Growing up in Lebanon in the midst of a civil war, Ali Soufan longed for safety and security. After moving with his family to Pennsylvania, he found it, but quickly realized “people who are born into this system may take it for granted … you don’t know how important these [civil] rights are if you haven’t lived in a country where you can be arrested or killed and not even know why.” Soufan would go on to join the FBI, playing a significant role in a number of complex international terrorism cases and enjoying a distinguished career with the agency. As an FBI supervisory special agent, he served on the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI’s New York office, where he coordinated both domestic and international counterterrorism operations. He often operated out of hostile environments and carried out sensitive extraterritorial missions and high-level negotiations.
Soufan resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing intelligence that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks and for torturing prisoners during interrogations. Speaking out against torture in an interview with the Guardian, he stated that “our imagination is very limited, limited by our perceptions, knowledge, experience, partisan politics … we have to have empathy — understanding the enemy, seeing the world through their eyes.”
Today, Soufan is a leading national security and counterterrorism expert, and an ardent and outspoken critic of the use of torture. He has testified against the efficacy of those techniques, including before a 2009 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on torture. Soufan is also the author of multiple books as well as chairman and CEO of the Soufan Group, which provides strategic security intelligence services to governments and multinational organizations. Among numerous awards, he has received the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence, the James W. Foley Legacy Achievement Award, and a commendation from the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2017, Soufan founded the Soufan Center, an independent nonprofit organization offering research, analysis, and strategic dialogue on foreign policy challenges with a particular focus on global security, conflict prevention and resolution, and the rule of law.
Twitter: @Ali_H_Soufan
