U.S. Department of Defense

The U.S. Department of Defense appears in Guantánamo Diary not as a single actor but as the institution whose officials, military commands, and policies governed crucial parts of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s detention. Its role extended from the expansion of camp intelligence operations and approval of a special interrogation plan to the classification of records and control over access to the prisoner and his manuscript. The book’s account, read alongside later investigations and court materials, shows both how authority was exercised and how difficult it remained to establish what happened behind official secrecy.

Military Authority and Changing Interrogation Policy

When Guantanamo opened, the detention commander was questioning the designation of prisoners as enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war entitled to Geneva Convention protections. The Pentagon responded by replacing him and increasing the camp’s intelligence operations. That episode places the department’s authority at the level of institutional direction: a dispute over detainees’ status and protections was followed by a change in command and a stronger emphasis on intelligence gathering.

A related divide developed between military interrogators and Federal Bureau of Investigation and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents, who had generally led prisoner interviews. Over their objections, the military created a Special Projects Team in 2002 and devised a plan for the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani. That plan drew on enhanced techniques already used in a CIA secret prison. After Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized its implementation, al-Qahtani underwent a fifty-day interrogation involving round-the-clock sleep deprivation, loud noise, cold, stress positions, threats, and physical and sexual humiliation. The episode documents a change in the camp’s methods, as well as disagreement among U.S. personnel over the use of coercive interrogation.

The department’s role in Slahi’s case became more direct in 2003. A specially designed interrogation plan was developed for him and personally approved by Rumsfeld. The Senate Armed Services Committee later reported that the plan included prolonged isolation, psychological and physical pressure, humiliation, threats against Slahi and his family, and a simulated abduction and transfer. The book describes the plan’s effects through Slahi’s account; the existence and broad course of the special interrogation were also documented in government investigations. This convergence matters because it supports key parts of his account without making every redacted detail independently knowable.

Planning, Command, and the Staged Transfer

The planning record reveals a chain of authorization rather than an improvised act by an individual interrogator. In July 2003, General Geoffrey Miller submitted Slahi’s plan for approval through the command structure. It was forwarded to Rumsfeld on July 18, approved by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on July 28, and signed by Rumsfeld on August 13. The sequence connects decisions at Guantanamo to senior civilian officials in the department, while also showing that the plan passed through multiple levels of military and civilian authority.

One element was designed to make Slahi believe he had been removed from Guantanamo to a place where the rules had changed. The original proposal contemplated hooding him and flying him around the bay in a helicopter, but investigators reported that this was abandoned as too difficult to arrange. Instead, on August 25, 2003, he was taken from his cell wearing blackout goggles and carried on a disorienting boat ride, during which he could hear prearranged deceptive conversations. The Senate Armed Services Committee also described preparations for his subsequent isolation in Camp Echo: the cell was to be sealed against light, screened from visual contact with guards, and equipped to limit outside stimulation. The plan thus joined a fabricated transfer with a deliberately controlled environment afterward.

Records, Review, and Disputed Claims

The documentary record became an important counterweight to the official presentation of detainees. When transcripts of secret hearings became public in 2006, the Pentagon’s spokesman maintained that Guantanamo held dangerous terrorists and that detainees were trained to lie about their treatment. Slahi’s account of abuse was therefore presented within a public dispute over both the credibility of prisoners and the purpose of their claims. His transcript from a later 2006 Administrative Review Board hearing was missing when other hearing records were released, and it remains classified according to the book’s account.

Investigators working on Slahi’s case obtained military interrogation files that included the Special Projects Team’s daily memoranda. These records documented not only what interrogators said had been learned, but also how information had been elicited. The underlying files remained classified, while the Senate Armed Services Committee’s inquiry and a Justice Department review summarized aspects of them. Those later accounts documented a second, painstakingly prepared interrogation plan and substantially corroborated the broad sequence described in Slahi’s manuscript. They do not, however, make the entire classified record available to readers.

The book’s annotations make that evidentiary boundary explicit. Its editor describes using the manuscript’s context, information elsewhere in the text, and public sources—including released government records and investigations—to assess what might correspond to redactions. The notes do not claim to reconstruct the missing text or expose classified material; their proposed readings are editorial judgments, not verified restorations. This distinction is especially important in a book where black bars both interrupt the narrative and mark the government’s continuing control over what can be read.

Custody, Access, and Accountability

The department also controlled whether outsiders could communicate with Slahi. In 2012, after his manuscript had been cleared for public release, the editor requested a meeting with him before submitting the finished work, hoping to check whether the edits met his approval. A Pentagon public affairs officer refused the request, stating that communication with a detainee was not possible for someone who was not legal counsel. The refusal meant that Slahi could not participate directly in the editorial process, even as his work was being prepared for publication. The editor described this exclusion as one of the practical consequences of the government’s control over both the author’s circumstances and the manuscript.

Slahi’s own writing records another form of institutional mistrust. He said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had sent the contents of his confiscated company hard drive to Jordan when he was transferred there, and that the Department of Defense had sought the disk for years. His account questioned why American agencies would share material with foreign services while failing to coordinate with one another. This is Slahi’s characterization of the agencies’ conduct, not an independently established account of every transfer, but it captures the fragmented and opaque intelligence system he experienced.

When Slahi eventually reported his treatment to an interrogator, that person brought in another official to question him after guards had been sent away. Slahi understood the exchange as a possible beginning of an internal Department of Defense investigation; he later noted that he had been asked questions about his account, but did not know what followed. The episode ends without a disclosed finding or a clear account of what corrective action, if any, resulted. Across the book, the department is therefore associated not only with the authority to authorize and conduct interrogation, but also with the less visible powers to retain records, restrict access, and determine what can be reviewed publicly. The surviving evidence supports scrutiny of particular decisions and chains of command, while the persistent classification of records leaves important limits on what can be concluded about institutional accountability.