Millennium Plot targeting Los Angeles International Airport

The Millennium Plot was a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day, 2000, associated with Ahmed Ressam and later used as a recurring frame for questioning Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Its significance in Slahi’s story lies not only in the planned attack, but in the way a real investigation of Ressam’s connections repeatedly turned an unsubstantiated association into a reason to detain and interrogate Slahi, even as the evidence described in the book failed to connect him to the plot.

Background and Montreal investigation

In 1998, after he could not secure permanent residency in Germany, Slahi applied for landed immigrant status in Canada on a college friend’s recommendation. He moved to Montreal in November 1999, lived first with a former classmate and then at a large mosque, where his memorization of the Koran led to an invitation to lead Ramadan prayers when the imam was away. These details placed him in a community that would become a focus of suspicion, but they did not establish a connection to Ressam’s plan.

Ressam, an Algerian immigrant and al-Qaeda member, had been based in Montreal and had attended the same mosque. Less than a month after Slahi arrived, Ressam was arrested while entering the United States in a car laden with explosives. He planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day as part of the Millennium Plot. Ressam had left Montreal before Slahi arrived; the connection between the two men in the investigation therefore arose through their shared setting and overlapping acquaintances, not from evidence that Slahi had been present with Ressam in the city.

The arrest prompted a broad investigation of Montreal’s Muslim immigrant community, particularly the mosque community. It was the first time Slahi had been questioned about possible terrorist connections. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked whether he knew Ressam and other people. Slahi testified that he denied knowing them, was frightened and shaking, and wanted to avoid trouble by telling the truth. His account conveys how quickly the investigation’s scrutiny became a personal experience of suspicion, before the later detentions that would keep the Millennium Plot at the center of his interrogations.

Detentions and recurring questions

Slahi’s family became alarmed by his situation in Canada and wanted him to return to Mauritania. In January 2000, after twelve years studying, living, and working abroad, he set out for home. On the way, Senegalese police detained him, followed by Mauritanian authorities; Federal Bureau of Investigation agents questioned him about the Millennium Plot. Authorities released him on February 19, 2000, having concluded there was no basis to believe he had been involved.

That finding did not end the association. Slahi lived with his family and worked as an electrical engineer in Mauritania until September 29, 2001, when Mauritanian authorities detained him again for two weeks and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents again asked about the plot. Mauritanian authorities released him and publicly affirmed his innocence. Slahi later said the Jordanians who interrogated him after his transfer there were especially concerned with his supposed part in the Millennium Plot. Across distinct countries and periods of custody, the same investigation supplied a persistent line of questioning, even though the earlier inquiries had not established his involvement.

Evidence, association, and later claims

The account contrasts the repeated attention to the plot with the available evidence about Ressam’s statements. By the time the CIA delivered Slahi to Jordan, Ressam had been cooperating with the U.S. Department of Justice for months. By the time the CIA retrieved Slahi eight months later, Ressam had testified in two terrorism trials and given the U.S. government and the governments of six other countries the names of more than 150 people involved in terrorism. The book notes that some Guantánamo detainees were subsequently opposed in habeas cases using Ressam’s statements, but not Slahi. Judge James Robertson later observed that Ressam conspicuously failed to implicate him.

The plot also needs to be distinguished from the later allegations that reshaped Slahi’s detention. In 2002, Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s identification of Slahi as a person who had hosted him in Germany brought a new link to the September 11 attacks into the case. That allegation was separate from the Millennium Plot, though the two strands became entangled in the broader story of Slahi’s custody. In 2009, when the government litigated Slahi’s habeas petition, it did not argue that he was a major al-Qaeda figure or had participated in al-Qaeda plans or attacks. A newspaper editorial nevertheless described him as a top recruiter for the September 11 attacks, despite the court record’s distinction between the government’s claims and what it could support.

Aftermath and significance

The government initially argued that Slahi could be detained under the theory that he had aided the September 11 attacks, then abandoned that theory, acknowledging that he probably did not even know of the attacks. That concession did not erase the earlier Millennium Plot inquiries, nor did it make the different allegations interchangeable. Instead, the successive narratives show how suspicion could persist and change shape: first questions about Ressam’s planned bombing, later a claim about Slahi’s association with al-Qaeda and the September 11 attacks.

When Slahi arrived at Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, aboard a military aircraft with thirty-four other prisoners, the available account gives no indication that he was then regarded as an especially high-value detainee. His eventual detention therefore sits uneasily beside the repeated portrayal of him as a central figure in major plots. The Millennium Plot began as a specific investigation of a planned attack and Ressam’s network; in Slahi’s case, it also became an enduring accusation whose recurrence outlasted the finding that there was no basis to believe he had taken part.