This is that day, and that edition.
On October 16, 2016, 5,445 days after he drove himself to Mauritania’s national police for questioning and was forcibly disappeared, Mohamedou was released from Guantánamo and returned to his home city of Nouakchott, Mauritania. Within hours we were video chatting—the first time we had ever spoken—and within a few weeks we were meeting face-to-face in the baggage claim area of the Nouakchott airport.
Since then, in one of the most unexpected and extraordinary pleasures of my life, we have been in contact almost every day, by e-mail, WhatsApp, Skype, and text. Much of that time has been spent working on this new edition of Guantánamo Diary, which realizes the aspiration I expressed in my Notes to the first edition, and which fulfills what Mohamedou has described from the moment of his release, with straightforward clarity, as a responsibility to his readers: to free the text from the restraints of U.S. government censorship.
As Mohamedou explains in his Introduction to this new edition, we came to see this process as one of restoration and reparation, as of an ancient building or damaged painting.
Had we been allowed access to the still classified original uncensored manuscript, this might have seemed a simple matter of “filling in” the redactions with the deleted text. But even that would have required some editing beyond the redactions, since sometimes the redactions froze in place phrases and text that might otherwise have been edited, and sometimes my sense of the phrasing or the content beneath the redactions was incorrect.
As it was, we carried out this process of reparation in phases, working from short redactions of nouns and pronouns to longer descriptive passages and ultimately to the three multipage erasures in the original edition, two that described polygraph examinations and one that contained a poem Mohamedou had written. It was impossible to replicate the exact text that appeared in these longer passages a decade after they were written. Instead, our commitment was to reconstruct the scenes that the censored text obscured as faithfully and accurately as possible, with Mohamedou re-creating these scenes in text and then the two of us revising and editing these passages together. Our aim was always to stay as closely as possible within the textual spaces and narrative structure of the first edition. In one case, however, this process necessitated moving a block of text that originally appeared near the beginning of chapter 5 to the end of the first chapter to correct the chronology of interrogation sessions.
In this new edition, the lightly shaded text indicates areas of restoration and reparation, for anyone wishing to compare this version with the first published edition.
Not so indicated, but easily discernible in a side-by-side comparison with the first published edition, are several revisions to my footnotes. As first published, these annotations served two purposes: first and foremost, to refer readers to government documents and other publicly available information that corroborate Mohamedou’s narrative; and second, to offer occasional speculations, based on my own close reading of the text and these corroborating materials, on what might be hidden beneath the redactions. Happily there is no longer any need for these speculations, and so several of my original footnotes have been eliminated. The footnotes that remain, and a few new ones that have been added, now refer entirely to the resources available to readers interested in exploring the extensive documentary record of Mohamedou’s ordeal.
Five years after I was first handed a disk with the censored version of Mohamedou’s handwritten manuscript, I still struggle to fathom the scope and intensity of that ordeal, and what it says about my country’s commitment to the core human rights values of due process and freedom of expression. But every day I have lived with that manuscript, and now, to my great fortune, with the living presence of its author, I have understood Guantánamo Diary as a profound gesture of reconstruction and of hope.
One evening during my visit to Nouakchott a few weeks after his release, Mohamedou stood at the back gate of his family’s weathered home on the edge of the Sahara reenacting the events of the evening of November 20, 2001, when he said goodbye to his mother and aunt, assured them he would be home in a few hours, and climbed into his car and started toward the police station. By sheer, unnerving accident, we realized as we were standing there that it was fifteen years to the hour since his fateful odyssey began. Time telescoped; I saw him both at the beginning and the end of his journey, and I recognized, in the slightest slump of his shoulders, its enormous weight.
I have felt that weight many times since, as we worked our way through this new edition. Mohamedou is home now, and with this edition, his long quest to tell this story is complete. Speaking not as an editor but as an American citizen, I see other reparations work that remains to be done. But Mohamedou has done his part. The rest is up to us.
The End of the Story, and an Introduction to the New Edition
by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
1.
Every time we had a hurricane warning in Guantánamo Bay, I had the same daydream. I imagined the prison camp wiped away and all of us, detainees and captors alike, fighting side by side to survive. In some versions I saved many lives, in others I was saved, but somehow we all managed to escape, unharmed and free.
This is what I was imagining on October 7, 2016, when Hurricane Matthew was building in the Caribbean. The forecast was predicting a direct hit on Guantánamo, so the camp command decided to move all the detainees, about seventy of us, to Camp 6, the safest facility in GTMO. I was told that my belongings might not survive the hurricane, so I took my family pictures, my Koran, and two DVDs of the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men. The NCO in charge, a sympathetic Hispanic sergeant first class in his forties, arranged for another detainee to lend me his portable DVD player, but the machine died within minutes.
Outside my cell, an argument broke out between one of the detainees and the guards over the temperature in the block, an argument we all knew was futile, but the detainee had started and now couldn’t stop.
“You Americans, even if I treat you as human beings, you don’t respect me,” he was yelling.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the guards were yelling back. I did my best to tune them out, and I spent the night listening for the sound of the heavy wind battering the cell, daydreaming another dramatic escape.
The structure was so strong that I never even heard the storm. But in the morning the camp was buzzing with rumors about detainees who were going to leave. One rumor said that there was a comprehensive plan that I was going be resettled along with Abdul Latif Nasir, a Moroccan detainee, and Soufiane Barhoumi from Algeria. We had all heard so many rumors over the years that turned out to be just that, rumors, that we knew not to celebrate; this would prove to be another.
For me, though, the real news came that afternoon. The bearer was our brand-new officer in charge. She had just taken over and I had not even met her yet, but now this army captain was sticking her head through my bin hole and giving me the broadest smile I’d seen in many years.
“Do you know that you’re going to leave soon?” she said. It was the best introduction to a new OIC ever: I’m taking over, and you’re going home.
I was moved to a different cellblock. I met with representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross, who officially informed me that I was to be transferred. The U.S. government dreads the mention of detainees being freed, so it uses its own vocabulary of “transfer” and “resettlement,” as if we were cargo or refugees. Yazan, a Jordanian representative I knew from previous ICRC delegations, asked if I would accept resettlement to my home country of Mauritania. I told him I would take any transfer I was offered, quoting the title of a Chris Cagle country song: “Anywhere but Here.” The next day, my attorneys Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan called me from the United States to confirm the news. Only then I could say to myself, Now it’s official: I’m leaving this prison after so many years of pain and humiliation.
“You have the Gold Meeting tomorrow,” the new OIC told me when I got back to my cell after the call. Her smile still hadn’t faded.
The “Gold Meeting” takes place in