And serving for many years as director for the writers advocacy organization. Recently wrote introduction to mohamed, guantanamo dairy which we will talk about today and other books between the lines, mexican and Central American immigrant and families and friends and torture report, what the documents say of post9 11 torture report. He lives in brooklyn. Janenie could not make it to let you all know. Both i want to start by saying both of these books are incredible and if you havent read them yet, you should and one of the reasons i think theyre so great, obviously they are different, molly is more or less a memoir and is a dairy it was forced out by secret litigation that process that took about seven years. And any one who is a writer and reads this, you can never have an excuse for why youre not producing. The writer is incredible. One thing i like about both of the books and we will get to the writers, even though they are different, each one is sort of kind of serve cultural history in the last 15 years or so, post 9 11 america in their own way, you really get a sense of kind of whats been going on, i mean, we can get a little bit to the way things are now and each one is a great way to get context, there are type capsule books, i guess, is what im saying, we wont only talk about guantanamo but since that is a common threat, mollys book is a memoir, do you want to talk a little bit about that . Sure. In summer of 2013i got the chance to visit Guantanamo Bay to do investigative, series of investigative reports for vice, the time i visited gaun tan another 150 men of nearly 800 muslim men who were and generally brought to guantanamo. 150 men remaining and the majority of the men were on hunger strike. I was able to visit Guantanamo Bay for vice and when i was there i was able to attend the pretrial hearings, alleged master mind of september 11 as visiting prisons themselves. Guantanamo bay is one of the most censored places in the world. A place where every journalist and photographer has to wear a sign that says military escort all of the times, all photos in guantanamo are looked by a military by a member of the military and deleted if they dont meet standards of security. Its forbidden to speak to the prisoners even when you see the prisoners you see them through a oneway a twoway mirror so they wont know that youre there or make any attempt to communicate. Faces are sensorred at guantanamo. Names are sensorred at guantanamo. The entire place is built on racial. But i draw rather than take pictures because i work in obscure medium, i was able to say things for accurate. Im curious, they probably werent used to an artist being there . Did that confuse them censor wise . Theres an artist basically since i want to say at least eight years. And shes an extraordinary artist and i feel like her work that shes done at the court is actually like the eye of history there, it has the transparency and accuracy, however, yes, theres basically just jim and one other artist filtered through there but artists in general havent visited the way that photographers, reporters have. It was a strange thing. I did once have had a pair of glasses that i use today see from the back of the courtroom and they were confiscated. [laughter] larry, can you talk about the story behind the book . I mean, the story behind it is almost amazing as the book itself. Sure, i can not begin writing about who gets to tell the story of the u. S. interventions in the middle east without noting the fact, the fact that im sitting here talking about this book and not mohamed who is, i would say, the most graphic illustration about, you know, about the problem about what gets to still the story and exactly what molly was saying about the intense and purposeful censorship that surrounds guantanamo and detention operations as a whole. I cant help to think that mohamed who would smirk at the irony in a moot courtroom with the suggestion of fake justice, so mohamed is a 45yearold man who has a remarkable story. He was one of 12 children of a quite a poor kamel camel trader in subsaharan africa. First person to fly to europe and get degree in technical engineering. A couple of times when he was a student in 19911992, he did something that a lot of muslim men is he traveled to afghanistan to see what he could do the civil war against the communist government in afghanistan and he trained in an alqaeda camp. At the time when that conflict collapsed, mohamed decided he was done with all of that. Thats over, im going back to germany. He lived and worked in germany throughout the 1990s. Went back home, because of those past associations he was on the u. S. Intelligence radar screen. After 9 11 he had been questioned and questioned before. He got a call from the National Security director asking him to come in for questioning. They said drive your own car, he will be home tomorrow. His mother said, i just cooked dinner and he drove to the Police Station and he disappeared. Sent him to jordan, interrogated to jordan and then to afghanistan then sent to guantanamo, that entire time his family thought he was still in the local prison, they. Bringing him food, they were bringing him money for upkeep for an entire year until his brother read an article about this former german resident who was in guantanamo that was his mother. Subjected to one of the worst tortures in guantanamo, special projects interrogations that left him in an isolated camp echo in guantanamo where he was for almost 14 years. In 2005 he sat down to write that incredible story that i just told and he wrote it in the isolation in camp over the course of the summer, he produced a 466page handwritten manuscript in english, his fourth language aen an incredible document. You can line it up to declassify document that is describe interrogation and its day for day and sometimes word for word, the interrogation sessions but much more than that. Its a deep, deep look at the human interactions in most dehumanizing place and its so good that the u. S. Government wasnt about to let it out. So they like all materials at guantanamo prisoners looked it away in the secured facility outside of washington, d. C. And it sat there from 2005 until 2012 when his attorneys finally won a long secret battle to get the u. S. Government to release a declassified version. I was handed a cdrom, declassified version, written in sharpy and i took it home and popped it, the manuscript minus 2,000 redacted