Slahi's secret rendition to Jordan

Slahi's secret rendition to Jordan began on November 20, 2001, when he went with Mauritanian police for what he understood to be further questioning, and continued eight days later with his covert transfer by CIA aircraft to a prison in Amman. The gap between those events turned a voluntary return to a police station into an undisclosed cross-border detention, while his family was left to believe he remained in Mauritania.

Background and Departure

After returning to Mauritania in January 2000, Mohamedou Ould Slahi had been detained and questioned about the Millennium Plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Authorities found no basis to believe he was involved and released him on February 19. He then lived with his family and worked in Nouakchott, including computer and electronics work. After a further detention in September 2001, Mauritanian authorities again released him and publicly affirmed his innocence.

By November, Slahi had resumed work. It had even taken him to the Presidential Palace, where he spent a day preparing a bid to upgrade President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya’s telephone and computer systems. When police came to his home again, he asked to shower, dressed, took his car keys, and told his mother not to worry because he expected to return soon. He went to the police station in his own car, voluntarily complying with the request for questioning. The ordinary details of that departure sharpen the reversal that followed: this time, he did not come home.

Transfer to Jordan

On November 28, a CIA rendition plane transported Slahi from Mauritania to a prison in Amman. Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him there for seven and a half months. The transfer was not presented to his family as a departure from Mauritanian custody; for nearly a year, they were led to believe that he remained in a security prison in his own country.

That concealment depended on the family’s understandable reliance on what local officials told them. Slahi’s oldest brother, Hamoud Ould Slahi, regularly visited the prison to deliver clean clothes and money for his brother’s meals. Prison officials accepted the money while saying nothing about Slahi’s absence. The family’s practical efforts to care for him thus continued inside a false account of where he was being held.

Discovery and Consequences

The family learned the truth through a German news magazine rather than through the authorities. On October 28, 2002, Slahi’s youngest brother, Yahdih Ould Slahi, read in Der Spiegel that his brother had been held for months in Guantánamo. The report revealed that the supposed Mauritanian custody had concealed a chain of transfers: from Mauritania to Jordan, then to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and finally to Guantánamo. By the time the family discovered the deception, Slahi was no longer in Jordan.

The consequences extended beyond his absence. The family had paid for his upkeep at the Nouakchott prison while he was elsewhere, and the officials who took the money had withheld that fact. Yahdih’s anger, as recounted in the account, was directed at the local authorities who had assured the family that Slahi was safe in their custody. The secrecy therefore obscured not only Slahi’s location but also the role of the officials on whom his family depended for information.

Record and Significance

The rendition forms part of the wider detention journey that began with Slahi’s return from Canada in January 2000. Over the next eighteen months, that journey covered roughly twenty thousand miles and involved detention and interrogation in four countries, often with American participation and at the behest of the United States. Jordan was a hidden stage in that route: Slahi’s family did not know he was there, and the transfer moved him beyond the reach of the account they had been given in Mauritania.

The book’s account sits alongside a broader documentary record, but that record also requires distinctions. Later military interrogation files and government investigations documented the special interrogation plan used against Slahi at Guantánamo; they concern a subsequent phase of his detention, not the details of the flight to Jordan. The editor’s notes explain that annotations about redacted passages draw on public records and close reading, while declining to reconstruct classified text or present speculation as confirmed fact. That caution matters here: the central facts of the transfer and the family’s prolonged misapprehension are presented directly, while the blacked-out material and the limits of what was publicly known remain part of the story of how the detention was concealed.