by Adrian Levy
Zubaydah was one of the most controversial of the seventy-six detainees still housed at Guantánamo eight years after Obama’s groundbreaking promise to close the facility, which continued to function at an annual cost of around half a billion dollars. The man around whom the CIA’s torture program had been built and the first to be sent to a CIA “black site,” the first to be waterboarded, and the only prisoner subjected to all of the CIA’s approved techniques and others never formally approved, Zubaydah had come to define the war on terror years, his story eclipsing even that of his thirteen coprisoners in Guantánamo’s Camp 7, who included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.
Once hailed by Dick Cheney as a place to hold “the worst of the worst,” Guantánamo had by 2016 become an expensive and embarrassing reminder that the United States was willing to hold people captive for life, without a trial, undermining basic democratic principles.
Zubaydah’s experience of the program created by former army psychologists Dr. Bruce Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell had sickened those few with security clearance to read his diary, and yet the years of torture had provided no actionable intelligence from him about Al Qaeda’s future plans, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Following the rules of Guantánamo hearings, the observers in Washington were not allowed to hear Zubaydah speak. Instead, his statement was read by one of the uniformed soldiers at his shoulders. To avoid any embarrassing outbursts, the sound from the courtroom was time-delayed by forty seconds and there was a censorship button, should the audio feed need to be cut completely.
The patch that in earlier Red Cross photographs had covered Zubaydah’s left eye, lost due to botched plastic surgery or after his bloody capture in Faisalabad in March 2002, depending on whom you believed, hung from a strap like a necklace and he wore a glass eye to keep the socket open. Now age forty-five, he had one pair of glasses to read with and another pair with which to address the board members who sat out of sight of the cameras and comprised senior officials from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In the face of this phalanx, Zubaydah had no legal counsel. His approved lawyer, Mark Denbeaux, had been forced to cancel his trip to Guantánamo at the last moment because his wife was on her deathbed.50 The board had decided to go ahead anyway.
Summarizing Zubaydah’s words, his military spokesman declared that the world of jihad now dominated by Islamic State was “out of control and had gone too far.” Zubaydah wanted nothing to do with it and simply wanted to be reunited with his family. He talked of having some “seed money” to start a business, a reference to a $130,000 payment he had received from the Polish government in 2014, compensation for his time in the Stare Kiejkuty black site that had been awarded after his case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights in 2014.
Zubaydah’s most up-to-date Guantánamo Detainee Profile was read out.51 It had significantly softened over the years and had been last edited in preparation for the hearing. The man characterized in it was barely recognizable as relating to the same person President Bush had once declared “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” None of the things Zubaydah had been previously accused of—such as being bin Laden’s top lieutenant, being Number Three in Al Qaeda, and helping to plot 9/11—were any longer mentioned.
After more than fourteen years in custody and thousands of hours of interrogation, the United States now claimed only that Zubaydah had run a “mujahedeen facilitation network” in the 1990s, “played a key role in Al Qaeda’s communications,” and before 9/11 had “closely interacted” with the Number Two in Al Qaeda, Abu Hafs al-Masri. Like many others operating on the fringes of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11, he “possibly” had advance knowledge of the attacks on American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000. But he was now described as only being “generally aware” of planning for the 9/11 attacks and having “possibly” coordinated training at Khaldan camp when two of the future hijackers were there.
Unlike the five 9/11 defendants—Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Balochi, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, and Walid bin Attash, who when they were charged in 2008 told the judge they wanted to plead guilty and become martyrs—Zubaydah had always denied he was a member of Al Qaeda, something that the Senate Intelligence Committee had also concluded.52 At the end of the hearing, the board retired to consider its verdict.
