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 I was young, I memorized a poem by the Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar called “Prison Guard.” It begins,
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
