September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001, is the hinge between two different accounts of why Mohamedou Ould Slahi was held by the United States. In the aftermath of the attacks, suspicion of a connection to them became central to the case made against him, even though the available record traced his questioning back to the Millennium Plot and later contained the government’s acknowledgment that he probably did not know about September 11. The date thus marks both a national crisis and a shift in the grounds, language, and consequences of Slahi’s detention.

Background and the change in focus

Before the attacks, the questions put to Slahi concerned the Millennium Plot, a plan targeting Los Angeles International Airport. FBI agents questioned him when he returned to Mauritania in February 2000, and again a few weeks after September 11. Slahi later told a review board that the Jordanian authorities also focused on his alleged part in that plot. The chronology matters: the book does not present his detention as having begun with an established allegation that he was a leading organizer of the September 11 attacks. Rather, the attacks changed the context in which older suspicions and contacts were interpreted.

Slahi recounts that on September 29, 2001, he received a telephone call asking him to turn himself in. He did so immediately, believing that questioning would clear him. Instead, U.S. agents interrogated him in Mauritania, and the United States reached an agreement with the Mauritanian government to send him to Jordan for further questioning. He describes eight months in Jordan, followed by two weeks at Bagram Air Base and his eventual transfer to Guantánamo. His account presents this sequence as part of a secret detention operation launched after the attacks; that is Slahi’s characterization of the policy and its legality, not a judicial finding established in the cited passages.

An allegation takes shape

A year after September 11, the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh brought Slahi into a new line of suspicion. At his 2005 review-board hearing, Slahi said that bin al-Shibh identified him as the man he had met in October 1999 and had stayed with. According to the account of the interrogation material, bin al-Shibh and two companions had met a stranger on a train in Germany while discussing jihad and travel to Chechnya. The stranger directed them to Slahi in Duisburg. Slahi put them up for a night and, as later summaries of the intelligence reporting described it, advised them that Afghanistan offered a route to training before they continued toward Chechnya.

Those details became the basis for a larger inference. The allegation was not only that Slahi had hosted visitors or offered travel advice, but that his actions connected him to al-Qaeda and to the September 11 plot. In Slahi’s account of the interrogation, questioners pressed him to accept that he had recruited bin al-Shibh and two other men. One interrogator framed the decisive issue as whether Slahi had sent them to an al-Qaeda operative; another asserted that September 11 would not have happened without him. The accusations turned an episode of hospitality and advice into a claim of responsibility for the attacks. Slahi denied that he had recruited the men or participated in September 11.

Detention, interrogation, and the public record

The attacks also supplied the wider political and administrative setting for Slahi’s detention. On September 18, 2001, Congress authorized the president to use force against those responsible for, or connected to, the attacks. Slahi’s account links that authorization to a secret U.S. operation to capture, detain, interrogate, or kill terrorism suspects. In Guantánamo, allegations relating to September 11 became part of the pressure to obtain admissions. Slahi describes being told that he had recruited hijackers and was a leader whose associates followed him; he also recounts being made to write extensive accounts of his life and facing a forged letter claiming that the government would arrest his mother if he did not cooperate. The source presents these as tactics used against him, not as proof that the accusations were true.

The official records preserve both disclosure and silence. At an earlier tribunal, when asked whether U.S. authorities had abused him, Slahi declined to answer, saying he did not have to respond unless forced. At a 2005 review-board hearing, after he had gained access to attorneys and written his account, he spoke more freely about his experience and said he wanted the board to understand his story. Yet the transcript breaks off as he begins to discuss the summer of 2003: recording equipment malfunctioned, and the missing portion was replaced by the board’s recollection that he had discussed being tortured. The documentary record therefore gives the reader a vivid allegation of abuse while also showing how an interruption left part of his testimony unavailable.

Reassessment and significance

Later legal and prosecutorial accounts complicated the public image of Slahi as a central September 11 recruiter. In the government’s argument at his habeas proceedings, one theory was that he could be detained for having aided the attacks. The government abandoned that theory and acknowledged that he probably did not even know about September 11. The record described in the book also notes that Ahmed Ressam, despite cooperating with U.S. authorities and naming many people in terrorism investigations, did not implicate Slahi. Prosecutor Stuart Couch said that the intelligence reports he received did not show Slahi committing an overt act in a conspiracy to attack the United States.

The distinction between allegation and evidence remained consequential. No charge sheet was drawn up against Slahi in Guantánamo, and the book reports no subsequent attempt to prepare a prosecution. When his habeas case reached federal court, the government argued that he had been part of al-Qaeda because of an oath of allegiance, associations, and assistance to members, rather than because he had fought against the United States or taken part in a September 11 attack. Slahi had joined al-Qaeda in 1991 but maintained that his participation ended with the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan. The case therefore turned on how past affiliation and later contact should be interpreted, not on a demonstrated role in the attacks.

September 11 consequently functions in the narrative as both a catastrophic historical event and a powerful frame through which Slahi’s earlier actions were reclassified. The attacks intensified scrutiny, helped make extraordinary detention appear urgent, and attached a lasting public label to a case whose evidentiary and legal foundations remained contested. By setting the initial Millennium Plot inquiries beside the later September 11 allegations and the government’s eventual retreat from one central claim, the account shows how a national emergency could change the meaning assigned to a person’s past without resolving what that person had actually done.