The Abu Zubaydah myths won’t die

Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value terrorist captured after the 9/11 attacks, just made his first public appearance this week since 2002, when he stood before a military review board to argue for his release from Guantanamo Bay.

Inevitably, the news reports of his hearing dredged up all of the old falsehoods often peddled in the media about Zubaydah. So for the slow learners in the press, here is a rundown of the top three myths regarding his capture and detainment.

MYTH 1:  ZUBAYDAH WAS WATERBOARDED 83 TIMES.

The Washington Post and the New York Times once again repeated the debunked myth that Zubaydah was “waterboarded 83 times.”  They don’t seem to want to take his word for it that this is not the case.

When Zubaydah was interviewed by the International Red Cross after his arrival at Guantanamo Bay, he told them waterboarding “was applied during five sessions of ill-treatment that took place during an approximately one-week intense period of interrogation.”  He further told the IRC that “during each session, apart from one, the suffocation technique was applied once or twice; on one occasion it was applied three times.”  So according to Zubaydah’s own account, that is between 8 and 13 times — not 83.

So according to Zubaydah’s own account, that is between 8 and 13 times — not 83.

So where does 83 number come from?  The CIA inspector general’s report, but the number refers not to waterboarding sessions, or even the number of applications within a session, but rather to the number of individual splashes of water (for example, a single 15-second application could involve a dozen quick splashes).  No matter how often this is explained, the press continues to falsely report that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times – even though Zubaydah himself says it is not so.  At some point, this becomes intentionally misleading.

MYTH 2: ZUBAYDAH WAS A LOW-LEVEL “FIXER”, NOT A HIGH-VALUE TERRORIST.

The Times reports today that “American intelligence officials wrongly concluded that he was a top-ranking leader of al Qaeda who might have knowledge of forthcoming plots.”  The Post reports that “President George W. Bush described Abu Zubaida in 2002 as ‘al Qaeda’s chief of operations,’ but U.S. officials later assessed that he was a Pakistan-based “fixer,” not a formal member of the group.”

It is true that Zubaydah was not “formal” member of al Qaeda when captured, and it is also irrelevant. According to CIA documents declassified at former Vice President Cheney’s request, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, was also not an “formal member of al-Qaeda” until well after the 9/11 attacks.

After his capture, KSM told his CIA debriefers that he intentionally did not swear bayat (the pledge of loyalty to Osama bin Laden) until after September 2001 so that he could have ignored a decision by the al Qaeda leadership to cancel the 9/11 attacks. So at the time he was planning the biggest al Qaeda operation in history, KSM was not an “official member” of al Qaeda. If KSM had been captured before he swore allegiance, should he have been dismissed as unimportant because he was not a “formal member of al Qaeda?” Of course not.

The same is true for Zubaydah. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Although he never pledged bay’ah to Usama bin Ladin, Abu Zubaydah functioned as a full member of al-Qa’ida and was a trusted associate of al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders.”

According to the official US government biography of Zubaydah:

Bin Ladin recruited him to be one of al-Qa’ida’s senior travel facilitators following Zubaydah’s success in 1996 at securing safe passage of al-Qa’ida senior members returning from Sudan to Afghanistan. In November 2001, Abu Zubaydah helped smuggle now-deceased al-Qa’ida in Iraq leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and some 70 Arab fighters out of Kandahar, Afghanistan, into Iran.

In other words, he was the man who moved terrorists in and out of Afghanistan and then deployed them around the world for Bin Laden.  He knew the identities, plans, and locations of hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists.

According to former CIA Director George Tenet, Zubaydah had spent years screening al Qaeda recruits, training them, and deploying them on missions across the world—including the would-be “millennium bomber” Ahmad Ressam, who was captured while entering the country in 1999 on a mission to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. After his capture, Ressam told the FBI a great deal about Zubaydah. Ressam said that Zubaydah was the Emir of the Khalden and Deronta training camps in Afghanistan, where Ressam had trained, and that Zubaydah ran many terrorist camps in Afghanistan. He said Zubaydah had asked him to obtain Canadian passports to help terrorist operatives infiltrate the United States. He also said that Zubaydah had a direct relationship with Osama bin Laden and corresponded frequently with the al Qaeda leader. From another source, the CIA learned more about Zubaydah’s relationship with bin Laden—including that he had traveled to Saudi Arabia in 1996 to visit bin Laden and deliver $600,000 to the al Qaeda leader.

Bottom line: Zubaydah was a senior al Qaeda operative who was close to Osama bin Laden and deeply involved in al Qaeda’s training and operational activities.

MYTH 3: ZUBAYDAH GAVE THE CIA NOTHING OF VALUE THAT FOILED PLOTS.

The Times and Post accounts of Zubaydah today portray him a low-level fixer, while failing to mention the instances in which Zubaydah’s CIA interrogation did help the US capture or kill other high-value terrorists and disrupt forthcoming plots. Here are the facts.

