The definitive, unauthorized insider account of Guantánamo—funny, furious, and terrifyingly relevant

In October 2001, days before bombs began dropping on Afghanistan, Mansoor Adayfi was kidnapped by militia and sold to the CIA as a middle-aged general. He was eighteen years old and what he knew about the US he’d learned from TV shows and movies. He’d never seen a skyscraper and couldn’t imagine airplanes flying into one. None of that mattered. He was tortured until he confessed to being who they wanted him to be and then shipped to Guantánamo as one of its first prisoners.

“When the Red Cross arrived and told us to write letters home to our families, we all knew they would never be sent. But I wrote one, just not to my family. I wrote it to my interrogators. After that, I kept writing. I wrote to President Bush. To Martin Luther King Jr. To the defense contractors who make pepper spray, to space aliens, to the Pope. Writing was the one thing they couldn’t take away from me—my love of language, my sense of humor, my insistence on reaching beyond my cage to the world that I prayed hadn’t forgotten us. Almost every letter came back stamped, NOT APPROVED.”

Of the 779 men imprisoned at Guantánamo, only ten were ever charged with a crime. Only one was convicted. What you hold in your hands is the record of what happened to the rest of them.