*Abu Zubaydah has been connected to three Canadians, including Mohamed Harkat. Determining Zubaydah's real place in the world of terrorism holds important consequences, Andrew Duffy writes.
*Source: DTN News / The Ottawa Citizen By Andrew Duffy
(NSI News Source Info) OTTAWA, Canada - July 18, 2009: When the public phase of the Mohamed Harkat case begins, the epic saga of another accused terror
ist -- Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah -- is likely to unfold as well.
Zubaydah promises to be a central figure because the Canadian government says it has evidence that Harkat associated with him since the early 1990s.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has already presented evidence in secret to Federal Court Judge Simon Noël that allegedly ties Harkat to Zubaydah.
According to a summary of that evidence, made public for the first time earlier this year, Harkat admitted in a March 1997 conversation that he knew Zubaydah personally and did not fear being contacted by him at home.
In court filings, CSIS describes Zubaydah as "one of (Osama) bin Laden's top lieutenants" -- a reflection of the status accorded Zubaydah by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
But that intelligence assessment of Zubaydah is now, increasingly, under assault.
Zubaydah's U.S. lawyers have launched what they call a "reclamation process" to separate fact from the dangerous fiction they say has been authored by the Bush administration to justify their client's torture.
Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times by U.S. agents and subjected to other harsh interrogation methods, according to recently released U.S. Justice Department memos.
"He was not -- and never has been -- a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban," Zubaydah's lawyer, Brent Mickum, told the Citizen in a recent interview.
"Those facts are really not in doubt anymore."
George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, however, has forcefully rejected the suggestion that U.S. officials overstated Zubaydah's importance. "Baloney," Tenet wrote in his 2007 memoir. "Abu Zubaydah had been at the crossroads of many al-Qaeda operations and was in position to -- and did -- share critical information with his interrogators."
The 9/11 Commission Report refers to Zubaydah as "a sympathetic peer" to al-Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden and leader of a foiled millennial plot to blow up tourist sites in Amman, Jordan. Former U.S. President George Bush has called Zubaydah "one of bin Laden's top leaders."
Mickum, however, said the truth is more complicated and much less sensational.
To support his contention that Zubaydah was a minor player in jihadist circles, Mickum points to the fact that his client has not been charged with any crime and does not face a military commission trial. Zubaydah is being held without charge as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo prison.
Five other "high value" detainees who played roles in the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now face criminal charges and the death penalty.
Recent reports in the Washington Post and New York Times, quoting unnamed U.S. government officials, have also cast doubt on the CIA's intelligence assessment of Zubaydah.
Sources told the Times that Zubaydah was not an al-Qaeda leader but rather "a helpful training camp personnel clerk who would arrange false documents and travel for jihadists, including al-Qaeda members." The Post called him a jihadist "fixer" who worked for al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11.
The reports all suggest he played no role in the operational planning of al-Qaeda.
Zubaydah was the victim, Mickum charges, of the same thing that led the U.S. into Iraq: rotten intelligence.
"The bottom line is people have to come to realize that just as Maher Arar was a mistake, so too was Zubaydah. That's not to say that there may not be any baggage in his closet. But, I mean, he's really more akin to Bin Laden's driver (former Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan, of Yemen), who is free."
Zubaydah is now one of the most debated figures in the intelligence world: Is he a junior jihadist tortured for his limited information? Or a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant reinventing himself as a victim to fashion an escape from prison?
Determining the real meaning of Abu Zubaydah holds important consequences, both in the U.S. and Canada.
Zubaydah, 38, a Saudi-born Palestinian, has been connected in court documents to dozens of terror suspects, including three Canadians: Harkat, Adil Charkaoui and Abousfian Abdelrazik.
The security certificates initially filed against Harkat, in 2002, and Charkaoui, in 2003, included evidence supplied by Zubaydah. Both security certificates were reissued last year without that evidence.
Abdelrazik, meanwhile, was returned to Canada last month after six years of detention and exile in Sudan. He was initially detained in Sudan at the request of CSIS, but the Canadian spy agency cleared him of any criminal activity; he remains on a United Nations terrorism blacklist, however, because of U.S. intelligence.
Mickum says the cases highlight a larger trend: that Zubaydah's name is being purged from many prosecutions while other cases connected to him collapse. Mickum listed 21 former Guantanamo detainees who have been released in recent years despite being publicly linked to his client.
It suggests, he says, that being associated with Zubaydah is no longer considered a serious offence.
In the Harkat case, the federal government has expunged any evidence from Zubaydah himself -- the new security certificate law prohibits the use of evidence when it's reasonable to believe it flows from torture -- but continues to allege that Harkat associated with "the top al-Qaeda lieutenant" since the early 1990s.
Harkat has previously denied any association with Zubaydah.
