the appeal as moot. In March 2009, al-Marri made his first appearance before a judge in Charleston, South Carolina. After denying al-Marri's request for bail, the South Carolina judge ordered his transportation to Illinois. al-Marri pleaded not guilty before Judge Michael Mihm in a U.S. District Court of Illinois. Judge Mihm set the date of the trial for May 26. Mihm also ordered the prosecution to hand over evidence, such as a copy of al-Marri's hard drive, to the defense attorneys. Al-Marri was transported afterward back to the Peoria federal court by the marshals and appeared before Mihm. He indicated to Mihm he understood the charges against him. In March 2009, al-Marri was returned to civilian custody in Peoria, from military custody. Guilty plea On April 30, 2009, al-Marri entered a plea of guilty to one count of conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization. He agreed in his plea that he attended terrorist training camps between 1998 and 2001, where he studied weapons and operational security. He met with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and "offered his services" to aid al-Qaeda. Mohammed told him to travel to the United States by September 20, 2001, and wait for further instructions. al-Marri said that while enrolled at Bradley University, he researched cyanide on the Internet and continued communicating with al-Qaeda. On October 29, 2009, al-Marri was sentenced to 8 years in prison, in consideration of the nearly eight years he had already been held. In March 2010, he was moved from Federal Correctional Institution, Pekin to the US Penitentiary, Florence Supermax security in Colorado. His release date was set as January 18, 2015. On October 12, 2011, Tony Bartelme, writing in the Charleston Post and Courier reported on documents the paper had recently received from an 8-year-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the use of the consolidated Navy brig in Charleston in the "war on terror". Among those documents was a 2005 exchange of memos between the prison's commander, E.P. Giambastiani, to Charles Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs. In the memos, Giambastiani requested that al-Marri, Hamdy and Padilla be transferred to Guantanamo. According to Bartelme: This information was considered significant to the cases of the Guantanamo Bay homicide accusations, as there were reports in 2009 and 2010 that the three reported suicides in 2006 had been found with rags stuffed down their