly.”
Long before 2001, Slahi had admitted to participating, along with the CIA and Osama bin Laden, in the anticommunist jihad in Afghanistan; he had parted company as early as 1992 with the truly culpable incubators of today’s worldwide mayhem. His torture in Guantánamo – periodic beatings, sleep deprivation, isolation, diet manipulations – yielded no information of any value. The CIA, the FBI and military intelligence failed to link him to the many acts of terrorism they accused him of. Nevertheless, for more than 13 years, Slahi’s frail physical self seems to have offered his captors the satisfaction of ritually humiliating a religious and political “other” and then finding in his degradation the much-needed proof of his moral and physical inferiority. As one interrogator put it to Slahi, “in the eyes of the Americans, you’re doomed. Just looking at you in an orange suit, chains, and being Muslim and Arabic is enough to convict you.” A trial seems to have been ruled out by the imperatives of systematic dehumanisation. Slahi asked one of his persecutors soon after being renditioned from Mauritania in 2001, “Am I going to be sent to court?” The answer was: “Not in the near future. Maybe in three years or so, when my people forget about September 11.” Thirteen years later, the still furious resistance to closing down Guantánamo hints that September 11 is far from being forgotten. The xenophobic frenzy unleashed by Clint Eastwood’s film American Sniper suggests that failures in Iraq and Afghanistan may have exacerbated the psychic wounds of those who want to believe that white Americans are smarter and better than anybody.
Slahi’s catalogue of physical and verbal cruelty underscores the desperation in their many attempts to re-establish absolute superiority: from exhibitions of “great American sex” and murder and rape in Abu Ghraib to peeing on the Koran and dropping incendiary bombs on Fallujah. War, no longer the continuation of politics by other means, took on a theological intensity, aiming at the extirpation of what Chris Kyle in his memoir American Sniper calls “savage, desperate evil”. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian,” Kyle writes, explaining his red Crusader-cross tattoo in his blithe chronicle of exterminating the brutes, which should be read alongside Guantánamo Diary for its inadvertent anatomising of a psychotic masculinity.
To Slahi, the anti-western calumnies peddled by the propagandists of jihad were routinely verified. He doesn’t believe that “the average American is paying taxes to wage war against Islam”. Nevertheless, faced with routine blasphemies against his faith and vengeful prohibitions on prayer and fasting, he finds that “the war against the Islamic religion was more than obvious”: “I am not talking here about hearsay; I am talking about something I experienced myself.” If one of his guards, a Christian fundamentalist, is “very open about his hatred toward Islam”. others are not much more discreet. Slahi notes the arrest in Guantánamo under trumped-up charges of American military personnel who are practising Muslims. Blasting Slahi’s eardrums with “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a whole night in a freezing room, his torturer warns him not to seek comfort in Allah: “You’ll insult my country if you pray during my National anthem. We’re the greatest country in the free world, and we have the smartest president in the world.”
Slahi often sighs over his tormentors. Their overall quality can be ascertained by this typical exchange:
“Before 9/11 you called your younger brother in Germany and told him, ‘Concentrate on your school.’ What did you mean with this code?”
“I didn’t use any code. I always advise my brother to concentrate on his school.”
Slahi concludes that his interrogators were incapacitated by their fear and hatred: “they were literally taught to hate us detainees” to see them as “the most evil creatures on Earth”. Indeed, Guantánamo Diary, which Slahi wrote in 2005 and which was released to publishers with some brutal and mostly pointless redactions only in 2012, is by far the most intimate account of post 9/11 radicalisation – not of Muslims, rather of a significant swathe of the American military-intellectual complex. To read about Slahi’s repetitive and futile brutalising is to shed the comforting illusion that the most vehement partisans of holy war flourish in the ravaged landscapes of south and west Asia. Such fanatics, who can be atheists as well as crusaders and jihadists, also lurk among the US’s best and the brightest, emboldened by an endless supply of money, arms and even “ideas” supplied by terrorism experts and clash-of-civilisations theorists.
We sense more vividly while reading Guantánamo Diary the interlocking mechanism of political authority, military action, intellectual legitimisation and populist demagoguery that triggered and then prolonged Slahi’s nightmare: the chilling figure of Donald Rumsfeld signing the “Torture Memo”; William the Torturer zealously exceeding his brief in Guantánamo while “liberal” intellectuals in Brooklyn and Harvard inflated thought-balloons about “Islamic totalitarianism” and “torture-lite”; Barack Obama breezily announcing “We tortured some folks”; and Dick Cheney unrepentantly asserting “I’d do it again in a minute”. It becomes clearer why the Bush administration launched a global war with no rational goal, one designed to be as much of a spectacle as the attacks on the Twin Towers, rather than a precisely targeted and intrinsically limited operation against the criminal perpetrators of 9/11; why the US government bet, as Slahi writes, “its last penny on violence as the magic solution for every problem” and, while trampling on many international laws regulating war also abolished some fundamental ethical limits.
