United States Armed Forces

The United States Armed Forces emerge in Guantánamo Diary as both the institution that holds Mohamedou Ould Slahi and a collection of military authorities whose methods and responsibilities are contested from within. The book traces the change from his arrival at Guantánamo in military custody to a secretive interrogation operation approved at the highest level, and sets his account beside records later examined by government investigators. Its central institutional portrait is one of divided practice and concentrated power: disagreement over methods did not prevent the military from carrying out a coercive plan.

Custody and the Guantánamo system

On August 4, 2002, after two weeks of interrogation at Bagram Air Base, Slahi was placed aboard a military transport with thirty-four other prisoners. They arrived at Guantánamo the following day and were processed into the detention facility. The journey marks the beginning of the account’s sustained focus on military custody, following Slahi’s earlier detention by other authorities and his transfer between countries.

The setting was not initially described as holding a group of prominent leaders. At the time of Slahi’s arrival, the camp held nearly six hundred detainees, and contemporary reporting cited in the book characterized them as not being senior figures in al-Qaeda’s command structure. Military personnel themselves questioned whether detainees should continue to be designated enemy combatants rather than treated as prisoners of war entitled to Geneva Convention protections. The camp’s commander was replaced, and its intelligence operations were expanded. In this sequence, the institution’s classifications and command decisions shape the conditions of custody even as the basis for those decisions is disputed.

Internal conflict over interrogation

The book describes a widening disagreement between military interrogators and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Criminal Investigation Task Force, who had generally led interviews at Guantánamo. In September and October 2002, the military established its first Special Projects Team and prepared a written interrogation plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani. The plan used techniques that the Central Intelligence Agency had already employed in secret detention. After Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed its authorization, al-Qahtani underwent a fifty-day period of intensive interrogation beginning in November. The episode shows a shift in institutional practice: military officials moved beyond ordinary interviewing toward a planned, sustained regime, despite strong objections from the FBI and task-force agents.

That precedent forms part of the context for the later plan targeting Slahi. In 2003–2004, military interrogators subjected him to a special interrogation plan personally approved by Rumsfeld. The book describes months of extreme isolation, degrading treatment, threats against Slahi and his family, and a staged kidnapping and transfer. The plan was not simply an accumulation of acts by individual interrogators: it was formally authorized and implemented within a military operation. The account thus distinguishes the decisions of particular personnel from the larger chain of command that enabled the plan.

Secrecy, records, and corroboration

The interrogation was conducted under conditions that limited outside scrutiny. Slahi’s account describes a planned boat journey intended to make him believe he was being taken away from Guantánamo. Later public investigations describe a related staged transfer: military personnel removed him from his cell in blackout goggles and took him on a disorienting boat ride with deceptive conversations arranged for him to hear. The interrogators then brought him to Camp Echo, where his cell and interrogation room were configured to reduce outside stimulation, including by preventing light from entering and limiting visual contact with guards. These details connect the experience he recounts to the physical design and planning of military detention spaces.

The records that later illuminated the operation were themselves part of a restricted system. A Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent working with the military prosecutor Stuart Couch gained access to the Special Projects Team’s files. These included daily memoranda recording both what was said in interrogation sessions and how information was obtained. The files remained classified, but their contents were summarized in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and a 2008 review by the U.S. Department of Justice. The reports documented a second, carefully prepared plan for Slahi and corroborated important elements of his account. This documentary trail makes the military’s own paperwork a means of testing the testimony, while the continued classification of underlying records leaves limits on what can be independently examined.

A distributed operation and its consequences

The detention operation was not limited to uniformed interrogators. In Slahi’s account, a secret task force within the larger organization brought together the U.S. Army, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Navy, and civilian personnel to obtain information from detainees. Its work was surrounded by secrecy. The combination of multiple services and civilians illustrates how responsibility could be distributed across a specialized unit without making the operation transparent to detainees or the public.

The military also controlled consequential channels of communication. Slahi says that he was unable to send letters to his family in Jordan and that, after he reached Guantánamo, many letters he sent went unanswered. The first family letter he received had been written months earlier and delivered through the International Committee of the Red Cross; it arrived after 815 days without contact with his family. In the account, this delay is not separate from detention policy: control over communication deepened the isolation produced by confinement and left Slahi’s relatives without reliable knowledge of his situation.

Institutional power in the book

The book presents the Armed Forces through a tension between stated purpose and experienced practice. Slahi reflects critically on the belief that military service protects freedom and oppressed people, contrasting that public ideal with what he sees as the government’s reliance on violence as a solution. This is his interpretation of the institution, not a neutral description of every service member. The narrative also records a military interrogator expressing concern that the United States was using harsh treatment to prevent attacks, while the investigation and internal objections reveal that the consequences and legitimacy of those methods were contested.

The account’s force lies in showing how institutional action becomes visible in specific procedures: a transport carrying thirty-four other prisoners, a signed authorization, a task force, daily memoranda, a sealed isolation space, and a letter delayed for years. Later investigative reports support significant details while the source records and manuscript remain subject to secrecy and redaction. The United States Armed Forces therefore appear not as an undifferentiated backdrop, but as the custody system, chain of decision-making, and operational structure through which Slahi’s treatment was organized—and as an institution whose conduct the book asks readers to assess against both its official rationale and the documentary record.