A journalist from the New York Times who witnessed the fourteen and a half minutes of public proceedings described the military case against Zubaydah as concluding “with unsettling ambiguity.” As the fifteen observers left the Pentagon conference room, murmurs of “handsome,” “striking,” “good looking,” “not so disheveled like you might expect” could be heard, unusual words to describe someone alleged to have perpetrated unspeakable crimes against humanity.53
However, another of Zubaydah’s lawyers, Joseph Margulies, who first met his client in 2007 shortly after the Red Cross was also allowed to see him for the first time, remained pessimistic.54 “This was mere political theater,” he said, explaining that government lawyers had made it clear to him long ago that his client occupied a bizarre netherworld: he had not been charged in the military commission system, let alone a real court, and probably never would be.55 But because of what he had endured in Thailand and elsewhere, he could never be released.
“He became the poster child for the torture program and that’s why they will always keep him under wraps,” said Margulies, who, along with Mark Denbeaux, had regularly flown down to Cuba over the past few years to meet their client in a small wooden ten-by-twelve-foot makeshift cell where they sat at a plastic folding table, with Zubaydah’s feet shackled to a ring in the floor. Denbeaux and Margulies, who sometimes brought food parcels and family updates, represented Zubaydah’s only link to the outside world.
Like many Guantánamo inmates, Zubaydah suffered from serious psychological conditions as a result of his long years of incarceration, including uncontrollable shaking, memory loss, fainting, and vomiting, said Denbeaux. Alone in his cell at Camp 7, he was sometimes observed banging his head against the wall to drown out the noises he heard and to “spread the pain” of a headache he had had since 2002.
While Guantánamo’s military psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health teams operated under strict instructions to avoid any discussion with detainees about their experiences during interrogation, Margulies and Denbeaux had recorded intimate details of their client’s torture.56 “Literally physically sick” is how people would feel if allowed to read his case file, said Margulies.
Out of the 76 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo (166 had been transferred since Obama took office), the government said it now hoped to send more than half to foreign countries after they appeared before the review board.57 Ten would be tried by military commissions, including the five 9/11 defendants who faced the death penalty if convicted, but twenty-five more—who the White House referred to as the “irreducible minimum” and who everyone else called the “forever prisoners”—faced an uncertain fate.
But even the seemingly straightforward cases against those who had admitted to their roles in 9/11 were by now contaminated, their hearings turned into embarrassing spectacles. After attempts to hold their trial in New York were halted in 2010, for fear it would draw another terrorist attack to the city, their cases were transferred back to Guantánamo and their guilty pleas were set aside. Proceedings were frequently interrupted by Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who military psychiatrists had concluded had gone crazy as a result of his years of incarceration, or by Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who appeared in court dressed in a military-style waistcoat to hector and taunt the judge. During one hearing, their codefendant Walid bin Attash had to be restrained in a chair. In October 2016, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi’s pretrial hearing had to be adjourned after his defense atto
rney, a Navy Reserve officer, revealed that his client was having urgent rectal prolapse surgery.58 He described his client as having been “sodomized” during CIA torture.
Even the U.S. military sometimes struggled to present a united front. In 2014, Khalid’s Pentagon-appointed lawyer, Major Jason Wright, had resigned after accusing the Army of trying to undermine his client’s right to a fair trial. Wright tried to represent him as a civilian but was thrown off the case.59
In late 2016, Abu Zubaydah was informed that his request for transfer had been denied.60 In February 2017 he spoke to his parents in Saudi Arabia via Skype.61 Some detainees had better luck. In October 2016, just weeks ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the brother-in-law of Mahfouz the Mauritanian, was released, bringing the number down to sixty inmates.62 Slahi had become a New York Times bestselling author from inside the walls of the world’s most infamous prison with his book Guantánamo Diary. “I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people,” Slahi had written. “I know there is a small extremist minority that believes everybody in this Cuban prison is evil, and that we are treated better than we deserve. But this opinion has no basis but ignorance.”
Just weeks after Slahi’s departure, Donald Trump, a man who many Americans once thought only represented a small extremist minority, was voted in as president, shocking everyone connected to Guantánamo. During campaigning, he had promised to reverse Obama’s decision to close the facility. Instead, he would “load it up” with more bad guys, including, potentially, American citizens and illegal immigrants. He championed torture and “waterboarding” and promised to bring the procedure back and enhance it.
