Hello and welcome to a new episode of Jamra show
Our episode for today is about one of the important intelligence arms of Qatar:
Ali Soufan,
The former FBI agent
and who was charged with investigating 9/11
Welcome again, everybody.
The New Yorker has published
an article accusing me of many things
and I’ll talk about the most important parts of it.
In May 2020,
officials with the CIA informed Ali Soufan
that Al Qaeda militants were plotting against him.
Members of the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy,
have opened an investigation,
concluding that the campaign was being run from Saudi Arabia
by a journalist named Hussain al-Ghawi
who has a YouTube program called "Jamra"
The team concluded
that I was the one who claimed responsibility for the attack on Jamal Khashoggi
while he was in Washington
and that there had been a previous discussion between Khashoggi and I,
where I wrote to him at the time, "There is no one bigger than the homeland."
And that I had published false information about Ali Soufan
and his work in Qatar,
accusing him of torturing detainees in the 9/11 events,
and even threatening him publicly on Twitter
by tweeting at him, "make yourself dead."
Many members of the US Congress engaged with the article.
The article was published in more than 50 foreign,
Arab, Iranian and Turkish newspapers,
and in a number of television channels,
including Al-Jazeera.
“Earlier this May,
Soufan received a call from the CIA
warning him about a Saudi plan against him.
Two weeks later,
Soufan was bullied on social media
including death threats”
Of course,
for this topic to be exciting and to be spread widely,
the Saudi government and MBS were dragged into the matter in a way that is silly,
to say the least – that they are behind the targeting of Ali Soufan with no clues or evidence regarding the matter,
when in fact
there was no targeting,
but only that I wrote few tweets about the details of Soufan's work as I’m going elaborate later on.
Before refuting the points mentioned in the article,
I have tried to reach out to the magazine.
but I received no reply.
First,
the article says
that in May – in the same month where Soufan
was informed about the Al-Qaeda plot against him
a social media campaign  was launched against Soufan
and that I was behind it.
The fact is that
I talked about Soufan in January
after he accused Saudi Arabia of being behind 9/11.
His accusation came in a reply to US Vice President on Twitter.
The Vice President Tweeted, after the killing of Soleimani,
that Iran and Soleimani were accused of being involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Second,
Soufan’s intelligence team claimed it had concluded that
the campaign was being run from Saudi Arabia.
This is not true.
In fact,
the first hashtag on Twitter about Ali Soufan appeared in 2018
and it was from Qatar
because he had been accused of torturing a Qatari citizen named Ali Al-Marri.
The hashtag was trending at the time, calling for the expulsion of Soufan from Qatar.
Al-Marri himself appeared in a video in which he talked about the story of his torture
“after some time had passed,
it was revealed to me that the criminal who tortured me
in America’s prisons
the Lebanese Ali Soufan
is here in Qatar
and has multi-million dollar businesses in Qatar,
I hope that my family and brothers in Qatar support this Hashtag.”
And by the way,
Qataris were complaining about Soufan’s presence in Qatar since 2009
in their forums.
Third,
Soufan claims that he is against the torture methods that
were used on former detainees in the September events.
He was even seen as a national hero because he refused to torture detainees.
According to him, this was one of the reasons that led him to resign from the FBI.
He even wrote in his book, the Black Banners - that
he served tea and gave car magazines and meals from McDonald's to detainees during the interrogation.
I must confess: I believed him at first,
but after further investigation,
it became clear to me that he practiced the most severe, unimaginable methods of torture in interrogations.
And this is not my saying;
several foreign newspapers have reported it
and there are many lawsuits filed against Ali Soufan in London.
There are more than 2,500 documents corroborate their allegations,
for example,
making threats to rape the prisoners’ wives and families,
sexual assault threats,
suffocation, sleep deprivation, etc.
And here is a testimony given by the former Qatari detainee Ali Al-Marri himself.
Fourth,
as for Khashoggi, may Allah have mercy on him,
my tweets were ordinary tweets that I wrote in 2017.
