The September 11 attacks are the turning point in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account of his detention: after the attacks, questions from Mauritanian security officials became renewed custody, and suspicion of terrorism became the basis for his transfer through a sequence of foreign detentions. The memoir does not recount the attacks as a detailed scene. Instead, it traces their afterlife in the decisions made about Slahi, the allegations built around him, and the later public record that supports parts of his account.

From questioning to renewed detention

In the two and a half weeks after the attacks, Mauritania’s State Security Directorate had already summoned and questioned Slahi twice. When an inspector told him that the officials had been instructed to arrest him, he asked why; the inspector said he did not know, but hoped Slahi would soon be free. He also acknowledged that the attacks were disrupting everyone. Slahi, who had turned himself in when asked, read the reassurance against the pressure of the moment: in his account, the American government was not satisfied with a limited inquiry and wanted far more.

After the September 29, 2001, telephone call asking him to surrender, Slahi expected that an interrogation would clear him. Instead, American officials questioned him in Mauritania, and his detention became part of a wider security response. During a brief opportunity to use a telephone, he told an unnamed contact that he had been arrested, then erased his address book. He wanted to protect business contacts in Mauritania and Germany from being harassed because their numbers were on his phone. One entry, PC Laden, referred to a computer shop: the German word for shop happened to resemble the name of Osama bin Laden. Slahi anticipated that the coincidence would be treated as incriminating rather than explained away.

Seven days, then a transfer

Slahi spent seven days in Mauritanian custody. His family was not allowed to visit and, as he later learned, was not told where he was. On November 28, 2001, he was informed that he would be sent to Jordan. The date was Mauritania’s Independence Day, marking the country’s independence from France in 1960. Slahi sets the transfer against that anniversary: a state celebrating sovereignty was, in his account, handing one of its own citizens to foreign authorities. He says the transfer violated Mauritania’s constitutional prohibition on extraditing its citizens and exposed him to American justice without a trial.

The night before the transfer, guards allowed him to watch an Independence Day parade moving toward the Presidential Palace. Schoolboys carried lighted candles alongside the bands. The procession brought back his own childhood participation in the same parade, nineteen years earlier. That contrast gives the handover its particular force in the memoir: the national ceremony recalls belonging and self-rule, while his removal demonstrates how little control he had over his own fate. He describes a multilateral arrangement involving Mauritania, the United States, and Jordan; after eight months of detention and interrogation in Jordan, he was taken to Bagram Air Base for two weeks and then to Guantánamo.

Suspicion becomes an accusation

The attacks also supplied the framework for allegations against Slahi. In the later interrogations described in the memoir, officials pressed claims that he had recruited people connected to September 11. The accusations expanded beyond a single alleged act: he was portrayed as a recruiter and leader, and interrogators asserted that the attacks would not have happened without him. Slahi rejected the claims and said he did not know of the al-Qaeda cells in Germany and Canada that interrogators repeatedly asked about. The account shows how the attacks did not merely prompt investigation; they became a ready-made explanation into which investigators tried to fit his relationships and past conduct.

One interrogator presented a forged Department of Defense letter alleging Slahi’s involvement in the Millennium attack and recruitment of three hijackers. It threatened that, because he had refused to cooperate, the government would arrest his mother and place her in a special facility. The letter turned family vulnerability into pressure within the interrogation. Slahi’s account of this tactic later found support in documentary summaries: an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee described a fictitious letter designed to exploit his relationship with his mother. That corroboration does not make every detail of the memoir independently established, but it connects his description to records of the interrogation program.

Interrogation, records, and the limits of the account

In 2003, military prosecutor Stuart Couch received intelligence reports attributed to Slahi and became concerned about how they had been obtained. Couch had previously seen a prisoner held under harsh interrogation conditions and had experience of similar techniques during military training. An investigator later gained access to military interrogation files, including daily memoranda recording both what was said and how information was extracted. Those files remained classified, but the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Justice Department summarized the records and documented a special interrogation plan that, according to those reports, unfolded much as Slahi described it.

The memoir’s account therefore moves between personal recollection and a contested public record. Its editor explains that annotations about redacted passages draw on context, other material in the manuscript, and publicly available sources, including declassified documents and government investigations. The editor also stresses that the notes are not attempts to reconstruct classified text and that the cleared attorneys and others with access to the unredacted manuscript did not confirm the speculations. This distinction matters: the attacks’ consequences for Slahi are narrated directly, while some details surrounding the secret program remain obscured or are presented as reasoned interpretation rather than recovered fact.

The wider response to the attacks supplies the political context for that distinction. The United States authorized force against those determined to have planned, aided, or harbored those responsible; an editorial note identifies the Authorization for Use of Military Force as the law governing Guantánamo. Slahi describes a separate secret operation to capture, detain, torture, or kill terrorism suspects, and says he was swept into it despite having committed no such crimes. In his telling, the crucial reversal is that the state’s response began with the promise of security and ended in prolonged detention without a satisfactory explanation. The attacks remain the historical event; the memoir’s subject is the machinery of suspicion and custody that followed them.