“Global War Against Terrorism”

“Global War Against Terrorism” names the campaign under which, the memoir says, United States and Jordanian personnel worked together to interrogate detainees across borders. The phrase’s significance lies in the distance between that expansive political frame and the particular evidence, procedures, and legal arguments in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s case: cooperation was presented as part of a common security effort, while its methods and the grounds for holding him remained contested.

Naming the campaign

The memoir describes Jordanian interrogators as working alongside Americans from the beginning of the operation called the “Global War Against Terrorism.” Their work extended both inside and outside Jordan. Jordanian agents also operated in Afghanistan, where, according to Slahi, their Middle Eastern appearance could help them blend into the surroundings. The phrase thus appears not simply as a name for military action, but as a frame for a dispersed system of interrogation and cooperation.

Slahi distinguishes that operational campaign from the legal authorization announced after the September 11 attacks. He recounts that, on September 18, 2001, a joint resolution of Congress authorized the president to use force against those responsible for the attacks or those who harbored them. He then describes a separate secret operation to capture, detain, torture, or kill suspected terrorists, which he says had no legal basis. That is his account and judgment; the narrative’s distinction is between a public authorization to use force and a clandestine detention program whose methods and reach were not made public.

Cooperation and the division of work

In Slahi’s description, Jordan was initially treated by American authorities as a potential partner for work they did not wish to perform themselves. He says that the widespread use of torture in Jordanian interrogation impressed those authorities, but also describes a limit: Jordanian interrogators required a reason before resorting to severe physical torture. As American officials became more willing to take on that work directly, he says, the division of labor changed. The label of a common campaign therefore sits alongside a shifting allocation of responsibility for interrogation.

The account also identifies a senior, redacted Jordanian official as a key participant in this cooperation. Slahi says the official was responsible for interrogating people whom the United States delivered to Jordan and assigning them to members of his team; he also came to Guantánamo to interrogate detainees on the United States’ behalf. The official’s identity remains obscured in the text, but the described duties connect the Jordanian prison system to questioning carried out at the American detention camp.

A changing case beneath a broad label

The record presented in the book does not begin with an allegation that Slahi was a leading recruiter for the September 11 attacks. FBI agents questioned him in Mauritania in February 2000 and again after the attacks, with attention focused on the Millennium Plot. Slahi later said that Jordanian interrogators were especially concerned about his part in that plot. The distinction matters: the broad language of a war against terrorism could encompass a detainee whose initial questioning, as the narrative describes it, concerned an earlier alleged conspiracy.

A connection to the September 11 attacks surfaced later. Slahi recalled that, on September 11, 2002, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured and identified him as someone he had met in Germany in 1999. Slahi acknowledged hosting bin al-Shibh and two companions for a night, but described the subsequent claim that he had directed bin al-Shibh toward Afghanistan and served as an operative as an accusation made during interrogation. The appearance of that connection changed the stakes of Slahi’s detention, but the existence of an allegation is not the same as proof of the larger role attributed to him.

The distinction became explicit in the habeas proceedings. When the government argued in court in 2009 that Slahi could be held as part of al-Qaeda, it did not claim that he was a major figure or had a hand in al-Qaeda plans or attacks. Its case instead relied on his past oath of allegiance, associations, hosting of leaders, and referral of aspiring jihadists to an operative. The government had also initially argued that he was detainable because he aided the September 11 attacks, but abandoned that theory, acknowledging that he probably did not even know about them. These shifts expose the difference between a sweeping public characterization and the specific propositions the government presented to justify continuing detention.

Evidence, secrecy, and the phrase’s limits

The account places the campaign’s language beside evidence gathered under conditions that were themselves disputed. A military investigator gained access to records of the Special Projects Team, including detailed memoranda describing what was said in interrogation sessions and how information was extracted. Those files remain classified, but the book notes that the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Justice Department summarized the records and documented a special interrogation consistent with Slahi’s description. Here, the framework of a security campaign does not settle whether an interrogation produced reliable information; the process by which an account was obtained remains central to interpreting it.

The book’s editorial notes also mark the limits imposed by secrecy. They draw on context in the manuscript, declassified government documents, reporting, and official investigations, but explicitly do not claim to reconstruct the original wording hidden by redactions. The black bars therefore remain both a record of censorship and a boundary around what can responsibly be asserted. In this setting, “Global War Against Terrorism” is a name for the political and institutional frame within which cooperation and detention took place, not a substitute for examining the changing allegations, the evidence behind them, or the legal grounds advanced in Slahi’s case.