As this book goes to press forty-one prisoners remain at Guantánamo and Trump’s plans for the facility are yet to be made public. But some awkward facts remain: despite multiple requests to visit the facility the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has been repeatedly refused access. Despite a Defense Department outreach project to allow independent observers from Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law to witness military tribunal and review board proceedings, no truly independent assessment has ever been made as to the likelihood that the remaining detainees will ever be afforded a fair trial.
September 2016, Syria
By the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, Islamic State appeared to be rapidly contracting. “Everywhere they have tried to make a stand in recent times, they have been hosed out,” said one Baghdad-based U.S. diplomat. “They know it’s near the end.”63
Once in control of an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s fighters had lost significant territory. They had been driven out of the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Fallujah and routed from the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra (only later to retake it), as well as the Syrian countryside bordering Turkey and the gateway cities of Jarabulus and Manbij, through which European recruits had once poured. Farther afield in Libya, IS fighters were evicted from their headquarters in Sirte, and Abu Bakr’s Khorasan branch that operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan was thrown into disarray after the death of its leader, Hafiz Saeed Khan, in July 2016.
Dozens of Abu Bakr’s most senior lieutenants were dead. After losing Abu Alaa al-Afri, his second-in-command, in March 2016, an Iraqi called Abu Waheeb, who had been one of IS’s most feared executioners, was targeted in May 2016. Two months later an important IS commander, Abu Omar al-Shishani, was also killed, and in August Abu Bakr’s chief spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, who had announced the caliphate in June 2014 and was principal architect of IS’s external operations, died in a U.S. airstrike near Raqqa.64 Abu Bakr’s “information minister,” a man who oversaw the group’s gruesome execution videos, met the same fate in Raqqa just over a week later.65
Rapid victories on the battlefield had drawn thousands of young Muslims to the movement. Now, the U.S. government crowed as the black flags were ripped down all over Syria and Iraq, men shaved their beards while women allowed themselves to be photographed taking off their niqabs. Between thirty thousand and fifty thousand IS fighters were estimated dead, and stories abounded that Abu Bakr’s Western support was hemorrhaging, with thousands reaching out to friends and even diplomats to try to negotiate a passage home. Embarrassingly, some were caught wearing burqas in an attempt to hide their escape.66 “We are now really into the heart of the caliphate,” said General Joseph Votel, the U.S. CENTCOM commander, at the end of August 2016. “We do see momentum building.”67
In mid-October 2016, Turkish rebels drove Islamic State out of the symbolic town of Dabiq in northern Syria. Days later, Iraqi forces, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes and assisted by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, launched an offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, where Abu Bakr had made his famous speech declaring the caliphate in 2014. Next in their sights was Raqqa, where IS began in April 2013, and Al Bab, from where IS had plotted much of the carnage it wreaked in Paris, Brussels, and Istanbul. Aleppo was also retaken. Caught in the middle were Iraqi and Syrian civilians, who continued to die in large numbers.
Counterterrorism experts warned that as its power was shaken, IS would redouble its efforts to launch “mass casualty attacks” in the West.68 Several hundred IS acolytes were said to have slipped back in to Europe to establish cells. Speaking in August 2016, President Obama predicted that the group would in the future rely on small-scale terrorist attacks to generate “the kind of fear and concern that elevates their profile.”69
His words were echoed by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who said in December 2016 that IS had “never been stronger.”70 Holding grounds was no longer important. Lone wolf attacks in Europe and destabilizing Turkey were all that mattered. Days later, a Christmas market was attacked in Berlin. On New Year’s Eve, thirty-nine died in a gun attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul.
