Mohamedou Ould Slahi—Jordanian intelligence services relationship

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s relationship with Jordanian intelligence services began with a secret transfer and became a prolonged investigation of his alleged role in the Millennium Plot. He was held and questioned in Amman for seven and a half months, then transferred by the CIA to Bagram Air Base. His later account identifies the focus of the Jordanian questioning, but the available record presented here does not disclose a definitive result from it.

Transfer and Detention

On November 28, 2001, a CIA rendition plane transported Slahi from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan. Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him there for seven and a half months. The account gives the duration and destination of his detention, but does not describe particular interview sessions or establish what information, if any, the questioning produced.

On July 19, 2002, another CIA plane retrieved Slahi from Amman and flew him to Bagram Air Base. He was then transferred onward to Guantánamo in August. The sequence placed the Jordanian interrogation between his detention in Mauritania and his entry into the U.S. military detention system, with the CIA arranging both transfers.

The Millennium Plot Investigation

Slahi later described the Jordanian investigation as focused on the Millennium Plot. In 2005, he told the Administrative Review Board that the Jordanians were investigating his part in the plot and were especially concerned about it. This account places the questioning within the earlier inquiry into the planned bombing of Los Angeles International Airport, rather than establishing that Jordanian interrogators were then investigating him as a participant in the September 11 attacks.

The chronology also complicates any inference that the interrogation yielded evidence against him. Ahmed Ressam, whose arrest had brought the Millennium Plot investigation to prominence, was cooperating with U.S. authorities by the time Slahi was transferred to Jordan. By the time Slahi left Amman, Ressam had testified in two terrorism trials and given the names of more than 150 people to U.S. authorities and authorities in six other countries. The account notes that Ressam’s statements were used against other Guantánamo detainees, but not against Slahi; in his habeas opinion, Judge Robertson observed that Ressam conspicuously failed to implicate him. This absence does not by itself establish what Jordanian intelligence services concluded, but it is a significant limit on the publicly described case against Slahi.

What the Record Leaves Unclear

The account raises a further question about the transfer of information from Amman to Guantánamo. The CIA would have known whether Jordanian authorities had uncovered information linking Slahi to the Millennium Plot, the September 11 attacks, or other plots. Yet the CIA apparently did not provide information from the Amman interrogation to Guantánamo prosecutors. Stuart Couch, the Marine prosecutor assigned to Slahi’s case, later said that the CIA had shown him no intelligence reports of its own; most of the reports it did share came from Slahi’s Guantánamo interrogation. That testimony concerns the prosecution’s access to intelligence and does not establish exactly what Jordanian interrogators learned or reported.

The editorial account also distinguishes public evidence from conjecture: its notes draw on the manuscript, declassified government materials, reporting, and official investigations, but do not claim to reconstruct redacted or classified material. Accordingly, the Jordanian phase is firmly described in its basic outline—transfer, location, duration, and the subject Slahi later said was under investigation—while the interrogation’s full contents and its effect on the later case remain unresolved.