“What are you going to do for him? Reduce his sentence from 500 to 400 years?” I asked wryly. People in other parts of the free world like Europe have problems understanding the draconian punishments in the US. Mauritania is not a country of law, so we don’t have a problem understanding whatever the government does: even so, the Mauritanian legal code, when it is followed, is much more humane than the American. Why sentence someone to 300 years when he is not going to live that long?” -Mohamedou Ould Slahi

“Censorship has been integral to the United States’ post-9/11 detention operations from the start. It has been purposeful, not once but twice: first, to open a space for the abuse of prisoners, and then to conceal that those abuses happened. In Mohamedou’s case, those abuses include enforced disappearance; arbitrary and incommunicado detention; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and torture. We know thanks to a documentary record that was also, for years, rigorously suppressed.”
-Larry Siems