Law of War

The Law of War in Guantánamo Diary is more than a label for the legal setting of detention: it becomes a measure of the distance between declared protections and the conditions under which Mohamedou Ould Slahi is held. The book places that distance in two connected arenas. At the detention facility, officials invoke the law while denying an editor access to Slahi; in the editorial process, government redactions and the secrecy around interrogation records limit what can be known about his treatment. The resulting contrast is not a formal legal ruling, but a sustained question about what humane-treatment principles mean when the institutions responsible for applying them also control access to the detainee and the record.

The treaty language and its promise

The editor connects the Pentagon’s reference to public curiosity with Article 13 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. As presented in the book, the article requires humane treatment, prohibits unlawful acts or omissions that cause death or seriously endanger a prisoner’s health, and calls for protection from violence, intimidation, insults, and public curiosity. It also prohibits reprisals against prisoners. These provisions give the discussion a concrete legal vocabulary: protection is not merely an aspiration, and humane treatment is framed as an ongoing obligation of the detaining power.

The book’s wording requires care about the scope of that connection. The Pentagon told the editor that detainees were held under the Law of War, while the editor identified the phrase public curiosity with a provision of a convention concerning prisoners of war. The passage presents the treaty language as a standard against which the response can be read; it does not set out a judicial determination of Slahi’s status or a court’s finding that a particular provision was violated. The distinction matters because the force of the comparison rests on the official invocation of the framework and on the protections the editor places beside it, not on a legal judgment the passage does not report.

Access, protection, and public scrutiny

The editorial exchange makes the tension immediate. The editor had asked to meet Slahi before submitting the completed manuscript, hoping to check that the edits preserved the content and intent of a work he had written for public readers. The request was for a confidential meeting under strict security protocols. The Pentagon replied that visiting or otherwise communicating with a detainee was not possible unless the visitor was legal counsel, and cited the principle against subjecting detainees to public curiosity.

That response placed the language of protection at the center of a decision that also prevented the author from taking part in editing his own book. The editor says he had not met or communicated with Slahi, apart from sending an introductory letter whose receipt he could not confirm. He therefore could not obtain Slahi’s approval of the changes, even though he had sought a way to verify them. The Law of War’s concern with protection from public curiosity thus stands beside a different concern in the passage: the work’s intended public audience, and the author’s exclusion from the process of preparing it for that audience. The book does not treat these concerns as interchangeable. Instead, it shows how an official appeal to protective language can coexist with restrictions on communication and participation.

Detention practices and the documentary record

The contrast extends beyond editorial access. The editor describes Slahi’s treatment as including enforced disappearance, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, and torture. He also notes that a documentary record of abuse was, for years, rigorously suppressed. These are the editor’s account of the case and its record, not a list of findings quoted from a court judgment in this passage. Their placement beside the treaty’s humane-treatment provisions makes the law a point of comparison, while the history of secrecy explains why that comparison depends on the recovery and careful reading of evidence.

Some of that evidence came from records obtained by an investigator working with Stuart Couch, the military prosecutor assigned to Slahi’s case in 2003. The investigator gained access to files containing the Special Projects Team’s daily memoranda. The records described what was said in interrogation sessions and how information was extracted. They remained classified, but the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2008 review summarized relevant material. According to the editor, those reports described a special interrogation conducted under a second plan approved by Donald Rumsfeld and broadly consistent with Slahi’s account in his diary. Couch concluded from two documents he encountered in early 2004 that Slahi had been tortured.

One reported episode involved a staged transfer. The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee described a plan in which Slahi would be removed from his cell, put aboard a watercraft, and taken around the island so that he would think he had been moved elsewhere. The plan then placed him in a Camp Echo hut arranged to restrict outside stimuli. The U.S. Department of Justice inspector general reported that the planned helicopter flight was abandoned for logistical reasons and that a disorienting boat ride took place on August 25, 2003. In the context of the Law of War, these details matter not as a complete legal analysis but as evidence of the gap between a framework whose stated protections include humane treatment and a detention program whose methods were later described in official investigations.

Redaction, interpretation, and limits

The editor’s notes make the limits of the available record part of the account. Reading a censored manuscript requires trying to understand passages interrupted by black bars, but the notes do not claim to restore the hidden wording. They draw on context elsewhere in the manuscript and on public sources, including declassified government documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, news reporting, investigative writing, and government inquiries. The editor says he included information only when it was a plausible match for a redaction, publicly available or evident from close reading, and important to readability or impact.

That method leaves uncertainty visible. The editor disclaims any attempt to uncover classified material and accepts responsibility for errors in his speculations. He also states that neither Slahi’s attorneys with security clearances nor anyone else with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed or confirmed the introductory materials and footnotes. In this way, the Law of War is linked not only to treatment inside detention but to what can be established about that treatment: secrecy constrains both the detainee and the reader, while documentary corroboration can clarify some events without making every obscured passage recoverable.

Narrative significance

The book’s account of the Law of War turns on the difference between a rule’s protective language and the conditions in which that language is invoked. In one passage, the editor recalls that war can bring out both people who use lawlessness to harm others and people who try to reduce suffering. That observation resists a simple division between law and lawlessness: the law is presented as an essential restraint, but its presence does not by itself guarantee that restraint will govern practice.

For Slahi’s manuscript, this tension is also editorial. Government control over the text has, the editor argues, both obscured the account and prevented its author from participating in publication. The black bars therefore mark more than missing words: they register the continuing effect of detention and secrecy on the production of public knowledge. The Law of War supplies a standard of humane treatment and protection, while the book’s records, redactions, and blocked meeting show how difficult it can be to assess the distance between that standard and lived experience.