U.S. Military Action Against Afghanistan’s Taliban Government

U.S. Military Action Against Afghanistan’s Taliban Government is presented as the immediate political response to the September 11 attacks and as the backdrop to a broader system of detention and interrogation. The account separates the campaign against the Taliban government from the secret operation that followed, while showing how the post-attack climate shaped the treatment of Mohamedou Ould Slahi and other terrorism suspects.

Background and Authorization

At the end of his account, Slahi places the campaign within the United States’ response to the September 11 attacks. At the direction of President George W. Bush, the United States began a campaign against Afghanistan’s Taliban government. A joint resolution of Congress dated September 18, 2001, authorized the president to use force against nations, organizations, or persons that had planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attacks, or had harbored those responsible. The stated scope of that authorization thus concerned responsibility for the attacks and the sheltering of those involved.

The campaign belongs to a chronology in which Slahi had already faced scrutiny before the attacks. After returning to Mauritania in January 2000, following twelve years abroad, he was detained by Senegalese and Mauritanian authorities and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about the Millennium Plot. Authorities released him on February 19, 2000, having found no basis to believe he was involved. He was detained and questioned again in September 2001, then released with Mauritanian authorities publicly affirming his innocence. This prior history matters to the account’s distinction between the military response to the attacks and the allegations later used to justify Slahi’s continued detention.

From Military Campaign to Secret Detention

Slahi’s closing account describes a secret operation initiated after the campaign began, aimed at kidnapping, detaining, torturing, or killing terrorism suspects. He characterizes that operation as lacking a legal basis; this is his stated judgment, not a description of the congressional resolution itself. The narrative therefore keeps two related but distinct developments in view: military action directed at the Taliban government and covert measures directed at people suspected of terrorism.

Slahi recounts how those measures reached him. On November 28, 2001, a Central Intelligence Agency rendition plane transported him from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. In 2003 and 2004, U.S. military interrogators subjected him to a special interrogation plan personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. His account describes prolonged isolation, physical and psychological humiliations, threats against him and his family, and a mock kidnapping and rendition. These later acts are presented as part of the post-attack detention apparatus, not as battlefield events in the campaign against the Taliban government.

The Camp as a Later Consequence

The movement from military action to detention policy is also visible in the changing practices at Guantánamo. Slahi arrived there on August 5, 2002, among thirty-five prisoners transported from Afghanistan. Contemporary reporting described the detainees as not being high-level figures in al-Qaeda’s command structure, and a camp commander’s officers were questioning whether detainees should be classified as enemy combatants rather than receive prisoner-of-war protections. The commander was replaced, and the camp’s intelligence operations were expanded.

In September and October 2002, military interrogators and Federal Bureau of Investigation and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents divided sharply over interrogation methods. The military created a Special Projects Team and developed a written plan for interrogating another prisoner; the resulting dispute reflected the larger institutional struggle over how far interrogation could go. A 2004 Central Intelligence Agency inspector general report likewise described the agency’s interest in detainees who, if not kept isolated, might reveal information about the circumstances of their detention. These records place Slahi’s experience within a widening system of secrecy and coercive interrogation, while not establishing that every practice described was a direct part of the Afghanistan campaign.

Claims, Evidence, and the Limits of the Case

The campaign’s political context also helps explain how suspicion around Slahi changed over time. In 2000 and again in 2001, questioning focused on the Millennium Plot. At a later review hearing, Slahi said that Jordanian interrogators had been investigating that plot. After Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured in September 2002, an allegation linking Slahi to the September 11 hijackers surfaced: bin al-Shibh said Slahi had hosted him and advised him to travel to Afghanistan for training. The account presents this as a subsequent intelligence lead, not as proof that Slahi participated in the attacks.

The legal record later narrowed the government’s position. 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 government initially argued that he could be detained for aiding the September 11 attacks, but later abandoned that theory, acknowledging that he probably did not even know about them. Judge James Robertson granted Slahi’s petition and ordered his release; the government appealed, and the appellate court remanded the case under a broader standard for assessing whether a detainee had been part of al-Qaeda. The sequence underscores the central distinction in Slahi’s account: a military campaign authorized in response to the attacks did not itself establish that every person swept into the ensuing security system was responsible for them.