passages. Thats what became guantanamo dairy. Im glad you mention humor aspect, it reminded me like hes caught in the awful, awful like system and theyre actually parts where i found myself laughing and its not because he had such a great sense of absurdity of whats going on. I think thats what he really captures. Its not the awful pain, the physical and mental torture but just the ridiculousness. Total ubcertainty. Guantanamo is built on the notion that the men em prison there are boogie men and stripped of past achievements, who they are in their communities, thoughts and emotions. Victims arent really victims. What he writes is he writes himself back into the land of the living, writes to being an individual and and awry intelligent person and thats really one of the greatest strikes that someone can do against an institution like guantanamo which is entirely on people like sahi and going to orange jump suits. Exactly the way they claim humanity. The way you released it with redactions. In a couple, few spots, three to four pages of black lines and its experience of reading what youre not reading. It was an interesting process. I work for penn all of these years, anticensorship person and its very difficult for me to swallow that my job had to include accepting the fact that a significant portion of writing was going to be remain obscured by the government that controlled his faith the whole time. I was a bit rebellious against it but there was no way that i could not include redactions. Like the whole process of editing the book was learning so many ways in which i was writing and one of the ways that i was wrong was my desire to eliminate redactions on the page because they are the physical embodiment of that force thats a character in the voice, the u. S. Government, the voice and the more i lived with the voice, the more i came to recognized not just censorship of blocked bureaucratic force but there are moment that is you could get a sense of the sensor of the individual. Mohamed is describing, kept locked in a sensory deprived trailer for two years, doesnt know day or night for almost a year and he finally leads him outside and gets the warm cuban sub and he has a puerto rico guard contingent and the guard reaches out and touches him on the shoulder and says, dont worry, its going to be all right, youre going get home to your family and mohamed writes, i could not help breaking in and the word is redacted and the next sentence is, i dont know whats wrong with me lately, just one one word of one kind word in this ocean of agony is enough to make me cry. Clearly the word is tears. What is the National Security purpose to obscure the word tears . I have no idea. Theres something about the visceral impact of the word and image a censor moved by that, jarred by that moment that the only instinct of reaction was to try to blunt that in some way in the manuscript and the other big example is more profound and disturbing that one of the things that they do during the book is systemically eliminate female pronouns she and her. When youre reading and you have something thats clearly a pronoun thats been redacted, you know that person is a woman. Now why are they doing it . Theyre doing it because the majority of the female characters in the book are female interrogators who are instrumentallized into sexually assaulting him. We made them sexually assault prisoners. The censorship process is a lot about shame. There are two ways to tackle it. This is something that i dealt in my own work in guantanamo. The first is im an artist or tor bidden to writing the face of officers who advise them on specifically tor sures. Im forbiddening in drawing that conforms to it but hides existences or i can emphasize it. When ii illustrated and showed how they were faced and the black sharpie government censorship is that it makes the impossible if hidden. A lot of the censorship was an attempt to cover information in the public realm. The editor of the book was make sure readers had access to the information that i and anybody we wanted to take the time to learn the story to find. When we first ran excerpts and got a note from hacker in europe, i could remove redactions, oh, really, not true. It cant be done. But it was, you know, i left them because thats part of the story and continued drama and he gets to fill them in when its released. At the same time, i did anotate the book whenever hes describing in the transcript of the hearing before the review board, same information, i would refer to that in the footnotes, readers can get the sense, a that everything ha mohamed has said is corroborated in the now declassified record. Everything he says and then b, that its out there for all of us to look at and the government continuing to try to censor it is trying to push us away from information thats actually in the public realm. You have a subtitle of this panel is who gets to tell the story and i think thats a promound profound question. One of the things thats interesting about your book, molly, that part of it is about basically you discovering yourself as a journalist and you jump head first and produce amazing work. Thats like in your case you had no choice but collaborate. Most journalism is not collaboration between author and subject. Im curious, how important is that, do you think, how important is really having subject as active participants . Foreign journalism is collaborative than the foreign journalists who would like to give them credit for. Drive, translate, protect, get out of trouble, tell people what to look for and what not to look for, give education to people who parachute in and people generally unacknowledged. They generally dont get bylines and existence isnt even acknowledged in the text and when possible ive try today least acknowledge the acknowledge the work that these people have done with me and i just think its a matter of justice, otherwise youre like pretending that you just like speak all of the languages fluently and know all of the things that you dont. In the economy is an incredibly problematic part of foreign journalism that doesnt have to be but and can be done in an ethical way if people were credited like tv producers were but in actuality done in a pretty messed up way but in terms of other collaborations that ive done, one series that im really, really proud of is collaboration i did with a syrian journalist for vanity fair. Native of raqqa and invaded by isis