War on Terror

The War on Terror in Guantánamo Diary is both a period of U.S. policy after the September 11 attacks and the framework used to justify the secret detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. Through Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s passage from Mauritania to Jordan, Bagram Air Base, and Guantánamo, the book traces how an initial investigation expanded into years of confinement, even as the government’s public and legal accounts of his supposed importance shifted. The term names a campaign against violence, but in Slahi’s account it also describes a system in which suspicion could cross borders more readily than legal process could constrain it.

From investigation to secret transfer

Slahi’s encounters with U.S. authorities began before the September 11 attacks. In January 2000, after twelve years studying, living, and working abroad, he was returning to Mauritania when he was detained first by Senegalese police and then by Mauritanian authorities. FBI agents questioned him about the Millennium Plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Authorities concluded there was no basis to believe he had participated and released him on February 19. He then lived with his family and worked as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott.

On September 29, 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained Slahi for two weeks and FBI agents again questioned him about the Millennium Plot. He was released, with Mauritanian officials publicly affirming his innocence. When police came to his home on November 20 seeking further questioning, he went with them voluntarily and drove his own car to the station. Eight days later, a CIA rendition plane took him to a prison in Amman, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. In this sequence, an investigation that had twice ended in release gave way to a transfer beyond ordinary public scrutiny.

On July 19, 2002, another CIA plane took Slahi from Amman to Bagram Air Base. After two weeks there, he was flown with thirty-four other prisoners to Guantánamo; they arrived on August 5. The account in Guantánamo Diary begins with the Bagram transfer. The accompanying chronology makes the institutional movement legible: questioning in Mauritania, secret custody in Jordan, U.S. military detention in Afghanistan, and confinement on the island. The change of location did not bring a clear public explanation of why Slahi remained detained.

The expanding machinery of interrogation

The book places Slahi’s treatment within a broader change in military interrogation policy. In September and October 2002, military interrogators established a Special Projects Team and developed an interrogation plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani. The plan drew on enhanced methods already used by the CIA. Following objections from FBI and Criminal Investigation Task Force agents, and later authorization by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, al-Qahtani was subjected to an extreme, round-the-clock interrogation regime. This institutional conflict matters to Slahi’s story because it shows that the choice of methods was contested within the U.S. government even as the methods were being put into practice.

In 2003 and 2004, Slahi himself became the subject of a special interrogation plan approved by Rumsfeld. It involved months of extreme isolation, physical, psychological, and sexual humiliations, threats of death and harm to his family, and a staged kidnapping and rendition. The book also describes other detainees being subjected to harsh interrogation and restrictions on religious practice. Slahi’s account presents these experiences as part of a camp environment in which interrogators were trained to anticipate dangerous enemies, while detainees were often transferred into U.S. custody without proper judicial process. The resulting climate, he argues, made reconciliation unlikely and allowed suspicion to shape how prisoners were treated before their individual circumstances were understood.

The account connects that climate to the political aftermath of September 11. Slahi writes that Americans had become chaotic, vengeful, and confused after the attacks. Congress authorized the use of force on September 18, 2001, against those who had planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attacks, or harbored those responsible. The government then began a secret operation to capture, detain, interrogate, or kill terrorism suspects. Slahi identifies himself as a victim of that operation and maintains that he had committed none of the crimes at issue. His narrative treats the campaign’s exceptional powers not as an abstract policy debate but as forces that altered where he could be held, who could question him, and whether his family could know where he was.

A changing case and its legal limits

A connection between Slahi and the September 11 hijackers surfaced after Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured on September 11, 2002. Bin al-Shibh reportedly identified Slahi as someone he had met in Germany in October 1999, stayed with for a night, and received advice from about going to Afghanistan to train. He also reportedly described Slahi as an operative of Usama bin Laden. The allegation marked a change in the public and institutional meaning attached to Slahi: a man initially questioned about the Millennium Plot was now linked to the September 11 attacks through another prisoner’s account.

Yet the available legal record did not simply confirm the most sweeping versions of that accusation. When Slahi’s habeas petition came before federal court in 2009, the government did not argue that he was a major al-Qaeda figure or that he had taken part in an al-Qaeda attack or plan. Its case instead rested on his oath of allegiance, associations, alleged assistance, and past contacts with people connected to al-Qaeda. A footnote in the declassified version of Judge James Robertson’s order stated that the government had abandoned its initial argument that Slahi was detainable for aiding the September 11 attacks, acknowledging that he probably did not know about them.

Judge Robertson granted the habeas petition and ordered Slahi released. The order came amid a broader series of Guantánamo cases in which the government had lost thirty-four of forty-six habeas proceedings by April 1, 2010. On appeal, however, the D.C. Circuit adopted a looser standard for deciding whether a detainee was part of al-Qaeda and reversed Robertson’s order, remanding the case for rehearing. The appellate court emphasized that Slahi had not been criminally indicted for material support and that the government was not seeking to detain him on the basis that he aided the September 11 attacks. The legal proceedings thus expose a central tension in the period: grave public labels could circulate even when the government’s courtroom case was narrower and the governing detention standard remained contested.

Public narratives and the record of detention

The conflict over Slahi’s case extended into public commentary. A March 2010 New York Daily News editorial described him as a leading recruiter for the September 11 attacks and called the order for his release a rush. The later-released court order showed that the government had abandoned the theory that Slahi aided the attacks. The book uses this contrast to show how public certainty could outrun the legal record: the editorial urged continued detention without access to the order, filings, or hearing that formed the basis of the judge’s decision.

Slahi’s account also challenges assumptions about what interrogation produced. He describes interrogators as being taught to regard detainees, especially Arab prisoners, as exceptionally dangerous, while basic information about the people they questioned could be withheld or misunderstood. The result, in his telling, was a persistent gap between the identity assigned to a prisoner and the evidence actually developed about him. This does not erase the allegations or the recorded contacts that formed the government’s case; it clarifies why the book distinguishes suspicion, association, and proof rather than treating them as interchangeable.

The manuscript itself reflects the difficulty of establishing a record under these conditions. Government redactions obscure names and passages, and the editor’s annotations document efforts to read those gaps using context and publicly available material without claiming to reconstruct classified text. That restraint is significant to the book’s treatment of the War on Terror: the narrative records what Slahi says he experienced while also marking what remains unavailable or uncertain. The result is an account in which detention is not only a series of transfers and interrogations, but also a struggle over who may define the facts, what can be made public, and how long a person can be held while the official explanation changes.