Global War Against Terrorism era

The Global War Against Terrorism era is the political and institutional setting through which Guantánamo Diary follows Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s passage from questioning in Mauritania to detention in Jordan, Bagram Air Base, and Guantánamo. Its significance lies not only in the extraordinary reach of the post-September 11 security system, but in the changing explanations offered for holding him: an investigation first centered on the Millennium Plot, later claims linking him to the September 11 attacks, and ultimately a legal case framed around association and assistance to al-Qaeda. The book sets those shifts against the government’s secrecy, the transfer of information among agencies and countries, and the later effort to test official claims against public records.

The post-September 11 framework

The attacks of September 11, 2001, produced a rapid change in the legal and political environment described in the book. On September 18, Congress authorized the president to use force against nations, organizations, or persons connected to the attacks or those who harbored them. The narrator presents that authorization alongside the start of a secret government operation involving the capture, detention, interrogation, and killing of people suspected of terrorism, which he argues had no legal basis. These are related but distinct parts of the account: a public congressional authorization and a clandestine system whose scope, methods, and legal foundation were difficult for outsiders to see.

For Slahi, the machinery began with a request to report to authorities. On September 29, 2001, he received a call on his cellphone and turned himself in, believing that questioning would clear him. Instead, United States officials questioned him in Mauritania, and the United States reached an agreement with the Mauritanian government to send him to Jordan. He describes eight months of detention there, followed by two weeks at Bagram Air Base and transfer to Guantánamo. The sequence makes the era concrete: interrogation and custody crossed national borders, while the person being moved had little control over where he was held or what legal process would follow.

Intelligence cooperation and shifting suspicions

The account presents the Global War Against Terrorism era as a network of cooperation, not simply a domestic United States policy. Slahi says Jordanian interrogators worked alongside American officials from the beginning of the campaign, questioning people inside and outside Jordan. He also describes Jordanian agents operating in Afghanistan and the United States turning to Jordanian expertise. His account portrays this partnership as instrumental and unequal: American agencies relied on a foreign service while different parts of the United States government did not necessarily share information or even appear to value the same records equally.

One example is a hard drive seized by the FBI when Slahi turned himself in in 2001. According to his account, its contents went with him to Jordan, while the Department of Defense tried for years to obtain the disk. He interprets that mismatch as evidence of a security and intelligence system in which agencies could cooperate across borders while competing or failing to coordinate at home. The book does not resolve every institutional motive behind the episode; its force comes from the contrast between the ease with which his data travelled and the uncertainty about who within the United States government could access it.

The allegations against Slahi also changed over time. When FBI agents questioned him in Mauritania in February 2000, and again after the September 11 attacks, the focus was the Millennium Plot. He later said that Jordanian investigators were especially concerned about his supposed part in that plot. In his own analysis, United States officials saw his arrest and return to Mauritania as a chance to obtain information about Ahmed Ressam, then refusing to cooperate, as well as Slahi’s contacts in Canada, Germany, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. The government labelled him the mastermind of the Millennium Plot. This is Slahi’s account of the investigative priorities and pressure he faced, not proof that every suspected connection was established.

A new link surfaced when Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured on September 11, 2002, exactly one year after the attacks. Slahi recalled that bin al-Shibh identified him as someone he had met in Germany in October 1999, and said Slahi had advised him to travel to Afghanistan for training. Bin al-Shibh also reportedly described Slahi as an operative of Usama bin Laden and credited him with a role in his own involvement in the attacks. The book distinguishes the disclosure of this accusation from its verification: an intelligence report could make an association newly consequential without settling what Slahi knew or did.

Guantánamo and the meaning of detention

Slahi arrived at Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, aboard a United States military C-17 with thirty-four other prisoners. He was thirty-one. The surrounding record complicates any assumption that he was already regarded as a leading figure: contemporary reporting described the camp’s nearly six hundred detainees as not high enough in al-Qaeda’s command structure to help unravel its organization, and the account says there is no indication Slahi was then considered an especially high-value detainee. At the same time, military officers were questioning whether prisoners designated as enemy combatants should instead receive the protections of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The camp’s approach to status and interrogation was still being contested.

That contest soon became a dispute over methods. The book describes a division between military interrogators and FBI and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents who had generally led interviews. In the fall of 2002, the military created a Special Projects Team and developed a written plan for interrogating Mohammed al-Qahtani, incorporating methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency. The account treats this development as part of the changing institutional climate around Slahi’s detention, rather than as evidence that every later interrogation followed the same plan. In Slahi’s case, a separate, painstaking plan was later used for what the United States Senate Armed Services Committee and the United States Department of Justice described as a special interrogation.

The documentation of that interrogation also illustrates the era’s dependence on records that were produced inside secretive institutions and later became available only in part. An investigator for Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch gained access to military interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda recording both what was said and how information was obtained. Those files remain classified, but government investigations summarized them and documented episodes consistent with Slahi’s description. One report described a fictitious State Department letter intended to exploit his relationship with his mother; another recorded an interrogator’s report that Slahi was hearing voices and a military psychiatrist’s response that sensory deprivation could cause hallucinations. In 2003, the interrogation plan also included a staged boat trip intended to make him believe he had been taken away from Guantánamo, followed by isolation in a specially prepared cell at Camp Echo. These records offer corroboration for particular details while leaving the underlying files inaccessible to the public.

Public claims, legal review, and the record

The period’s public language often hardened uncertain allegations into confident conclusions. In March 2010, the New York Daily News urged an appeal of Judge James Robertson’s order granting Slahi’s habeas corpus petition, calling him a leading recruiter for the September 11 attacks and treating his guilt as certain despite the weakness of admissible evidence. The newspaper had not seen the classified order or the proceedings behind it. Two weeks later, a declassified, redacted version disclosed that the government had initially argued Slahi could be detained for aiding the September 11 attacks but had abandoned that theory, acknowledging that he probably did not even know of the attacks. The contrast exposes how public certainty could outrun the government’s own changing account.

When Slahi’s habeas petition came before the federal court in 2009, the government did not argue that he was a major al-Qaeda figure or had participated in al-Qaeda plans or attacks. The appellate court described the case instead in terms of an oath of allegiance, association with members, hosting leaders, and referring aspiring jihadists to an operative. Slahi’s earlier membership and oath dated to 1991, and he maintained that his participation ended with the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan. The dispute was therefore also about time: whether past affiliation and later contacts established active membership when he was detained. Judge Robertson’s decision, based on a thorough review of the case, stood in tension with years of public suspicion and detention.

The book’s editorial apparatus extends this inquiry into the present. Its annotations address redactions through close reading, information elsewhere in the manuscript, declassified government documents, journalism, and investigations by the Department of Justice and the United States Senate. The editor expressly distinguishes plausible, publicly supported context from any attempt to reconstruct classified text; the annotations are acknowledged as speculation and are not presented as confirmed by people with access to the unredacted manuscript. Black bars therefore remain more than missing words: they mark the government’s continued control over what could be read and over Slahi’s ability to participate in editing his own work. The era is rendered not as a closed historical episode but as a continuing struggle over custody, evidence, and who has authority to explain the record.