For months now, human rights activists and NGOs have been concerned about the status and whereabouts of Abu Zubaydah, whose plight is most eloquently described by NION administrator and editor, blueness.
In September of 2006, President Bush felt the need to appear on national television, smirk and proclaim the following untruthful statements:
We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.
I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.
We now know that Zubaydah is, geographically, at Guantanamo, although still listed as a ghost detainee by some NGOs.
What we will never know is where the fractured remnants of this man's soul have gone.
Amid the lies and damned lies about Abu Zubaydah, accused by Bush thusly:
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody -- and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.
And suspected by American intelligence of even more crimes and "evil-doings," there is Ron Suskind's very convincing account in The One Percent Doctrine:
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.
From Media Matters'series on Broken Government:
"[A]lternative procedures" used on Zubaydah led to capture of KSM, Binalshibh
King uncritically reported that "captured senior Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah ... initially told interrogators little," and that Bush "credit[ed] ... alternative procedures for information that led to the capture of 9-11 planners Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed [KSM]." However, as Media Matters noted, New York Times staff writer David Johnston wrote that "[c]rucial aspects of what happened during Mr. Zubaydah's interrogation are sharply disputed" and that current and former government officials "who were more closely tied to law enforcement" said that Zubaydah "cooperated with F.B.I. interviewers until the C.I.A. interrogation team arrived. They said that Mr. Zubaydah's resistance began after the agency interrogators began using more stringent tactics."
They reported that much of what Zubaydah purportedly provided was already known by the U.S. government and that the information he did pass along contributed little to the capture of other high-level Al Qaeda operatives. As Media Matters has noted, those reports found that contrary to Bush's claims, the CIA learned of KSM's alias as early as August 2001 and was in the dark regarding his location until a $25 million reward led an Al Qaeda operative to tip them off. Similarly, the reports documented that U.S. authorities had been aware of Binalshibh's involvement in the 9-11 attacks by December 2001, before Zubaydah was captured, and information gleaned from an Al Jazeera reporter and the emir of Qatar -- not Zubaydah -- provided crucial leads toward Binalshibh's location.
King also uncritically aired Bush's claim that when KSM "was questioned by the CIA using these procedures. ... he soon provided information that helped us stop another planned attack on the United States." But as Media Matters noted, Suskind wrote that the interrogation of KSM by the CIA resulted in some vague, "half-delirious" descriptions of plots against the United States. According to Suskind, KSM's interrogators eventually received a message from CIA headquarters to "do whatever's necessary." In response, they told him that his young children -- both of whom were also in U.S. custody -- "would be hurt if he didn't cooperate." But KSM reportedly responded that his children would "join Allah in a better place." Suskind also reported that the CIA's harsh techniques only led Zubaydah to disclose a variety of apparently nonexistent plots.
And in Zubaydah's own diaries, the mind-numbing voices of three people: "Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter. What people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said."
There is much more to say for and about the silenced Abu Zubaydah. For now, it is enough that he has been "found" (physically) after seven months of ghost detainee status, although somewhere in the timeline, Abu Zubaydah's false confessions, elicited under torture by the CIA, were justification for the loss of habeas corpus and The Military Commissions Act of 2006.