Dar al-Tawqif wa al-Tahqiq Detention and Interrogation Center is the Jordanian detention facility in which Mohamedou Ould Slahi recounts being held and interrogated during his secret transfer through Jordan. Its significance lies not only in confinement itself but in the facility’s control of movement and contact: Slahi describes being moved between a cell and a cellar to evade visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, while rules posted inside the prison disclosed how access and communication were managed.

Place in Slahi’s detention route

The facility forms part of the cross-border sequence that began when Slahi left Canada for Senegal in January 2000 and developed into what the book describes as an eighteen-month, twenty-thousand-mile journey through detention and interrogation in four countries. After Slahi voluntarily went to Mauritanian police headquarters for further questioning, his family believed he remained in Mauritanian custody. In fact, a CIA rendition flight had taken him to Jordan; months later, the United States transferred him from Amman to Bagram Air Base and then to Guantánamo. The Center is therefore presented within a route in which the family’s understanding of Slahi’s whereabouts diverged sharply from the reality of his successive transfers.

Confinement and religious routine

Slahi’s account places the Center’s routines against the observance of Ramadan. He describes receiving meals at sunset and before dawn, the pre-fast meal known as suhoor, and trying to pray and read the Quran despite the strain of detention. The meal at the facility contrasts with the family routine he recalled at home, where his older sister woke everyone and they ate together. The contrast makes the prison’s daily schedule more than a matter of food: the timing of meals and prayer remained, while the communal setting that had given those practices comfort was absent.

The facility’s commanding officer took Slahi’s wallet and copied the personal information from his identification. Slahi describes seeing the officer and guards working for long periods and sleeping within the prison. This account places oversight and daily operations inside the detention site itself, rather than presenting the Center as a temporary stop with no continuing staff presence.

Cellar transfers and withheld access

A forgotten paper on a cellar door gave Slahi a partial view of the prison’s rules. Among them were restrictions linking permission to smoke to cooperation, prohibiting conversation with guards, and directing detainees not to discuss their political cases with the International Committee of the Red Cross. The paper also stated that the Committee visited every fourteen days. Slahi initially took the rules to mean that he would be able to send letters to his family, but he had not yet understood why he had been moved to the cellar.

The cellar was part of a recurring evasion of the visits. Every fourteen days, guards moved Slahi from his cell to the cellar for a couple of days and then returned him. He later understood that this pattern concealed him from the International Committee of the Red Cross during the eight months he spent in Jordan. When he asked his interrogator to see the Committee, the interrogator denied that it was present and described the facility as a military prison. The episode shows how the site’s internal geography—cell and cellar, movement between them, and the timing of transfers—could determine whether an outside visitor could locate a detainee.

Redactions and the limits of the record

The published account does not make every detail of the Center or its personnel visible. Government redactions interrupt the manuscript, and the editor’s annotations explain that they are contextual speculations based on the surrounding text and publicly available records, not attempts to reconstruct the original wording or reveal classified material. The annotations draw on sources including declassified documents and investigations, while expressly leaving uncertain what cannot be established from the public record or close reading. The Center consequently appears both as a physical place in Slahi’s account and as a site whose full description remains limited by the censorship imposed on the manuscript.