In these tweets, I criticized Saudi media and the work of the old generation of journalists.
Jamal Khashoggi responded by rejecting my criticism of that generation of journalists.
My response to him was, “there is no one bigger than the homeland.
" As for the “make yourself dead” reply to Sofan,
I did not write that.
Rather, it was one of the sarcastic replies to the tweet
which I wrote about Ali Soufan and a funny meme taken from a comedy film.
Can you believe this?
Before I start talking about the most important information,
I liked to send a message to Soufan’s intelligence team:
what I do is journalism and it is protected by international laws,
specifically Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
So these methods of suppressing freedom of the press and intimidation will not work,
instead, I’ll reveal more in in this episode.
Forgive me, the Jamra program is my only platform to respond,
so I felt it was my duty to respond to this article.
I also would like to thank the twitter users who sympathized with me,
and several American journalists.
Let’s get into the most important part
Lebanon-born Ali Soufan
went to America to study,
then began his work in the FBI in 1996 as a translator,
and then directly joined the team overseeing the prosecution of al-Qaeda members.
He has also participated in several investigations,
most notably the investigations into the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya
and the investigations into the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen
and finally participated in the investigations of September 11, 2001.
Of course, before the events of 9/11,
there were very important operations that raised many questions
that suddenly disappeared from the files of the investigations
that were supervised by Ali Soufan:
For example,
the mastermind of the bombings, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
used to work for Qatar’s Water Department,
and he used to live in Qatar at the Al Waab farm,
which is owned by the Qatari Minister of Interior and Endowments, Abdullah bin Khalid Al Thani,
despite him being wanted by the United States for security reasons.
The person who revealed the information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
was the director of police and the minister of economy,
Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad.
What happened next?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not arrested in Doha
but they arrested Sheikh Hamad and returned him to Qatar
and suddenly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed disappeared before the eyes of Soufan and his team.
After Osama bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, he went to Doha
and lived in the Al-Waab farm for two weeks before leaving for Afghanistan.
He also returned to Doha in 2000
and was not arrested.
Mohammed al-Islambouli, brother of President Sadat’s killer
and bin Laden’s son-in-law.
He was a resident of Qatar
and accused of plotting terrorist operations known as the Bojinka plot in ’93.
He hasn’t been arrested and is now living in Turkey.
The USS Cole [attack] planner
had left Iraq and visited Qatar prior to carrying out the terrorist operation.
No one arrested him.
Bin Laden’s mobile phone,
with this number,
was bought by Sa’ad al-Faqih from the US for $7500
through a person named Khalid al-Fawwaz,
and sent it to Doha.
The well-known officer in charge John O’Neill,
then-FBI Deputy Director,
has located bin Laden and ordered his arrest.
But the then-US ambassador to Yemen refused the operation to be carried out.
John O’Neill resigned due to disruption of his duties by parties he hasn’t named.
John O’Neill was killed in the September bombings
two weeks after being appointed as World Trade Center security head.
Suspiciously,
the US ambassador works in Doha today,
in the same center where Soufan works.
She’s even a faculty member at Georgetown University in Qatar.
Before moving on to the crucial matter.
What’s been mentioned were just simple questions.
There are other big questions over events Soufan was very close to.
Notably, a large number of American officers
had information on serious operations the US would witness
in the summer of 2001,
and that’s exactly what happened in the painful September bombings.
Most important among those sources
was bin Laden’s financial manager, Jamal al-Fadl,
who surrendered to the US in 1997.
He appeared before New York courts 11 months prior to the bombings,
warning them that al-Qaeda would carry out terrorist operations in the US
that would alter the world map
and that the primary financier of al-Qaeda is the Qatar Charitable Society.
But Soufan and other officer cared not about al-Fadl’s info,
rather believing he was exaggerating and mentally ill.
Did you know that three Qataris
Meshal al-Hajri, Fahad Abdullah and Ali al-Fuhaid – accused in connection with September attacks,
whose mission was monitoring operations and surveying sites targeted by the September 11 attacks
in New York and Washington,
have visited World Trade Center and Statue of Liberty weeks before carrying out the terrorist operation
and had bookings on the plane that hit the Pentagon in Washington.
