September 11, 2001 attacks

The September 11, 2001 attacks mark a turning point in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account not through a scene of the attacks themselves, but through the sudden intensification of scrutiny around him. In Mauritania, he was questioned again about the Millennium Plot, released without charges, and publicly declared innocent; within weeks, his detention would become secret and cross-border.

Renewed scrutiny in Mauritania

Slahi had already been detained in January 2000 and questioned by American agents about the alleged Millennium Plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Authorities concluded there was no basis to believe he was involved and released him. By the time of the September 2001 attacks, he was living with his family and working as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott.

In his retrospective account, Slahi says that the Mauritanian State Security Directorate had called him in and interrogated him twice during the two and a half weeks after the attacks. The renewed inquiry was framed around the Millennium Plot, rather than a disclosed finding tying him to the attacks. One official told him that the Americans had asked for his arrest and hoped he would soon be free, while describing the attacks as disrupting everyone’s lives. Slahi understood the pressure as part of a widening demand: the American government, he wrote, was no longer satisfied with limited cooperation.

Release, innocence, and continued control

On September 29, 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained Slahi for two weeks and again questioned him with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about the Millennium Plot. They released him, and Mauritanian officials publicly affirmed his innocence. After his release, the head of the national security service offered him a loan in case returning to work posed a problem, and the service assured his employer that he was innocent and should resume his job. His former employer welcomed him back, and he found more employment opportunities than before.

That public exoneration did not end the pressure. Slahi says the government kept him under house arrest at the United States’ direction, without giving a reason. His family and friends welcomed his return, but he remained concerned about his sister’s depression and anxiety. The contrast between official assurances of innocence and continuing restrictions gives the attacks’ aftermath its particular force in the memoir: release did not restore ordinary freedom.

From questioning to secret detention

On November 20, Mauritanian police asked Slahi to accompany them for further questioning. He complied voluntarily and drove his own car to the station. Eight days later, a CIA rendition plane took him from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. The movement from public questioning and release to covert transfer is the decisive consequence of the post-attack period in his personal chronology.

The attacks also recur in a later interrogation scene at Guantánamo. Slahi expects a recording to show him carrying out an attack on a U.S. facility; instead, he sees a video of Usama bin Laden discussing the September 11 attacks with an associate. Slahi understands the Arabic, while the interrogators rely on subtitles. He objects that the recording has nothing to do with him. The scene shows how the attacks remained an organizing frame for suspicion even when the material presented to him did not establish his involvement.

Retrospective record and limits

The memoir’s account is accompanied by editorial notes that compare its claims with public records, declassified government documents, news reporting, and official investigations. The editor describes the notes as efforts to identify information most plausibly corresponding to redactions, not to reconstruct classified text; he also acknowledges that such interpretations may be mistaken. This distinction matters to the episode: the narrative records Slahi’s experience of renewed questioning and its aftermath, while the surviving record does not warrant treating every inference about government motives or hidden information as confirmed.

The broader context was a rapidly changing detention system. At Guantánamo, military interrogators’ methods were becoming a point of conflict with Federal Bureau of Investigation and investigative task-force agents, and the military developed special interrogation plans that included severe deprivation and humiliation. Slahi’s later treatment unfolded within that expanding system, but the September 2001 episode retains a distinct significance: it marks the transition from repeated investigation in his home country to detention beyond public view.