After years of litigation, “Guantanamo Diary,” the first and only memoir ever to be published by a current Guantánamo Bay detainee, hit shelves last month. It contains descriptions of the torture Mohamedou Slahi, 44, suffered during his 2001 CIA capture, extraordinary rendition and his 12-year-long detention in Guantánamo.

The diary, which was hand-written at the naval base’s Camp Echo prison in 2005, was published after more than 2,500 redactions by the U.S. government. It details food and sleep deprivation, being chained to the floor, exposure to extreme temperatures, sexual humiliation, beatings, mock executions and other horrific forms of mistreatment. U.S. authorities have corroborated his abuse in through the course of several investigations.

The tragedy of Slahi’s memoir is not just his grave abuse at the hands of U.S. officials. It is that every single one of the 779 detainees who have populated Guantánamo has similar stories, and the abuse shows no sign of abating.

The government has made no comment so far on the Slahi book. Their response to every allegation of abuse or torture at Guantánamo Bay is that operations are “safe, humane, legal, and transparent,” and they generally refuse to comment further except when forced through litigation.

However, apart from hundreds of testimonies from detainees contradicting the official position, video evidence of abuse at Guantanamo is also mounting.

For example, in May 2014 the White House admitted, during the course of litigation, that Guantanamo authorities had made videotapes of force-feedings at the prison — but said that a request to produce them was “burdensome.” The government clearly knew the potential for scandal — it had even asked for the case to be heard in secret, a request that the presiding judge, Gladys Kessler called “deeply troubling.”

Last October, Judge Kessler ordered the release of these classified videotapes. I am one of a handful of people currently authorized to view them, and am permitted to say only that they are truly distressing.

Even the Department of Defense has admitted that the techniques violate medical ethics. Yet the Obama Administration is currently fighting the court order to publicly release the recordings due to vague security concerns, contrary to the president’s straight-faced claim of transparency.

The government is trying hard to keep the veil of secrecy around Guantanamo from being lifted. But when it finally is, what other stories are going to emerge?

Perhaps the public will finally learn the full story of Samir Moqbel. He is one of my Yemeni clients who lived through the early, inhuman outdoor cages of Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray. He says that he was subjected to multiple torture methods, including being doused with freezing water until hypothermia set in. He told me that: “The 6,000 pages of the [2014] Senate report [on torture] are just the start of what Americans have to accept happened in their name.”

Moqbel has been long cleared by six U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and Defense Department. Of course, being cleared for release does not mean that one is cleared of charges — for that to happen, there must be charges in the first place. The clearing process means that Samir and others like him have been deemed to be no threat to the United States, and approved to be released.

Samir, who is still imprisoned at Guantanamo, has never been charged with a crime, and never been brought in front of a judge. It is a mystery why he and so many others continue to be detained.

The U.S. public pays $3 million in tax dollars per detainee, per year of detention, at Guantánamo. For that money, they deserve to see and hear for themselves what is being done in their name.

Slahi’s account of life — if it can be called that — at Guantánamo is not the exception. It is the rule, and it continues today. The U.S. government can rest assured that the longer these men remain in an intentional legal vacuum, the more torture and abuse will be brought to light in the form of grisly books, videos and images that refuse to go away.