Monstrosities such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib became inevitable when the west’s own holy warriors, rejecting all conventional norms of war and conflict, chose to stigmatise a range of human beings, innocent and guilty alike, as savage beasts, who could only be annihilated or banished to a hellish limbo. They did not consider the risk that men trying to convince themselves of their strength and virtue through dehumanising others can assume the most vicious traits of their enemies. The French in Algeria had used torture techniques originally deployed by the Nazis during their occupation of France. Americans in the global war on terror resorted to cruel interrogation methods that the Soviet Union had patented during the cold war. In the latest stage of this grisly dialectic, Islamic State dresses its hostages in Guantánamo’s orange suits before beheading them.
Such retributive terror, while barbarising its perpetrators, betrays weakness and panic rather than strength to many of its victims. Slahi for one appears to be an exceptionally resourceful and agile survivor. Banned from invoking Allah, he learns English, reads the Bible, and boldly engages in theological discussion with his guards – the same people who frequently burst into his cell with a huge German shepherd straining at the leash. He tactfully avoids disputation with the interrogator who wonders, “why people hate us. We help everybody in the world!” “I knew,” Slahi writes, “it was futile to enlighten him about the historical and objective reasons that led to where we’re at.” He teases his guards about their obsession with bodybuilding and chides them for wasting so much food. “Americans are just big babies,” he writes in a rare foray into unsound, if affectionate, generalisation. “In my country it’s not appropriate for somebody my age to sit in front of a console and waste his time playing games.”
He worries that the US is losing friends every day and that “the rest of the world” thinks of “Americans as a bunch of revengeful barbarians”. For even his limited exposure to Americans has revealed a much more varied and complicated actuality. Black people may be subservient to white in the local hierarchy, and no one treats the detainees more humanely than the Puerto Ricans. But some of the other “good Americans” are also moved to acknowledge his fundamental decency. One of them is brave enough to confess his unease over following illegal orders, such as the ban on prayer. A web of ambiguous new feelings and emotions eventually binds Slahi to his persecutors. Seeing a guard cry, Slahi breaks down in empathy, and then hates himself for his betrayal of “weakness” and “confusion”: “I started to ask myself questions about the humane emotions I was having toward my enemies. How could you cry for somebody who caused you so much pain and destroyed your life? How could you possibly like somebody who ignorantly hates your religion? How could you put up with these evil people who keep hurting your brothers?”
Slahi here seems to be seeking refuge, like his anxious oppressors, in an us-versus-them mentality. As it turns out, his own invocations of racial and religious solidarity, and apportioning of all evil to his adversaries do not calm his mind nor relax his conscience. Seeking release from a seemingly infinite regime of torture, he makes false confessions, which he knows would implicate an innocent person. As he examines his choices, he discovers that the evil he sees in his unjust persecutors is latent in all of us. “I understand,” he writes, “that nobody is perfect, and everybody does both good and bad things. The only question is, how much of each?”
Slahi directs this all-important inquiry as much at himself as at his captors. He won’t reserve the privileged status of victimhood for himself or his “brothers”. He is no gaudy moralist, deriving from the crimes of his enemies the proof of his virtue. Rather he seeks in his own actions and feelings an explanation for his suffering. It is this disavowal of righteousness that makes Guantánamo Diary more than a simple record of atrocity, and gives Slahi’s untutored, disjointed prose a kind of nobility.
Having rejected Manichean dichotomies of good and evil, he can easily transcend macho notions of power and powerlessness. “Some people may say”, he writes, “that I am a weak person; well, then, let me be!” He has come to realise that what seems weakness to the insecure warriors is actually great and enduring strength: a capacity to compassionately understand the self and other. This is why Slahi, though condemned to indefinite suffering, hasn’t turned into the Muselmann, the physical and spiritual wreck witnessed by Levi and Amery. Nor does he resemble the radicalised Muslim feared and despised by the French in Algeria. He attains his own great power by rejecting the depraved logic of violence and counter-violence that presently ravages large parts of the world. In a recent conversation with his lawyer, he disclaimed any hatred for his torturers; he dreams of talking to them over a cup of tea, “having learned so much from one another”. Hopefully, that day will come, and then we’ll also learn about Slahi’s last decade in purgatory. But this much can already be said: that the global war on terror, our own Mahabharata in its extensive devastation of bodies and souls, has found in a Mauritanian captive its true and complete witness.
