The Secret Diary of Abu Zubaydah

At the Independent UK, "The secret diary of al-Qa’ida’s No 3 - Abu Zubaydah, from student to hardline jihadi and CIA torture":

The private diaries of Abu Zubaydah, formerly thought to be the third in command of al-Qa’ida and one of the most prominent remaining detainees in Guantanamo Bay, have been released by the US government.

They offer a remarkable and personal picture of how al-Qa’ida grew from its origins in the mujahedin struggle against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan into the organisation that carried out the 2001 attacks against the US.

They track Zubaydah’s journey from a student to a hardened jihadi.

The diaries, obtained by a freedom of information request by Al Jazeera, cover more than a decade. They start in 1990 when Zubaydah – a Saudi-born Palestinian – was a 19-year-old student in computer sciences in Mysore, India, a few months before he travelled to join the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet departure. They end days before his capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002.

At the time, he was regarded by the CIA as the third-ranking figure in al-Qa’ida, behind only Osama Bin Laden and the group’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Zubaydah was held to be one of the planners of the 9/11 attacks and of virtually every other major attack perpetrated by al-Qa’ida before that, including the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa.

He was taken to a CIA  “ghost site” in Thailand and waterboarded 83 times in a bid to extract information about future terrorist operations.

He was among the first al-Qa’ida detainees subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had just been approved by George W Bush’s Justice Department.

Later the Bush administration revised its view of Zubaydah’s importance as it became clear he was more of a bureaucrat within al-Qa’ida than a frontline operative. Even so, he was mentioned no less than 52 times in the final report of the 9/11 Commission on the 2001 attacks, published in 2004.

The secret and highly personal dairies, with their  numerous mentions of bin Laden and other al-Qa’ida figures, suggest a meticulous record keeper. Their contents, which are being revealed for the first time, provided the basis for holding many of the prisoners at Guantanamo, of whom 160 remain.

According to Al Jazeera America, the documents – a copy of the government’s English translation of the diaries – were obtained from a former US intelligence official who worked with the CIA and FBI on al-Qa’ida issues.

There are six volumes of the 1990-2002 diaries, excerpts from the first of which were published by Al Jazeera.

Zubaydah is believed to have compiled more diaries while being held by the CIA, in which he is said to describe in detail his torture. Since 2006 he has been held at Guantanamo Bay, although he has not been charged with any crime.

The loss of his diaries, now formally the property of the Pentagon, appears to have affected him deeply. In March 2007, he told a review tribunal that the CIA’s refusal to honour what he claimed was a promise to return them had caused him to have 40 seizures. That mental anguish, Zubaydah said, “is bigger than what the CIA (did to) me”...

Screw the f-ker.

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