Al Qaeda, once Islamic State’s ideological rival, was also growing stronger by exploiting the chaos. While the world was mesmerized by the IS reign of horror and swayed by the Obama administration’s dissembling message that it and Al Qaeda were both spent, al-Zawahiri, who had been ignored and written off, settled on a more pragmatic approach, building confidences among the regional franchises, burrowing deeper into host country Iran, and creating alliances through Julani’s Army of Conquest, now Al Qaeda’s largest-ever affiliate (that is not an affiliate) with an estimated ten thousand fighters.71 In late 2016, he was also strengthened by the release, finally, of Saif al-Adel, who was flown from Tehran to Damascus with General Qassem Suleimani’s blessing.
“Eliminating the caliphate will be an achievement,” said one former State Department counterterrorism coordinator. “But more likely it will just be the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.”72
On the morning of September 11, 2001, having settled into a mountain redoubt that overlooked the plains of Khost, Osama bin Laden had considered his future, with his sons and a handful of fighters sitting around him. Pouring hot tea into a beaker, while a brother fiddled with a satellite dish that was clearly never going to be capable of broadcasting news of the most important day in Osama’s life, he turned to his cohorts, trying to conceal his disappointment.
There were many missing faces; the ones he had hoped would share this moment with him. But most of Al Qaeda’s leadership had rejected the Planes Operation as an off-the-books project, planned and executed almost entirely by brothers who were not in the outfit.
“They rejected Holy Tuesday,” Osama said, bitterly, of the shura.73 “But they forgot one thing.”
He looked around, nodding his head.
“We are not writing our history. But America will and many times over. What it will say—regardless—is that we all …”
He gathered in the room with his arms.
“… did this. Everyone associated with our cause, regardless of who they are, where they were, and what they said—will be condemned to the same fate. But nev
er mind,” he cautioned, “a time will come …”
He sipped some tea.
“… when there is time to write our own version.”
He visualized a tome, detailing triumphs and tragedies, rivalries, jealousies, and great victories.
“An unexpurgated document is what will emerge—about an epoch that begins today.”
Acknowledgments
This book started to coalesce thanks to Zakariya al-Sadeh, a Yemeni student, pro-democracy campaigner, and brother of Amal bin Laden, Osama’s youngest wife, who we met in February 2012 in Islamabad as he struggled to free her from detention in Pakistan. A tense discussion with Zakariya led to nervy meetings with many others that resulted eventually in conversations with Osama’s family, friends, mentors, companions, factotums, security chiefs, and religious and media advisers. Daniel Pearl’s fate is branded into the collective memory: the luring and videoed murder (by Khalid Shaikh Mohammad) of the Wall Street Journal correspondent in 2002. And, perhaps surprisingly, it is as much a burden on the collective consciousness of Islamists as it was with us.
But the Pearl miasma began to fade, and finally, something unique came into focus—as we traveled wherever a meeting could be brokered—from Mauritania to Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, the United States, and Pakistan. Many people in these countries helped bring this book together: religious scholars; Al Qaeda fighters, commanders, thinkers, and cheerleaders; Al Qaeda fund-raisers and their friends; as well as Gulf intelligence agents and their sources (working with Al Qaeda and sometimes against it), who cannot or do not wish to be named. This book would not have been possible without their input.
In Pakistan, after making our case that senior officers should express the country’s national interest in the way that American officials freely and frequently do, some came forward just as the military establishment struggled to regain composure, respect, and authority after being rocked by the Abbottabad affair. The military is not monotheistic and consists of many different shades of opinion. Senior officers who cannot be named took enormous risks in-country (and out of Pakistan) to meet. Those we can name include General Asim Bajwa, General Athar Abbas, Brigadier Shaukat Qadir, Brigadier Syed Amjad Shabbir, General Masood Aslam, General Jehangir Karamat, Commodore Zafar Iqbal, General Ziauddin Butt, and of course the late General Hamid Gul, who began cautiously and mischievously—but the written and verbal accounts he shared with us were pinpoint, perceptive, and captivating, proving his proximity to the unfolding epoch of terror, which has bloodied Pakistan more than anywhere else in the world.
