Mohamedou Ould Slahi–Larry Siems editorial collaboration

The editorial collaboration between Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems turned a manuscript written in Guantánamo into a work that readers could encounter alongside the record needed to examine it. Its defining elements were Slahi’s decision to entrust his words to publication, Siems’s sustained reading and editorial work, and the legal and documentary labor that made a heavily censored account available without pretending its context was simple.

From Manuscript to Public Record

In the summer of 2012, after the manuscript had finally been cleared for public release, a member of Slahi’s legal team gave Siems a disk containing the unclassified version. Slahi had then spent a decade in Guantánamo. A federal judge had granted his habeas corpus petition and ordered his release, but the government appealed and the appeals court sent the case back to the district court for rehearing. The publication effort therefore proceeded while the legal question of Slahi’s detention remained unresolved.

The route to publication had taken more than six years of work by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to obtain clearance. Siems acknowledged that his own role depended on that sustained effort: Slahi and his legal team had given him the opportunity to help bring the manuscript to print. The collaboration was not simply a transfer of pages from prisoner to editor; access itself had been contested, and the version available to readers remained subject to severe censorship restrictions.

Editorial Work and Context

Siems described spending each day reading, thinking about, and working with Slahi’s manuscript. His acknowledgments characterize the relationship as one founded on Slahi’s trust and confidence, and identify the editorial task as helping make the words public while preserving their force. He credited Slahi’s writing with integrity, wit, and humanity, qualities that shaped the work’s presentation as more than a record of confinement.

The collaboration also required placing the account beside evidence beyond the manuscript. Siems wrote that Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project had uncovered secret government documents documenting abusive post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. That record made cross-referencing, corroboration, and annotation of Slahi’s account possible. The editorial relationship thus joined a detainee’s testimony to documentary material produced outside his own narrative, offering readers grounds for comparison without replacing his voice.

Family Reporting and the Human Context

Siems’s work extended into reporting on Slahi’s family, whose experiences helped illuminate the personal history surrounding the manuscript. He met Yahdih Ould Slahi in Düsseldorf, where they shared meals and sorted photographs of relatives, including siblings and younger generations connected to the family household in Nouakchott. Yahdih also described his role in supporting the family and advocating for his brother’s release. This reporting brought everyday kinship and responsibility into view alongside the security suspicions that had shaped Slahi’s detention.

The family’s first telephone conversation with Slahi, arranged through the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2008, supplied a particularly intimate measure of separation. His mother had not heard his voice for more than six years; she wept when they spoke. Slahi asked about marriages, siblings, and new children, while his brother Hamoud Ould Slahi later said that Mohamedou had not changed. By the time Siems recounted the calls, they had become video calls, but the family’s mother had died. Such reporting gives the editorial collaboration a dimension beyond preparing a text: it preserves the altered circumstances in which that text was written and received.

Publication, Trust, and Responsibility

The publication acknowledgments trace a network of people and institutions necessary to carry the manuscript into print. Siems thanked Slahi’s lawyers, publishers, and the editors and staff who navigated the practical challenges of publication; excerpts had appeared in Slate, while Little, Brown, Canongate, and foreign-language publishers helped bring the work to readers. He also recognized the documentary work of the American Civil Liberties Union as indispensable to understanding and annotating the account.

At the center of that network, Siems placed Slahi’s willingness to write and to entrust the result to a reading public. The relationship is therefore documented less through scenes of direct editorial exchange than through the obligations both men’s roles imply: Slahi committed his experience to print, and Siems accepted responsibility for helping readers encounter it in a censored and contested form. The collaboration’s outcome was a publication that made the manuscript accessible while keeping visible the legal struggle, family separation, and documentary record surrounding it.