The Release ruling and appeal in Salahi v. Obama turned a federal judge’s order to free Mohamedou Ould Slahi into a renewed fight over the standard for detaining him. Judge James Robertson granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition and ordered his release, but the government appealed; the D.C. Circuit reversed and sent the case back for reconsideration under a broader test. The reversal did not resolve the allegations against Slahi, and he remained imprisoned at Guantánamo without a criminal charge.

The case behind the ruling

The legal dispute concerned whether Slahi could be held as a member of al-Qaeda. He had joined the organization in 1991 and sworn an oath of loyalty, but maintained that his participation ended after the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan. The government relied in part on his intermittent contacts with people who remained active in al-Qaeda, including Abu Hafs, his brother-in-law and cousin. Robertson considered those contacts too sporadic to establish criminal material support and read them as consistent with Slahi trying to avoid both close ties to the organization and open hostility toward its members.

That question arose against the history of Slahi’s detention. After earlier questioning about the Millennium Plot, authorities released him in February 2000; he was detained and released again in Mauritania in 2001. Later that year, a CIA rendition plane took him to Jordan, where he was held and questioned for seven and a half months. He was subsequently transferred through Bagram to Guantánamo, where the military subjected him to a special interrogation plan. Those circumstances formed part of the larger record surrounding his detention, but the habeas case focused on whether the government had shown that he could lawfully be held as part of al-Qaeda.

The release order and its reversal

Robertson’s decision came amid a series of habeas cases in which the government was frequently losing. As of April 1, 2010, it had lost 34 of 46 such cases. The release order was therefore consequential beyond Slahi’s individual case: it came while courts were defining what evidence could justify holding Guantánamo detainees without criminal trials.

On appeal, the D.C. Circuit adopted a looser standard for deciding whether a detainee was part of al-Qaeda and reversed Robertson’s order, remanding the case for a new hearing. Under that standard, the government did not have to show that Slahi was carrying out the organization’s orders or directions when he was taken into custody. His past associations could remain relevant to whether he was a member at the time of capture, even if those connections did not independently establish membership. The change shifted the inquiry away from proof of contemporaneous operational activity and toward what his earlier relationships might imply about his status later.

What the appeal did—and did not—decide

The appellate opinion carefully distinguished detention from criminal prosecution. The government had not indicted Slahi for providing material support to al-Qaeda or other terrorists, and it was not seeking to detain him on the basis that he aided the September 11 attacks or purposefully supported forces fighting the United States and its coalition partners. Its position was instead that his sporadic interactions with active al-Qaeda members in the 1990s could support the claim that he remained part of the organization when captured.

The distinction mattered because the appeal did not establish Slahi’s criminal guilt, nor did it affirm that he had participated in the September 11 attacks. It changed the legal framework for evaluating his detention and returned the dispute to the district court. The government’s success on appeal thus displaced the immediate force of the release order without supplying a criminal charge against him.

An unresolved outcome

A federal judge had ordered Slahi released, yet the appellate reversal meant that order did not bring his imprisonment to an end. The remand reopened the question under a standard more favorable to the government’s reliance on past associations. Slahi remained at Guantánamo, where he had been held since 2002, and the United States government had never charged him with a crime.

The case’s central tension lies in that difference between a ruling about the legality of detention and an outcome that actually frees a detainee. Robertson’s order recognized that the evidence before him did not justify continued custody; the appeal changed how the evidence could be weighed. The resulting procedural reversal left Slahi’s freedom unresolved even as the courts continued to examine the basis for holding him.