Mohamedou ould Slahi was born in a small town in Mauritania in 1970. He received a scholarship to study in Germany, where he After a few years he worked as an engineer. He returned to Mauritania in 2000. The following year, on the orders of the United States, due to suspicion that participated in the Millennium Conspiracy, was arrested and extradited by Mauritanian authorities to prison in Jordan; later he was extradited again, first to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and then finally, on August 5, 2002, to an American prison in the Gulf Guantánamo in Cuba, where he was subjected to severe torture. In 2010, the judge District Judge James Robertson ordered his immediate release, but the US government appealed the decision. It was never officially recognized by the US authorities accused of a crime. He is still in prison at Guantánamo.

Larry Siems is a writer and human rights activist law, and long-time director of the Freedom to Write program at PEN America To the center. He is the author of the book Between lines: letters from unregistered Mexican and Latin American immigrants and their family and friends , for which he was shortlisted for the PEN award in 1993. His the latest work is the Report on torture: what the documents say about the US torture program after 9/11 . He lives in New York.