Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Covert Rendition Through Jordan and Bagram

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s covert rendition through Jordan and Bagram transformed an arrest in Mauritania into a secret, multinational detention route whose locations and duration were concealed from his family. In his account, the transfers were directed by the United States and driven by efforts to obtain intelligence; the concealment left relatives paying for his presumed upkeep in a prison where he was no longer held.

From Voluntary Surrender to Secret Transfer

Slahi places the rendition within the post-September 11 expansion of secret detention. On September 29, 2001, after receiving a call asking him to turn himself in, he did so, expecting that questioning would clear him. Instead, he writes, American officials interrogated him in Mauritania, and the United States reached an agreement with the Mauritanian government to send him to Jordan for further questioning. He denies having committed the crimes for which he was being investigated; the memoir presents his transfer as part of a secret operation against terrorism suspects, not as the result of a public legal process.

The book also sets this episode against Slahi’s earlier detention in 2000. After flying from Montreal to Brussels and on to Dakar on January 21, he was questioned about the Millennium Plot and returned to Mauritania. That first journey began what the editor describes as an eighteen-month, twenty-thousand-mile passage through detention and interrogation in four countries. The 2001 transfer to Jordan marked a further disappearance within that longer sequence: Slahi was again in Mauritanian custody in the eyes of his family, while in reality he had been moved abroad.

Jordan, Bagram, and Guantánamo

Slahi says he was incarcerated and interrogated in Jordan for eight months. The transfer placed him under the authority of Jordanian interrogators while, in his account, American officials continued to direct the effort to obtain information. After those months, Americans flew him from Amman to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he spent two weeks being interrogated. A few weeks later, he was taken to Guantánamo, where he remained as he wrote his account.

The route was both geographical and informational: each transfer moved Slahi farther from home while keeping his whereabouts from the people looking for him. The editor describes an overall journey of roughly twenty thousand miles, beginning as a supposed homecoming and ending with Slahi held thousands of miles from Mauritania. He was detained in four countries along the way, often with American participation and, in the editor’s account, at the behest of the United States.

The Family Left Behind

For almost a year, Slahi’s family was led to believe he was still in Mauritanian custody. His older brother Hamoud regularly brought clean clothes and money for his meals to the security prison. But a week after Slahi turned himself in, a CIA rendition flight had already taken him to Jordan; later transfers carried him through Bagram to Guantánamo. Prison officials continued to accept the family’s money and said nothing, so the family’s attempts to care for Slahi were directed toward a prison where he was no longer present.

The deception was exposed on October 28, 2002, when his younger brother Yahdih read in Der Spiegel that Slahi had been held for months in a wire cage at the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo. Yahdih was enraged at local authorities who had assured the family that Slahi was safe in their custody. His relatives, afraid of the consequences of his accusations, repeatedly ended his telephone calls. The revelation showed that the disappearance was not simply a matter of lost contact: the family had been given false assurances while Slahi was secretly moved across borders.

Records and the Limits of the Account

The book’s editorial framing distinguishes between reconstructing the public record and filling in classified gaps. Its annotations draw on declassified government documents, litigation, reporting, and investigations, but the editor states that they do not attempt to recover the original redacted text or expose classified information. Interpretations of redactions are presented as informed possibilities, not verified restorations; the cleared attorneys and other people with access to the unredacted manuscript had not reviewed or confirmed them.

Some of the later interrogation record was nonetheless available in summarized form. An investigator for Stuart Couch gained access to military interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda describing both what was said and how information was obtained. Although those files remained classified, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Justice Department published accounts of the special interrogation plan used against Slahi at Guantánamo. The documented staged boat transfer and preparations for isolation there concern the final stage of the route, rather than independently establishing every detail of the earlier rendition. They nevertheless place his account of secret movement and controlled access within a broader, documented system of detention practices.