September 11 attacks and their impact on Slahi's detention

The September 11 attacks and their impact on Slahi’s detention are presented not as a single event at a distance, but as a turning point in a sequence of arrests, renewed questioning, and allegations. Although Mohamedou Ould Slahi had been released after earlier inquiries and Mauritanian authorities had publicly affirmed his innocence, the attacks brought renewed scrutiny that ultimately helped carry him from Mauritania into secret detention abroad. The later allegation that he had advised Ramzi bin al-Shibh to seek training in Afghanistan gave the authorities a link to investigate; it did not, in the evidence described, establish that Slahi had directed him toward an attack on the United States.

Renewed Scrutiny in Mauritania

The sequence began before the attacks. In September 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained Slahi for two weeks and again questioned him about the Millennium Plot. He was released, and the authorities publicly affirmed his innocence. That release makes the renewed detention after September 11 consequential: the new climate did not simply continue an uninterrupted investigation, but reopened suspicion after an official public statement that there was no basis to hold him.

On November 20, police came to Slahi’s home and asked him to accompany them for further questioning. He complied voluntarily and drove his own car to the station. The apparently ordinary manner of that request contrasts with what followed. Eight days later, a CIA rendition plane transported him from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. The attacks thus mark the surrounding political crisis in which repeated questioning became prolonged detention and transfer across borders.

Slahi’s own account recalls an official explaining that others had told the authorities to arrest him, while also acknowledging uncertainty about the reason. The official connected the predicament to the attacks and said that the attacks were disrupting everyone’s lives. Slahi did not answer. He understood that American authorities had already questioned him twice in the weeks after September 11, but that the inquiries had not settled the matter. His comparison between an initial demand and an eventual demand for far more captures the expanding reach of the scrutiny: a narrow question about a suspected plot seemed to grow into a search for wider associations.

The Alleged Link to Ramzi bin al-Shibh

A further connection surfaced later, during the struggle over interrogation methods at Guantánamo. At his 2005 review hearing, Slahi recounted that Ramzi bin al-Shibh had been arrested on September 11, 2002, and identified Slahi as someone he had met in October 1999. Bin al-Shibh said that Slahi had hosted him and advised him to go to Afghanistan for training. He also speculated that Slahi was an operative of Usama bin Laden and that, without Slahi, he would not have become involved in the September 11 attacks. These claims transformed an earlier encounter into a purported explanation of Slahi’s relationship to the attacks, but they were not all the same claim: the reported meeting and advice were distinct from bin al-Shibh’s speculation about Slahi’s identity and importance.

The account of the earlier meeting placed it in Germany. Bin al-Shibh and two friends had met a stranger on a train and discussed jihad and their wish to travel to Chechnya to fight the Russians. The stranger directed them to Slahi in Duisburg, where Slahi hosted them for one night. According to the account recorded by the 9/11 Commission from intelligence reporting, Slahi said that travel through Georgia was difficult because travelers were being detained, and recommended going through Afghanistan instead, where they could train before traveling to Chechnya. The stated purpose in this account was preparation for travel to Chechnya, not participation in an attack on the United States.

That distinction mattered in later assessments. Stuart Couch, who reviewed intelligence reports concerning bin al-Shibh, recalled seeing no indication that bin al-Shibh had said the men explained an intention to attack America and Slahi directed them to train for that purpose. In Slahi’s habeas proceedings, the government’s allegation was instead that the suggestion of training in Afghanistan amounted to recruitment for al-Qaeda. The Court of Appeals described the government’s basis for detention as Slahi’s oath of allegiance, associations, assistance, hosting of leaders, and referral of aspiring jihadists to a known al-Qaeda operative. It did not describe the case as proof that Slahi had planned or directed the September 11 attacks.

Allegation, Evidence, and Interrogation

The connection to bin al-Shibh became part of a larger effort to interpret Slahi’s past associations as evidence of continuing membership in al-Qaeda. Slahi had joined the organization in 1991 and sworn an oath of allegiance, but maintained that his participation ended with the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan. During the habeas proceedings, the government relied on his contacts with Abu Hafs and other acquaintances who remained active in al-Qaeda. James Robertson concluded that the contacts were sporadic and did not establish criminal material support; their pattern, he suggested, was consistent with Slahi trying to avoid both close ties to al-Qaeda members and making himself their enemy.

The investigation also unfolded alongside escalating interrogation practices. At Guantánamo, military interrogators developed special plans despite objections from Federal Bureau of Investigation and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents. Later, Stuart Couch received reports based on Slahi’s own interrogations, which officials had described as a major success. An investigator gained access to the military files, including daily memoranda recording not only what was said but how information had been obtained. Classified records were subsequently summarized in investigations by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice. Those public accounts corroborated central features of Slahi’s description of a special interrogation, while documenting the methods used to extract information. The association with September 11 therefore reached Slahi not only as an allegation to answer but within an interrogation system whose methods shaped the record of what he said.

The Record and Its Limits

The book treats the distinction between an allegation and a demonstrated fact as essential to understanding the case. Slahi was questioned about the attacks, and bin al-Shibh’s account supplied a link that investigators and government lawyers used to argue for his detention. Yet the available descriptions also preserve limits: bin al-Shibh’s reported account did not say Slahi sent him to Afghanistan to join a plot against the United States, and Couch recalled no such statement in the intelligence report he saw. The government’s later legal theory concerned association and assistance, not a claim that Slahi had personally planned the attacks.

The narrative’s evidentiary frame is itself incomplete. Government redactions obscure parts of the manuscript and can blur the people and events under discussion. The editor’s annotations draw on the surrounding manuscript, declassified documents, public reporting, and government investigations, but explicitly do not claim to reconstruct classified text or recover the original wording behind the black bars. This caution matters here because the attacks’ impact on Slahi’s detention is conveyed through both his recollections and later public records: the former records how suspicion entered his life, while the latter help assess what the allegations and interrogations could actually establish.