I stood in my cell
Wondering about my situation
Am I the prisoner, or is that guard standing nearby?
Between me and him stood a wall
In the wall, there was a hole
Through which I see light, and he sees darkness
Just like me he has a wife, kids, a house
Just like me he came here on orders from above
I wasn’t exactly enlightened all of my time in Guantánamo. I was often confused and angry, and still young in my thinking. But I think it was easier for me to see the people who were guarding and interrogating me than it was for them to see me.
In the summer of 2003, after a very long day of abuse that was part of my “Special Projects” interrogation, a female sergeant bragged to me about how knowledgeable Americans are in sexual matters, and how backward “Yemenis” like me are in that department. Nothing in that long day of torments hurt me more than to be confused with someone from Yemen. I admire the Yemeni people enormously; they represent all that is decent and honorable, in my experience. But here I was, being tortured slowly, and the woman on whom the job fell that day did not even know who I was. Not even close. If she had said Moroccan, Algerian, Malian, Senegalese, even Tunisian, I could maybe understand the geographical confusion. But Sanaa is four thousand miles and a continent away from Nouakchott.
I was shocked and hurt by her ignorance, but in a way she wasn’t too far off when she threw the Yemenis and me in the same pot. In Guantánamo it mattered where you were from, and early on detainees were divided into those with some entity backing them, usually an important American ally country, and those without. Those who remained in GTMO the longest were almost all from the latter group. Our individuality didn’t matter as much as the fact that we were poor and from countries that lacked the political will to stand up for us and demand our release.
The interrogator who said this to me appears twice in Guantánamo Diary—or I should say “appears,” because the U.S. government blacked out both passages so she is very difficult to see. Readers can’t see any of her features; they can’t even see that I refer to her as “she.” I did not use her name because she did not bother even to make up a name for me. In the United States, if the FBI or the police show up on your doorstep, they say my name is so-and-so, and show you their identification. The same is true for the police and intelligence services in Mauritania, Germany, and Canada. One of the aspects of Guantánamo that I found most disrespectful and insolent to us as human beings was the way they came to us nameless, sometimes even faceless, and said, “I’m here to interrogate you and ask you questions and you don’t know who I am. I can do anything to you without your being able to identify me.” They were so busy hiding themselves they couldn’t see the most basic things about the men that they were questioning.
Writing the manuscript for Guantánamo Diary was in a way a reaction to this. I first and foremost wanted to tell my side of the story, to say, “What those people are saying about me is not correct, it’s wrong, and here I am: Come and test me, ask me any questions yourself. When I was nineteen and twenty I went to Afghanistan for a couple of months. That’s it. I came back. I’m not a killer. I’m not a bloodthirsty person. I’m very peaceful. I love people. This is who I am.” But I also meant my story to be breaking news. I wanted the world to know what was happening in Guantánamo. For over seven years, the U.S. government kept that breaking news under lock and key, until it was not news anymore. And then it still said it could be released only in censored, broken form.
I will be forever grateful to my publishers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and around the world who were kind enough to publish these broken goods, and so very, very grateful to all who read the book in its broken form. I owe my freedom to my attorneys, who wrestled my manuscript into the light, and to all of you for sharing and reading it. And I believe I owe us all this repaired version. I never meant my story to be blacked out and redacted, and since I returned home, every person I have spoken with who read this book has asked me if she or he will now be able to read it in an uncensored version.
I tried to do this in the most direct, correct way, by asking the U.S. government to give me back my original, uncensored manuscript. The government refused repeatedly, and so I have worked with my editor Larry Siems on what we came to call this “repair,” because it often felt like we were trying to restore a very ancient building.
I thought at first this would be easy, a matter of reinstalling missing bricks to their proper places. I did a small section, and because the redactions were all little bricks of fact—names, places, sometimes dates—they slipped right in. But things quickly became complicated when it wasn’t just a few words that were missing, but sentences and paragraphs, full pages even. I began with the obsession of replacing what was taken out brick for brick, tit for tat, as a kind of revenge for the censorship. But revenge is always problematic—it ends up imprisoning you. In the longer censored passages, I knew the action that was being described, but not the phrasing or the order of the sentences, or even the exact aspects of the person or the experience I had described.
I worked in a copy of the book, making notes above the redactions and in the margins, and then I would take a break, go home, eat lunch, and remember even more. I found myself writing and remembering, beyond the boundaries of what I was supposed to be filling in. But it was by doing this, and not trying to confine myself to the government’s prescribed blacked-out spaces, that I felt myself recovering the feeling of the original pages. And then Larry and I did what we were denied the opportunity to do the first time Guantánamo Diary was published: we worked together to edit these censored sections.
The result, like the original uncensored manuscript, is as close as I can come to the truth as I experienced it and understand it, in the best form I can express it.
I am publishing this new, repaired edition in the same spirit in which I sent a censored version that I had not even been allowed to see into the world in 2015. This is especially true with respect to the men and women I have described in these pages. Except for senior officials who have been named publicly in U.S. government reports or the press, I have chosen in this restored edition to refer to my captors, interrogators, and guards with the names and nicknames I knew them by in prison. To all of them, I wish to renew the invitation that I delivered through my attorneys in my Author’s Note for the first, censored edition. In that Note, I said that I bear no grudge against anyone for my ordeal and treatment, and I invited all of the women and men who appear in the book to read it and correct any errors. I said that I dreamed of one day sitting down with all of them for a cup of tea, having learned so much from one another. I mean this still, and most sincerely, as every day teaches me even more about forgiveness.
Repairing this broken text has been about seeing things that someone wanted hidden. Sometimes that someone was me. When I received the photocopy of my book in Guantánamo I stayed up all night reading it, afraid that I wrote something I would regret. And yes, there were things that embarrassed me. I was especially ashamed of my habit, when I was young, of making up sarcastic nicknames for people I met. The Jordanian intelligence agent who oversaw my rendition operation was not “Satan”; he is a human being, as Ahmed Matar pointed out, with a full life and a family. That kind of name-calling is someone I was, not someone I am now. In that sense, reading what I’d written ten years before really was like reading an old diary. Sometimes I laughed, and sometimes I got very upset. But mostly I just smiled at my own silliness and learned more about who I was, and also who I am. Seeing myself this way gives me confidence for the future.
I am thankful for this confidence most of all. It comes from all the characters portrayed here, mainly government employees from around the world, whose human actions were the raw material for this book, and whose complicated humanity challenged me to be truthful, above all with myself.
It comes from everyone who helped in bringing my diaries to light, because without them there would be no book at all, and I would probably still be shouting in the dark: from Nancy Hollander and Theresa Duncan, who fought for nearly eight years to get the approval for a redacted version of my manuscript to be released;