Larry Siems

Larry Siems is the editor and introducer of the Guantánamo Diary manuscript, a handwritten memoir composed by Mohamedou Ould Slahi in detention. His role was not simply to prepare a difficult draft for publication: the text had already been censored by the United States government, while Slahi remained unable to participate in its editing. Siems’s account of the work therefore makes the conditions of its production and publication inseparable from the story it tells, while drawing a clear boundary between what the evidence supports and what remains obscured.

Identity and Editorial Assignment

Siems identifies himself as the editor responsible for bringing Slahi’s manuscript to print. Slahi had hoped the work would reach readers, especially readers in the United States, and authorized publication in edited form. He entrusted Siems with the task of conveying the manuscript faithfully. The responsibility was made more difficult by the fact that Slahi could not participate in, or respond to, either the government’s censorship or Siems’s own editorial decisions.

The manuscript reached Siems through a member of Slahi’s legal team in the summer of 2012, on a disk labeled as an unclassified version. By then, Slahi had been held at Guantánamo for a decade. A federal judge had granted his habeas petition in 2010 and ordered his release, but the United States government appealed and the case was sent back to the district court. Siems gives this legal history as part of the context in which he received a text written by an author who remained in the same segregation cell.

Siems had not met or communicated with Slahi. When asked to prepare the manuscript, he sent an introductory letter but did not know whether it reached its recipient. Before submitting the completed work, he requested a confidential meeting under security protocols to check that his editing reflected Slahi’s content and intent. The Pentagon refused access to a detainee by anyone who was not legal counsel. This left Siems to carry out the entrusted work without being able to consult its author.

The Manuscript and Its Shape

Slahi wrote the 466-page draft by hand in 2005, in installments, while confined in a single-cell segregation hut at Camp Echo. It was written in English, his fourth language, which he had acquired largely in United States custody. Siems emphasizes the literary consequences of that circumstance: Slahi uses a vocabulary of fewer than seven thousand words, yet gives it a broad range of action and emotion. Repeated phrases for recurring events also create effects Siems compares to the formulaic patterns of epic poetry. His editing aimed to preserve this distinctive voice rather than smooth it into a different kind of prose.

The draft was not a settled, uniformly polished book. Some passages appear more carefully revised, while others retain the sprawl and urgency of a first draft. The narrative also changes shape: accounts of more recent events are less linear, and flashbacks to earlier events had been appended at the end. Siems regularized tense and word order, adjusted awkward phrasing, and sometimes consolidated or reordered material for clarity. He also moved the appended flashbacks into the main narrative and streamlined the whole draft, reducing a work of about 122,000 words to just under 100,000. He describes these interventions as his own editorial decisions, made in the hope that Slahi would have approved them.

Censorship, Annotations, and Limits

Before Siems edited the manuscript, the United States government had added more than 2,500 black-bar redactions. Slahi was unable to review these changes. Siems treats the bars both as missing information and as visible evidence of the author’s continuing situation: they can interrupt the narrative, blur characters, and make the voice less approachable. The act of editing around them cannot recover what the public is not permitted to read.

The annotations record Siems’s effort to make the surviving text legible without presenting conjecture as recovered fact. He based his notes on the context of redactions, material elsewhere in the manuscript, and public records about Slahi’s case. Those records included declassified government documents obtained through litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests, news reports, investigative writing, and Justice Department and Senate investigations. He explicitly did not attempt to reconstruct the censored original or uncover classified material. Where he offers a plausible explanation for a redaction, he identifies it as speculation for which he, not Slahi, bears responsibility. He also notes that Slahi’s attorneys with security clearances, and others with access to the unredacted manuscript, did not review or confirm his introductory material and footnotes.

Research and Public Record

Siems sets the memoir alongside public records that could test parts of its account. In discussing the special interrogation of Slahi, he points to the Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry and a Justice Department review, which describe a second, approved interrogation plan and events corresponding closely to the account in the diary. The records included a fabricated State Department letter that threatened Slahi’s mother with detention, as well as an exchange between an interrogator and a military psychiatrist after Slahi reported hearing voices. Siems’s use of these documents gives readers a basis for comparing the memoir with official findings, while the censored files and unavailable manuscript prevent that comparison from becoming complete.

His reporting also brings Slahi’s family into the frame. In Düsseldorf, Siems met Yahdih Ould Slahi over meals and helped sort and label family photographs. He recounts Yahdih’s role in supporting a large family in Nouakchott and advocating for his brother’s release, including helping organize a demonstration outside the Presidential Palace. The account supplies a view of the family’s continuing connection to Slahi: calls arranged through the International Committee of the Red Cross linked him with relatives in Nouakchott and Yahdih in Germany, but occurred only twice a year at the time Siems wrote.

Editorial Position and Significance

Siems’s introduction joins editorial explanation to an argument about secrecy and accountability. He notes that the government both controlled the manuscript through classification and prevented him from checking his edits with its author. He also invokes the Geneva Convention’s protection of prisoners from public curiosity, observing the tension between that principle and a censorship regime that withheld Slahi’s account. His point is not that annotation can fill every gap, but that the gaps themselves shape what readers are allowed to know.

The limits of his access remain part of his portrayal of Slahi’s case. After reading the public record, Siems says he could not understand why Slahi had been held at Guantánamo and was not persuaded by the government’s shifting explanations for his continued detention. He argues that the question of why Slahi remained in United States custody should have been answered long before the manuscript became public. The published book consequently bears two traces of Siems’s work: the editorial choices that make the draft readable, and the restraint with which he marks what censorship, lack of access, and an unfinished legal process leave unresolved.