Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch is an independent human-rights organization whose reporting, cited in the book’s notes, provides a documented account of Jordanian intelligence’s role in CIA detention operations and the facility where prisoners were held. Its 2008 report, based in part on a visit to the Wadi Sir Detention Facility, supplies institutional and spatial context for Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account of detention in Jordan while distinguishing recorded facility details from allegations made by prisoners.

Reporting on Jordanian Detention

In its 2008 report, Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan, Human Rights Watch reported that Jordan’s General Intelligence Department had served as a proxy jailer for the CIA from 2001 until at least 2004. According to the organization, the department held people the CIA apparently wanted kept out of circulation, and later returned some detainees to the CIA. The report identified Mohamedou Ould Slahi among at least fourteen people sent to Jordan during this period.

Human Rights Watch located these detentions at the intelligence department’s headquarters in Amman, in the Jandawil district of Wadi Sir. Its researchers visited the site in August 2007. The report thus places Slahi’s experience within a larger system of detention, rather than treating his account as an isolated case; it does not, on the evidence cited here, establish that every reported practice applied to every detainee.

The Wadi Sir Facility

The researchers described a large, four-story detention facility with administrative offices and interrogation rooms on the second floor, and visiting rooms on the ground floor. During their inspection, detainees were being held on the second floor, though the report also noted cells on the ground, third, and fourth floors. The fourth floor included collective cells and an area the facility’s director described as the women’s section.

The report also recorded claims by prisoners that they had been taken to the basement for the most violent treatment. Human Rights Watch presented this as detainees’ accounts, not as a finding that it had independently verified every allegation. That distinction matters: the report offers an external record of what prisoners said while making the limits of what could be established visible.

Isolation and Restricted Contact

Human Rights Watch reported that detainees at Wadi Sir were kept in single-person cells and prohibited from speaking with one another. Some nevertheless managed to communicate through the rear windows of their cells, which faced a central courtyard. The facility’s layout therefore combined enforced separation with narrow, improvised possibilities for contact.

These findings illuminate the conditions behind Slahi’s account of being moved to a cellar every fourteen days as authorities sought to keep him from the International Committee of the Red Cross. His description of a prison rule requiring detainees not to discuss their political cases with the ICRC belongs to his own account; Human Rights Watch’s report provides a broader description of the Jordanian facility and the restrictions on communication, not direct confirmation of each detail of his experience.

Significance and Limits of the Record

Human Rights Watch’s reporting contributes a second kind of evidence to the book: an external investigation describing the detention system, the physical organization of a facility, and the reported treatment of prisoners. Read alongside Slahi’s narrative, it helps situate his detention within the broader period in which Jordanian intelligence reportedly held people on the CIA’s behalf. The report’s account of both institutional arrangements and constrained communication also clarifies how the location and design of detention could limit contact among prisoners and with visitors.

The account remains bounded by its sources. The book’s notes identify the report as publicly available documentation and relay its researchers’ observations and the claims they recorded; they do not authorize reconstructing material hidden by government redactions or treating every allegation as independently confirmed. Human Rights Watch’s significance here lies in making parts of a secretive detention system publicly describable while preserving the difference between observation, reported testimony, and unresolved claims.