![]() For New York Times reviewer Mark Danner – in addition to Dostoevsky, Beckett, and Kafka, the literary spirits “looming over these pages” – it is the U.S. Instead, Siems chose to keep them intact, creating for readers a visually disorienting book that incorporates into Slahi’s memoir the menacing effects of state censorship and surveillance. Some editors might have excised the redacted passages given their supposed illegibility. Thus, Siems quickly learned: “redactions are like the fingerprints of that longstanding censorship regime.” 9 Read together, these documents trouble the very classification procedures designed to conceal incriminating evidence implicating state actors. Siems went to work cross-referencing Slahi’s account of his detention with Justice Department and Senate Armed Services Committee reports that also documented his interrogation. Slahi’s editor Larry Siems explains that the 466-page handwritten manuscript was edited twice: “first by the United States government, which added more than 2,500 black-bar redactions, … and then by me.” 8 He first saw the manuscript in 2012, at which time other documents related to Slahi’s case had entered the public record. In fact, only one passage from the memoir is more strictly classified (an episode recounting a December 2003 interrogation). 7 Slahi’s poem, however, is no doubt the first to appear in print fully redacted. In 2007, law professor Marc Falkoff published a small collection, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, having undertaken a herculean effort in negotiations with Pentagon review teams that first classified the poems as a national security threat, according to its editor. This was not the first time a prisoner at Guantánamo published his poetry. ![]() The poem’s eighty-six lines are redacted in full, and hence opaque in an altogether different sense: I hardly understood any of her poems.” 5 He did not keep his interrogator’s work, but dutifully included one of his own in the diary. “During my time with █████████,” Slahi recounts of one official who interrogated him late in 2005, “many poems went across the table.” His interrogator’s verses, recalls Slahi, were far too “surrealistic,” admitting he is “terrible when it comes to surrealism. 4 At the time of the diary’s publication, Slahi will have been held without charge by the U.S. ![]() ![]() The memoir tells a story consistent with many former detainees: abducted by the CIA and rendered to a prison in Jordan in late 2001, Slahi was then taken to a black site known to its inmates as the “Dark Prison” north of Kabul, Afghanistan, before subsequent transfer to Guantánamo Bay’s infamous “Strawberry Fields” compound for high-value prisoners (known as “ghost detainees”). We do know that his attorneys first underwent a legal battle to gain access to an unclassified version of the document the manuscript was then subject to clearance by a Pentagon “privilege review team,” after which further negotiations were made for its public disclosure. How exactly the heavily redacted document was released in its present form is not entirely known, since all communications by detainees at the prison are subject to automatic censor. The Mauritanian national began writing the memoir in his cell shortly after meeting with his attorneys in 2005. In January 2015 Mohamedou Ould Slahi published his Guantánamo Diary in twenty-two languages worldwide. In short, the thesis of this book is ███████████. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary 1 The song was, “Let the bodies hit the floor.” I might never forget that song. █████████ started playing a track very loudly - I mean very loudly.
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