Status as a terrorism suspect

Status as a terrorism suspect became the organizing label for Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s years in custody, but the grounds attached to that label changed over time. The narrative traces a movement from questions about the Millennium Plot to allegations linked to the September 11 attacks, and then to a legal claim based on association with al-Qaeda. It also records a widening gap between the certainty of public accusations and the more qualified case presented in court.

From Investigation to a Terrorism Label

The account places the beginning of U.S. scrutiny before the September 11 attacks. FBI agents questioned Slahi after he returned to Mauritania in February 2000, with the Millennium Plot as a focus. They questioned him again a few weeks after the attacks. Slahi later told an administrative review board that Jordanian investigators were also concerned about his alleged part in the Millennium Plot. The sequence matters: the account does not present the later public image of a September 11 organizer as the original basis for every investigation or transfer.

In his own explanation of the case, Slahi argued that the United States saw his arrest and return to Mauritania as an opportunity to obtain information about Ahmed Ressam, who was then refusing to cooperate with U.S. authorities, and about Slahi’s contacts in Canada, Germany, and elsewhere. He also said investigators sought information about jihadist activity in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. He described being labeled the mastermind of the Millennium Plot and said that the label helped drive international requests for information about him. These are Slahi’s account of the government’s aims, rather than a finding that those aims were proven in court.

The book also recounts the circumstances in which Slahi says his custody escalated. On September 29, 2001, he received a call asking him to turn himself in, and he complied, believing he would be cleared. Instead, U.S. agents questioned him in Mauritania. Slahi writes that the U.S. then reached an agreement with the Mauritanian government to send him to Jordan, where he was held and interrogated for eight months, before transfer to Bagram Air Base and then Guantánamo. His account places these transfers within a broader secret U.S. operation begun after Congress authorized force against those responsible for, or connected to, the September 11 attacks. It presents his own case as an example of that operation, while maintaining that he had committed no such crime.

Labels, Rankings, and Allegations

The government’s stated picture of Slahi shifted as investigators pursued different leads. In Jordan, he says, a grocery list used in the prison recorded his accusation as participation in terrorist attacks. At another point, an interrogator showed him a list of fifteen people classified as the worst cases and placed Slahi at number one. The interrogator characterized him as a top terrorist on the basis of a checklist that included being Arab, young, having gone to jihad, speaking foreign languages, traveling widely, and holding a technical degree. The episode shows how Slahi’s identity and biography were treated as indicators of danger, even as he asked what specific crime he was accused of committing.

Another allegation concerned Slahi’s personal homepage. He recounts being shown a CNN report from March 2002 that described him as a coordinator who had facilitated communication among the September 11 hijackers through the site’s guestbook. Slahi denied designing the page for al-Qaeda, saying he had made it much earlier and had not checked it since early 1997. He also argued that anyone deliberately assisting al-Qaeda would not use a homepage under his own name. In the passage, the report functions as an asserted explanation for suspicion, while Slahi challenges both the alleged purpose of the site and the inference drawn from it.

A separate link to the attacks emerged after the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh on September 11, 2002. Slahi later recounted that bin al-Shibh identified him as a person he had met in Germany in October 1999, who had hosted him for a night and advised him to go to Afghanistan for training. According to Slahi’s account of the interrogation report, bin al-Shibh also speculated that Slahi was an operative of Usama bin Laden and that, without him, bin al-Shibh would not have become involved in the attacks. The narrative distinguishes the reported meeting and advice from the broader conclusions attributed to bin al-Shibh; it does not treat every allegation as an established fact.

Guantánamo and the Changing Government Case

When Slahi arrived at Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, aboard a U.S. military C-17 with thirty-four other prisoners, the available account does not characterize him as an especially high-value detainee. Contemporary reporting cited in the book described the camp’s nearly six hundred detainees as lacking senior positions in al-Qaeda’s command structure. The camp’s commander and some uniformed officers were also questioning whether detainees should be called enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions. The contrast is significant: the sweeping suspicion surrounding Slahi’s case developed within a detention system whose status categories and intelligence judgments were themselves contested.

The relationship between the interrogation and the evidence also became part of the record. Stuart Couch, assigned Slahi’s case in 2003, received intelligence reports that military interrogators promoted as the product of their most successful interrogation at Guantánamo. His investigator later gained access to the interrogators’ files, including daily memoranda describing both what was said and how information had been obtained. The files remained classified, but summaries appeared in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 inquiry and a Justice Department review. Those investigations documented a special interrogation conducted under a second, approved plan and reported that the Senate committee found a fabricated State Department letter had threatened Slahi’s mother with detention. A separate email exchange recorded Slahi reporting that he was hearing voices; a military psychiatrist connected hallucinations to sensory deprivation. These records do not, by themselves, settle every disputed allegation against Slahi. They do establish that the way information was extracted became central to evaluating the government’s claims.

Habeas Review and Public Representation

When Slahi’s habeas petition came before a federal court in 2009, the government did not argue that he was a major al-Qaeda figure or that he had taken part in al-Qaeda plans or attacks. The later account of the government’s position instead described a case that he had been part of al-Qaeda because he had sworn allegiance, associated with members, hosted leaders, and referred aspiring jihadists to a known operative. The distinction narrowed the dispute: the government’s stated basis concerned membership and assistance, not a claim that Slahi had fought U.S. forces or planned the September 11 attacks.

Judge James Robertson considered whether the government had shown that Slahi was an active al-Qaeda member when he was detained. Slahi acknowledged joining the organization and swearing an oath in 1991, but maintained that his participation ended with the fall of the communist government in Afghanistan. The government relied on later contacts, including ties to Abu Hafs and other acquaintances who had remained active. In this account, the legal question was therefore not simply whether Slahi had ever joined al-Qaeda, but whether the evidence connected his earlier oath and later associations to active membership at the relevant time.

Public commentary often made a more categorical claim. A March 2010 New York Daily News editorial called Slahi a top recruiter for the September 11 attacks and objected to Judge Robertson’s order granting his habeas petition. The declassified version of the order, released two weeks later, included a footnote stating that the government had initially argued Slahi was detainable under the theory that he aided the attacks, but had abandoned that theory and acknowledged that he probably did not even know about them. The contrast between the editorial’s accusation and the court record illustrates how the public label could outlast, and exceed, the government’s own litigating position.

Evidence, Redaction, and the Meaning of Suspicion

The published account does not treat its redactions as permission to reconstruct secret material. Its editor explains that the annotations draw on context in the manuscript, information elsewhere in it, and public sources, including declassified documents and government investigations. The notes offer the most plausible public-record explanation for some obscured passages when the information matters to readability, but explicitly do not claim to recover the original text or disclose classified content. That boundary is especially important in an account where disputed allegations and withheld evidence helped sustain Slahi’s suspect status.

The result is a layered record: Slahi’s own recollections, interrogation reports, later investigative summaries, legal arguments, and public accusations do not all carry the same evidentiary weight. The account repeatedly sets the force of a label against the specificity of the supporting claim: an accusation written in a prison list, a checklist based on personal characteristics, an allegation about a website, a reported statement by another detainee, and a narrower theory advanced in habeas proceedings. The distinction does not erase the allegations or establish that every disputed detail is resolved. It shows how terrorism-suspect status could harden into a rationale for prolonged detention even while the grounds for that status remained contested and changed across investigative, public, and legal settings.