Harkat's lawyer, Matthew Webber, has asked Judge Noël to order Canadian officials to update its intelligence assessment of Zubaydah, but such an order has not been issued.
"There's an enormous body of material that leads one to conclude that this characterization of Zubaydah was nothing but a transparent, U.S. administration propaganda device," Webber charged.
Mickum told the Citizen that he would be willing to take questions from Harkat's defence team to Zubaydah. He could then provide Federal Court an affidavit, supplying the information offered by his client.
Webber said he would pursue Mickum's offer, which could put the controversial Zubaydah front and centre at Harkat's public hearing in January.
Abu Zubaydah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1971 as Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn. He moved to the West Bank as a teenager and was educated in India.
He embraced Islam, and in 1991 travelled to Afghanistan to fight communist insurgents who continued to wage war after the 1989 withdrawal of Russian forces. On the front lines, he suffered serious head wounds in a mortar attack.
He lost the ability to speak for a year and his memory was permanently damaged by shrapnel that remains embedded in his head. (His lawyer says he now suffers blinding headaches and seizures.)
Zubaydah told a Guantanamo Bay legal hearing that in 1994 he became Pakistan-based "co-ordinator" for the Khalden camp, which was run by Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi (al-Libi died in Syrian custody earlier this year). The camp, Zubaydah testified, trained jihadists first to fight the Russians, then to defend Muslim lands in Chechnya and Bosnia.
"I disagreed," he said, "with the al-Qaeda philosophy of targeting innocent civilians like those in the World Trade Center."
As co-ordinator, he said, he managed logistics for jihadists travelling to and from the Khalden camp, and raised money to support its operation. Khalden, he said, was closed by the Taliban in 2000 because bin Laden did not want a rival camp available to jihadists in Afghanistan that was outside of al-Qaeda's control.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Zubaydah said he volunteered to be a soldier for al-Qaeda to defend Afghanistan from a U.S. invasion, but the terrorist group didn't want him. He returned to Pakistan, he said, to raise money for jihadist "brothers" who were not supported by the well-funded al-Qaeda.
On March 28, 2002, U.S. and Pakistani forces raided a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Zubaydah was shot in the abdomen and groin, and within days, was flown to a secret CIA prison in Thailand where FBI agents led questioning of him.
Using traditional interview methods, the agents gleaned a vital piece of information: that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the main organizer of the 9/11 plot. Zubaydah also told authorities about José Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was later convicted of plotting to kill people overseas.
Some agents believe he gave authorities all of the actionable intelligence to which he had access within months of his arrest.
According to the New York Times, by the summer of 2002, interrogators began to surmise that Zubaydah was not a terrorist leader, but a well-connected travel agent for jihadists. But senior CIA officials disagreed. They continued to believe that as an al-Qaeda leader he must know more, and as a result, they sought and received legal authorization from the U.S. Justice Department in August 2002 to use harsh interrogation techniques.
Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, confined in a small box for hours at a time, and beaten.
There is no evidence that Zubaydah provided his interrogators any significant new intelligence after the harsh methods were introduced -- although some in the CIA dispute that notion.
The CIA destroyed 90 videotapes that depicted his interrogations.
Curiously, it was a convicted terrorist with Canadian connections, former Montreal resident Ahmed Ressam, who appears to have convinced U.S. officials that Zubaydah played a leadership role in al-Qaeda.
Ressam, a failed refugee claimant in Canada, was convicted in April 2001 of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport; he subsequently co-operated with U.S. officials in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Ressam told them Zubaydah facilitated terrorist operations, including his own. He described Zubaydah as an associate of bin Laden "equal to and not subordinate to" him.
Zubaydah, however, told a Guantanamo hearing that Ressam was only a student who mistakenly believed that he controlled the training camps.
"He don't know the big picture," Zubaydah insisted.
(Zubaydah also admitted that he counselled Ressam: "He have ideas to make problems against Jew in Canada. I tell him if they are helping Israel, I told him this is good war. But if only Jew, it is not our headache.")
Lawyer Brent Mickum contends Zubaydah's version of events has been repeatedly confirmed by the testimony of other Guantanamo detainees.
Zubaydah remains one of 229 people detained in Guantanamo Bay. U.S. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the prison in January, 2010, but administration officials have said some detainees could still be held indefinitely in the U.S. if they pose a threat.
It's still unclear what will happen to Zubaydah, but it's possible that he could be tried in the U.S. on terrorist conspiracy charges or else sent to Jordan to be tried in connection with the Millennium bomb plot.
His lawyers believe Zubaydah, who has spent seven years in U.S. custody, should be released in Saudi Arabia, where he has relatives.
Argues Mickum: "Like the weapons of mass destruction and the need for war in Iraq, it is no longer shocking to find that the Bush Administration got it all wrong. Abu Zubaydah's supposed relationship with al-Qaeda is a complete myth.
