Enemy Combatant

Enemy combatant was a contested status applied to detainees at Guantánamo, not a settled description of their conduct. The book places the label between competing claims about wartime detention and protections for prisoners of war, then traces how its practical and legal meaning shifted: from a designation questioned by military officers to a basis for detention argued through alleged affiliation with al-Qaeda. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case shows how much could turn on that distinction even when the United States did not claim he had fought against it or taken part in the September 11 attacks.

A disputed label at Guantánamo

When a U.S. military C-17 landed at Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, it carried Mohamedou Ould Slahi and thirty-four other prisoners. Slahi was thirty-one, and the evidence offers no indication that he was then regarded as an especially high-value detainee. Nearly six hundred people were held at the camp. A Los Angeles Times article published two weeks later reported government sources describing the detainees as neither major leaders nor sufficiently high in al-Qaeda’s command structure to help unravel its organization. A top-secret Central Intelligence Agency audit reportedly reached similar conclusions.

The designation was disputed even within the military. During journalists’ visit to the camp that August, the commander responsible for detention operations said uniformed officers were questioning the continuing classification of detainees as enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war entitled to Geneva Conventions protections. The response described in the book was institutional, not a resolution of the underlying legal disagreement: the Pentagon replaced the commander and expanded the camp’s intelligence operations. The label therefore appears not as an uncontested fact about the prisoners, but as a classification whose persistence was itself questioned by people responsible for the detention system.

That disagreement unfolded alongside a divide over interrogation. Military interrogators increasingly pursued methods that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents opposed. In the fall of 2003, the military’s Special Projects Team created a written plan for the interrogation of another prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, incorporating techniques already used in secret detention. The book’s account situates the enemy-combatant designation within this expanding intelligence apparatus, while distinguishing the status label from any demonstrated finding that every person so classified was a major operational figure.

Slahi and the government’s detention theory

The distinction became concrete in Slahi’s habeas case. When his petition came before federal court in 2009, the United States did not argue that he was a major al-Qaeda figure or that he had participated in al-Qaeda plans or attacks. Its case instead rested on whether he had been part of the organization: the government relied on his 1991 oath of allegiance, association with members, and forms of assistance that included hosting leaders and referring aspiring jihadists to an operative.

The history of that oath mattered. Slahi had joined al-Qaeda in 1991, when it was, in the account presented, practically an ally of the United States. He maintained that his participation ended with the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan. The government nevertheless treated later interactions with his cousin and brother-in-law Abu Hafs and several other acquaintances as evidence that he remained part of the organization. Judge James Robertson considered the contacts sporadic. Although some might have involved gestures of support, the evidence did not, in his view, establish criminal material support for terrorism; their pattern also supported Slahi’s position that he was trying to avoid close ties without making himself an enemy of the people involved.

This argument illustrates the reach of the designation: the question was not simply whether Slahi had fought, but whether past allegiance and later relationships could establish membership at the time of detention. The appellate court’s account made clear that the United States had not criminally indicted him for providing material support to terrorists or al-Qaeda. Nor did it seek detention under the Authorization for Use of Military Force on the ground that he had aided the September 11 attacks or purposefully and materially supported forces associated with al-Qaeda in hostilities against the United States and its coalition partners. The dispute concerned the significance of affiliation and association under a detention framework, not a criminal conviction for those alleged acts.

A changing legal standard

In 2010, Judge Robertson granted Slahi’s habeas petition and ordered his release. The ruling came amid a broader series of cases in which the government had lost thirty-four of forty-six habeas proceedings as of April 1, 2010. In appeals of several cases, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit adopted a looser standard for deciding whether a detainee was part of al-Qaeda. The government no longer had to show that a prisoner was carrying out al-Qaeda’s orders or directions at the time he was taken into custody.

Under that revised standard, past connections could remain relevant even if they did not independently prove membership: they could make membership at capture more likely. The appeals court reversed Robertson’s release order and sent the case back for rehearing. It did not transform Slahi’s case into a criminal prosecution or say that he had aided the September 11 attacks. Rather, it changed what evidence of association might support detention. The concept’s legal force thus lay partly in the standard used to connect a detainee to an organization, and that standard could change while the underlying history of contacts remained the same.

Records, uncertainty, and the meaning of status

The book also asks readers to distinguish what records establish from what remains obscured. Its annotations address government redactions through close reading, information elsewhere in the manuscript, and publicly available material, including declassified documents and government investigations. The editor explicitly declines to reconstruct the original redacted text or disclose classified material; annotations offer the most plausible public or textually evident context where it matters to readability, and acknowledge that such interpretations may be mistaken. The black bars are not incidental: they register an ongoing censorship regime that restricts the author’s participation in the editorial process and limits what can be known from the published text.

That caution is important when considering both a status label and the intelligence used to sustain it. Records discovered by an investigator working with Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch included detailed daily memoranda describing interrogation sessions and how information was obtained. Though still classified, their contents are summarized in a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry and a Justice Department review. Those reports describe a special interrogation following a second, approved plan and broadly matching Slahi’s account. One cited document was a fictitious State Department letter threatening consequences for his mother; another was an exchange in which an interrogator reported that Slahi was hearing voices and a military psychiatrist discussed sensory deprivation as a possible cause of hallucinations.

The Senate inquiry also describes a staged transfer intended to make Slahi believe he had been taken away from Guantánamo. The original plan called for a helicopter flight, but interrogators later used a disorienting boat ride with planned deceptive conversations. He was then taken to Camp Echo, where the isolation hut was modified to reduce outside stimulation: light was to be blocked, the walls covered, and sound equipment installed. These records do not themselves settle the legal meaning of enemy combatant. They do show why the provenance and conditions surrounding intelligence matter when detention depends on what a prisoner is said to have disclosed or on how officials interpret his associations. Across the case, the designation joins legal argument to an opaque process of classification, interrogation, and review, while the redacted record leaves some of that process visible chiefly through its absences.