Amman was the site of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s prolonged secret detention by Jordanian intelligence services and a crucial stop in the cross-border custody that eventually brought him to Guantánamo. His arrival there in late November 2001 began a period of roughly eight months in which he was interrogated about the Millennium Plot, separated from his family and other detainees, and repeatedly hidden from International Committee of the Red Cross visitors. The city’s role in the account is therefore more than geographical: its detention spaces became instruments for controlling movement, communication, and what outsiders could know about his whereabouts.

Arrival and place in the transfer route

On November 28, 2001, a CIA rendition plane transported Slahi from Mauritania to a prison in Amman. The account’s arrival scene takes place at about seven in the morning local time, after the plane had left the previous evening. Slahi was removed from the aircraft in restraints and a hood, then taken by truck to a detention building. The journey ended not in a place where he could establish his location or contact anyone, but in a controlled sequence of vehicles, gates, and interior rooms.

Amman formed the middle stage of a longer route. Slahi had been detained and questioned in Mauritania; after months in Jordanian custody, another CIA plane retrieved him on July 19, 2002, and flew him to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He was later transferred to Guantánamo. Across the full route, the book describes an eighteen-month detention journey covering about twenty thousand miles and involving four countries, often with American participation and at the behest of the United States. Amman was thus both a destination and a temporary link in a system of transfers that moved Slahi beyond the reach of his family and ordinary public knowledge.

Detention spaces and daily conditions

The prison’s internal geography shaped the experience of confinement. The narrative describes a building reached after a drive through the city, with a guarded entrance and rooms used for detention and interrogation. A later public account by Human Rights Watch places the Jordanian General Intelligence Department’s main headquarters in the Jandawil district of Wadi Sir, describing a large detention facility with cells on several floors, administrative and interrogation rooms, visiting rooms, and a basement. Researchers reported that detainees were held in single-person cells and prohibited from speaking to one another. The book’s account of isolation and restricted movement belongs to this broader documented setting, though the available material does not establish that every described room was one particular cell in that facility.

Slahi’s daily life was also structured by uncertainty about time and separation from the outside. He was not allowed to know the date or hour and sometimes relied on guards to tell him the time. During Ramadan, meals came at sunset and before dawn; the early meal, or suhoor, was a small serving of pita bread, buttermilk, and cucumber. He read the Qur'an in dim light and prayed, while the call to prayer prompted thoughts of his family and of whether they knew where he was. These details make the prison’s routines visible without making them ordinary: meals and prayer continued, but under conditions in which Slahi could not know whether his family could find him or whether he would see them again.

Concealment and the ICRC visits

A paper listing prison rules, accidentally left on a cellar door, disclosed the restricted terms of detention. Smoking was permitted only for cooperating prisoners; speaking to guards was forbidden; and the International Committee of the Red Cross was scheduled to visit every fourteen days. The rules also warned detainees not to discuss their political cases with the visitors. Slahi initially took the cellar transfer as a possible step toward release. He later understood that he was being moved there temporarily to keep him from the ICRC.

The concealment followed a recurring pattern: every two weeks, guards moved him from his cell to the cellar for several days, then returned him. The cycle continued through his stay in Jordan. When Slahi asked his interrogator to see the ICRC, the interrogator denied that the organization was present and described the site as a military prison. The scheduled visits therefore became part of a contest over access: the visitors could enter the facility, but guards controlled which detainees they encountered and whether a particular prisoner was visible to them.

Family separation and the limits of the record

The concealment in Amman was compounded by false information reaching Slahi’s family. For nearly a year, his relatives were led to believe that he remained in Mauritanian custody. His oldest brother regularly brought clean clothes and money for his upkeep at a security prison, although Slahi had already been transferred to Jordan. His family learned from a newspaper in October 2002 that he had been held for months at Guantánamo. The false account of his location prolonged their uncertainty even as his actual detention moved across borders.

The record also leaves significant limits on what can be established about the Jordanian interrogation. Slahi told a later review board that the Jordanians were investigating his part in the Millennium Plot. A Marine prosecutor assigned to his Guantánamo case later said the CIA provided him no intelligence reports of its own about Slahi’s time in Amman; the reports he did receive largely came from Guantánamo interrogations. That gap does not prove what Jordanian interrogators learned, but it shows how little of the detention’s information passed into the subsequent prosecution.

Amman’s narrative significance lies in the combination of transfer and concealment. Slahi’s passage through the city connected Mauritanian custody to later American military detention, while the prison’s restricted movement and managed visits kept him beyond the knowledge of his family and, for much of the time, the ICRC. Public records and later investigations offer points of comparison with his account, but they do not remove every uncertainty. The city remains in the story as both a real place in the route and a space whose barriers governed who could see Slahi, speak with him, or learn where he was.