Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) occupied two sharply different positions in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo case: it initially led his questioning and sought to build rapport, then raised concerns when military interrogators took over and used more aggressive methods. The account does not portray the FBI as having a single, uncomplicated role. Its early interviews took place within a broader effort to extract information from a detainee whom government agencies already viewed through a terrorism-focused frame; later, its objections to military practices exposed a struggle over both control of the interrogation and responsibility for what happened.

Early Role at Guantánamo

The FBI sought to interview Slahi immediately after he arrived at Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. It led his interrogations for the first several months, using rapport-building techniques, while trying to keep him from being placed in the hands of military interrogators. This approach set the early FBI interviews apart from the special interrogation that followed, although the record does not establish that rapport-building resolved the larger conflict over what Slahi was suspected of or what information interrogators expected him to provide.

In his 2005 Administrative Review Board hearing, Slahi recalled an FBI interrogator who told him that the bureau did not beat or torture people and that such treatment was prohibited. The account identifies this person as a likely lead interrogator in Slahi’s first period at Guantánamo, while allowing that he may also have been the older man who appeared in a later session. The identification remains qualified rather than certain. In the available account, the assurance is evidence of how the FBI presented its methods to Slahi, not proof that all questioning across the detention system followed the same standards.

Slahi’s own description of his conversations with FBI and Defense Department personnel shows the overlap between questioning and the government’s developing theories about him. He wrote that those conversations gave him a sense of the government’s suspicions, while maintaining that he had no crimes to confess to. One accusation put to him was that he had come to Canada to plan harm against the United States. A later exchange returned to the credibility of his account of Canada: an interrogator said that it did not make sense and pressed him about what would. The text places these exchanges within a continuing effort to obtain a story that matched interrogators’ expectations, but does not identify every speaker as an FBI agent.

Competition and the Transfer of Control

The FBI’s early role was also shaped by interagency competition. The editorial notes connect an interrogator’s comment about military interrogators with Slahi’s reference to competition among agencies for control of his questioning. They suggest that a particular interrogator may have been from a civilian agency, likely the FBI; this is presented as an inference, not a confirmed identification. The broader conflict between the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency over military interrogation methods had been documented publicly, and Slahi’s case became one of the examples through which that conflict could be examined.

Slahi told the Administrative Review Board that his final interview with FBI interrogators took place on May 22, 2003. By late May, the FBI agents involved in his questioning had left Guantánamo, and the military assumed control. That transition was consequential: the interrogation moved from the bureau’s reported rapport-based approach to a military-led process that included a specially designed plan. The change in institutional control helps explain why accounts of Slahi’s treatment distinguish between his first months at the camp and the period that followed, rather than treating all interrogations as the work of a single agency.

Warnings About Military Methods

A few days after the military took over Slahi’s interrogation, an FBI agent circulated a report recording concerns about military practices at Guantánamo. The concerns were developed further on July 1, 2003, when the FBI’s assistant general counsel, Spike Bowman, alerted senior officials that military personnel had used aggressive techniques, including physical force, removal of clothing, cold exposure, and leaving detainees exposed to the cold. Bowman argued that the absence of prisoner-of-war designation could not itself authorize treatment that would be unlawful for prisoners of war or criminal detainees. He also raised the risk that the FBI would be associated with the military’s conduct and asked whether the matter should be referred to the Department of Defense inspector general.

These warnings matter in the account because they document that concern within the FBI arose soon after the transfer of control, rather than only in later public debate. They do not establish that the bureau stopped the military’s practices, nor do they erase its participation in earlier questioning. Instead, they show an agency confronting the consequences of an interagency handover: its personnel had left Slahi’s interrogation, but the bureau still faced questions about what was happening and whether its institutional reputation would be implicated.

Records, Investigations, and the Limits of Attribution

The documentary record widened beyond the FBI’s own reporting. A Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigator obtained military interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda that recorded what was said and how information was extracted. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2008 review summarized classified records of the special interrogation plan and found that the documented sequence broadly matched Slahi’s account in Guantánamo Diary. Those sources help establish the military program’s design and operation; they should not be confused with evidence that the FBI designed or directed it.

The U.S. Department of Justice review also examined the FBI’s involvement and observations of interrogations at Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In Slahi’s case, the distinction between agencies is especially important because the FBI both questioned him during the early months and later recorded objections to military methods. The account presents the bureau as an institution divided between its investigative role, its effort to retain control over questioning, and its warnings about practices adopted after that control passed to the military. That record is substantial, but it does not make every redacted interaction attributable to a named FBI agent, or settle every question about the bureau’s knowledge and responsibility.