The Millennium Plot was Ahmed Ressam’s plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day 2000, but its significance in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story lies as much in the investigations and accusations that followed as in the attack plan itself. Ahmed Ressam had left Montreal before Slahi moved there, yet their shared connection to the city’s Muslim community made the plot a lasting frame for questioning Slahi. The available account traces how suspicion widened into international interrogation, while later evidence failed to connect him to the plot.

The Plot and the Montreal Connection

In November 1999, Slahi moved to Montreal after being unable to secure permanent residency in Germany. He first stayed with a former classmate and later lived at the large al Sunnah mosque, where he was invited to lead Ramadan prayers when the imam was away. Less than a month after Slahi’s arrival, Ahmed Ressam was arrested while entering the United States in a car laden with explosives. His intended target was Los Angeles International Airport, and the attack was planned for New Year’s Day as part of what became known as the Millennium Plot.

Ahmed Ressam had been based in Montreal and had attended the same mosque, but he had left the city before Slahi arrived. He also had connections with several people Slahi later described at a hearing as his classmate’s “bad friends.” Those overlaps put Slahi within the orbit of a major investigation, but they did not establish that he knew Ahmed Ressam or participated in the plan. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police questioned him, Slahi said that he did not know Ahmed Ressam. He later recalled being frightened and shaking: it was the first time he had been interrogated, and he wanted to tell the truth and avoid trouble.

From Investigation to Accusation

Ahmed Ressam’s arrest prompted a major investigation of Montreal’s Muslim immigrant community, especially the al Sunnah mosque community. For Slahi, it was the first time in his life that authorities questioned him about possible terrorist connections. In his later account, surveillance itself became part of the pressure: he described the conspicuous manner in which he was watched as an attempt to make clear that the authorities were monitoring him.

Slahi understood the United States government’s interest in his case as extending well beyond what Canadian investigators had found. He wrote that the United States wanted information about Ahmed Ressam’s plan, Slahi’s friends in Canada and Germany, and jihadist activity in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. He believed the authorities sought any information other countries could provide and that his case was pushed as far as possible. The label he says they applied to him, “Mastermind of the Millennium Plot,” starkly exceeded the evidence he describes: the Canadian material consisted of association with people considered suspect, visits to mosques, and intercepted conversations that, in his account, contained no incriminating substance.

A particular pair of words became a recurring subject of questioning. Slahi said Canadian authorities provided edited transcripts of his conversations to their United States counterparts, who repeatedly asked him what “Tea and Sugar” meant. He insisted that the words referred to tea and sugar, not a code. The repeated question illustrates how a fragment separated from its original conversation could be treated as a clue and then pursued as if its significance were already established.

Slahi also recounted an attempted surveillance operation in Montreal. He said Canadian intelligence tried to install cameras in his room and his roommate’s room. Slahi, a heavy sleeper, heard noises but did not get up to investigate; his roommate followed them and discovered someone making a small hole through which to look. When Slahi confronted police, one officer advised him to put caulk in the holes. Slahi responded that the issue was trespassing and a violation of privacy, and asked for the officers’ business cards. He later contrasted the episode with his twelve years in Germany, where, he said, authorities had provided no incriminating information, against his less than two months in Canada, from which the United States claimed to have received extensive material.

Interrogation in Mauritania

After leaving Canada, Slahi flew from Montreal to Brussels and then Dakar on January 21, 2000. He later described his return to Mauritania as the point at which his detention and interrogation odyssey began. When Mauritanian questioning turned to the Canadian file, he said the interrogator focused on activities in Canada that he considered nonexistent in the criminal sense. Slahi repeatedly denied doing the things he was asked about, but felt that his answers were not believed.

He feared that the questioning would end in a forced confession. When the interrogator brought film equipment, Slahi thought he would be made to confess on national television, recalling the Mauritanian government’s televised confessions of Islamists in October 1994. The interrogator warned that he could pass Slahi to a special team; Slahi understood this as a threat of torture. He described sleeplessness, the sounds of doors opening and closing, and hallucinating that files visible through a hole near his room contained information about him. Under this pressure, he offered to tell the interrogator his full story but asked that his account of Afghanistan not be shared with the United States, which he feared would misinterpret it.

Later Evidence and the Plot’s Afterlife

The Millennium Plot remained central to the early focus of Slahi’s U.S. questioning. When FBI agents questioned him in Mauritania in February 2000 and again a few weeks after the September 11 attacks, the focus was on the plot. Slahi later told an Administrative Review Board that the Jordanians had also been especially concerned about his alleged part in it. Thus, the investigation persisted as he moved through successive custodial settings, even though the record described here does not show that Ahmed Ressam implicated him.

By the time the CIA delivered Slahi to Jordan, Ahmed Ressam had been cooperating with the United States Justice Department for months. By the time the CIA retrieved Slahi eight months later, Ahmed Ressam had testified in two terrorism trials and supplied the names of more than 150 people to the United States and six other governments. His statements were used against some Guantánamo detainees, but not against Slahi. In his habeas opinion, James Robertson noted that Ahmed Ressam “conspicuously fails to implicate Salahi.” The contrast matters: the plot helped generate suspicion and sustained questioning, but the person at its center did not, in the account presented, identify Slahi as a participant.

The CIA apparently did not provide Guantánamo prosecutors with information from Slahi’s interrogation in Amman. Stuart Couch, the Marine prosecutor assigned to build a case against him, later said the CIA showed him no intelligence reports of its own and that most reports it shared came from Slahi’s Guantánamo interrogation. Couch surmised that the agency had either obtained as much information as it could or concluded that the information did not establish Slahi’s significance, before transferring him to military control at Bagram. The plot’s afterlife in Slahi’s case is therefore a story of an explosive attack plan becoming an expansive accusation: the association endured, while the evidence described here remained conspicuously short of demonstrating his involvement.