21 Facts About Ali Soufan

Ali H Soufan was born on 1971 and is a Lebanese-American former FBI agent who was involved in a number of high-profile anti-terrorism cases both in the United States and around the world.

Ali Soufan resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing intelligence with him which could have prevented the attacks.

Ali Soufan is an admirer of the poet Khalil Gibran.

In 1999, Ali Soufan was called to Jordan to investigate the Jordan Millennium Bombing plot.

Ali Soufan's find "embarrassed the CIA", according to a 2006 New Yorker profile of him.

In 2005, Ali Soufan approached a Florida doctor, Rafiq Abdus Sabir, pretending to be an Islamist militant, and asked him whether he would provide medical treatment to wounded al-Qaeda fighters in the Iraq War.

Ali Soufan obtained a confession from Ali al-Bahlul, an al-Qaeda propagandist and bin Laden media secretary accused of making a video celebrating the Cole attacks, and testified at his military tribunal as well.

Ali Soufan resigned from the FBI in 2005 and founded the Ali Soufan Group.

Ali Soufan continues to be frequently called upon to serve as an expert commentator.

Ali Soufan was a former member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

On May 14,2009, Ali Soufan testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its hearing on torture.

Ali Soufan re-stated his claims in an April 22,2009, op-ed for The New York Times entitled "My Tortured Decision", which was published shortly after the memos were released, and similarly two months later.

Ali Soufan's argument was supported by the CIA Inspector General's 2004 Report into the program.

On May 8,2012, Bloomberg News published an op-ed by Ali Soufan criticizing a book recently published by former CIA official Jose Rodriguez.

Ali Soufan strongly disputed Rodriguez's claims that the CIA's enhanced interrogation program was effective at securing reliable, useful information.

Ali Soufan questioned whether the marked differences in Rodriguez's description of al-Nashiri's role in the USS Cole bombing from that of the prosecution would undermine the case against al-Nashiri.

Ali Soufan wrote that al-Nashiri was the bombing's mastermind; Rodriguez disputed that al-Nashiri was not intelligent enough to be a "mastermind".

When Khashoggi was assassinated in October 2018, Ali Soufan helped erect a memorial to him in Washington DC.

In May 2020, CIA officials contacted Ali Soufan to inform him they were monitoring al Qaeda militants who were plotting against him.

Ali Soufan started to receive threatening messages via social media.

Cybersecurity experts hired by the Ali Soufan Group determined the social media threats were orchestrated not by al-Qaeda, as the CIA claimed, but by the same Saudi government officials who had targeted his friend Jamal Khashoggi, prior to assassinating him.