and do journalism under cover. Marlon started sending photos that he took in raqqa of children going to the trash to finding things to sell or the long bread lines or isis fighters in hospitals recovering and i would draw from these and he would do accompanying texts. He did in raqqa and aleppo and we are currently working on a book together now and i feel so privileged to get to work and to learn from such, you know, an extraordinary peer and such an extraordinary journalist, so perhaps its more natural to me because im an artist and able to go into my role as an artist and have someone else take the role as a writer or work with them in that way but i think ive learned so much from this collaboration and been so lucky to have them. I think when you start with the professions i think you internalize the norms without thinking about it, because you kind of came in as an outsider that helped you have a fresher perspective of what journalism can be. Thats a very good observation. Its very similar to the fine art world which is, comes from the art world and youre broken to the fact that the model is that you work for an entire year on paintings, fronting all the costs yourself and you give them to a gally and they hang them up for months and what sells does and what sells doesnt and you take half. Thats a terrible model, how did that model how does prepare models in the industry and how do you live . Thats just how it works. When youre an outsider or just, i dont know, weirdo like me who spends too much time in my room, you very often think that its the way things work and seem perhaps very, very strange and you get different ideas on how you can do things which sometimes are maybe innovators. Larry, i want to ask a weird question, why did this come out . Instead of going through it and redacting all the things, like you say half of it becomes a experience trying to read around redactions. Why didnt they just censor it all. Why let it see the light of day . They did censor it for a long time. Its such an important subject and so we can only say that i collaborated in the way because today i havent spoken to him, we are not allow to exchange males or hello greetings through employments, so, you know, i was a collaborator by proxy of working turned broadest instructions, please, do what needs to be done to bring my manuscript to the public. The other thing is that i dont that was fine with me because im not so much a facetoface collaborator as the way a journalist is producing news. I have dealt with it in many ways in my life. I love literature thats produced by ordinary people in the course of their lives and findings way. The first book was letter from undocumented immigrant from mexico and central america. Correspondence that they sent home which was very much like, you know, like great poetry as a great tradition of it. So this was a manuscript that had been written selfconsciously as a work of literature so i was working from that sense, the collaborative process is one that requires the consent and approval and participation of the person who wrote the text. I dont think a text should get published without the approval of the writer. That was a very difficult process for me just to go through. But as far as why it got released . I mean, its a really good question. I would say the technical reason is that by 2012 his attorneys had been fighting for seven years to get this declassified in some ways. By 2012, we had a mountain of declassified documents about prison abuse in guantanamo, iraq and afghanistan. 140,000 pages of documents. There were two major government investigations won by the Senate Armed Services committee, one by the department of justice based on fbi complaints about fbi and guantanamo. Both of which have dozens of pages particularly about mohamed and interrogation, the government can no longer claim that the story was secret. I guess the only thing that and by 2012 these are not monolithic institutions. There are people that would like to bury this information forever, mostly because it points out to some requests to accountability that include criminal prosecution. I think that within the institutions an we see it within the documentary record, there many people that want this information to get out there and they want america to acknowledge these things and move on. So i think in 2012 it was a mix bag. I think some people wanted it out but i think others wanted it suppressed and others out. Obama administration was, you know, had proclaimed that it was going to try to close guantanamo and theres no more useful book to press that case than guantanamo dairy. A manual of how not to, you know, not to to conduct detention and interrogation operations in the current political climate. So i thought, you know, i didnt feel resistance as i was going it and i continued to believe that there are people in the government that are glad that this material is out. In theory hes free, right . Not in theory on a list that he could be released . He did, he had a review meeting, Obama Administration 2011 announced that it was going to set a new kind of hearing process for the men in guantanamo which are more or less like parole hearings and judge whether or not would be a threat if they were released. It took almost five years for those processes to really quick in and get going but mohamed had a hearing in june and he was cleared for transfer. 61 men in guantanamo and mohamed is one of 20 that has been cleared. The process moved fairly quickly. Hes determined to move everybody thats been clear before the end of the year. But as you may know, the house of representatives just passed a bill last week which which bans the administration or forbids the administration from transferring anybody out of guantanamo anywhere even those who were cleared for release. Its a shameful piece of shameful bit of publicity stunt but it wont pass the senate and the president has said that he will veto it and it suggests to me that this process may now stall again until after the election. We are talking about a man who has disappeared from his home in november of 2001, his family was told in 2010 when he won his habeas petition that he would be coming hope, the family started cleaning the house, they waited five more years, six for years until he finally got a periodic review board hearing. They were told again that hes been cleared for transfer and are expecting him any day and now i got a panic day t