Salahi’s Secret Transfer from Mauritania to Jordan

The secret transfer of Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Mauritania to Jordan began on November 28, 2001, after a week in custody without contact with his family. In his account, the handover turns a national holiday into a bitter contradiction: Mauritania’s Independence Day became the day its government sent one of its own citizens abroad, beyond his control and into a secret operation. The transfer was presented to him as brief, but it became the first step in a journey through detention whose terms he could neither verify nor refuse.

Background and Secrecy

Slahi says he spent seven days in Mauritanian custody. His family was not permitted to visit him and, as he later learned, was not told where he was being held. On the eighth day, he was informed that he would be sent to Jordan. The secrecy surrounding the decision mattered as much as its destination: he had been held apart from his family, then told of an international transfer only when it was imminent.

The date gave the handover a particular political meaning in Slahi’s telling. November 28 marked Mauritania’s independence from France in 1960. He contrasts that public commemoration of sovereignty with the government’s decision to transfer a Mauritanian citizen to another country. He asserts that the constitution forbade extradition of Mauritanian citizens and describes his removal as a breach of that protection. The episode therefore appears not merely as a change of prison, but as the state’s surrender of responsibility for a person under its control.

The previous night, guards allowed Slahi to watch the Independence Day parade approaching the Presidential Palace. He remembered taking part in the same parade as a schoolboy nineteen years earlier, without understanding what sovereignty would mean in practice. In the recollection, the parade links a childhood ceremony of national belonging to the next morning’s transfer: the state’s symbols remain visible while its power to protect him seems, to him, to have failed.

The Decision and Handover

On the morning of the holiday, the head of the Mauritanian State Security Directorate came to see Slahi, although Slahi was ill and the visit was unexpected. The guards were sent home, and Slahi initially understood their cheerful gestures as a possible sign that he would be released. Instead, after the director’s assistant brought inexpensive clothes and a bag, the director told him that he was going to Jordan. Slahi questioned the destination and asked how long he would be away.

The director described the operation as secret and said that Slahi could choose not to speak to the Jordanian authorities. He suggested that the trip might add another favorable account to the statements already made on Slahi’s behalf, and predicted that Slahi would return within a few days. Slahi distrusted those assurances. He understood that the transfer had a purpose, and that he was being sent to a country he regarded as a place where torture was practiced. The mismatch between the promised short trip and the concealed operation becomes one of the episode’s defining features: the official explanation offers a temporary excursion, while the circumstances point to a transfer whose duration and consequences are not disclosed.

Slahi describes the period between the decision and the handover as being treated like a package. He considered escape, but saw no viable route: he had no money for a taxi, the exits and nearby streets were guarded, and he doubted that his weakened condition would allow him to get over the wall. He weighed the risks of trying against the likelihood that the Mauritanian authorities would continue cooperating with the United States. His account makes clear that the choice was constrained on every side; the apparent option of escape was not a realistic alternative to being transferred.

The Journey and Arrival

At the handover, the Mauritanian director gave the Jordanian representative Slahi’s passport and a thin folder. Two young guards were assigned to watch him during what Slahi calls the longest eleven-hour journey of his life. Before boarding, he asked the director to tell the Jordanian representative not to torture him. The director offered a general request that Slahi be treated appropriately, but Slahi had no assurance that it would govern what happened next.

The journey ended in Amman. When the guards removed Slahi’s handcuffs, he thought the restraint might no longer be necessary now that the plane had landed. Instead, they cuffed him again behind his back, added larger earmuffs, and covered his head. He had been ill and had eaten very little during the preceding week. In his account, the changed restraints mark the end of any expectation that arrival would bring an explanation or relief: the handover had delivered him into the control of new guards, with no clear information about what would follow.

After the flight, guards drove him for roughly forty to forty-five minutes before bringing him through a gate into a building. He was left near a heater, then taken upstairs into a room where a man sat behind a desk. Slahi later recognized the voice of one of the men present as that of an interrogator. The journey thus carries the transfer beyond the airport and into a detention setting; the change of country also changes the officials who control his movement and questioning.

Record, Consequences, and Narrative Significance

The transfer is narrated as a sequence of narrowing choices: the family is kept uninformed, the operation is called secret, the promised stay is short, and the journey ends in a new place of custody. Its political force rests on the contrast between official language and the practical facts Slahi recounts. A visit said to last days begins with the delivery of his passport and a folder, proceeds under guard, and ends with him hooded and taken into a facility. The account does not treat the border crossing as an isolated administrative act; it shows how secrecy and uncertainty shaped the experience of being moved between governments.

The published text also makes its evidentiary limits visible. Its editor explains that annotations addressing redactions are contextual speculations, not attempts to reconstruct the censored words or reveal classified material. Those notes draw on the manuscript, public records, declassified documents, journalism, and government investigations, while expressly leaving room for error. In related investigations, records obtained by an investigator assigned to Slahi’s case included detailed memoranda about interrogation sessions and how information was extracted. Public summaries of those records described a later special interrogation plan and documents that persuaded the investigator that Slahi had been tortured. These findings corroborate aspects of the broader detention and interrogation context; they do not, by themselves, settle every obscured detail of the transfer.

The handover’s consequences extended far beyond the few days promised to Slahi. His account later describes a return to his family after nearly seven years away, when children had grown up and his mother had weakened. Set against that eventual homecoming, the 2001 transfer marks the start of a prolonged separation: a citizen removed from his country, a family left without access to him, and an official assurance of a brief absence that did not describe the fate awaiting him.