They didn’t board it, however, but boarded another to London.
Back to Soufan’s work at the FBI as in charge of investigation into the September attacks before resigning in 2005.
The resignation, he said, was due to the CIA withholding special information from him and obstructing investigations.
Following his resignation, Soufan bought a New York apartment for $1.5m.
Meanwhile, some US newspapers
were questioning where he got the money, considering how large the amount is.
Not many months after his resignation that Soufan became chief of a Giuliani Partners’ security firm.
Then, he was appointed as head of the firm’s branch in Qatar,
cutting deals for the company with Qatar Petroleum, Qatar’s Ministry of Interior
(headed by Abdullah bin Khalid accused of supporting terrorism),
Qatar Electricity Co., and the Public Works Authority for water
where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worked.
Remarkably, Giuliani Partners for security was founded in 2003 by Rudy Giuliani,
who was Mayor of NYC at the time of September attacks.
Going back in memory,
the first head of state to visit the US after the September attacks was Hamad bin Khalifa,
who visited the WTC bombing site and met with NYC’s Mayor Giuliani,
offering him $35m in compensation for the victims’ families,
which was more of a settlement due to Qatar’s harboring of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Since 2003, Rudy Giuliani works as a special advisor to the Qatari government to date.
Giuliani’s office,
managed by Qatar’s Soufan
is on the 10th floor of the Four Seasons Hotel,
registered in the name of company called Al Baraa Trading.
As for Ali Soufan’s residence card wasn’t by the company,
but rather under a sponsor named Mohammed al-Masned.
So, who is he?
Mohammed al-Missned is Head of the Qatari Intelligence Service,
and is the cousin of Sheikha Moza al-Missned,
mother of the current Emir of Qatar.
Soufan, later, founded several firms
such as the Soufan Group for security and intelligence,
which concluded a contract with the White House as a consultancy firm for Obama
He also founded Qatar International Academy for Security Studies (QIASS),
where most members used to work at the FBI,
and others were diplomats in the US embassy in Riyadh.
Afterwards, he founded the Qatari-US Research Center, and is a member of Brookings Doha Center.
Let’s not forget that Soufan is considered a co-founder of the International Centre for Sport Security,
established in Qatar in 2010,
with the stated aim of countering sports corruption.
According to the French journal Mediapart,
however, the center was spying on several international sports figures on a mission known as “Operation Hawk.”
Members of the operation were former Interpol officers, who worked to recruit sports figures to serve Qatar’s interests in hosting the 2022 World Cup.
Recently, through Soufan Group,
a contract was concluded between the Qatari embassy in Washington and Blueprint Consulting,
which worked to shine Qatar’s image after the boycott,
attack the boycotting countries, and covering up Qatar’s role in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Italy, for $1.2m.
Finally, before we conclude,
I have noted that Soufan acquired the Qatari citizenship
in tweets I posted according to Arabic and English Wikipedia,
which deleted this information following the tweets publication.
As for Al Baraa Trading, it’s the same company that
Mohammed al-Ahmari’s office worked under,
who was managing Ayana Center in the US.
The office was closed after the September attacks for its suspicious activity.
Ali Soufan has become a lecturer in Hamad bin Khalifa University
under Qatar Foundation’s supervision.
Where?
At the College of Islamic Studies,
where the Mauritanian Mohammed al-Shanqiti,
and others who were accused and prisoners in the US
To refresh your memory,
a bin Laden document had proposed
for Qatar to establish a research center supervised
by al-Ahmari, al-Shanqiti and Azmi Bishara.
How is Soufan, who is celebrated as a national hero fighting terrorism for 25 years, working with people accused of supporting terrorism?
Finally,
a journalist does not threaten,
nor assassinate,
nor kill.
A journalist’s ammunition is information and their weapon is words.
Our Jamra’s blaze grows.
Till next time.
