Book review: Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi - Tortured into lies

Near the end of his hellish account of perpetual torture, Mohamedou Ould Slahi makes what appears to be a remarkable confession.

Slahi, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who wrote a 466-page memoir from his cell, admits to his captors that he planned to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto with explosives from Russia. The military interrogators who have been questioning him for four years "almost had a heart attack from happiness", Slahi writes.

The confession, however, is an elaborate lie. It is a desperate act by a man subjected to four years of terror, including regular beatings, sleep deprivation, death threats, starvation and sexual molestation. "I had to wear the suit the US Intel tailored for me, and that is exactly what I did," Slahi writes.

is a unique and intimate view of what happens when due process is suspended and detainees (or, in this case, "enemy combatants") are cast into zones of non-being, where they are not even recognised as human. In these lawless zones, conjecture and hearsay provide the rationale for indefinite detention, and torture methods become almost limitless in their scope and sadism.

The manuscript raises a broader question about whether torture actually works. As Slahi demonstrates in his blow-by-blow account of his interrogation, the prisoners will say just about anything to stop the abuse.