Mohammed al-Qahtani

Mohammed Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani ( ar, محمد ماني احمد القحطاني) (sometimes transliterated as al-Kahtani) (born November 19, 1975) is a Saudi citizen who was detained as an al-Qaeda operative for 20 years in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detention camps in Cuba. Qahtani allegedly tried to enter the United States to take part in the September 11 attacks as the 20th hijacker and was due to be onboard United Airlines Flight 93 along with the four other hijackers. He was refused entry due to suspicions that he was trying to illegally immigrate. He was later captured in Afghanistan in the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001.

After military commissions were authorized by Congress, in February 2008, Qahtani was charged on numerous counts. In May, the charges were dropped without prejudice. New charges were filed against him in November 2008 and dropped in January 2009, as evidence had been obtained through torture and was inadmissible in court. This was the first time an official of the Bush administration had admitted any torture of detainees at Guantanamo.

In a ''Washington Post'' interview in January 2009, Susan Crawford of the Department of Defense said "we tortured Qahtani", saying that the U.S. government had so abused Qahtani through isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity and exposure to cold that he was in a "life-threatening condition."

On March 6, 2022, Qahtani was airlifted from Guantanamo Bay by the U.S. military and flown back to Saudi Arabia to a mental health treatment facility after 20 years in American custody. His release was announced by the U.S. Department of Defense the next day.

Early life

Mohammed al-Qahtani was born on 19 November 1975 in Kharj, Saudi Arabia. He is a Saudi national from a large Sunni family. His father served as a police officer for 28 years. His mother remained at home to raise their twelve children. He has seven brothers and four sisters, who range in age from 14 to 42 years of age.

Denied entry by US immigration

On August 3, 2001, Qahtani at the age of 26 flew into Orlando, Florida, from Dubai. He was questioned by immigration agent José Meléndez-Pérez, who was dubious that he could support himself with only $2,800 cash to his name, and suspicious that he intended to become an illegal immigrant, as he was using a one-way ticket. He was sent back to Dubai, and subsequently returned to Saudi Arabia.

Transfer to Guantanamo

Captured in the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, Qahtani was shipped by the Americans with other detainees in June 2002 to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp set up five months prior at the United States Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He continued giving a false name, and insisted he had been in the area solely to pursue an interest in falconry.

After ten months, U.S. Border and Immigration Authorities took a fingerprint sample and discovered that he was the same person who had tried to enter the United States just before the September 11 attacks. Seizing the airport's CCTV surveillance recordings, the FBI claimed they were able to identify the car of Mohamed Atta at the airport, believed to be there to pick up Qahtani. Another military account stated that Qahtani was identified as someone who had previously been turned away due to visa problems – by fingerprints "taken in Southwest Asia".

At that time, the military invited FBI interrogators to interview Qahtani. By the fall of 2002, they were frustrated by his resistance. DOD interrogators talked of using different techniques, based on a class they attended.

Shortly after September 26, 2002, top administration political appointees: David Addington, the VP's chief of staff; Alberto Gonzales, then White House Counsel; John A. Rizzo of the CIA; William Haynes II, General Counsel of DOD; his legal assistant, Jack Goldsmith; and two Justice Department lawyers, Alice S. Fisher and Patrick F. Philbin, flew to Camp Delta to view Qahtani and talk with his interrogators. They were trying to develop ways to break down detainee resistance and had come up with a list of potential techniques to be used.

Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the top legal adviser at Guantanamo, suggested to her command in Defense that acting with "pure intent" was important, and they might seek immunity from "command authorities" prior to using such harsh interrogation techniques. (In August 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, had provided legal opinions (later called the Torture Memos) to the CIA that narrowly defined torture and authorized the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, since commonly defined as torture).

The political appointees went on to Charleston, South Carolina to view Jose Padilla, and finally to Norfolk, Virginia to view Yaser Esam Hamdi. These men were United States citizens. Like the foreign detainees in Guantanamo, they were held in solitary confinement, where most human contact was with their interrogators, according to a theory about how to develop dependence among prisoners, for long-term gathering of intelligence by interrogators. At this time, none of the detainees, including the American citizens, had access to counsel or federal courts.

Qahtani had initially been interrogated by FBI agents, who used standard techniques based in police work. On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorized in writing the use of 17 enhanced interrogation techniques to be used against Qahtani (see next section). After details of Qahtani's status were leaked in 2004, the US Department of Defense issued a press release stating that Qahtani had admitted:
* He had been sent to the US by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the lead architect of the 9/11 attack;
* He had met Osama bin Laden on several occasions;
* He had terrorist training at two al-Qaeda camps;
* He had been in contact with many senior al-Qaeda leaders.

Al-Qahtani is also said to have informed interrogators that he had received operational training in covert communications from Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whom he identified as a courier for Osama bin Laden. This was an early lead at a time when the hunt for bin Laden by other means had ground to a halt, but, as the national security expert Peter Bergen has noted, it had to be combined with another eight years of work, relying on a wide variety of techniques of intelligence-gathering, to culminate in the US government's 2011 raid on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killing of the al-Qaeda leader.

Documented abuses while in Guantanamo

At Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of 17 aggressive interrogation techniques, known as the "First Special Interrogation Plan," authorized in writing by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002, and implemented under the supervision and guidance of Secretary Rumsfeld and the commander of Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller. After complaints from military investigators, the list of approved techniques was reduced.

The special interrogation plan and techniques were not revealed until 2008 in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee during its investigation of detainee treatment, and were reported by the FBI Inspector General, Glenn Fine. The authorized techniques were related to those described in the three August 2002 legal opinions, later known as the Torture Memos, drafted by John Yoo and signed by Jay S. Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, issued to the CIA.

Under these coercive techniques, Qahtani gave additional information, including naming 30 other prisoners as working directly for bin Laden. The military used this information as justification to hold the men as enemy combatants. But, because the material was extracted under torture, it was later considered inadmissible in court. Qahtani later recanted this testimony, saying he had given the names of other detainees only to stop the abuse.

It was not until February 2008 that Qahtani was first charged before a military commission, and the prosecution dropped the charges in May of that year. He was charged again in November 2008, but on January 14, 2009, Susan J. Crawford, a senior Pentagon official of the Bush administration, stated that she would not proceed with his prosecution. She said that Qahtani's "treatment met the legal definition of torture.... The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive". As convening authority of the military commissions, Crawford was responsible for overseeing the Guantanamo military commissions. Her statement was the first time any top official of the Bush administration had said there was torture of detainees at Guantanamo.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a defense lawyer for al-Qahtani who works for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights