Mohammad A. A. AI Harbi (ISN 333)

The material below has been lifted, verbatim, from Section VI, Chapter 11, of A Review of the FBI's Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq, released in May 2008 by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice.

An FBI agent who served at GTMO in late 2002 wrote an FD-302 report dated November 6, 2002, which described an allegation by detainee Muhammad A. A. AI Harbi (#333) that he was beaten by FBI agents in Afghanistan. According to the report, AI Harbi alleged:

After [AI Harbi's] arrest, he was taken by airplane to Bagram, Afghanistan. While on the airplane, he was struck in the mouth by a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). When he arrived in Bagram, he was beaten by two members of the FBI (one of them being the same as the person who struck him on the airplane). He suffered multiple injuries to his mouth, eye and back as a result of these beatings. He characterized the treatment in Bagram as bad and everyone who participated in these actions were Americans.

The two FBI employees who allegedly beat him were further described as white males; both 40 to 50 years of age.

Al Harbi's allegations were also recounted in a memorandum from the FBI to the Department of Justice entitled "Re: Repatriation Issues," dated January 20, 2004.

In October 2004, in connection with releasing the FBI memorandum along with many other documents in response to a FOIA request from the ACLU, FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni sought information about whether any investigation of Al Harbi's allegations was ever conducted. According to Caproni, the MLDU Unit Chief told her that no investigation was done.

We interviewed the agent who originally reported Al Harbi's allegations. He stated that the detainee did not make clear the basis for his statement that the agents who beat him were FBI. The agent told us that he believed something bad did happen to the detainee, but the agent did not believe that the FBI was involved.

The OIG interviewed Al Harbi in GTMO on April 26, 2005, with the assistance of a translator. He told the OIG that he had no complaints about his treatment by the FBI, either at GTMO or in Bagram. When the OIG pressed him regarding his complaint about being struck on the mouth and beaten by members of the FBI, he said that he did not think that the individuals who arrested him were FBI agents, but rather he thought that they were either military or possibly CIA.

AI Harbi did not have an explanation for why his earlier account identified the perpetrators as FBI agents. He said that all of his contacts with the FBI have been positive. We also did not find any basis for concluding that Al Harbi was ever mistreated by the FBI.

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