The interrogators’ effort to make Mohamedou Ould Slahi confess to the Millennium Plot targeting Los Angeles International Airport is significant both as a failed attempt to obtain an admission and as an episode later corroborated by government records. Slahi maintained that he was not involved and recalled that the sessions yielded no breakthrough. Investigative files and official reviews subsequently documented a special interrogation whose methods closely corresponded to his account.

The objective and the impasse

Slahi described the interrogators’ objective as securing his admission to the Millennium Plot, which he said he had not taken part in. The sessions were unproductive: the interrogators sought a breakthrough, but none came. In his account, an admission to something he had not done would require pressure beyond his capacity to withstand. The confrontation therefore turned on a sharp distinction between obtaining a confession and establishing what had actually happened: the interrogators wanted the former, while Slahi continued to deny the allegation.

The special interrogation plan

The official record places the effort within a planned special interrogation at Guantánamo. An earlier plan, signed by Geoffrey Miller on July 1, 2003, proposed hooding Slahi and flying him around Guantánamo Bay to make him believe he had been taken somewhere with different rules. Investigators later reported that the helicopter plan was abandoned as too difficult to arrange and too difficult to keep limited to a small number of people.

On August 25, 2003, Slahi was instead removed from Camp Delta wearing blackout goggles and taken on a disorienting boat ride. The ride included deceptive conversations planned for him to overhear, making the apparent transfer part of the interrogation strategy. The plan then moved him to Camp Echo, where his cell and interrogation room were in a modified, self-contained hut intended to limit outside stimulation. Preparations included blocking light from entering and preventing visual contact with guards. These measures made the setting itself part of the effort to influence what Slahi believed about his situation.

Records and corroboration

When Stuart Couch was assigned Slahi’s case in the fall of 2003, he received intelligence reports based on Slahi’s questioning. The reports were being presented as the product of a highly successful interrogation, but they did not explain how the information had been obtained. Couch had been told that Slahi was on Special Projects, and the mismatch between the reports and the absence of any account of the interrogation’s circumstances raised his suspicions.

Couch’s investigator, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent, obtained access to military interrogation files. These included daily memoranda from the Special Projects Team, recording both what was said in sessions and how the information was extracted. The records themselves remained classified, but the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and a 2008 U.S. Department of Justice review summarized the interrogation. Their accounts described a second, painstaking plan approved by Donald Rumsfeld and reported that the special interrogation unfolded almost exactly as Slahi had described it in his diary.

The account and its limits

The episode reaches readers through a manuscript marked by government redactions, which obscure narrative and sometimes make the identities and circumstances harder to follow. The editor’s annotations were developed by comparing the surrounding manuscript with material elsewhere in it and with public sources, including declassified records and government investigations. Their purpose was not to reconstruct the original redacted wording or reveal classified information, but to identify public information that plausibly clarified the passages.

That distinction matters to the account of this interrogation. The official investigations corroborate key features of the special plan and its implementation, while the annotations remain editorial interpretations rather than a recovered transcript. The editor also stated that neither Slahi’s security-cleared attorneys nor anyone else with access to the unredacted manuscript had reviewed or confirmed the introductory material and footnotes. The episode is thus presented through two related but distinct forms of evidence: Slahi’s recollection and the later public summaries of classified records.