A Timeline of Detention
| January 2000 | After spending twelve years studying, living, and working overseas, primarily in Germany and briefly in Canada, Mohamedou Ould Slahi decides to return to his home country of Mauritania. En route, he is detained twice at the behest of the United States—first by Senegalese police and then by Mauritanian authorities—and questioned by American FBI agents in connection with the so-called Millennium Plot to bomb LAX. Concluding that there is no basis to believe he was involved in the plot, authorities release him on February 19, 2000. |
| 2000–fall 2001 | Mohamedou lives with his family and works as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott, Mauritania. |
| September 29, 2001 | Mohamedou is detained and held for two weeks by Mauritanian authorities and again questioned by FBI agents about the Millennium Plot. He is again released, with Mauritanian authorities publicly affirming his innocence. |
| November 20, 2001 | Mauritanian police come to Mohamedou’s home and ask him to accompany them for further questioning. He voluntarily complies, driving his own car to the police station. |
| November 28, 2001 | A CIA rendition plane transports Mohamedou from Mauritania to a prison in Amman, Jordan, where he is interrogated for seven and a half months by Jordanian intelligence services. |
| July 19, 2002 | Another CIA rendition plane retrieves Mohamedou from Amman; he is stripped, blindfolded, diapered, shackled, and flown to the U.S. military’s Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The events recounted in Guantánamo Diary begin with this scene. |
| August 4, 2002 | After two weeks of interrogation in Bagram, Mohamedou is bundled onto a military transport with thirty-four other prisoners and flown to Guantánamo. The group arrives and is processed into the facility on August 5, 2002. |
| 2003–2004 | U.S. military interrogators subject Mohamedou to a “special interrogation plan” that is personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mohamedou’s torture includes months of extreme isolation; a litany of physical, psychological, and sexual humiliations; death threats; threats to his family; and a mock kidnapping and rendition. |
| March 3, 2005 | Mohamedou handwrites his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. |
| Summer 2005 | Mohamedou handwrites the 466 pages that would become this book in his segregation cell in Guantánamo. |
| June 12, 2008 | The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5–4 in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantánamo detainees have a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus. |
| August–December 2009 | U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson hears Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition. |
| March 22, 2010 | Judge Robertson grants Mohamedou’s habeas corpus petition and orders his release. |
| March 26, 2010 | The Obama administration files a notice of appeal. |
| November 5, 2010 | The DC Circuit Court of Appeals sends Mohamedou’s habeas corpus case back to U.S. district court for rehearing. It languishes there for years. |
| January 20, 2015 | Guantánamo Diary is published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and seven other countries. Publishers in nineteen more countries will release translations of the book in the next two years. |
| June 2, 2016 | Mohamedou appears before a Periodic Review Board in Guantánamo. |
| July 14, 2016 | The Periodic Review Board concludes Mohamedou’s imprisonment in Guantánamo “is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.” |
| October 16, 2016 | Mohamedou is released from Guantánamo. As he was on the flight to Guantánamo fourteen years before, he is shackled and wears a blindfold and earmuffs on the U.S. military transport throughout the flight. |
| October 17, 2016 | The military transport lands at the airport in Nouakchott, Mauritania, around 2 p.m. A few hours later, Mohamedou is reunited with his family. |
Note on the Text and Annotations of the Restored Edition
At the end of my Notes on the Text, Redactions, and Annotations for the first published edition of Guantánamo Diary, I wrote,
So many of the editing challenges associated with bringing this remarkable work to print result directly from the fact that the U.S. government continues to hold the work’s author, with no satisfactory explanation to date, under a censorship regime that prevents him from participating in the editorial process. I look forward to the day when Mohamedou Ould Slahi is