Guantánamo Manuscript Censorship Regime

The Guantánamo Manuscript Censorship Regime governed not only what readers could see in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir but also how the manuscript was written, edited, and brought to publication. Slahi wrote by hand in detention, yet each page was treated as classified from the moment it existed and submitted to government review. The resulting book bears the marks of two processes: the government’s redactions and editorial changes made later in an effort to present the surviving manuscript faithfully. Together, those processes left a public text whose gaps record the continuing limits placed on its author and his account.

Writing Under Review

In the summer and fall of 2005, Slahi composed a 466-page, approximately 122,000-word manuscript in his single-cell segregation hut at Camp Echo. He wrote in installments, beginning not long after he was finally permitted to meet with Nancy Hollander and Sylvia Royce, two lawyers on his pro bono legal team. Guantánamo’s censorship protocols treated every newly written page as classified, so each section had to be surrendered to the United States government for review. The manuscript was therefore not simply private writing later submitted for publication: government scrutiny was built into its production from the outset.

The regime also controlled the route by which the text could reach readers. On December 15, 2005, Slahi mentioned his recently written book during an Administrative Review Board hearing and urged the presiding officers to read it if it were released. Instead, the manuscript was classified SECRET and NOFORN, labels restricting access to cleared people with an official need to know and barring sharing with foreign nationals or intelligence services. It was placed in a secure facility near Washington, DC. For more than six years, Slahi’s lawyers pursued litigation and negotiations to obtain public release.

The government’s interventions are visible in the published text as black bars. The editor’s account describes more than 2,500 redactions; elsewhere, the introduction refers to more than 2,600 black-box redactions. These figures are presented in different passages of the book, but both convey the scale of the excisions. The bars conceal particular text while also interrupting the reader’s ability to follow events, distinguish individuals, and hear the open, approachable quality of Slahi’s voice. They do not disclose what has been removed, and their presence cannot by itself establish the precise wording or information beneath them.

Editing a Fragmentary Manuscript

The censorship regime intersected with the manuscript’s unfinished form. Slahi’s 2005 work was an incomplete, sometimes fragmentary draft: some passages appeared more polished than others, while differences in handwriting and prose suggested that certain sections might have had earlier drafts. Other passages retained the sprawl and urgency of first-draft writing. The narrative also became less linear when it approached recent events, and the manuscript’s original arrangement appended flashbacks to earlier events at its end.

Larry Siems, the editor, worked on both the sentences and the book’s overall structure. Line editing regularized tense and word order, adjusted awkward phrasing, and sometimes consolidated or reordered material for clarity. Siems also incorporated the appended flashbacks into the main narrative and streamlined the manuscript from a length of about 122,000 words to just under 100,000. These were editorial interventions distinct from the government’s censorship. Slahi could not participate in or respond to either round of editing, although he had authorized publication in edited form and hoped the work would reach readers in a version faithful to its content and purpose.

The conditions of composition make the memoir’s language and form part of the story of its production. Slahi wrote in English, his fourth language, which he had acquired largely in United States custody. The editor describes a vocabulary of fewer than 7,000 words capable of conveying a wide range of action and emotion, including recurring formulaic phrases. The finished text thus reflects a writer working with a language still being mastered, in isolation, through a process in which each installment was subject to review. The editorial effort aimed to preserve the character of that writing while making the draft readable; it could not restore access to material removed by censorship.

Annotations and the Limits of Reconstruction

The published edition’s annotations respond to the gaps without claiming to recover the original wording. Siems describes them as a record of close reading: they draw on the context around a redaction, information elsewhere in the manuscript, publicly available accounts, declassified records, litigation, and government investigations. The United States Senate Armed Services Committee’s inquiry and Justice Department reviews, among other sources, formed part of that wider documentary record. Where public information or the text itself made a likely explanation relevant to readability, the notes offer it as a plausible correspondence, not as a verified restoration of classified language.

That distinction limits what the annotations can responsibly claim. Siems expressly did not attempt to reconstruct redacted text or uncover classified material, and he accepted 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 materials and footnotes. The notes therefore make the editorial reasoning visible while preserving uncertainty about what the black bars conceal. They are not a substitute for the missing text, nor evidence that every proposed interpretation is correct.

The public documentary record also gives the censorship question a broader context. Records described in government investigations included the Special Projects Team’s detailed memoranda of interrogation sessions, recording not only what was said but how information was obtained. Those records remained classified, even as official reports summarized a special interrogation that followed a second approved plan and broadly matched Slahi’s account. This evidence does not make every redaction in the manuscript transparent; rather, it shows why the struggle over access to records and the ability to assess an account became consequential to the book’s publication.

Publication, Access, and Unfinished Control

Siems had not met or communicated with Slahi when preparing the edition. He requested a confidential meeting, under security protocols, to check whether his edits represented the original content and intent. The Pentagon refused, stating that communication with a detainee was not possible for someone who was not legal counsel. The denial left the editor without direct confirmation from the author, even though the manuscript had been written for a public readership and Slahi had authorized its publication. The editorial process consequently had to proceed through the manuscript and available records, with an acknowledged limit on verification.

For Siems, the black bars were not merely obstacles to comprehension. He argued that censorship had been integral to post-September 11 detention operations, both enabling abuse and concealing that abuse, and that secrecy continued to shape Slahi’s circumstances. He also emphasized that the United States government still controlled the author’s fate and that Slahi remained imprisoned without a satisfactory explanation in the account presented. These are the editor’s stated conclusions about the regime’s significance, not a claim that the redactions alone settle every question about detention.

The book’s publication therefore did not end the censorship problem. Its black bars make the limits of the available narrative visible on page after page, while the author’s absence from the editorial process leaves his approval of particular changes unconfirmed. Siems hoped that a future edition could present the work in full and as Slahi wished it to appear. Until then, the published memoir stands both as a shaped account of the author’s experience and as a record of what readers remain unable to see.