"In an ever-growing litany of horrors, the Bush administration simply tortured the wrong guy."
ist -- Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah -- is likely to unfold as well.
Zubaydah promises to be a central figure because the Canadian government says it has evidence that Harkat associated with him since the early 1990s.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has already presented evidence in secret to Federal Court Judge Simon Noël that allegedly ties Harkat to Zubaydah.
According to a summary of that evidence, made public for the first time earlier this year, Harkat admitted in a March 1997 conversation that he knew Zubaydah personally and did not fear being contacted by him at home.
In court filings, CSIS describes Zubaydah as "one of (Osama) bin Laden's top lieutenants" -- a reflection of the status accorded Zubaydah by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
But that intelligence assessment of Zubaydah is now, increasingly, under assault.
Zubaydah's U.S. lawyers have launched what they call a "reclamation process" to separate fact from the dangerous fiction they say has been authored by the Bush administration to justify their client's torture.
Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times by U.S. agents and subjected to other harsh interrogation methods, according to recently released U.S. Justice Department memos.
"He was not -- and never has been -- a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban," Zubaydah's lawyer, Brent Mickum, told the Citizen in a recent interview.
"Those facts are really not in doubt anymore."
George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, however, has forcefully rejected the suggestion that U.S. officials overstated Zubaydah's importance. "Baloney," Tenet wrote in his 2007 memoir. "Abu Zubaydah had been at the crossroads of many al-Qaeda operations and was in position to -- and did -- share critical information with his interrogators."
The 9/11 Commission Report refers to Zubaydah as "a sympathetic peer" to al-Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden and leader of a foiled millennial plot to blow up tourist sites in Amman, Jordan. Former U.S. President George Bush has called Zubaydah "one of bin Laden's top leaders."
Mickum, however, said the truth is more complicated and much less sensational.
To support his contention that Zubaydah was a minor player in jihadist circles, Mickum points to the fact that his client has not been charged with any crime and does not face a military commission trial. Zubaydah is being held without charge as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo prison.
Five other "high value" detainees who played roles in the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now face criminal charges and the death penalty.
Recent reports in the Washington Post and New York Times, quoting unnamed U.S. government officials, have also cast doubt on the CIA's intelligence assessment of Zubaydah.
Sources told the Times that Zubaydah was not an al-Qaeda leader but rather "a helpful training camp personnel clerk who would arrange false documents and travel for jihadists, including al-Qaeda members." The Post called him a jihadist "fixer" who worked for al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11.
The reports all suggest he played no role in the operational planning of al-Qaeda.
Zubaydah was the victim, Mickum charges, of the same thing that led the U.S. into Iraq: rotten intelligence.
"The bottom line is people have to come to realize that just as Maher Arar was a mistake, so too was Zubaydah. That's not to say that there may not be any baggage in his closet. But, I mean, he's really more akin to Bin Laden's driver (former Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan, of Yemen), who is free."
Zubaydah is now one of the most debated figures in the intelligence world: Is he a junior jihadist tortured for his limited information? Or a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant reinventing himself as a victim to fashion an escape from prison?
Determining the real meaning of Abu Zubaydah holds important consequences, both in the U.S. and Canada.
Zubaydah, 38, a Saudi-born Palestinian, has been connected in court documents to dozens of terror suspects, including three Canadians: Harkat, Adil Charkaoui and Abousfian Abdelrazik.
The security certificates initially filed against Harkat, in 2002, and Charkaoui, in 2003, included evidence supplied by Zubaydah. Both security certificates were reissued last year without that evidence.
Abdelrazik, meanwhile, was returned to Canada last month after six years of detention and exile in Sudan. He was initially detained in Sudan at the request of CSIS, but the Canadian spy agency cleared him of any criminal activity; he remains on a United Nations terrorism blacklist, however, because of U.S. intelligence.
Mickum says the cases highlight a larger trend: that Zubaydah's name is being purged from many prosecutions while other cases connected to him collapse. Mickum listed 21 former Guantanamo detainees who have been released in recent years despite being publicly linked to his client.
It suggests, he says, that being associated with Zubaydah is no longer considered a serious offence.
In the Harkat case, the federal government has expunged any evidence from Zubaydah himself -- the new security certificate law prohibits the use of evidence when it's reasonable to believe it flows from torture -- but continues to allege that Harkat associated with "the top al-Qaeda lieutenant" since the early 1990s.
Harkat has previously denied any association with Zubaydah.
Harkat's lawyer, Matthew Webber, has asked Judge Noël to order Canadian officials to update its intelligence assessment of Zubaydah, but such an order has not been issued.
"There's an enormous body of material that leads one to conclude that this characterization of Zubaydah was nothing but a transparent, U.S. administration propaganda device," Webber charged.
