During an appearance before a military review board, an attorney for Guantánamo Bay’s Gazan “forever prisoner” revealed that negotiations are underway for his possible release after being tortured and detained without charges for 22 years.
Abu Zubaydah (whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn) is perhaps the most egregious victim of the U.S. national security apparatus that ran amok after the September 11 attacks and still grinds on. He appeared in a Guantánamo courtroom Thursday, listening to his attorney Solomon Shinerock tell a board of U.S. officials that a “redacted” country could admit Abu Zubaydah and monitor his activities indefinitely. The detainee will agree to any form of surveillance by the host country, said Shinerock, who did not name the country during the unclassified portion of the hearing.
The prisoner looking healthy at 52 in a business suit and tinted glasses, did not sport the piratical eye patch he carried the first time he was seen in a public setting in 2016. At that time, the government was still insisting that Abu Zubaydah had been an important Al Qaeda operative who had advance knowledge of 9/11 and other attacks and was only cooperating with Guantánamo staff as a subterfuge. Since then, the claim that he was “No. 3” in Al Qaeda has been abandoned. The U.S. government’s assessment of Abu Zubaydah has shrunk to a brief statement that he “probably” served as one of Osama bin Laden’s “most trusted” facilitators.
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Margot Williams is the Research Editor for Investigations at The Intercept. Her career at the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is one of the most respected in the investigative reporting world. She has pursued jihadis online and detainees who died in U.S. immigration detention, investigated Iraq war contractors, and followed the money (and private jets) of mayors, governors, senators, presidential candidates, and ex-presidents. And she has spread her passion for investigative journalism — and her incredible ferreting skills — at numerous international workshops over the years.
