United States–Mauritania security cooperation

United States–Mauritania security cooperation appears in the account not as an abstract diplomatic relationship but as a consequential arrangement: after Mohamedou Ould Slahi surrendered to authorities in Mauritania in September 2001, the United States and the Mauritanian government agreed to send him to Jordan for further interrogation. The surrounding political history and the manuscript’s evidentiary limits show how counterterrorism partnership could shape a person’s route through detention while leaving important parts of the record concealed.

Political Context

The cooperation took place under President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, who came to power in a military coup in 1984 and became president in 1992. His government carried out repeated arrests of political opponents and Islamists. In one crackdown described in the editorial notes, more than ninety people—including a former government minister and ten religious leaders—were arrested, then amnestied after publicly confessing to membership in illegal organizations.

A later campaign against Islamists in the army and education system preceded a failed coup attempt in 2003. Taya was deposed in a successful coup in 2005. The account connects his declining public support in part to his support for United States counterterrorism policies and to the aggressive domestic campaign against Islamists. It specifically identifies the allowance of Slahi’s rendition as part of that cooperation, placing his case within a wider political relationship rather than presenting it as an isolated transfer.

Slahi’s Transfer Through the Partnership

Slahi recounts that on September 29, 2001, he received a telephone call asking him to turn himself in, and that he complied because he expected to be cleared. He says United States personnel questioned him in Mauritania before the United States reached an agreement with the Mauritanian government to send him to Jordan. He describes the purpose of that transfer as extracting further information from him.

The agreement began a sequence of transfers across jurisdictions. Slahi says he was detained and interrogated in Jordan for eight months, then taken by United States personnel to Bagram Air Base for two weeks, and finally transferred to Guantánamo. The account thus portrays cooperation as a practical mechanism for moving a detainee beyond the place where he first surrendered and into a prolonged, multinational detention route. Slahi’s description of the agreement and its consequences is his own account; the editorial notes separately identify the permission for his rendition as part of Taya’s cooperation with the United States.

Cooperation, Power, and Detention

Slahi’s account emphasizes the disparity between the two governments. He argues that the United States had greater power over non-American nationals than over its own citizens, and describes the Mauritanian government as cooperating with the United States. In this framing, cooperation was not simply an exchange between equivalent partners: it enabled United States authorities to pursue questioning and custody beyond their own territory, while Slahi had little control over where he would be held next.

The consequences extended beyond the transfer itself. Slahi remained in United States custody at Guantánamo for years without a criminal trial. A federal judge granted his habeas corpus petition in 2010 and ordered his release, but the United States appealed, and the appeals court returned the case to the district court for rehearing. The legal dispute did not resolve the underlying history of the cooperation, but it prolonged the uncertainty surrounding the detention that the transfer had helped make possible.

Documentary Record and Its Limits

The account’s treatment of the relationship depends on both Slahi’s recollections and later public documentation. The editor describes consulting declassified government records, reporting, published investigations, and Justice Department and Senate investigations. Those materials offer a way to compare the manuscript with records outside it, but the editor explicitly declines to reconstruct redacted passages or disclose classified material. The annotations present contextual interpretations only where the information is public or can be inferred from careful reading, and acknowledge that those interpretations may be mistaken.

That caution matters because the government’s redactions obscure parts of the manuscript and impede the reader’s view of events and actors. The editor notes that neither Slahi’s security-cleared attorneys nor other people with access to the unredacted manuscript reviewed or confirmed the introductory materials and annotations. The relationship is therefore legible in its broad outline—the political partnership, the agreement to transfer Slahi, and the ensuing route of detention—while some of the information needed to reconstruct its full workings remains unavailable.