Mansoor Adayfi: “If you are alive, you still have resistance within you”

Soon after I graduated law school in 2012, I joined two lawyers at my firm in their representation of Adel el-Ouerghi, a Tunisian man who had been held at Guantanamo for eleven years. He had never been charged with any crime; in fact, he had been cleared for release three times. It was not a popular case at my firm. Two partners asked me why the firm had devoted resources to representing a terrorist; a third questioned our work. Another, when my officemate discussed Adel’s case, told him, “Check your facts. There must be some mistake; he must have done something wrong, our government wouldn’t just hold him for no reason.”

The American judicial system reflects this attitude. Even now, US courts have ducked the question of whether Guantanamo detainees have the basic constitutional right to due process. Federal courts ruling on habeas corpus petitions have condoned detention on the flimsiest of pretexts: spending a few days at a “suspicious” guest house or learning English in the wrong part of Pakistan can make someone “part of Al Qaeda or associated forces” and justify decades in prison. Department of Justice lawyers across four administrations, from Bush through Biden, have argued that the US government can detain these men as long as it deems necessary.

Our justice system regularly performs injustice and systematically silences those whom it victimizes. And so Mansoor Adayfi’s memoir of his fourteen years at Guantanamo, , is a rare and remarkable document. Written over six years on scraps of paper hidden under his mattress