Mickum told the Citizen that he would be willing to take questions from Harkat's defence team to Zubaydah. He could then provide Federal Court an affidavit, supplying the information offered by his client.
Webber said he would pursue Mickum's offer, which could put the controversial Zubaydah front and centre at Harkat's public hearing in January.
Abu Zubaydah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1971 as Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn. He moved to the West Bank as a teenager and was educated in India.
He embraced Islam, and in 1991 travelled to Afghanistan to fight communist insurgents who continued to wage war after the 1989 withdrawal of Russian forces. On the front lines, he suffered serious head wounds in a mortar attack.
He lost the ability to speak for a year and his memory was permanently damaged by shrapnel that remains embedded in his head. (His lawyer says he now suffers blinding headaches and seizures.)
Zubaydah told a Guantanamo Bay legal hearing that in 1994 he became Pakistan-based "co-ordinator" for the Khalden camp, which was run by Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi (al-Libi died in Syrian custody earlier this year). The camp, Zubaydah testified, trained jihadists first to fight the Russians, then to defend Muslim lands in Chechnya and Bosnia.
"I disagreed," he said, "with the al-Qaeda philosophy of targeting innocent civilians like those in the World Trade Center."
As co-ordinator, he said, he managed logistics for jihadists travelling to and from the Khalden camp, and raised money to support its operation. Khalden, he said, was closed by the Taliban in 2000 because bin Laden did not want a rival camp available to jihadists in Afghanistan that was outside of al-Qaeda's control.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Zubaydah said he volunteered to be a soldier for al-Qaeda to defend Afghanistan from a U.S. invasion, but the terrorist group didn't want him. He returned to Pakistan, he said, to raise money for jihadist "brothers" who were not supported by the well-funded al-Qaeda.
On March 28, 2002, U.S. and Pakistani forces raided a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Zubaydah was shot in the abdomen and groin, and within days, was flown to a secret CIA prison in Thailand where FBI agents led questioning of him.
Using traditional interview methods, the agents gleaned a vital piece of information: that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the main organizer of the 9/11 plot. Zubaydah also told authorities about José Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was later convicted of plotting to kill people overseas.
Some agents believe he gave authorities all of the actionable intelligence to which he had access within months of his arrest.
According to the New York Times, by the summer of 2002, interrogators began to surmise that Zubaydah was not a terrorist leader, but a well-connected travel agent for jihadists. But senior CIA officials disagreed. They continued to believe that as an al-Qaeda leader he must know more, and as a result, they sought and received legal authorization from the U.S. Justice Department in August 2002 to use harsh interrogation techniques.
Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, confined in a small box for hours at a time, and beaten.
There is no evidence that Zubaydah provided his interrogators any significant new intelligence after the harsh methods were introduced -- although some in the CIA dispute that notion.
The CIA destroyed 90 videotapes that depicted his interrogations.
Curiously, it was a convicted terrorist with Canadian connections, former Montreal resident Ahmed Ressam, who appears to have convinced U.S. officials that Zubaydah played a leadership role in al-Qaeda.
Ressam, a failed refugee claimant in Canada, was convicted in April 2001 of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport; he subsequently co-operated with U.S. officials in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Ressam told them Zubaydah facilitated terrorist operations, including his own. He described Zubaydah as an associate of bin Laden "equal to and not subordinate to" him.
Zubaydah, however, told a Guantanamo hearing that Ressam was only a student who mistakenly believed that he controlled the training camps.
"He don't know the big picture," Zubaydah insisted.
(Zubaydah also admitted that he counselled Ressam: "He have ideas to make problems against Jew in Canada. I tell him if they are helping Israel, I told him this is good war. But if only Jew, it is not our headache.")
Lawyer Brent Mickum contends Zubaydah's version of events has been repeatedly confirmed by the testimony of other Guantanamo detainees.
Zubaydah remains one of 229 people detained in Guantanamo Bay. U.S. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order to close the prison in January, 2010, but administration officials have said some detainees could still be held indefinitely in the U.S. if they pose a threat.
It's still unclear what will happen to Zubaydah, but it's possible that he could be tried in the U.S. on terrorist conspiracy charges or else sent to Jordan to be tried in connection with the Millennium bomb plot.
His lawyers believe Zubaydah, who has spent seven years in U.S. custody, should be released in Saudi Arabia, where he has relatives.
Argues Mickum: "Like the weapons of mass destruction and the need for war in Iraq, it is no longer shocking to find that the Bush Administration got it all wrong. Abu Zubaydah's supposed relationship with al-Qaeda is a complete myth.
"In an ever-growing litany of horrors, the Bush administration simply tortured the wrong guy."
z is the 26 letter of the english alphabet. He could not have done what a senior leader would have been required to do.
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