about my manuscript. The litigation dragged on over five years, and in the end came to nothing. My lawyers could not even tell me why the Privilege Team was insisting it could not clear the manuscript or why, in the end, our motions failed.
So my lawyers and I decided to do what the Privilege Team suggested: send the manuscript back to GTMO and give up the attorney-client privilege. Now my writings were open to the government to use against me in my own habeas corpus case and in any proceedings it might decide to bring against me. But that still was not enough for the U.S. government. The government officially declassified the manuscript, but continued to call it “protected,” meaning it was still classified in effect, and could not be publicly released. Our frustration continued: we had not been fighting all those years so the government could tell my lawyers, “Now just you and your lawyer friends can read the manuscript.” My lawyers prepared to take this to the secret court again. Finally, the government decided not just to declassify but to “unprotect” the manuscript—a process that included adding all the redactions it considered necessary for it to be publicly released.
This whole process took almost seven years.
I remained for all that time in my isolation hut in Camp Echo Special. There were times when my faith that I would someday be released was severely tested. In late 2006 or early 2007, two FBI agents from Minnesota came to visit me and ask me about a young Arab man whom I was told was from Minneapolis. I could not possibly have known him, and everything I thought I knew about that part of the world came from a Chris Rock standup routine. According to him, no African Americans live in Minnesota, and so, by way of extrapolation, I had concluded that there must not be any Arabs or Arab Americans in Minnesota, either. But apparently I was wrong. The two men spent hours grilling me about this young man. In the end, they pulled one of my interrogators aside and told him that the way I talked to them meant I would never leave GTMO, or so my interrogator told me after they left the base. It was one of many, many days when I felt that I would never see freedom.
But there were some very hopeful days, too. One was in January 2009, the day after President Obama’s inauguration, when he signed the executive order to close Guantánamo. I don’t know how the outside world received this news, but in GTMO everyone took it very seriously. The Joint Task Force gave each detainee a copy of the President’s order. Very high-ranking officers toured the camp and spoke with many detainees. An Air Force captain in his jumpsuit and a four-star Navy admiral actually sat and talked to me. With them were several JTF staff members, including Paul Rester, GTMO’s director of intelligence. This delegation wanted to make sure inhumane practices were no longer on the menu at the camp.
I was elated. I cleaned the whole compound and took extra care of my garden. One of my guards was telling me not to bother, since I was going home. But remembering the history of Guantánamo, and thinking it might once again be used for refugees, I wanted the camp to look as good as possible for those who might be sent there after me. Everybody in GTMO—detainees, interrogators, and guards alike—truly believed that Obama would make good on his promise to close the place. We knew some of the detainees were going to be transferred to the United States for trial, but by then everyone knew that I had done nothing, so I was sure that this would not be me. Paul Rester even told me that I was going to be released, to Belgium or to Germany, he predicted.
That 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
