Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Abdu al-Nashiri (; ; born January 5, 1965) is a Saudi Arabian citizen alleged to be the mastermind of the bombing of USS Cole and other maritime attacks. He is alleged to have headed al-Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf states prior to his capture in November 2002 by the CIA's Special Activities Division. Al-Nashiri was captured in Dubai in 2002 and held for four years in secret CIA prisons known as "black sites" in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco, and Romania, before being transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. While being interrogated, al-Nashiri was waterboarded, a technique since classified as torture. In 2005 the CIA destroyed the tapes of Nashiri's waterboarding. In another incident he was naked and hooded and threatened with a gun and a power drill to scare him into talking. Al-Nashiri was granted victim status in 2010 by the Polish government and a Polish prosecutor began "investigating the possible abuse of power by Polish public officials with regard to a CIA black site" in 2008. In December 2008, al-Nashiri was charged by the United States before a Guantanamo Military Commission. The charges were dropped in February 2009 and reinstated in 2011. As of 2011, al-Nashiri is on trial before a military tribunal in Guantanamo on charges of war crimes that carry the death penalty. As it is extremely unlikely he would be freed if found not guilty, his lawyers have called the proceeding a show trial. In April 2019, a three judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated all orders issued by Air Force Colonel Vance Spath, the presiding military judge over al-Nashiri's case from November 2015, on the grounds that Spath had failed to properly disclose his ongoing employment negotiations with the Department of Justice to al-Nashiri. Background Born in Saudi Arabia, al-Nashiri travelled to Afghanistan in the early 1990s to participate in attacks against the Russians in the region, at a time when the United States supported the mujahideen in such actions. In 1996, he travelled to Tajikistan and then Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where he first met Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden attempted to convince al-Nashiri to join al-Qaeda at this point, but he refused because he found the idea of swearing a loyalty oath to bin Laden to be distasteful. After al-Nashiri travelled to Yemen, he is alleged