Ways with Words 2013: Gillian Slovo says US set up Guantanamo out of "revenge" After the terrible attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent ousting of the Taliban, the US had a choice: they could have treated the people they picked up as prisoners of war and prosecute them with due process; or circumvent the legal process and treat them as "enemy combatants" without the right to a trial. They chose the latter, and as the novelist Gillian Slovo argued at the Telegraph Ways with Words festival, the result was the disastrous experiment known as Guantanamo Bay. Part of the motivation, she added, was simple "revenge" for 9/11, even if it was carried out against people who had nothing to do with the attack. Slovo worked with the families of Guantanamo prisoners for her acclaimed 2004 verbatim play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. At first she approached the subject with mixed feelings, she told the audience. But as she learnt more about the conditions in which the prisoners were held and who was actually held there she got increasingly concerned: among the genuine terrorists were plenty of innocents sold to the US by disreputable Afghans. She has now collaborated with Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan cook living in London who foolishly went to Afghanistan after 9/11 in order, he says, to help his fellow Muslims. Their book The General tells his story in brutal detail: the shackling, the beatings, the humiliation. After five years of mental assault he was released without charge. Whatever Errachidi was doing in Afghanistan, there was never enough evidence to charge let alone convict him. Right now, said Slovo, many of the remaining 166 prisoners are on hunger strike and only being kept alive by force-feeding. President Obama reiterated his wish to close Guantanamo in April but the prisoners are now in legal limbo: since they might have been tortured their evidence would be inadmissible in US courts; and they can't be sent back to the country of origin for fear they will be tortured there. Kafka would have been proud.