Inspiration from an unlikely source

In 2015, Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi was published with many pages blacked-out to satisfy his jailers. Slahi had been viciously tortured for months because U.S. authorities thought they'd captured a key al-Qaida operative. In fact, Slahi seems to have merely been a well traveled, cosmopolitan young Mauritanian who passed through a series of places that turned out to have been wrong locations at wrong times. The U.S. military prosecutor assigned to take him to trial was so disgusted by his mistreatment that he quit; in 2011, a federal judge ordered Slahi released, but the government stalled until 2016 at the end of the Obama administration. He was held 14 years by the U.S. without ever being charged or convicted of a crime. But now he is free.

And once he arrived home in Mauritania, he could see for the first time what U.S. authorities had done to the descriptions of his internment he had written way back in 2005. That truncated memoir made the New York Times bestseller list. Now, with his editor Larry Siems, Slahi has issued a new edition with the redacted material replaced as Guantánamo Diary: Restored.

He described what return to freedom felt like for the ACLU.

When I wrote the manuscript that became Guantánamo Diary in 2005, I had all but disappeared. I was in an isolation hut, the same one I had been dragged into two years before during my months-long torture. For four years, the U.S. government had shut me up and done the talking for both of us. It told the public false stories connecting me to terrorist plots, and it kept the public from hearing anything from me about my life and how I had been treated.

Writing became a way of fighting the U.S. government’s narrative. I wanted to bring my case directly to the people. I wasn’t sure if the pages I was writing and giving to my lawyers would ever become a book. But I believed in books, and in the people who read them; I always had, since I held my first book as a child. I thought of what it would mean if someone outside that prison was holding a book I had written.

Now, incredibly, I was holding that book myself — though in a censored, broken form. And I was meeting many people who had read it. The first thing many of them asked me was when they would be able to read the book in an uncensored version. ...

Restoring this broken text has been about seeing things that someone wanted hidden. Sometimes that someone was me. When I received the photocopy of my book in Guantánamo I stayed up all night reading it, afraid I had written something I would regret. And yes, there were things that embarrassed me. I was especially ashamed of my habit, when I was young, of making up sarcastic nicknames for people I met. The Jordanian intelligence agent who oversaw my rendition operation was not “Satan,” as I named him in the original manuscript; he is a human being, with a full life and a family. That kind of name-calling is someone I was, not someone I am now.

In that sense, reading what I wrote 12 years ago really is like reading an old diary. Sometimes I’d laugh, and sometimes I got very upset. But mostly I just smiled at my own silliness and learned more about who I was, and who I am.

Amazingly, Slahi is a gentle, even inspiring, writer and his narrative of the U.S. Gulag in Cuba is a strangely uplifting story. If you missed the first, censored, edition, do try this new one. Contrary to what you might expect, you'll come away with more faith in humanity than you brought to reading it.