Guantánamo Diary manuscript

The Guantánamo Diary manuscript is Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s handwritten account of his life and detention, composed in 2005 while he was held in a single-cell segregation hut at Camp Echo. Its journey from that cell to public release was itself governed by confinement: the United States government classified and heavily redacted the text, while Slahi remained unable to participate in its editing. The resulting book preserves an unusually direct voice, but also bears visible traces of the system that controlled both its author and what readers could see.

Composition and Voice

In the summer and early fall of 2005, Slahi wrote a 466-page draft by hand in his Camp Echo cell. He worked in installments, beginning not long after he was finally allowed to meet his pro bono attorneys, Nancy Hollander and Sylvia Royce. Under the censorship protocols at Guantánamo, every page was treated as classified from the moment it was written, and each new section had to be submitted to the United States government for review.

The manuscript was written in English, Slahi’s fourth language, which he had acquired largely in U.S. custody. His vocabulary, estimated at fewer than 7,000 words, is comparatively limited, yet the account uses that lexicon to convey a wide range of action and emotion. Recurring formulaic phrases give repeated events a patterned quality, with echoes of epic storytelling; the language’s constraints become part of the work’s expressive character rather than a barrier to it.

The draft is incomplete and uneven in form. Some passages appear more polished, and some handwriting smaller and more precise, while other sections have the urgency and sprawl of a first draft. The narrative also becomes less linear when it approaches recent events, and the manuscript’s original arrangement left a series of earlier flashbacks appended at the end. These formal variations register the different conditions under which the account was composed, without resolving its unfinished shape.

Censorship and Editorial Work

The manuscript underwent two rounds of editing. The United States government first imposed more than 2,500 black-bar redactions; Larry Siems then edited the text for publication. Slahi could neither participate in nor respond to either process, although he had authorized publication in edited form and hoped the work would reach readers, especially readers in the United States.

Siems’s work included regularizing verb tenses and word order, clarifying awkward phrasing, and occasionally consolidating or rearranging passages. He also incorporated the appended flashbacks into the main narrative and streamlined the whole. The draft, described as approximately 122,000 words, became a published version of just under 100,000 words. Siems stated that he could only hope these decisions would meet Slahi’s approval: he had not met or communicated with him, and the requested opportunity for a confidential meeting to check the edits was denied.

The black bars do more than remove words. They interrupt narrative continuity, blur the outlines of people in the account, and obstruct the open tone of Slahi’s address to readers. At the same time, their repeated presence makes the limits on the text visible. The annotations accompanying the manuscript record attempts to read around those gaps, using context within the text and publicly available material; they do not claim to reconstruct the original censored wording or disclose classified information.

Release and Documentary Context

In December 2005, Slahi told officers at an Administrative Review Board hearing that he had written a book about his story and wanted them to read it when it was released. Instead, the manuscript was stamped SECRET and NOFORN and placed in a secure facility near Washington, DC, accessible only to people with the required clearance and official need to know. His attorneys pursued litigation and negotiations for more than six years to secure public release.

The editorial annotations draw on declassified government documents, litigation records, news reporting, published investigative work, and government inquiries. In particular, records described in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and the Justice Department’s 2008 review document a special interrogation that, in important respects, accords with Slahi’s account. Those materials provide a documentary context for reading the memoir, while the annotations distinguish publicly supported information from conjecture about redacted passages.

A member of Slahi’s legal team delivered an unclassified version to Siems in the summer of 2012. By then Slahi had spent a decade at Guantánamo. A federal judge had granted his habeas petition and ordered his release in 2010, but the United States government appealed and the case was sent back for rehearing. The manuscript reached the public while its author remained detained, still unable to review the editorial decisions or read the complete version as it would appear in print.

Significance of the Manuscript

The Guantánamo Diary manuscript is at once a personal narrative and an artifact of the conditions under which it was produced, withheld, and edited. Its direct address to readers stands in contrast to the secrecy imposed on the pages and to Slahi’s exclusion from the publication process. The account’s irregular chronology and recurring language preserve features of the draft, while editorial consolidation makes its story more accessible at the cost of altering its original length and arrangement.

The text also carries an unresolved distinction between what it tells and what readers are permitted to see. Annotations can place claims beside public records and clarify context, but they cannot restore the censored manuscript or substitute for Slahi’s participation. Its publication therefore brought forward a substantial record of his voice while leaving the black bars, the unfinished editorial relationship, and his continued detention as part of the work’s history.