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return to Mauritania in February 2000, and again a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the focus was on the Millennium Plot. This appears to have been the case for his rendition to Jordan as well: “The Jordanians were investigating my part in the Millennium plot,” Mohamedou told the Administrative Review Board in 2005. “They told me they are especially concerned about the Millennium plot.”
    By the time the CIA delivered Mohamedou to Jordan, though, Ahmed Ressam had been cooperating for months with the Justice Department in the United States, and by the time the CIA retrieved Mohamedou eight months later, Ressam had testified in two terrorism trials and provided the names of more than 150 people involved in terrorism to the U.S. government and the governments of six other countries. Some of those people were Guantánamo detainees, and the U.S. government has used Ressam’s statements as evidence against them in their habeas cases.Not so with Mohamedou. Ressam “conspicuously fails to implicate Salahi,” Robertson noted in his habeas opinion.
    The CIA would have known this. The agency would also have known if the Jordanians had uncovered anything linking Mohamedou to the Millennium Plot, the September 11 attacks, or any other terrorist plots. But the CIA apparently never provided any information from his interrogation in Amman to Guantánamo prosecutors. In a 2012 interview with the Rule of Law Oral History Project at Columbia University, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, the Marine prosecutor assigned to build a case against Mohamedou in Guantánamo, said that the CIA showed him no intelligence reports of its own, and most of the reports the agency did share with him came from Mohamedou’s Guantánamo interrogation. “He had been in their custody for six months. They knew I was the lead prosecutor. They knew we were contemplating a capital case. If we could have found his connection to 9/11, we were going to go for the death penalty.”
    “So something must have gone on,” Stuart Couch surmised in that interview. “Slahi was in the custody of the CIA, and they must have felt like they got as much information out of him as they could, or the information they had didn’t pan out to his significance, and they just kind of threw him over to U.S. military control at Bagram, Afghanistan.” 16
    There is a chilling passage in the 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation report
Counterterrorism and Detention Interrogation Activities, September 2001–October 2003
, one of only two unredacted passages in a four-page blacked-out section of the report headed “Endgame.” It says:
    The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition ofdetainees and a particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely have divulged information about the circumstances of their detention.
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    In early 2002, not even Mohamedou’s family knew he was in Jordan. Few people anywhere knew that the United States was operating a rendition, detention, and interrogation program, and that it was doing so not just with the assistance of long-standing allies like the Jordanian intelligence service but also with the cooperation of other, shakier friends. Mauritania was such a friend. In 2002, Mauritania’s president and multidecade ruler Ould Taya was under fire internationally for his country’s human rights record, and at home for his close cooperation with the United States’ antiterrorism policies. That Mohamedou had been questioned by FBI agents in his own country in 2000 had been controversial enough to attract the press. What if he had returned to the country in mid-2002 with stories that he had been turned over to the Americans without extradition proceedings, in violation of an explicit Mauritanian constitutional protection; that the CIA had delivered him in secret to Jordan; and that he had been