Abu Zubaydah (12 March 1971 - present) (Arabic: ابو زبيدة) was, according to American authorities, a high-ranking member of al-Qaida and close associate of Osama bin Laden. He is currently in U.S. custody in an unknown location. Zubaydah's name is often transliterated as Abu Zubaidah, Abu Zubeida, or Abu Zoubeida. Born Zein al-Abideen Mohamed Hussein (Arabic: زين العابدين محمد حسين), he is also known by over thirty-five aliases.

Born in Saudi Arabia, Abu Zubaydah has been close to al-Qaida all his life, helping to operate a popular terrorist training camp near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 1990s. He became an associate of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and served as a chief recruiter for al-Qaida.

In the late 1990s, Abu Zubaydah played a lead role in one of the 2000 millennium attack plots, and a possible tangential role in a second. There were plans to bomb a fully booked Radisson hotel in Amman, Jordan, and three other sites. This targeted tourists from the United States and Israel. But on November 30, 1999, Jordanian intelligence intercepted a call between Abu Zubaydah and Khadr Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian militant, and determined that an attack was imminent. Jordanian police arrested 22 conspirators and foiled the attack. Abu Zubaydah was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court for his role. There is also evidence that Abu Zubaydah approved the Los Angeles airport bomb plot in 2000. This plot was also foiled.

In March of 2001, United States Condoleezza Rice was informed by the CIA that Zubaydah was planning a major operation in the near future. This was one of the first of many reports in the Spring of 2001 that increased the threat level and indicated that an attack was coming. Many of these reports mentioned Zubaydah by name. The attack finally came in the form of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The U.S. government believes he became al-Qaeda's top military strategist following the death of Muhammad Atef in November 2001. A later plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris failed, as did an alleged plot to attack a target in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Zubaydah was probably a conspirator in both of those plots.

U.S. intelligence located Abu Zubaydah in 2002 by tracing his phone calls. He was captured March 28, 2002, in a two story apartment in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was shot three times in a firefight, including a wound to the groin and a wound to the thigh, but survived. While in U.S. custody, he has given a great deal of (mis)information about the 9/11 attack plot. Such information was used by the Canadian government in seeking to uphold the 'security certificate' of Mohamed Harkat. Critics however have claimed that several of the interrogations may have bordered on torture to pressure Abu Zubaydah into fingering other suspects.

Abu Zubayda is held within the CIA prison system, where many have claimed that he is subjected to torture. His statements under interrogation have provided a very large amount of the information used around the world as 'definitive', and he is the sole person to make many of the claims.

Capture

Abu Zubaydah was captured in a safehouse in Pakistan. Several of the detainees who face charges before military commissions were captured at the same time as Abu Zubaydah. In the case of Abdul Zahir, being captured at the same time as Abu Zubaydah is one of the factors in favour of his continued detention.Summarized transcripts (.pdf), from Abdul Zahir's Combatant Status Review Tribunal pages 1-8

Suskind allegations

According to author Ron Suskind's 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine, Abu Zubayda was found by CIA and FBI interrogators to be mentally ill, whose decade-long diary was written by three separate personalities and who appeared to have an intense interest in the minutiae of other people's lives, including what they ate and what clothes they wore. Dan Coleman, a former FBI counterterror agent, told Suskind that "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Despite evidence of Abu Zubaydah's mental instability and that his position within al-Qaeda was primarily as a travel agent for operatives' wives and children, the Bush administration continued to present the al-Qaeda member as the organization's top strategist. Suskind reports that President George W. Bush asked CIA director George Tenet, "I said he was important. You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" Following that conversation, interrogators subjected Abu Zubaydah to techniques such as waterboardings, threats of execution, sleep deprivation and withholding of medication. As a result, Abu Zubaydah gave details on dozens of plots, none of which were independently substantiated. As Suskind put it, "^*he United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

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