The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan appears in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account not as a battlefield narrative but as the opening of a larger political and security campaign. He places the military action against the Taliban government alongside the U.S. government’s subsequent secret operation to seize, detain, interrogate, and sometimes kill terrorism suspects, linking international policy to his own passage through a chain of custody outside ordinary legal process.

Authorization and Campaign

In his closing account, Slahi says that, at President George W. Bush’s direction, the United States began a campaign against the Taliban government in Afghanistan. He identifies a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress, dated September 18, 2001, as authorizing the president to use force against nations, organizations, or persons that had planned, authorized, committed, or aided the September 11 attacks, or had harbored those responsible. The breadth of that authorization is part of the context he gives for what followed; the passage does not describe military operations or battlefield events.

Slahi distinguishes the campaign against the Taliban from the secret operation that began afterward. He characterizes that operation as having no legal basis and describes its purpose as the capture, detention, interrogation, or killing of suspected terrorists. His account thus places a publicly authorized use of force beside a covert detention system, without treating the two as identical or claiming that the resolution itself authorized every method used in that system.

From Security Campaign to Detention

The book’s chronology shows that Slahi had already been questioned about the Millennium Plot before the invasion. In January 2000, after returning toward Mauritania from years abroad, he was detained first by Senegalese police and then by Mauritanian authorities, and questioned by FBI agents. He was released on February 19, 2000, after authorities concluded there was no basis to believe he had been involved. After a further detention and questioning in September 2001, Mauritanian authorities again released him and publicly affirmed his innocence.

On November 28, 2001, a CIA rendition plane carried Slahi from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan. Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him there for seven and a half months. In the account’s final reflection, Slahi describes his transfer as the result of an agreement between the United States and the Mauritanian government, and situates it within the secret operation that had followed the September attacks. The sequence connects the campaign’s political setting to his personal experience, while distinguishing the earlier investigations and releases from his later transfer into secret detention.

The Expanding Interrogation System

The detention system continued across transfers and institutions. In July 2002, another CIA plane took Slahi from Amman to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan; after two weeks there, he was flown to Guantánamo with thirty-four other prisoners. The account does not establish that the invasion itself determined these transfers. Instead, it shows how Slahi’s detention unfolded within the broader security framework that the post-September 11 campaign helped define.

At Guantánamo, disagreements over interrogation methods developed into a conflict between military interrogators and FBI and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents. In the fall of 2002, the military formed a Special Projects Team and prepared an interrogation plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani. With Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization, that plan was implemented as a fifty-day, round-the-clock program involving sleep deprivation, noise, cold, stress positions, threats, and humiliating treatment. The episode documents the spread of coercive methods within military detention; it is presented as a development at the camp, not as a battle of the invasion.

Slahi’s own interrogation later took place under a special plan personally approved by Rumsfeld. During 2003 and 2004, it involved prolonged isolation, physical and psychological abuse, humiliation, threats against Slahi and his family, and a staged kidnapping and rendition. The account places these actions within the broader detention system while identifying their immediate institutional setting as his Guantánamo interrogation.

Institutional Consequences and Significance

A passage from the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report describes the agency’s interest in the disposition of detainees and in isolating those who might otherwise disclose the circumstances of their detention. The report excerpt does not establish the invasion’s direct operational consequences, but it illuminates the logic of secrecy within the detention system Slahi describes: controlling where detainees were held also controlled what could become known about their treatment.

The later legal proceedings show another consequence of the post-September 11 detention framework. In 2010, Judge James Robertson granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition and ordered his release. The government appealed, and the appeals court remanded the case under a broader standard for determining whether a detainee was part of al-Qaeda. The court emphasized that Slahi had not been criminally indicted for material support and that the government was not seeking to detain him on the ground that he aided the September 11 attacks. The invasion therefore remains significant in the book as the public military context for a prolonged detention regime whose justifications and limits were later contested in court.