Slahi's detention and interrogation in Jordan

Slahi's detention and interrogation in Jordan was a seven-and-a-half-month period of secret custody that connected his renewed detention in Mauritania to his later transfer into U.S. military custody. Taken by CIA aircraft to a prison in Amman on November 28, 2001, he was questioned by Jordanian intelligence services, chiefly about the Millennium Plot; on July 19, 2002, another CIA flight removed him from Jordan and carried him to Bagram. The episode marks a change in the authorities holding him, but not a clear change in the central question being asked: the available account identifies the Millennium Plot, rather than the September 11 attacks, as the focus of the Jordanian interrogation.

Transfer and interrogation

The transfer followed a sequence of renewed questioning in Mauritania. On September 29, 2001, Mohamedou Ould Slahi had been detained for two weeks and questioned again by FBI agents about the Millennium Plot, then released; Mauritanian authorities publicly affirmed his innocence. On November 20, police returned to his home and asked him to accompany them for further questioning. He complied voluntarily and drove his own car to the police station. Eight days later, a CIA rendition plane took him out of Mauritania and delivered him to a prison in Amman.

Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. In 2005, when addressing the Administrative Review Board, Slahi said the Jordanians were investigating his part in the Millennium Plot and had told him that it particularly concerned them. His account thus places the Jordanian questioning within an investigation already directed at that alleged plot, rather than presenting it as an inquiry that began with allegations of involvement in the September 11 attacks.

The account of custody

The narrative conveys the human consequences of the Jordanian period partly through recollection. In one passage, Slahi describes remembering detainees in Jordan who were being tortured: their cries remained with him, and he recalls trying unsuccessfully to shut out the sound. The account presents this not as a detached description of an interrogation method but as an enduring memory of other prisoners’ suffering. It also distinguishes what he says he witnessed from what he had only heard about, a boundary that matters in a narrative where much of the surrounding detention history is obscured.

Other scenes in the manuscript describe threats, pain, exhaustion, and fear during interrogation, as well as the sense that a questioner was demanding a particular answer. The account portrays Slahi as denying membership in terrorist organizations while facing repeated questioning and intimidation. Because the book’s narrative incorporates flashbacks into its main sequence, these scenes should not automatically be assigned to the Jordan prison solely because the text also recalls Jordan there. The Jordan-specific facts established in the account are the place of detention, its duration, the Jordanian interrogators, and the stated focus on the Millennium Plot.

The changing evidentiary picture

The subject of the questioning acquires significance against the later U.S. case. The available account says Slahi’s U.S. custody did not begin with allegations that he was a leading recruiter for the September 11 attacks: earlier questioning in Mauritania, and the stated reason for his Jordanian rendition, concerned the Millennium Plot. The same account notes that Ahmed Ressam, who was cooperating with U.S. authorities during this period, did not implicate Slahi, according to Judge Robertson’s habeas opinion. These points do not establish everything the Jordanian services learned or did not learn, but they underscore the difference between the stated investigative focus in Jordan and later characterizations of Slahi’s significance.

The record also leaves an important gap between the lengthy interrogation in Amman and the later U.S. proceedings. The account reports that the CIA did not provide Guantánamo prosecutors with intelligence reports from Slahi’s Jordan interrogation. In a later interview, Marine prosecutor Stuart Couch said he had not been shown the CIA’s own intelligence reports. That absence limits what the subsequent prosecution could demonstrate from the Jordan period and makes it difficult, on the available record, to treat the interrogation’s duration as proof that it produced evidence supporting later allegations.

Transfer to Bagram and the limits of the record

On July 19, 2002, a CIA plane retrieved Slahi from Amman and took him to Bagram Air Base. The transfer ended his Jordanian detention but did not end his confinement or questioning: after two weeks at Bagram, he was flown to Guantánamo with thirty-four other prisoners, arriving on August 5. The movement from Mauritania to Jordan, then from Jordan to Bagram and Guantánamo, makes the Jordan period one stage in a continuing chain of custody across jurisdictions.

The published account must also be read in light of the manuscript’s censorship. The editor explains that annotations were used to place redactions in context, drawing on the manuscript, public records, declassified documents, reporting, and government investigations. He explicitly distinguishes this contextual work from reconstructing the original redacted language or uncovering classified material, and acknowledges that annotations involving speculation may be wrong. That qualification is especially important here: the broad chronology and stated subject of the Jordanian interrogation are clear, while the surviving account does not supply a complete record of every question, answer, or intelligence conclusion. Jordan’s place in Slahi’s story is therefore both consequential and bounded by what can be established: a covert transfer, months of questioning about the Millennium Plot, and another secret transfer onward without a publicly available, complete account of what the interrogation yielded.