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Qatari Al-Qaeda suspect alleges US torture at naval base Convicted Al-Qaeda terrorist says admission of guilt was obtained with torture, sues FBI agent
(about 5 hours later)
A Qatari man convicted of being a “sleeper terrorist” linked to those behind 9/11 has claimed he was tortured and abused by authorities while being held at a US naval base. The only “enemy combatant” in the War on Terror arrested on US soil now insists he was innocent and demands that those who allegedly tortured him while he was in confinement at a South Carolina naval base be arrested and tried.
The alleged abuse of one-time businessman Ali al-Marri has been documented in a report compiled by the UK advocacy group Cage. Al-Marri, who had arrived in the US on September 10, 2001, was arrested in December that year. He was declared an “enemy combatant” and held for six years at Charleston Naval Brig in South Carolina. Ali al-Marri, a Qatari citizen, was detained in December 2001 in Illinois. Police later found fake IDs, a printout of 1,750 credit cards, information about toxic chemicals, detailed information about US waterways and extremist Islamist literature in his possession.
READ MORE: Retired intelligence operatives ask Trump to reverse Haspel CIA nomination In 2003, after being reclassified as a military adversary, al-Marri was transported to the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, and six years later he took a plea deal when facing trial. As part of it, he admitted that he had been in contact with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, visited multiple terrorist training camps and traveled to the US in anticipation of further instructions from Al-Qaeda, to whom he pledged his loyalty.
In their investigation, FBI officers found materials on US waterways and toxic chemicals as well as lists of hundreds of American credit card numbers. In 2009, he was jailed for 15 years after pleading guilty in a civil court to working with Al-Qaeda. Now, three years after his release, al-Marri is denying all the charges made against him, saying that he took a plea deal after “suffering sustained abuse” at the hands of US officials. He was released in 2015 and traveled back to Doha, where he was hailed as a hero and has now launched a campaign to clear his name with the aid of CAGE, a controversial UK-headquartered Muslim advocacy group.
“Ali al-Marri might have taken a plea deal and admitted to being an unknowing part of the 9/11 plot, he now emphatically denies every allegation that he was involved in terrorism, and claims he did so due to the coercion of being in solitary confinement and suffering sustained abuse,” the Cage report reads.   “Everything in that plea bargain that has to do with Al-Qaeda and terror is 100% false,” he told the Guardian. “My battery was at 1%, I’m done. From seven years of isolation, I missed my kids, my wife. To kiss my mum before she died outweighed my need to show innocence. In the military jail there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”
READ MORE: 'Severe democracy flaws:' China releases report on human rights in US Al-Marri has repeatedly insisted that he was mistreated while in the military jail, and his sentencing judge even admitted that his conditions were “unacceptable” factoring the circumstance into the verdict.
Speaking to the Guardian three years after his release, the one-time businessman claimed his wife had been reading about rivers and lakes as well as planning to set up a business importing chemicals into the US at the time of his arrest. The report outlines instances of intimidation, isolation, freezing cell conditions, sleep deprivation and threats of physical and sexual assault by the FBI as well as other staff at the naval base. “I was treated the worst of any inmate in America. I had no mattress, no blanket, no pillow, no Koran or prayer rug. I had no idea which way is Mecca, so I prayed each way each time,” al-Marri told the Guardian.
Al-Marri claims he was subjected to a technique known as ‘dry boarding’ in which a sock is stuffed down the subject’s throat and a duck tape placed over the mouth. The report specifically names individuals al-Marri says carried out the attacks against him. He has returned to Qatar since his release from custody in 2015. His most potent accusation is that he was “dry-boarded” on one occasion in 2004 in the presence of three FBI agents, including Ali Soufan, a prominent former FBI agent, author and terrorism expert. Dry-boarding involves stuffing a sock in the subject’s mouth and taping it up, to make him feel like he is choking, in a bid to get him to reveal information.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Al-Marri’s lawyers have lodged a request for an arrest warrant for Soufan with the Met Police War Crimes Unit in London.
“We have been forced to seek justice outside of the US, when it was denied to my client inside. The systematic programme of torture coerced him into accepting a lie in order to return home. Now we have an opportunity to redress this wrong by highlighting how torture took place, and who was involved,” wrote his legal representative, Andrew J. Savage of the Savage Law Firm, in a statement published by CAGE, which urged NGOs in other countries to launch separate legal proceedings against Soufan.
The former interrogator, who has publicly spoken out against torture, has rejected “false allegations by a convicted terrorist [that] have absolutely no basis in fact.”
The FBI has also batted away the charges, telling the Guardian that it “does not engage in torture and we maintain that rapport-building techniques are the most effective means of obtaining accurate information in an interrogation.”