This is the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man detained on dubious grounds by the U.S. government, and later held captive - and subjected to torture and monstrous conditions - in the brutal Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

In the year 2000, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was returning home to his native Mauritania from a study abroad when he was detained by the U.S. government on suspicions of involvement in an al-Qaeda-linked plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

Although Slahi was eventually released, just one year later - amid heightened suspicion after the September 11 terror attacks - he was once again swept up by the CIA.

This time, he was taken to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, where he would be held for 14 years - without charges.

For years, Slahi was subjected to constant humiliation and torture, which eventually prompted him to make a false confession.

Through Slahi's accounts of his interrogators' ruthless castigations, it becomes clear that his American captors luxuriated in his humiliation, and sought to establish a sense of absolutist cultural superiority.

Slahi's account paints a devastating portrait of the post-9/11 American military-intellectual complex, and shows how a mix of fear and xenophobia stoked the fires of a brutal campaign of Islamophobia.