Guantánamo Diary. Mohamedou Ould Slahi

did not happen. But that same year my habeas corpus case was heard by District Court Judge James Robertson in Washington, D.C. A little over a year after Obama’s promise, Judge Robertson issued his decision, which ended, “The petition for habeas corpus is granted. Salahi must be released from custody. It is SO ORDERED.” Again I briefly believed I would be going home. And then I learned that the Obama administration was appealing several habeas corpus decisions, including mine, and I knew once again I wasn’t going anywhere. But in preparing for the habeas corpus case, I learned how much information the U.S. government itself had released about my treatment in GTMO, and Judge Robertson’s opinion showed the world that the government’s version of who I was and what I had supposedly done was not true. It had become impossible for the government to argue that my own version of my story must stay classified.

      When my lawyers finally received the censored public version of my manuscript, they contacted Larry Siems, and he chose some excerpts and wrote about my ordeal for Slate magazine. I was shaken when I learned that parts of the manuscript were now in print. I was dying to read it, but it had been eight years since I had seen any part of it, and I didn’t want to wake up memories I had been doing everything to forget. I was also afraid that I would embarrass myself with my unpolished English. But my fears soon faded. Of course there were painful moments in the excerpts; I read them like the wide-awake sleeping wolf in the Arabic proverb, with one eye open and one eye shut. But I also found myself reliving scenes that made me laugh.

      And then, at long last, I saw my book . . . on TV.

      It was January 20, 2015, a Tuesday, around 10 a.m. I was having a Spanish class with an Egyptian American JTF contractor who calls himself Ahmed—a random pseudonym, because contractors weren’t allowed to share their names with the detainees. Ahmed’s Spanish, as he had confessed to me, was extremely basic, but I welcomed any opportunity GTMO offered to learn languages, in casual conversations or classes. Since I was his only student, our class took place in my cell. That morning, I turned the TV on to make a little more noise and give some life to the class, and both of us froze: the Russian channel I had tuned into, RT, was running a long piece on my book, including a live interview with Nancy Hollander and Larry Siems in RT’s London studio. At one point, my picture filled the screen.

      “You know this guy?” said Ahmed, joking.

      For the first time, I felt what it’s like to be free inside a prison, that moment of total freedom that comes when you take back some of your lost dignity. I thought of Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption, and the smile on his face when he offers his fellow prisoners drinks, the drinks he earned for doing his guards’ tax returns. My cell expanded, the lights became brighter, colors more colorful, the sun shone warmer and gentler, and everyone around me looked friendlier; even the small, short-haired female sergeant who seemed to be on an open-ended fast from smiling smiled that day, not once but many times. Now my family and the whole world would know my side of the story. That was liberation.

      About fourteen months after Guantánamo Diary was published, I learned that I was scheduled for a hearing before the Periodic Review Board (PRB). President Obama set up the review boards in 2011, but it took years for them to get going, and when they did, I watched for months as other detainees had their hearings. It seemed like no one wanted to touch my file. Finally, in the summer of 2016, almost fourteen years after I was brought to GTMO and six months before President Obama’s second term would end, I would have my chance to be cleared for release.

      As with earlier versions of review boards, I was assigned personal representatives. This time, though, the PRs really seemed to have the interests of the men they represented at heart. When I first met with my PRs, a Navy commander and an Air Force lieutenant colonel, they expressed frustration that some of the other detainees had hurt their chances during the PRB hearing because they were too thirsty to tell their stories. In fact, they explained, the Periodic Review Board was not a forum for detainees to tell their stories. This was not a court that was supposed to decide facts about the past; instead, like a parole board, the review board was supposed to weigh whether the detainee would presently pose a threat to the United States if he was released.

      But when they were preparing for their hearings, my PRs told me, many of the men would write. A lot. They kept writing and writing, I’m so and so, and I went to so and so, and I did this and this, and I’m a good man, trying to tell their whole story. Their representatives would give their papers back to them and tell them, “We can’t say this in the hearing. This hearing is very limited, very formal.” But the detainees insisted. “No, it’s my life, it’s my decision, I want to say this.” It is the burning desire of an innocent man: I want to register an injustice, I want the world to know I did nothing wrong, I am not a bad person. Some had lost their hearings because of this basic need.

      The personal representatives told me this, and I was smiling. “You won’t have this problem with me,” I told them. I’ve already told my story, I was thinking. I’m past that. I’d had my closure. The world had my versions of events, and I was happy.

      3.

      But my book, as it was originally published, was broken goods.

      The first I saw of the published version was a few months after publication day, when Nancy Hollander brought me a photocopy my publisher had made. She could not bring me the actual published book, because the U.S. government would not allow me to see the introduction and footnotes that Larry Siems had contributed, on the grounds that they sometimes referred to documents the government still called “Classified”—even though those documents can easily be found online. The photocopy was just my text, with all the government’s redactions.

      As I read through the text, my mind automatically filled in what was missing; it took me a while to realize that what I was reading and what my readers were seeing were often two different things. It wasn’t just that the readers were without certain details or information. It was that they would have in their minds the idea that what was missing was something that the U.S. government considered threatening.

      To be honest, I do not know why many of the things I wrote were censored, and I cannot follow the logic of many of the redactions. Why on earth would the U.S. government censor a poem I wrote for my interrogator as a parody of a well-known literary classic? Why would it censor the fake names that a group of my guards gave themselves when they decided to take on the roles of characters from Star Wars? Why would it censor the names of people I was being questioned about during interrogations, when it did everything it could to link me publicly to these same people? All of this supposedly had something to do with “national security,” but I wasn’t convinced. I had been delivered to Jordan, then to Bagram, then to Guantánamo because of “national security.” I was abused in Jordan and Bagram and tortured in GTMO because of “national security.” And I would always think, Could we be a little more specific about what we mean by “national security”?

      I grew up under a military dictatorship, not as brutal as some, but undemocratic nonetheless. I remember my mother telling my older brothers not to discuss politics, for fear the walls would hear. In my country, we’re used to censorship in the name of national security. What shocks people here in Mauritania is that the censorship in Guantánamo Diary isn’t just in the Arabic edition; it comes directly from the American original, which means the information is being kept from the American people.

      I wonder what would America’s founders think of this censorship. I like to think it’s the same thing they would think of my entire story: after all, one of the complaints against the British king listed in their Declaration of Independence was “for transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.” I like to believe they would have been on my side in a discussion in Guantánamo I remember with an FBI agent named William. He was explaining my legal situation to me, and how I couldn’t be treated as a U.S. citizen. Understood, I said, but how can I be without protection from anywhere? Of course I was protected—by U.S. law, as American courts would later confirm, but also by the laws of Mauritania, where I was born, and by international law, because the rights the United States was violating were not just American rights, but human rights. But this was something William would not or could not see.

      When