In a cell clinging to his blanket, the lights always on, with no windows or way to know the time, having been denied human contact for months, at the tail end of his senses, secretly observed talking to people who aren’t there: this is the state of Al-Qahtani when his hood is removed in the interrogation booth on November 23.

This is his state before the log begins, before it records: Detainee states he’s on hunger strike, asks to pray and is refused, The Detainee began to cry, agreed to drink water in return for being allowed to pray, Medical personnel checked vital signs.

Before Detainee was informed that we would not let him die, wrap was put on detainee’s feet to combat the swelling, The detainee bent over and bit the IV tube completely in two …

But then it’s already been kind of a strange day on the internet for me.

On Monday, the site got its first real burst of attention, getting linked by Kottke (thanks to Ben Pieratt) and from there finding it’s way to Metafilter. And then last night Boing Boing posted about it. From having daily visits in the low double digits and about the same number of followers on Twitter, in the last few days it’s had more than 12,000 visits, and it’s now got more than 400 followers on Twitter and another couple of hundred for the RSS feed. Those are numbers that plenty of big sites could laugh off, but it’s definitely good news for something like this, and I’m very happy about it. (What will be interesting will be to see how quickly and how sharply people on Twitter stop following the site. It’s not a particularly pleasant experience to follow, and I wouldn’t blame anybody.)

Then today, something I’d written went up at the McSweeney’s website – an article titled ‘I am locking the Wikipedia article on our sex life’.

So there you go, whether you want to think about the horrendous torture policies of the Bush administration and the damage they’ve done to human lives and to the course of justice in the war of terror, or you just want jokes about vaginas, I’ve got you covered.

And thank you for visiting the web’s first books/design/torture/sex comedy blog.

The log covers a fifty-day stretch of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation at Guantanamo Bay (where he was, and still is, being held on suspicion of terrorism) from 23 November 2002 to 11 January 2003. Each entry will appear on the website exactly seven years after it was first recorded.

For the fifty days of the log, Detainee 063 is questioned by teams of interrogators working in shifts, typically for twenty hours a day. Often the log is brutal and unpleasant to read. Often it is almost banal – detailing the quotidian, humdrum schedule by which the interrogators mean to apply unbearable pressure to a person’s will.

Within the first hour on Monday, Detainee 063 will refuse water, a tactic that he will come to repeat often. As the days and weeks go on, sometimes an IV drip will be forcibly administered to ensure that he remains well enough to continue. On one occasion, when he has been handcuffed to his seat to prevent him interfering with the IV, he will bite through the tube running into his body. He will be put in a booth covered with images of 9/11 victims. Images of victims will be taped to his clothes. His head and beard will be shaved and female interrogators will be used to cause him discomfort. He will be made to act as a dog, being taught to stay, come and bark. His hands and feet will swell. His heart rate will slow to 35 bpm.

Detainee 063 is meant as a kind of re-enactment. It will use the internet (as well as the site itself, an RSS feed and a Twitter account will be updated) as a means to dramatize torture as it is practiced but not often talked about: not with techniques used in isolation, but the cumulative effect of mistreatment over a prolonged period. I don’t expect many to read it in its entirety but I hope that following it, even for a few days, that being made aware of the passing of time between entries in the log, will make any visitors to the site more aware of the relentlessness of this interrogation, and of relentlessness as an aspect of torture.

On January 22, 2009, two days after assuming office, Barack Obama issued an executive order that the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay be shut down within a year. By the time the last entry of Al-Qahtani’s interrogation log is published at Detainee 063, that deadline will almost have arrived.

Update, 23 November: Detainee 063 is up and running. I posted an explanation of the project (similar to this post) at the Detainee 063 blog.