The Convenient Terrorist by John Kiriakou

Author:John Kiriakou [Kiriakou, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2017-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Will The Real Abu Zubaydah Please Stand Up?

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After the failed Millennium Attacks, Abu Zubaydah went on the run. The FBI and the CIA were both looking for him, and the RAND Corporation also began investigating Abu Zubaydah. From the information they had on hand, RAND created a biography of Abu Zubaydah which was then used by CIA and FBI operatives in the field. The problem was that most of RAND’s information was completely wrong.

For example, RAND (and the CIA and FBI) believed of Abu Zubaydah that he:

• Had been born in Saudi Arabia, but grew up in the Gaza Strip of Palestine

• Had joined Hamas as a youngster

• Had been recruited in the 1980s by Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Al-Zawahiri (a commander of Al Qaeda)

• Had fought directly against the Soviets

• Had become an Al Qaeda’s operational chief in the 1990s

• Was married to a woman

After extensively interviewing Abu Zubaydah’s family and studying his personal diaries, we now know that every point from the RAND file noted above is completely wrong. Abu Zubaydah didn’t grow up in Palestine; he grew up in Saudi Arabia. He was never in Hamas, and did not meet Al-Zawahiri in his youth. He did not fight the Soviets in the late 1980s—he was still in high school in Saudi Arabia at that time. He was not in Al Qaeda, let alone their chief of operations. And he was never married.

Red flags should have been raised by these discrepancies when (after his eventual capture) the Pakistani media reported that the Taliban leadership was stating that the United States had captured “the wrong Abu Zubaydah.” It is also evident that someone in the CIA still had questions about Abu Zubaydah’s capture. Shortly after, Abu Zubaydah went into CIA custody and was rendered to a classified location for interrogation, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which was tasked with questioning Abu Zubaydah, did not immediately send anyone to interrogate him because they did not believe it was the correct Abu Zubaydah who had been captured. When interrogation did finally begin, his answers led many in the CIA to wonder whether they had the right person. However, none of this resulted in any substantive reevaluation by the CIA. Instead, Abu Zubaydah was simply counted “a tough egg to crack.” The CIA concluded that he was lying to them intentionally. This, eventually, led to the decision to torture Abu Zubaydah.

So how did our top intelligence agencies formulate such distorted untruths?

It has never before been reported, but the fact is there were indeed two Jihadi Abu Zubaydahs.

The other one was named Maher Abu Zubayda, and they were cousins. Intelligence agencies, in a rush and unaware of this, had conflated their Abu Zubaydahs when piecing together dossiers. Discrepancies that should have been red flags were never raised because the CIA and FBI did not communicate effectively with one another, and because, before 9/11, both agencies did not have enough staff fluent in Arabic available to analyze critical information in the case.

There are other signs of a ball being dropped, too.

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