The United States in Guantánamo Diary is less a bounded setting than a power that reaches across borders: it helps set Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s route through detention, directs the questioning that follows, and continues to restrict the account through which that history can be read. The narrative links this international reach to a domestic system of records, investigations, and editorial controls, while distinguishing documented findings from what remains redacted or uncertain.

A destination and a directing power

The book frames the beginning of Slahi’s detention odyssey around a flight from Canada to Senegal in January 2000. A timeline included in Judge James Robertson’s declassified 2010 order records that Slahi and his brothers were seized after arriving in Senegal and questioned about the Millennium Plot. An American took photographs; afterward, someone Slahi presumed to be American flew him to Mauritania for further questioning. The timeline makes the United States present before the account reaches American military custody: its involvement begins within a chain of transfers conducted on foreign soil.

That chain gives the United States a distinctive place in the narrative. Slahi’s account describes an eighteen-month journey of roughly twenty thousand miles through four countries, with American participation in the detentions and the United States directing the process. Mauritania appears not simply as a place where he is questioned but as a country whose authorities can be drawn into an arrest sought by the United States. The book presents the resulting geography as a structure of custody: distance from home does not mean distance from the power determining where Slahi will be held.

Arrest, records, and institutional reach

Between two arrests in Mauritania, Slahi returned to computer and electronics work, first for a medical-supply and Internet-services company and then for a family-owned import business. After his October 2001 release, Mauritanian intelligence officials assured his employer that he could return to work. A little over a month later, following a day preparing a bid to upgrade the president’s telephone and computer systems, Slahi was summoned again. He drove himself to police headquarters, expecting to come home soon; this time, he disappeared.

Slahi describes the later arrest as the result of a request passing from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the president of the United States and then to Mauritania’s president. Before his phone was taken, he called someone to say he had been arrested and erased his contacts. The numbers, he explains, belonged to business partners in Mauritania and Germany, not to a clandestine network; he feared that innocent associates would be harassed because they appeared in his phone. He also deleted an entry that could be misread as a reference to Osama bin Laden, although it was the German word for a computer store. The episode shows how an ordinary object and its stored information could acquire a threatening meaning once interpreted within the government’s suspicion of him.

That suspicion extended to a company computer Slahi had used at work. When shown images from its hard drive during questioning in Jordan, he recognized business correspondence and photographs. The computer was shared by employees and contained the company’s financial information as well as private material belonging to the family that owned it. Slahi’s concern was not only that the search would expose his own correspondence, including messages to Muslim friends, but that a foreign government’s access could compromise the privacy of people and a business that had trusted him.

Interrogation and the movement of custody

The book traces Slahi’s passage from questioning in Mauritania to secret detention in Jordan, then to Bagram Air Base and the Guantánamo system. A 2004 Central Intelligence Agency inspector general report, as quoted in the introductory material, describes the agency’s interest in the eventual disposition of detainees and in isolating people who might reveal the circumstances of their detention. The account also notes that, despite six months of Central Intelligence Agency custody in Jordan, the agency apparently supplied no interrogation intelligence of its own to the Guantánamo prosecutors. Stuart Couch, the Marine prosecutor assigned to Slahi’s case, later said that the reports he received largely came from Slahi’s questioning at Guantánamo.

Couch’s suspicions about that questioning were tested against records rather than left as inference. His investigator gained access to military interrogation files, including daily memoranda detailing both what was said and how information was obtained. Although those files remained classified, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice published investigations that described a second, carefully planned special interrogation and found substantial agreement between the documented methods and Slahi’s account. The published record included a forged Department of Defense letter alleging his involvement in the Millennium Plot and the September 11 attacks while threatening the detention of his mother. The letter’s appearance in the investigations made the pressure on Slahi’s family legible without establishing every detail hidden by redactions.

The documented plan also used a staged boat journey to make Slahi believe he had been taken away from Guantánamo. The original plan proposed a helicopter flight, but investigators reported that it was abandoned as too difficult to organize. On August 25, 2003, Slahi was instead removed from Camp Delta wearing blackout goggles and taken on a disorienting ride aboard a watercraft, where he could hear prearranged deceptive conversation. The Senate inquiry described his subsequent placement in Camp Echo, where the cell and interrogation room were altered to reduce outside stimulation: preparations included blocking light and limiting visual contact with guards. These findings place the United States’ power not only in the decision to transfer a detainee, but in the design of the conditions under which he was questioned.

Censorship, evidence, and the limits of the record

The United States also enters the book as the authority that controls what can be published. Larry Siems explains that government redactions interrupt the narrative, blur the contours of people in it, and make Slahi’s voice less accessible. The black bars are therefore both absences in the text and visible signs of the continuing control exercised over its author. Editing could regularize language, consolidate passages, and integrate flashbacks, but it could not restore Slahi’s participation in decisions about a manuscript that remained subject to censorship.

The annotations accompanying the text record an effort to read around those absences. They draw on context elsewhere in the manuscript, declassified documents obtained through information requests and litigation, reporting, and government investigations. Siems explicitly does not claim to reconstruct the original redacted wording or uncover classified material. Instead, he offers what he considers the most plausible publicly documented or textually evident information, only where it helps the work’s readability and impact. He also makes clear that Slahi’s attorneys with security clearances and others with access to the unredacted manuscript did not review or confirm the annotations. The distinction matters: a plausible explanation of a redaction is not the same as access to the concealed text.

The book thus presents the United States in two connected forms: as the power capable of arranging custody across national borders, and as the government that can limit public access to the story of that custody. Its account is supported at points by judicial timelines, interrogation files, and official investigations, while other passages remain obscured or necessarily qualified. The resulting incompleteness is not merely a gap in the narrative; it is part of the evidence the narrative asks readers to confront.