{"id":53370,"date":"2015-02-02T13:13:15","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T13:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=53370"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:08","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:08","slug":"how-guantanamo-diary-escaped-the-black-hole-and-got-past-the-censors-mostly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/how-guantanamo-diary-escaped-the-black-hole-and-got-past-the-censors-mostly\/","title":{"rendered":"How Guant\u00e1namo Diary Escaped the Black Hole and Got Past the Censors (Mostly)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Intercept\/Connie Yu<\/p><\/div>\n

31 Jan 2015 – <\/em>The first word of Guant\u00e1namo Diary<\/em> is a black bar.<\/p>\n

The book, in which Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells of his odyssey through overseas prisons and his torture and abuse by the US and its counterterrorism allies, is pockmarked with redactions left by military censors.<\/p>\n

The diary was finally published last week, more than nine years after Slahi wrote it, and it jumped onto bestseller<\/a> lists<\/a>. But the details of how his lawyers fought for its release are still under seal \u2013 highlighting the secrecy that still surrounds everything to do with the U.S. military prison and the 122 men who remain there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe starting point is that everything that Mohamedou says, like anything that any Guantanamo detainee says, is considered classified and has to be cleared by the government,\u201d said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, who was involved in the negotiations for the manuscript\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

Slahi, a 44-year-old Mauritanian educated in Germany, was rendered by the CIA to prison in Jordan in late 2001, then held by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The government claimed that Slahi had been an al Qaeda recruiter. He admits<\/a> that he went to Afghanistan in 1990 to fight against the communist government; his brother-in-law was an adviser to Osama Bin Laden<\/a>; and he\u2019d met one of the 9\/11 plotters in Germany. But Slahi maintains that he\u2019d had nothing to do with al Qaeda since 1992, and the U.S. has never charged him with a crime.<\/p>\n

Slahi began to write his memoir in the summer of 2005, soon after he first met with attorneys. But, consistent with its policy of censoring communications from detainees, the government refused to approve it for release: Instead, the manuscript sat in a facility near Washington D.C., off-limits to anyone without the right security clearance. His attorneys, Shamsi said, fought to get it declassified, but that litigation remains under seal. Once they obtained an unclassified version, it could still only be read by Slahi\u2019s legal team. It took further negotiations to get the government to approve it for public release.<\/p>\n

By the time the editor Larry Siems got hold of the manuscript in 2012, volumes of information about Slahi\u2019s case had come into the public record. In 2006, the government released transcripts from hearings evaluating prisoners\u2019 detention status, Slahi\u2019s among them. Reports from the Justice Department<\/a> and the Senate Armed Services Committee<\/a> detailed his interrogation. Documents from a federal court challenge revealed aspects of the government\u2019s intelligence against him.<\/p>\n

Siems was able to cross-reference these materials to establish the chronology of Slahi\u2019s narrative, in which all dates have been redacted.<\/p>\n

For instance, Slahi writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe dropped me on the dirty floor. The room was dark as ebony. [Redacted] started playing a track very loudly\u2014I mean very <\/em>loudly. The song was, \u201cLet the bodies hit the floor.\u201d I might never forget that song. At the same time, [redacted] turned on some colored blinkers that hurt the eyes. \u201cIf you fucking fall asleep, I\u2019m gonna hurt you, he said.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Senate report recounts a July 8, 2003 session where Slahi was \u201cexposed to variable lighting patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pool\u2019s \u2018Let the Bodies Hit [the] Floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a remarkably accurate historian of his own experience. His account just lines up with publicly available information,\u201d said Siems.<\/p>\n

Some of Slahi\u2019s lawyers have security clearance, and could read the full manuscript, but they are barred from talking about what might be behind the redactions. \u201cThese were not conversations that I could have with them,\u201d said Siems.<\/p>\n

Siems was never in contact with Slahi as he prepared Guant\u00e1namo Diary<\/em>. Journalists have not\u00a0been allowed to speak directly to current detainees (although in the book, Slahi claims that his interrogators asked at one point if he would talk to \u201ca moderate journalist from the Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u201d to \u201crefute the wrong things we\u2019re suspected of\u201d). Military commissions trials at Guantanamo, though open to the media, must be watched from behind soundproof glass<\/a>, with the audio on a 40-second time delay to allow censors to bleep out any classified information. In 2012, detainee lawyers, the ACLU, and a host of media organizations challenged<\/a> that \u201cpresumptive classification,\u201d but a judge ruled against them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the absurdity of this classification regime,\u201d said Shamsi. \u201cThere is so much public information about what happened to the prisoners at Guantanamo, yet the government goes out of its way to prevent us from hearing directly from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Larry Siems, censorship is at the core of Slahi\u2019s story, and while the redactions sometimes impede his narrative, they serve a literary function as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cSecrecy was imposed in order for abuse to happen, and then more secrecy was imposed in order to cover it up,\u201d said Siems. \u201cThe redactions are like the fingerprints of that longstanding censorship regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

The redactions often appear to cover up details of the accusations leveled against Slahi, and the questions asked of him during interrogations. That gives the impression that the book elides the murky parts of his case, Siems says, when in fact, \u201che\u2019s really open and transparent about the charges against him. It looks like information is being withheld but it\u2019s not him that\u2019s doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The identities of guards and interrogators are also redacted. (It is fairly obvious that every female pronoun was blacked out, though an occasional \u201cshe\u201d or \u201cher\u201d seems to have slipped through. A few interrogators\u2019 nicknames also appear to have been inconsistently redacted.) That anonymity, Siems notes, is ironic given that Slahi explains numerous times that he considered each person he encountered throughout his ordeal as individuals \u2014 from the guard who tells Slahi proudly, \u201c\u2018my wife calls me asshole,\u2019\u201d to a lapsed Catholic guard with whom he debates the existence of God. Of a notorious interrogator, Slahi wonders, \u201chow could a man as smart as he was possibly accept such a degrading job \u2026 maybe he had few choices, because many people in the Army come from poor families.\u201d Another interrogator, however, is \u201cmore of a lover than a hater.\u201d<\/p>\n

Near the end of the book, Slahi describes a woman with whom he exchanged poems: \u201cI am terrible when it comes to surrealism. I hardly understood any of her poems. One of my poems went\u2026\u201d The next page and a half are blacked out.<\/p>\n

Slahi is one of Guantanamo\u2019s so-called \u201cforever prisoners,\u201d who have been neither charged nor cleared for release. In 2010, a federal appeals court vacated<\/a> a judge\u2019s decision that he must be let go, and sent it back to the lower court for further proceedings, which are still pending. He is also eligible for a review board hearing to evaluate his status at Guantanamo, which the government could schedule at any time.<\/p>\n

Nearly a decade has now passed since Slahi wrote, \u201cAs I am writing this, the United States and its people are still facing the dilemma of the Cuban detainees\u2026under these circumstances, Americans need and have a right to know what the hell is going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\ufeff31 Jan 2015 – The first word of Guant\u00e1namo Diary is a black bar. The book, in which Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells of his odyssey through overseas prisons and his torture and abuse by the US and its counterterrorism allies, is pockmarked with redactions left by military censors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}