Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld appears in Guantánamo Diary not as an interrogator in the room, but as the senior official whose approvals helped establish the conditions under which military interrogators questioned Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The account traces decisions from broader policies on interrogation to a separate, individually approved plan for Slahi, and places those decisions beside documentary investigations of what followed. Rumsfeld’s significance lies in that chain of authorization: methods devised and applied at the detention facility were also approved at the highest level of the Department of Defense.

Office and Authority

The narrative situates Rumsfeld within the post-September 11 expansion of U.S. military interrogation. In late 2002, military interrogators were developing new approaches at Guantánamo, amid a dispute with FBI and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents who had generally been leading prisoner interviews. The military formed its first Special Projects Team and prepared a plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani. After development in fits and starts, Rumsfeld signed the authorization associated with a fifty-day interrogation barrage beginning in November. That regimen included extended sleep deprivation, loud music and white noise, cold conditions, stress positions, threats, and physical and sexual humiliation.

This episode provides context for, but is distinct from, the later plan for Slahi. It shows that the use of exceptional interrogation methods was not confined to one prisoner or one decision. By the time Slahi became the subject of his own Special Interrogation Plan, the military had already developed and applied a written program beyond ordinary interviews, and Rumsfeld had already authorized such a program in another case.

Policies and Interrogation Authorizations

Rumsfeld’s broader role is also recorded in the December 2, 2002 memorandum authorizing methods that included nudity, forced standing, stress positions, and interrogations lasting twenty hours. A later account identifies a December 22 memorandum on Counter Resistance Techniques and a March 13, 2003 legal opinion by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel among the authorizations and legal rationales surrounding military interrogation. Rumsfeld signed another authorization on April 16, 2003. These documents belong to a sequence of policy decisions, rather than a single order, and the narrative presents them as part of the institutional framework in which the Special Projects Team operated.

The account also notes Rumsfeld’s response to limits on forced standing. When he issued his original authorization for methods beyond those in the Army Field Manual, he appended a handwritten comment questioning why standing was limited to four hours when he himself stood for eight to ten hours a day. The juxtaposition is consequential: the memorandum treated prolonged standing as an authorized technique, while the handwritten note framed the question of its duration through Rumsfeld’s own experience. The narrative contrasts that comparison with research describing prolonged standing as especially excruciating for detainees. It does not suggest that the note alone determined how any particular interrogator treated Slahi; it shows the language in which senior authorization and the limits on a technique were being considered.

Approval of Slahi’s Special Plan

In 2003, the military developed a second, separate plan for Slahi. The chronology makes the approval process specific. General Geoffrey Miller submitted the plan to General James Hill, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, in July. Hill forwarded it to Rumsfeld on July 18; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz approved it on July 28; and Rumsfeld signed it on August 13. The Senate Armed Services Committee found that Miller had sought official Pentagon approval and that Rumsfeld personally signed off on Slahi’s plan.

The plan placed Slahi’s interrogation within a sustained program, not a spontaneous encounter. The book describes months of extreme isolation, physical, psychological, and sexual humiliation, threats to Slahi and his family, and a staged kidnapping and rendition. A planned deception was carried out on August 25, when Slahi was removed from his cell, fitted with blackout goggles, and taken on a disorienting boat ride with prearranged deceptive conversations. An earlier proposal to use a helicopter was abandoned as too difficult to arrange. The subsequent movement to Camp Echo was also part of the plan: the isolation hut was prepared to block light and outside visual contact, with the stated aim of reducing external stimulation. These details connect the signed approval to a designed sequence of measures, while leaving the direct execution to the military personnel at Guantánamo.

Documentary Record and Accountability

The account distinguishes what Slahi wrote from what later investigations documented. Stuart Couch, a military prosecutor assigned to Slahi’s case, received intelligence reports and developed suspicions about the interrogation. An investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service gained access to the military interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda recording both what was said and how information was obtained. Those records remain classified in the account, but the Senate Armed Services Committee’s inquiry and the U.S. Department of Justice’s review summarized the special interrogation and its planning. The reports described a second Rumsfeld-approved plan and a course of events that closely matched Slahi’s narrative.

Two items in the files especially affected Couch’s assessment. One was a fictitious State Department letter presented to Slahi in August 2003, which threatened that his mother had been detained and might be transferred to Guantánamo. The other was an October email exchange about Slahi reporting that he was hearing voices; a military psychiatrist responded that sensory deprivation could cause hallucinations. The book presents these records as evidence of the methods used and of the effects interrogators were observing. They help establish the documentary basis for scrutiny of the plan, without making Rumsfeld a participant in those individual exchanges.

Political and Legal Significance

Rumsfeld’s approvals sit within a larger contest over how Slahi’s detention was justified. When a federal court considered Slahi’s habeas petition, the government did not argue that he was a major al-Qaeda figure or that he had taken part in an al-Qaeda attack or plan. It had initially advanced an argument that he was detainable under the provision concerning assistance in the September 11 attacks, but later abandoned that theory, acknowledging that he probably did not know about the attacks. Judge James Robertson ordered Slahi released in 2010, nine years after he had been taken into custody; the government appealed.

That legal history does not establish that Rumsfeld personally assessed each allegation against Slahi. It does sharpen the institutional stakes of the decisions attributed to him: the government’s case and its theories shifted, while the signed interrogation plan had already subjected Slahi to a prolonged, deliberately structured program. In the book’s account, the gap between high-level authorization, coercive interrogation, and a later contested detention case is central to understanding Rumsfeld’s role. His presence is chiefly documentary and administrative, but the consequences of those decisions are described through the prisoner whose interrogation the plan governed.