Abu Zubaydah

Best known as Abu Zubaydah and the first of the High Value Detainees captured by the United States, he was taken into custody in Faisalabad, Pakistan on 28 March 2002.

Of Palestinian nationality but raised in Saudi Arabia, his true name is believed to be Zayn al-'Abidin Abu Zubadayah. He is also known as Hani and Tariq. The U.S. described him as a travel facilitator for al-Qaeda.

Operations

According to his Director of National Intelligenc (DNI) biography, he began at a low level with al-Qaida, as a recruiter for Arabs in Pakistan, and sending them to training in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechniya. Subsequently, he became a smuggler, explosives instructor, and forger, eventually becoming director of the Khaldan, Afghanistan facility by 2000. He also channeled funds from donors in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to al-Qaeda.

Abu Zubaydah assisted in supporting the U.S. and Jordanian Millenium Plots. In 2001, he arranged the travel of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, into Iran. He was captured while arranging an attack in Israel.

Captivity

He was the subject of the first detailed Office of Legal Counsel opinion authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques.

While he was considered of high value when captured, reports indicate he was less important than believed, and material gained through the enhanced techniques, according to the Washington Post, turned out to be useless. He did have valuable material, "chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates," but this was obtained before waterboarding. Prior to 9/11, he was not an official member of al-Qaeda, a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues,who "ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan." He has not been formally charged by a Military Commission. There are competing arguments to try him for conspiracy in the U.S., or, instead, to send him to Jordan for trial there.

There is little argument that he was committed to radical jihad, and "regarded the United States as an enemy principally because of its support of Israel...He was widely known as a kind of travel agent for those seeking such training." The fact of his involvement with travel, may have made him unusually visible before capture, perhaps through communications intelligence tracking the movements.

The argument for trying him in the U.S. centers on his links with Ahmed Ressam, "an al-Qaeda member dubbed the 'Millennium Bomber' for his plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999...he was involved in discussions, after the Taliban government fell in Afghanistan, to strike back at the United States, including with attacks on American soil, according to law enforcement and military sources."

Jordan, however, "tied him to terrorist plots to attack a hotel and Christian holy sites in their country..." Some U.S. officials are concerned about at trial that might set a legal precedent due to interrogation methods, and prefer a Jordanian solution.

"It's simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaida wasn't intimately involved with al-Qaeda," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much about Abu Zubaida remains classified. "He was one of the terrorist organization's key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures . . . and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members. How anyone can minimize that information -- some of the best we had at the time on al-Qaeda -- is beyond me."

That role, it turned out, would play a part in deciding his fate once in U.S. hands: Because his name often turned up in intelligence traffic linked to al-Qaeda transactions, some U.S. intelligence leaders were convinced that Abu Zubaida was a major figure in the terrorist organization, according to officials engaged in the discussions at the time.