'Guantanamo Diary' - insightful censoring included

A young Jewish writer, Alex Meier, who fled Nazi Germany for the US before World War 2, now finds himself a target of the McCarthy witch-hunts.

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon (Simon & Schuster)

Faced with deportation, he strikes an unholy bargain with the fledgling CIA: he'll earn his way back into the US by spying for them in Berlin - a city at the epicentre of the then emerging Cold War.

Berlin is also home to the only woman Meier has ever loved. Things go awry from the start, of course, and the result is a compelling espionage thriller with a bit of Casablanca at its heart.

The issue

The US censor who went to work on Mauritanian engineer Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantanamo Diary (Canongate) - a brilliant account of his imprisonment there and an unnerving glimpse into the poisoned heart of the US war on terror - had a busy time.

After six years of legal wrangling to get Slahi's handwritten manuscript from his captors, it was handed back with more than 2500 cuts.

Every chapter in this book has been heavily censored, with thick black bars everywhere. As the London Sunday Times noted: "Entire pages appear as wordless stripes of black and white."

The censors seemed more concerned about concealing the identity of Slahi's interrogators than their dodgy methods. They weren't very good at it.

Much redaction concerned the gender of the interrogators.

"Why the censors decided their gender should be secret is anybody's guess," the New York Times reported. "Still, they missed enough feminine pronouns that their efforts at cover-up were undone."

It was a woman who conducted one of Slahi's more harrowing inquisitions. Shackled to the floor, beaten and abused, he finds his genitals being caressed.

"You know how good I am in bed," the woman whispered, aware that she is humiliating him. "If you start to co-operate, I'm gonna stop harassing you."

Slahi co-operated. He was part of al-Qaeda when it fought against the Russians in Afghanistan, but left the organisation in 1992. The Americans thought otherwise. So he told them whatever he thought they wanted to hear. Just made it up.

The fact that he is still in Guantanamo, where he has been held since 2002, and the authorities have yet to charge him with anything, says a great deal about the ultimate futility of torture.

And, for all the redaction, Slahi's generous voice emerges from this testament to human survival in a most unforgettable manner. That, then, is the futility of censorship.

The bottom line

"This is a book about a very simple idea. Where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic." - Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Crau)