Slahi's rendition and transfers through Jordan and Bagram to Guantánamo turned a sequence of questioning and releases into years of secret detention. After he had twice been released following questioning about the Millennium Plot, he was taken from Mauritania to Jordan in a CIA rendition operation, held and interrogated there, and then transferred through Bagram Air Base to Guantánamo. The route linked an individual case to a larger detention system, while later records and investigations provided partial corroboration of his account without removing the secrecy surrounding it.

From questioning to secret transfer

In January 2000, after twelve years studying, living, and working overseas, primarily in Germany and briefly in Canada, Mohamedou Ould Slahi returned toward his home country, Mauritania. At the behest of the United States, Senegalese police and then Mauritanian authorities detained him, and FBI agents questioned him about the Millennium Plot. Authorities found no basis to believe he had been involved and released him on February 19. He subsequently lived with his family and worked as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott.

On September 29, 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained him again for two weeks and FBI agents again questioned him about the plot. He was released, with Mauritanian authorities publicly affirming his innocence. On November 20, police came to his home and asked him to accompany them for further questioning. He complied voluntarily and drove his own car to the police station. Eight days later, a CIA rendition plane took him from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan. The contrast between that ordinary act of compliance and the secret transfer that followed marks the decisive change in his circumstances.

Jordan, Bagram, and Guantánamo

In Jordan, Slahi was interrogated by Jordanian intelligence services for seven and a half months. His later account describes the detention as part of a joint arrangement between the United States and the Mauritanian government, while the introductory timeline specifies the transfer date and duration. In July 2002, another CIA plane retrieved him from Amman and flew him to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He was held and interrogated there for two weeks.

On August 4, 2002, Slahi and thirty-four other prisoners were put aboard a military transport bound for Guantánamo. They arrived and were processed into the facility on August 5. This transfer began the period covered by Guantánamo Diary. Slahi later described his successive detentions as a secret operation in which American agents questioned him in his own country before he was sent to Jordan, Bagram, and finally Guantánamo. His account emphasizes that he had not committed the acts he was being questioned about; the published biographical account likewise states that the U.S. government never charged him with a crime.

Interrogation and documentary corroboration

In 2003 and 2004, U.S. military interrogators subjected Slahi to a special interrogation plan personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The plan involved months of extreme isolation, physical and psychological humiliation, death threats, threats against his family, and a staged kidnapping and rendition. These events followed his arrival at Guantánamo and made the transfer more than a change of location: it placed him within an interrogation regime that the book connects to broader military policy.

The records supporting the account are incomplete but significant. The interrogators' files included daily memoranda describing both what was said and how information was obtained. Those files remain classified, but the Senate Armed Services Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice summarized records of the special interrogation; their reports describe a plan and course of treatment that closely correspond to Slahi's narrative. The Senate committee also documented a staged scene in which he was taken by boat and led to believe he had been removed from the island, followed by isolation in a modified hut at Camp Echo. The editorial notes accompanying the book distinguish such public-record support from speculation about censored passages: they do not claim to reconstruct the blacked-out text or uncover classified material.

Long aftermath and significance

The transfers left Slahi detained at Guantánamo, where he handwrote a habeas corpus petition on March 3, 2005, and the 466 pages that became the book that summer in his segregation cell. In 2010, a federal judge ordered his release, but the government appealed and the case was remanded for rehearing under a different standard. The published account states that Slahi remained imprisoned at Guantánamo and had never been charged with a crime.

The route through Mauritania, Jordan, Bagram, and Guantánamo therefore carries two intertwined histories: the changing geography of Slahi's confinement and the institutional transfer of responsibility among governments and agencies. Earlier releases, including Mauritania's public affirmation of his innocence in 2001, sit against the later years of detention without criminal charge. The public investigations and surviving documents substantiate parts of his account, while classified records and redactions preserve important limits on what can be established from the published text.