On October 21, 2008, Susan J. Crawford, the official in charge of the Office of Military Commissions, announced that charges were dropped against Al Sharbi and four other detainees: Jabran al Qahtani, Sufyian Barhoumi, Binyam Mohamed, and Noor Uthman Muhammed. [9][10] Carol J. Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Times, reported that all five men had been connected to Abu Zubaydah by his testimony. The CIA has acknowledged that Zubaydah is one of three high-value detainees who were interrogated at length under the technique known as "waterboarding", generally considered a form of torture, before the CIA transferred them to military custody in September 2006 at Guantanamo Bay.