Mauritanian

Ould Slahi Mohamedou

Description

Previously published as Guantanamo Diary, this momentous account and international bestseller is soon to be a major motion pictureThe first and only diary written by a Guantnamo detainee during his imprisonment, now with previously censored material restored. Mohamedou Ould Slahi was imprisoned in Guantnamo Bay in 2002. There he suffered the worst of what the prison had to offer, including months of sensory deprivation, torture and sexual assault. In October 2016 he was released without charge. This is his extraordinary story, as inspiring as it is enraging.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir
• Prisoner of war

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 18 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838855192
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born in a small town in Mauritaniain 1970. He won a scholarship to attend college in Germany andworked there for several years as an engineer. He returned toMauritania in 2000. The following year, at the behest of the UnitedStates, he was detained by Mauritanian authorities and rendered toa prison in Jordan; later he was rendered again, first to Bagram AirForce Base in Afghanistan, and finally, on 5 August 2002, to the USprison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was subjected to severetorture. In 2010, a federal judge ordered him immediately released,but the government appealed that decision. He was cleared andreleased on 16 October 2016, and repatriated to his native countryof Mauritania. No charges were filed against him during or afterthis ordeal. Larry Siems is a writer and human rights activist and for many yearsdirected the Freedom to Write Program at PEN American Center.He is the author of The Torture Report: What the Documents Say aboutAmerica’s Post-9/11 Torture Program . He lives in New York.
 
 

The film tie-in edition published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain as Guantánamo Diary in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books canongate.co.uk Diary, restored diary and introduction to the restored edition copyright © Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 2015, 2017 Notes and introduction to the original edition copyright © Larry Siems, 2015, 2017 The right Mohamedou Ould Slahi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published in the United States by Little, Brown and Company,Hachette Book Group, Inc, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 First Back Bay trade paperback edition, December 2015 Restored edition, October 2017 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978 1 83885 417 1 eISBN 978 1 83885 519 2
To my late mother, Maryem Mint El Wadia
Contents
A Timeline of Detention
Note on the Text and Annotations of the Restored Edition
The End of the Story, and an Introduction to the New Edition by Mohamedou Ould Slahi One Jordan–Afghanistan–GTMO July 2002–February 2003 BEFORE Two Senegal–Mauritania January 21, 2000–February 19, 2000 Three Mauritania September 29, 2001–November 28, 2001 Four Jordan November 29, 2001–July 19, 2002 GTMO Five GTMO February 2003–August 2003 Six GTMO September 2003–December 2003 Seven GTMO 2004–2005 Author’s Note Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition Editor’s Acknowledgments to the First Edition
A Timeline of Detention January 2000 After spending twelve years studying, living, and working overseas, primarily in Germany and briefly in Canada, Mohamedou Ould Slahi decides to return to his home country of Mauritania. En route, he is detained twice at the behest of the United States—first by Senegalese police and then by Mauritanian authorities—and questioned by American FBI agents in connection with the so-called Millennium Plot to bomb LAX. Concluding that there is no basis to believe he was involved in the plot, authorities release him on February 19, 2000. 2000–fall 2001 Mohamedou lives with his family and works as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott, Mauritania. September 29, 2001 Mohamedou is detained and held for two weeks by Mauritanian authorities and again questioned by FBI agents about the Millennium Plot. He is again released, with Mauritanian authorities publicly affirming his innocence. November 20, 2001 Mauritanian police come to Mohamedou’s home and ask him to accompany them for further questioning. He voluntarily complies, driving his own car to the police station. November 28, 2001 A CIA rendition plane transports Mohamedou from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan, where he is interrogated for seven and a half months by Jordanian intelligence services. July 19, 2002 Another CIA rendition plane retrieves Mohamedou from Amman; he is stripped, blindfolded, diapered, shackled, and flown to the U.S. military’s Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The events recounted in Guantánamo Diary begin with this scene. August 4, 2002 After two weeks of interrogation in Bagram, Mohamedou is bundled onto a military transport with thirty-four other prisoners and flown to Guantánamo. The group arrives and is processed into the facility on August 5, 2002. 2003–2004 U.S. military interrogators subject Mohamedou to a “special interrogation plan” that is personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mohamedou’s torture includes months of extreme isolation; a litany of physical, psychological, and sexual humiliations; death threats; threats to his family; and a mock kidnapping and rendition. March 3, 2005 Mohamedou handwrites his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Summer 2005 Mohamedou handwrites the 466 pages that would become this book in his segregation cell in Guantánamo. June 12, 2008 The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5–4 in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantánamo detainees have a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus. August–December 2009 U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson hears Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition. March 22, 2010 Judge Robertson grants Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition and orders his release. March 26, 2010 The Obama administration files a notice of appeal. November 5, 2010 The DC Circuit Court of Appeals sends Mohamedou’s habeas corpus case back to U.S. district court for rehearing. It languishes there for years. January 20, 2015 Guantánamo Diary is published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and seven other countries. Publishers in nineteen more countries will release translations of the book in the next two years. June 2, 2016 Mohamedou appears before a Periodic Review Board in Guantánamo. July 14, 2016 The Periodic Review Board concludes Mohamedou’s imprisonment in Guantánamo “is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” October 16, 2016 Mohamedou is released from Guantánamo. As he was on the flight to Guantánamo fourteen years before, he is shackled and wears a blindfold and earmuffs on the U.S. military transport throughout the flight. October 17, 2016 The military transport lands at the airport in Nouakchott, Mauritania, around 2 p.m. A few hours later, Mohamedou is reunited with his family.
Note on the Text and Annotations of the Restored Edition
At the end of my Notes on the Text, Redactions, and Annotations for the first published edition of Guantánamo Diary, I wrote,
So many of the editing challenges associated with bringing this remarkable work to print result directly from the fact that the U.S. government continues to hold the work’s author, with no satisfactory explanation to date, under a censorship regime that prevents him from participating in the editorial process. I look forward to the day when Mohamedou Ould Slahi is free and we can read this work in its entirety, as he would have it published.
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 w