Slahi's secret detention in Jordan was marked by a repeating concealment: every fourteen days, Mohamedou Ould Slahi was moved from his cell to a cellar for several days so that he could not meet the International Committee of the Red Cross. The discovery of a forgotten prison-rules sheet exposed the purpose of those transfers. In his account, an apparently routine move became evidence of a system designed to keep his detention out of view, while the eventual resumption of interrogation showed that the investigation and custody continued to be shaped by cooperation between Jordan and the United States.

The Cellar and the Forgotten Rules

One morning, guards woke Mohamedou Ould Slahi, told him to gather his belongings, and blindfolded him. He took a blanket, his Quran, and the one library book he had. Believing that he might be going home, he was instead taken to a cold, unclean cellar. He still tried to interpret the transfer hopefully, imagining that it might be a holding place for detainees about to be released. Exhaustion overcame that hope, and he slept.

At around 4:30 p.m., when the Iftar meal was served, he noticed an old paper on the door. It contained the prison rules, which the guards had apparently failed to remove. Among the rules were conditions on smoking, a ban on speaking to guards, and instructions about contact with the Red Cross: visits took place every fourteen days, and prisoners were not to discuss their political cases. The sheet supplied a timetable for what had otherwise seemed an unexplained transfer. It also revealed the crucial fact that he had been brought to the cellar temporarily to prevent a visit.

A Repeating Cycle of Concealment

The cellar was not a one-time stop. Throughout his eight-month stay in Jordan, guards moved Mohamedou Ould Slahi there every fourteen days, kept him for a couple of days, and then returned him to his cell. The interval matched the rules’ stated schedule for Red Cross visits. Once he understood the pattern, he explicitly asked his interrogator to let him see the organization.

The interrogator denied that the Red Cross was present, describing the institution as a military prison. Mohamedou Ould Slahi challenged that explanation by referring to the rules and the recurring cellar transfers. The interrogator then insisted that he was protecting him while refusing access. In Slahi’s telling, that exchange made clear that the decision was not within the interrogator’s power to change. Slahi interpreted the concealment as part of a conspiracy involving Mauritania, the United States, and Jordan, and feared that if an involvement in terrorism were established, he could be executed without anyone knowing what had happened. That is his expressed understanding of the danger, not independent proof of the alleged conspiracy.

The request for outside contact extended beyond the Red Cross. Mohamedou Ould Slahi also asked to see the Mauritanian ambassador and was told that it was impossible. His account thus presents the cellar not simply as a change of location, but as one part of a broader absence of access to people who might have learned where he was or intervened on his behalf.

Investigation and Renewed Interrogation

The course of detention changed after the Jordanian authorities shared the results of their investigation with the United States and sent over the file. Mohamedou Ould Slahi says the United States took the file, after which the tone of his detention shifted and the interrogations resumed during the final two months. The earlier investigation therefore did not bring his custody to an end; instead, the transfer of its results preceded renewed questioning.

He describes trying different ways to respond: at times he spoke, and at other times he refused. He also went on hunger strike for days in an effort to compel the Jordanians to send him home. An interrogator made him eat under threat of torture. The tactic failed to secure his return, and Slahi later judged himself as not having been sufficiently determined. His account gives this failure a concrete shape: the wish to go home persisted, but neither refusal nor hunger strike changed the authorities’ decision to keep him in custody.

Recollection, Record, and Limits

The account of the Jordanian detention appears within a memoir Mohamedou Ould Slahi wrote by hand in his Guantánamo cell in 2005. The manuscript was subsequently edited by the United States government and by its editor; more than 2,500 black-bar redactions were added, and Slahi could not participate in either round of editing. This publication history matters to how readers encounter the detention: the memoir is a first-person account reaching the public through layers of censorship and editorial intervention, not a text that its author was able to revise for publication himself.

The editor describes using close reading, information elsewhere in the manuscript, and publicly available sources to develop annotations around redacted passages, while expressly declining to reconstruct censored wording or claim access to classified material. That caution is important here. The rules sheet, the fourteen-day transfers, the denial of Red Cross access, and the later renewed interrogations are presented in Slahi’s account; the editorial discussion of redaction does not independently establish every allegation about the Jordanian detention. The repeated interval nevertheless gives the episode a stark narrative structure: the same transfer recurs until a discarded document makes its purpose legible, and the routine itself becomes the evidence through which the concealment is recognized.