was with their interrogators, according to a theory about how to develop dependence among prisoners, for long-term gathering of intelligence by interrogators. At this time, none of the detainees, including the American citizens, had access to counsel or federal courts. Qahtani had initially been interrogated by FBI agents, who used standard techniques based in police work. On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorized in writing the use of 17 enhanced interrogation techniques to be used against Qahtani (see next section). After details of Qahtani's status were leaked in 2004, the US Department of Defense issued a press release stating that Qahtani had admitted: He had been sent to the US by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the lead architect of the 9/11 attack; He had met Osama bin Laden on several occasions; He had terrorist training at two al-Qaeda camps; He had been in contact with many senior al-Qaeda leaders. Al-Qahtani is also said to have informed interrogators that he had received operational training in covert communications from Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whom he identified as a courier for Osama bin Laden. This was an early lead at a time when the hunt for bin Laden by other means had ground to a halt, but, as the national security expert Peter Bergen has noted, it had to be combined with another eight years of work, relying on a wide variety of techniques of intelligence-gathering, to culminate in the US government's 2011 raid on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killing of the al-Qaeda leader. Documented abuses while in Guantanamo At Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of 17 aggressive interrogation techniques, known as the "First Special Interrogation Plan," authorized in writing by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002, and implemented under the supervision and guidance of Secretary Rumsfeld and the commander of Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller. After complaints from military investigators, the list of approved techniques was reduced. The special interrogation plan and techniques were not revealed until 2008 in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee during its investigation of detainee treatment, and were reported by the FBI Inspector General, Glenn Fine. The authorized techniques were related to those described in the three August 2002 legal opinions, later known as the Torture Memos, drafted by John Yoo and signed by Jay S. Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice,