Jordanian intelligence services

Jordanian intelligence services held and interrogated Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Amman from November 28, 2001, until the CIA removed him on July 19, 2002. The available account links their questioning to the Millennium Plot and describes a system of detention that kept Slahi from the International Committee of the Red Cross. His case shows how an interrogation carried out in Jordan formed one stage of a secret, United States-directed chain of transfers, while the limits of the record leave important details of the agency’s role unresolved.

Role in Slahi’s Detention

On November 28, 2001, a CIA rendition plane transported Slahi from Mauritania to a prison in Amman. Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him there for seven and a half months. The transfer followed his voluntary return to Mauritanian police questioning; his family was not told that he had left the country.

The Jordanian detention was an intermediate stage in a longer route. On July 19, 2002, another CIA aircraft took Slahi from Amman to Bagram Air Base. After two weeks of questioning there, he was flown to Guantánamo with thirty-four other prisoners, arriving on August 5. The book situates these movements within an eighteen-month detention journey spanning four countries, undertaken at the behest of the United States and often involving Americans. It does not, however, establish that Jordanian intelligence services arranged the rendition flights.

Interrogation and the Millennium Plot

The recorded focus of the Jordanian questioning was the Millennium Plot. Slahi later told the Administrative Review Board that his Jordanian interrogators were investigating his part in that plot and were especially concerned about it. This account places the subject of the Jordan interrogation in continuity with earlier FBI questioning in Mauritania, which had also centered on the Millennium Plot.

The book’s broader review of the government’s case adds a significant qualification: it reports that the CIA apparently did not provide Guantánamo prosecutors with information from Slahi’s interrogation in Amman. That silence does not show what the Jordanian interrogators learned or what they reported to the CIA. It does mean that the article’s available evidence cannot establish an investigative finding from the seven-and-a-half-month detention beyond its stated focus on the Millennium Plot.

Red Cross Access and Concealment

Slahi’s account describes prison rules that he discovered on a paper left on a cell door. They said that the International Committee of the Red Cross visited every fourteen days and instructed prisoners not to discuss their political cases with its representatives. Slahi later understood that he was taken to a cellar for several days around each scheduled visit, then returned to his cell afterward. He described this concealment as continuing throughout his eight-month stay in Jordan.

When Slahi asked an interrogator to see the International Committee of the Red Cross, the interrogator denied that it was present. The account presents the denial alongside the written visit schedule and the repeated movements between cell and cellar. It does not identify the redacted interrogator by name, so the precise chain of responsibility for those actions cannot be specified from the available passage. The episode nevertheless records a concrete consequence of the detention regime: Slahi was prevented from using anticipated visits to communicate with an outside monitor about his case.

Secrecy and the Limits of the Record

For nearly a year, Slahi’s family believed he was being held by Mauritanian authorities. His older brother Hamoud regularly brought clothes and money to a Mauritanian security prison for his upkeep, unaware that Slahi had been transferred to Jordan and then onward to Bagram and Guantánamo. This account documents the family’s prolonged uncertainty and the practical effects of the secret transfer; it does not establish that Jordanian intelligence services themselves directed the misinformation given to the family in Mauritania.

The book’s editorial introduction explains that its annotations draw on the manuscript, publicly available reporting, declassified records, and government investigations, while declining to reconstruct redacted text or expose classified material. It also cautions that the annotations’ proposed readings are the editor’s responsibility and were not confirmed by people with access to the unredacted manuscript. That distinction matters when assessing the Jordanian detention: the dates, duration, stated interrogation focus, and Slahi’s account of Red Cross concealment are presented, but the surviving evidence does not provide a complete institutional record of Jordanian intelligence services’ decisions or methods.