After the CIA began applying the first initial enhanced interrogation techniques (which included forced nudity, exposure to cold temperatures and sleep deprivation, but before his waterboarding was approved in August) Abu Zubaydah provided information on a terrorist code-named “Abdullah al-Muhajir,” whom he identified as an American with a Latino name. This terrorist, subsequently identified as Jose Padilla, was captured thanks to information provided by Abu Zubaydah. FBI agent Ali Soufan tried to take credit for getting this information, but according to the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Soufan’s own FBI partner (identified as “Agent Gibson”) confirmed that Zubaydah “gave up” Padilla “during the CIA interrogations.”

Padilla is known to most Americans as the “dirty bomber,” but he was actually on a mission from KSM to carry out a much more sinister—and realistic—attack on America.

Padilla made his way to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000 where came to the attention of al Qaeda’s then-military commander, Mohammed Atef, who saw in Padilla an American-born terrorist who could enter the United States at will. Atef took Padilla on as his protégé, and in June 2001 asked Padilla to take on a mission: to blow up apartment buildings in a major American city using natural gas.

Padilla was still training in Afghanistan for this mission when the 9/11 attacks took place and coalition forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom. Atef was killed in an airstrike, and Padilla joined the other al Qaeda operatives fleeing Afghanistan.

It was at this time that he met Abu Zubaydah, who helped arranged his passage across the Afghan-Pakistan border.  Zubaydah then sent Padilla to see KSM. He wrote Padilla a letter of reference, gave him money, and even called KSM to say he was free to use Padilla for his planned follow-on operations in the United States.

KSM instructed Padilla to undertake the apartment buildings operation, and KSM’s right-hand man, Ammar al-Baluchi, gave Padilla $10,000 in cash, as well as travel documents, a cell phone, and an email address to be used to notify Ammar once Padilla arrived in America. The night before Padilla’s departure, KSM, Ammar, and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh hosted a farewell dinner for him—a send-off to America from the men responsible for the destruction of September 11, 2001.

Thanks to the information Zubaydah provided, American authorities apprehended Padilla as he got off his plane at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on May 8, 2002 — thwarting KSM’s plot to blow up buildings in the United States.

After being waterboarded, Zubaydah began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped the CIA find and capture more of those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Zubaydah’s identification of Padilla also led to another terrorist Padilla had trained with at an al-Qaeda camp in Kandahar who went by the code name “Jafar al-Tayyar,” or “Jafar the Pilot.” In May 2002, the CIA asked Abu Zubaida whom al-Qaeda would pick to lead the next big attack on the United States, and Abu Zubaida told them it was “Jafar.” But the CIA still did not know the real name or identity of “Jafar.” After KSM was captured in March 2003, he identified “Jafar” as Adnan Shukrijumah — leading the FBI to issue a BOLO (“Be on the Lookout”) alert for Shukrijumah calling him an “imminent threat to U.S. citizens and interests.”  Shukrijuma eluded capture, but the alert and manhunt that followed KSM’s revelation undoubtedly set back his plans to conduct follow-on attacks.  He later rose to become al Qaeda’s top operational commander.  In December 2014, the Post reported that Pakistani forces had finally killed Shukrijumah.  The U.S. would not have known (a) that Shukrijumah existed, and (b) that he posed an “imminent threat” to the United States without Zubaydah.

After being waterboarded, Zubaydah began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped the CIA find and capture more of those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to at least two former CIA directors—George Tenet and Michael Hayden— Zubaydah’s questioning after the application of enhanced interrogation techniques led directly to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh.  When he was taken into custody, bin al-Shibh was at the end stages of planning a KSM-conceived attack that the CIA knew nothing about: a plot to replicate 9/11 on the other side of the Atlantic by hijacking multiple passenger planes and crashing them into Heathrow airport and the Canary Wharf business district in London.

I have plenty more detail in my book on the CIA interrogation program, Courting Disaster. Other good resources on this subject include: Jose Rodriguez’s excellent book, Hard Measures, Mike Hayden’s terrific memoir Playing to the Edge, and the excellent compendium Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program (most accounts cite the partisan Feinstein report as fact, when many of its details and conclusions have been debunked).

And for more information, go to the Long War Journal, where Tom Joscelyn reports today on the US government’s unclassified file on Zubaydah, which notes that Zubaydah “played a key role in al Qaeda’s communications,” “closely interacted” with Osama bin Laden’s “second-in-command,” enlisted al Qaeda operatives in planned attacks against Israel, worked with 9/11 planner Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, and so on.

Reporters are entitled to their own opinions about the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, but they are not entitled to their own facts – and the facts show that Abu Zubaydah was a top al Qaeda operative whose interrogation stopped terrorist attacks and saved lives.