Abu Zubaydah : biography
Numerous anonymous U.S. officials also made allegations against Abu Zubaydah in the press. . The Seattle Times, January 11, 2003 CNN News, March 4, 2002 BBC News
While Zubaydah provided important intelligence, his value as an intel source was greatly inflated by the administration, much like his role in the global terror network. The U.S. Government has not officially charged Abu Zubaydah with any crimes., April 30, 2009
Exploitation of Abu Zubaydah’s perceived value
President Bush personally used Abu Zubaydah’s perceived “value” as a detainee to justify the use of the CIA’s harsher interrogation techniques September 2006 as well as Abu Zubaydah’s detention in secret CIA prisons around the world. NPR, September 6, 2006
In a speech in 2006, President Bush claimed that Abu Zubaydah revealed useful intelligence when enhanced interrogation was used, including identification of two important suspects and information that allegedly helped foil a terrorist attack on American soil. These claims directly conflict with the reports of the F.B.I. agents who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah. He gave them the names before torture was used, and the third piece of information came from other sources. who had been receiving crucial pieces of information from him without the use of harsher techniques, as well as other government officials., New York Times, April 20, 2009
Iraq War (2003)
The Bush administration relied on some of Zybaydah’s claims in justifying the invasion of Iraq. U.S. officials stated that the allegations that Iraq and al-Qaeda were linked in the training of people on chemical weapons came from Abu Zubaydah., Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 26, 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, September 27, 2002 (Access My Library Link, requires free membership)], "One tortured lie: that’s all it took for war"], The Sunday Times, April 26, 2009 The officials noted there was no independent verification of his claims.
The U.S. Government included statements made by Abu Zubaydah in regards to al Qaeda’s ability to obtain a dirty bomb to show a link between Iraq and al Qaeda., Salon, 13 April 2006 According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2004, Abu Zubaydah said "he had heard that an important al Qaeda associate, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence.", The Daily Standard, October 20, 2004 But the year before in June 2003, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were reported as saying there was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.John Diamond and Bill Nichols , 8 June 2003, The New York Times, 9 June 2003
In the Senate Armed Services Committee 2008 report on the abuses of detainees, the Bush administration was described as having applied pressure to interrogators to find a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda prior to the Iraq War., The New York Times, 25 April 2009 Major Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the United States Army, said to the committee, "while we were [at Guantanamo] a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.", Senate Armed Services Committee, 20 November 2008 He said that higher-ups were "frustrated" and applied "more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.", Science Blogs, 4 May 2009
Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell has said:
"Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002—well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion—its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.
So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop."
