United States

In Guantánamo Diary, the United States is both a country largely absent from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s own travels and the power that increasingly determines where he can go, who can question him, and whether he can return home. Slahi says he had never been to the United States, yet suspicions about a plot directed at it helped set in motion a cross-border detention journey that moved through Mauritania, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo. The country’s significance therefore lies not only in its territory but in the reach of its requests, intelligence operations, and detention policies beyond its borders.

A Distant Destination and a Nearby Pretext

At the beginning of 2000, Slahi was returning to Mauritania after twelve years of study, work, and residence abroad, principally in Germany and briefly in Canada. His route took him through Senegal, where he and his brothers were detained and questioned about the Millennium Plot, before he was taken to Mauritania for further questioning. American agents participated in the inquiries. Authorities concluded there was no basis to believe Slahi had taken part in the plot and released him on February 19.

The suspected target was in the United States, but Slahi’s first encounters with detention took place elsewhere. That geographic separation recurs throughout the book: allegations framed as threats to the United States were investigated through police and intelligence services in other countries, while Slahi remained outside American territory. The United States thus entered his life first as the destination of an alleged attack and the source of investigative interest, not as a place he had visited.

Between the first detention and his next arrest, Slahi lived with his family in Nouakchott and worked in computer, electronics, and electrical-engineering-related jobs. He was detained again in September 2001 and questioned by FBI agents about the same plot. After his release, Mauritanian officials publicly affirmed his innocence, and an intelligence official contacted his employer so that Slahi could return to work. These episodes placed American suspicion alongside local decisions that, at least temporarily, allowed him to resume an ordinary life.

American Reach Across Borders

After the September 11 attacks, the pressure intensified. On November 20, 2001, Mauritanian police asked Slahi to accompany them for questioning. He complied and drove his own car to the station. Eight days later, a CIA rendition plane transported him from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. A second CIA plane later took him from Amman to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan; after two weeks there, he was flown with thirty-four other prisoners to Guantánamo, arriving in August 2002.

The route shows how the United States could exercise power without holding Slahi in the continental United States. American action and requests intersected with foreign police, intelligence agencies, and detention facilities, while custody shifted from one jurisdiction to another. The book describes the resulting journey as an approximately twenty-thousand-mile “endless world tour” over eighteen months, beginning with what was supposed to be a homecoming and ending with Slahi held thousands of miles from home. The United States appears as the organizing force behind this geography, even when other governments performed particular arrests or interrogations.

That reach also shaped the interpretation of information. Slahi recounts that American authorities sought details about his contacts in Canada and Germany, his past in Afghanistan, and the Millennium Plot. Canadian material included references to people he had known, mosques he had visited, and intercepted conversations; he objected that selectively edited transcripts could distort their meaning. Two words from those conversations, “Tea and Sugar,” became a recurring focus of questioning. In his account, information gathered abroad could be detached from its original context and made to support an existing suspicion.

The United States as an Absent Place

Slahi’s account repeatedly distinguishes between having traveled to a country and being treated as answerable to its authorities. He says he had legally traveled to Afghanistan during the war against communism, returned to his regular life, and had not broken Mauritanian or German law. He also stresses that he was not a United States citizen and had never been in the United States. His argument is not that American authorities had no interest in him, but that their interest did not establish a crime committed within their territory or a lawful basis for his detention.

That distinction gives the United States a peculiar place in the narrative. It is invoked as the country endangered by the alleged plot, the country whose officials question Slahi abroad, and the authority to which he is eventually transferred. Yet it is not the setting of the initial arrests, his family life, or the early interrogations. Guantánamo, where he is imprisoned, is a United States detention site outside the continental country. The separation between national territory and detention power is central to how the memoir maps responsibility.

Family, Secrecy, and the Record

The distance between American custody and Slahi’s family produced a second geography of uncertainty. For almost a year, his relatives were led to believe he was in a Mauritanian prison. His oldest brother, Hamoud, brought clothes and money for his meals there, unaware that Slahi had been transferred to Jordan and then onward to Afghanistan and Guantánamo. In October 2002, his youngest brother, Yahdih, learned from a German magazine that Slahi was being held at Guantánamo. The family had been paying officials who concealed that he was no longer in their custody.

The book also traces the obscurity surrounding the American detention system itself. In early 2002, Slahi’s family did not know he was in Jordan, and few people knew about the United States’ rendition, detention, and interrogation program or the cooperation it received from partner governments. A CIA inspector general report later stated that the agency had an interest in the disposition of detainees who might disclose the circumstances of their detention if not kept isolated. The passage appears in a heavily redacted section, making both the official record and its gaps part of the evidence about how the system operated.

Censorship further shaped what could be known. The book’s introductory account describes suppression of the documentary record and the prolonged withholding of Slahi’s manuscript, connecting secrecy to both the conditions of detention and the later concealment of abuses. His United States-centered detention story is therefore also a story about where information travels, who controls it, and how a person can be physically held far from the country whose authority governs his confinement. The country’s decisive presence in the narrative is measured not by Slahi’s time on its soil, but by the distance its power crossed.