Censorship and Redaction

Censorship and Redaction are not merely obstacles surrounding Guantánamo Diary: they are part of the book’s material form and its account of power. The manuscript’s black bars conceal words and relationships, interrupt the reader’s access to the narrative, and recall that Mohamedou Ould Slahi remained in United States custody while the government controlled both his fate and the text’s circulation. The published version thus bears two marks at once: an effort to make Slahi’s account readable and the visible evidence of what readers still cannot see.

The Manuscript and Its Two Editorial Passes

The book derives from a 466-page manuscript that Slahi wrote by hand in his Guantánamo prison cell during the summer and fall of 2005. The United States government edited it first, inserting more than 2,500 black-bar redactions. Larry Siems then prepared an edition for publication. Slahi had no opportunity to participate in or respond to either pass, although he had authorized publication in edited form and hoped the manuscript would reach readers, especially readers in the United States. His authorization did not remove the central limitation: the author whose voice the edition presents could not review how that voice had been shaped.

Siems’s editing included ordinary line-level adjustments to tense, word order, and awkward phrasing, as well as occasional clarification through consolidation or reordering. He also incorporated flashbacks that had been appended at the end of the draft into the main narrative and streamlined the work as a whole. A manuscript of approximately 122,000 words became a published version just under 100,000. These editorial changes differ from the government’s black bars: the former were intended to clarify and organize the text, while the latter withheld portions of it. Yet both interventions mean that readers encounter an edited work rather than an untouched manuscript, and Slahi could not assess either intervention before publication.

What the Black Bars Do to Reading

The redactions are conspicuous visual interruptions, but their effects extend beyond the missing words. Siems observes that they can impede the narrative, blur the contours of characters, and obscure the manuscript’s open, approachable tone. In some passages, they also make it harder to follow Slahi’s effort to distinguish individuals as culpable, admirable, or morally complex. The withheld material therefore affects not only what information readers possess, but also how clearly they can perceive the people and relationships through which the account unfolds.

The edition records more than 2,600 black-box redactions, a count that makes the scale of the visible erasure part of the reading experience. Their recurrence gives the page a second kind of content: the bars repeatedly announce that some portion of the story has been withheld. They do not disclose what lies beneath them, and their presence cannot by itself establish the wording or significance of any particular deletion. Instead, they make the boundary of available knowledge impossible to overlook. The visual form of the book keeps the limits of the account in view even when the missing text cannot be recovered.

Annotations and the Limits of Reconstruction

Siems’s annotations arose from close reading of the redacted passages and from comparison with material elsewhere in the manuscript and in public records. Those records included declassified government documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, news reporting, investigative writing, and government investigations. In a related example of documentary corroboration, an investigator working with Stuart Couch gained access to military interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda describing what occurred in sessions and how information was obtained. The records remained classified, but their contents were summarized in a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry and a Justice Department review. These sources provide context for the account; they do not give the published reader direct access to every underlying record.

The annotations do not claim to reproduce the redacted original or expose classified material. They offer the most plausible contextual information only when it is public or evident from careful reading, and when Siems judged it important to the text’s readability and impact. He explicitly takes responsibility for possible errors in his speculations. Neither Slahi’s attorneys with security clearances nor other people with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed or confirmed the introductory material and footnotes. The notes therefore preserve a distinction essential to reading the book responsibly: a contextual inference is not the same as recovered text, and a plausible interpretation is not a verified disclosure.

Censorship as Part of the Detention System

The editorial problem is inseparable from Slahi’s continuing imprisonment and the conditions under which the manuscript could be published. Siems describes the government that redacted the work as the same government that continued to control its author’s fate, and he presents secrecy as an instrument of that control. He characterizes censorship in post-September 11 detention operations as serving two purposes: first creating room for abuse, and later concealing that abuse. In Slahi’s case, the documented abuses included enforced disappearance, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, and torture. The redactions do not alone prove each event; the account places them alongside a documentary record that had itself been suppressed for years.

The restrictions also prevented direct editorial contact. Siems had not met or otherwise communicated with Slahi beyond sending a letter introducing himself, which he did not know whether Slahi had received. He requested a confidential meeting under security protocols to check that the edited book represented the manuscript’s content and intent, but the Pentagon refused access to a detainee by anyone other than legal counsel. Its explanation invoked detention under the Law of War and protections against public curiosity in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The contrast is consequential: a convention invoked to justify withholding access stood beside a censorship regime that, in Siems’s account, had not consistently served the convention’s purposes.

Voice, Form, and the Unfinished Record

Censorship is only one condition shaping the text. Slahi wrote in English, his fourth language, which he had largely acquired in United States custody. His vocabulary numbered fewer than 7,000 words, yet he used recurring formulaic phrases to carry a wide range of events and emotion. The handwritten work was also an incomplete, sometimes fragmentary draft: its prose varies in polish, some passages suggest possible earlier drafts, and the most recent events are narrated less linearly. These features belong to the manuscript’s composition, not to the black bars, but the editing and redaction meet on the same page, making it necessary to distinguish the author’s developing form from the government’s imposed silences.

The edition’s incompleteness remains part of its ending condition. Slahi hoped for publication that faithfully conveyed the original, while Siems hoped for a future in which Slahi would be free and the work could be read in its entirety as its author wished. Until then, the black bars function both as absences within a narrative and as reminders that the editorial process took place without the author’s participation. The annotations can orient readers toward evidence and mark the limits of what can responsibly be inferred; they cannot make the censored manuscript whole.