Slahi Writes Guantánamo Diary in Prison

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s writing of the Guantánamo Diary manuscript in prison was an act of authorship under confinement and censorship: during the summer and early fall of 2005, he composed a 466-page account by hand in a single-cell segregation hut at Camp Echo. The manuscript was meant for public readers, but every page was treated as classified, and the work reached publication only after extensive government redaction and editorial revision.

Composition in Camp Echo

Slahi wrote the manuscript in installments in his single-cell segregation hut at Camp Echo, Guantánamo. The work comprised 466 handwritten pages and approximately 122,000 words. He began not long after he was finally permitted to meet with Nancy Hollander and Sylvia Royce, attorneys on his pro bono legal team. The writing therefore took place within a setting of isolation and strict control over communication, even as the manuscript was addressed beyond the prison to a public readership.

English was Slahi’s fourth language, acquired largely while in U.S. custody. His decision to write the book in English was a significant achievement as well as a formal choice. The editor describes a vocabulary of fewer than seven thousand words, used to convey a wide range of action and emotion, with recurring formulaic phrases that sometimes echo epic storytelling. The manuscript’s language and scale make the act of writing itself part of the work’s significance: a sustained narrative made by hand, in a language learned largely during detention.

A draft shaped by its circumstances

The handwritten manuscript was incomplete and at times fragmentary. Its sections vary in polish: some appear more carefully worked, while others have the urgency and sprawl of a first draft. The narrative approach also shifts, becoming less linear in passages about recent events, where the events’ intensity and the described people’s proximity to Slahi shaped how he recounted them. Flashbacks to events preceding the central narrative had been appended at the end, leaving the work’s overall structure unresolved.

These features document the conditions of composition rather than a finished and stable design. Slahi wrote in installments, and the editor later incorporated the appended flashbacks into the main narrative, consolidated or reordered some material for clarity, and regularized grammar and phrasing. The editorial version was reduced from a draft of about 122,000 words to just under 100,000. These changes made the account more streamlined, but they were made without Slahi’s participation or opportunity to respond.

Censorship and the publication process

Under Guantánamo’s censorship protocols, each page was considered classified from the moment it was written, and each new section was surrendered to the U.S. government for review. The government then added more than 2,500 black-bar redactions. The editor describes those bars as more than missing text: they interrupt narrative movement, blur the contours of characters, and make the author’s open tone harder to perceive, while also making his continuing confinement visible on the page.

The editor’s notes were designed to help readers navigate those gaps, not to restore the hidden text. They draw on context elsewhere in the manuscript, public records, declassified documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, journalism, and government investigations. Where a redaction’s likely subject could be inferred from public information or close reading, the annotations offered that context while acknowledging that the underlying words could not be confirmed. The editor did not claim to reconstruct classified material, and he stated that neither Slahi’s security-cleared attorneys nor anyone with access to the unredacted manuscript had reviewed or verified the introductory materials and footnotes.

Testimony, corroboration, and limits

Slahi described his method as writing only what he had experienced, seen, or learned firsthand, and as trying neither to exaggerate nor understate. The editor judged the account reliable and said it was well corroborated by the declassified record, while also noting that the public record contained torments and humiliations omitted from the manuscript and that Slahi recounted some events with discretion. The account’s restraint and its documentary corroboration support its function as testimony without erasing the limits imposed by censorship.

The editor had not met or communicated with Slahi, apart from sending a letter introducing himself, and his request for a confidential meeting before completing the edited version was refused by the Pentagon. Slahi had expressly authorized publication in edited form and hoped the manuscript would reach readers, but he could not take part in either the government’s redactions or the editor’s revisions. The published text consequently bears two marks at once: the author’s effort to tell his story for the public, and the institutional controls that kept him from overseeing how that story appeared.