11/13/13 – Jason Leopold – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I got Jason on the phone, Jason Leopold, now writing for Al Jazeera, america.aljazeera.com, I think it is.
Where the hell is this article?
Holy journalism, Batman.
Welcome back to the show.
Jason, how are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
Wow.
Tell the people about this great scoop you got.
Where'd you get it?
Yeah.
Well, I'm not going to say that.
But this is not a Freedom of Information Act thing.
This is you got, you were leaked, correct?
Yeah.
All of Abu Zubaydah's journals, going back to the early 1990s?
The whole...
Yeah.
Six volumes of diaries that he wrote between 1990 and eight days before his capture in March of 2002.
And Abu Zubaydah, in case people are not completely aware of who he is, he is the first high-value, so-called high-value detainee captured after 9-11.
He is the one who the torture memo written by John Yoo was written specifically for.
He is mentioned in the infamous Presidential Daily Brief of August 2001, warning George W. Bush, quote, bin Laden determined to strike U.S.
He is also tied to dozens of other Guantanamo prisoners, and their detention is basically linked to the fact that they were, you know, associates, alleged associates of Zubaydah.
So these are incredibly important documents.
I will say that I did actually file a Freedom of Information Act, Scott, for these diaries two years ago, and as recently as two months ago.
And I filed that with the Department of Defense because these documents, and I should say that I have the English, the government's translations of the Arabic.
But unredacted, correct?
Completely unredacted.
And the government, or the Department of Defense, denied my request for the diaries, and they said that if they were released to me, it would potentially jeopardize or, you know, his potential charges before a military commission.
And the Justice Department just simply denied turning them over.
But these diaries are so important because it is more or less the bulk of the evidence that the government has against him in whatever their case is.
And these diaries have been used to build a psychological profile of him, to exploit his fears.
It's important as well because it tells this, he tells this unbelievable, compelling story, Scott, certainly about the events leading up to 9-11 and the aftermath following the U.S. invasion.
But going back even further, he talks about the, you know, the role of jihadists, of mujahideen in Afghanistan, which was supported by the U.S. at one time, and his involvement with these groups and his fight on the front lines there.
And so he's really present at the rise of al-Qaeda, which he talks about, the arrival of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which he, you know, he also talks about.
And it's just a fascinating look at, you know, certainly at this complex figure that he turned out to be.
He's really, and it's amazing, you know, insight.
All right, now I want to get into as much of that as we can, but a couple of notes here.
First of all, what is your confidence in the translation here in the documents that this is, are you certain, for example, that this is a product prepared by lower CIA people for their higher-ups, that they would have every reason to get it as right as they could, kind of thing, as compared to some story they're selling you?
Yeah, I mean, I did check on the authenticity of it, and, you know, his lawyers are even, you know, confident with regard to that as well.
And let me just say that there have been many claims made about Abu Zubaydah over the years about who he is, what his role is, and it's pretty clear that there's, you know, a chunk of these diaries that would not make the U.S. look very good, particularly, you know, what we've learned later on.
Well, now, hold it just one sec, because I wanted to ask you about the narrative that exists in some places anyway, and, well, I'll leave the footnotes out because I don't want to get it wrong who wrote what, but more or less, I'm under the impression, I guess I should say, that the CIA was torturing this guy, or they wanted to, the FBI was questioning him and they were getting somewhere, and then the CIA took him away and tortured him, whatever.
Bush used him over and over again in press conferences as the reason that we had to torture people, like, man, there's this Zubaydah guy, we tortured him, and then he sang like a canary and we saved all your lives over and over again because of what he told us.
And then, according to Ron Susskind, Bush got in a big fight with George Tenet, because at some point, George Tenet, the head of the CIA, came and said, actually, that's not right.
And Bush got mad at him and said, well, I already said he was important, so now you're going to make me lose face.
Oh, and then part of that, too, was that the FBI said that the CIA is crazy if they think that this guy's the big kingpin, because he's crazy.
If you look at his diaries, he's obviously a madman and couldn't possibly have been in charge of anything.
That's not the impression I'm getting from your journalism here, so...
No, it's absolutely wrong that, you know, that Dan Coleman, former FBI special agent, who basically put out that narrative and passed it along to Ron Susskind, who wrote the book The One Percent Doctrine, basically stating that evidence of his insanity was his diaries.
And what was behind that was that, as Susskind wrote in his book, that Zubeda wrote to these various versions of himself, called Honey One, Honey Two, Honey Three.
Honey is the nickname that his parents gave him.
But Zubeda makes it so clear, Scott, in these diaries, why he chose to speak to another version of himself.
And he says that, I am writing to a 30-year-old version of myself, because I don't have any friends and I need someone to talk to.
And then he adds that, I'm not schizophrenic, I'm not insane, I'm not a crazy person, you know, this is me paraphrasing here, for doing this.
So he's stating that explicitly.
You have to wonder how could, you know, an FBI special agent attached to the CIA's bin Laden unit would come away with reviewing the diaries believing that this person is, you know, quote, certifiable, split personality.
There's absolutely no way, Scott, that he is mentally unstable, as the FBI claimed.
No, I get it.
I mean, look, FBI agents think a lot of things, and almost none of them are ever correct about anything.
So I can understand how that goes in the category.
Even if the CIA are the bad guys in this story, that they're the ones torturing him, that doesn't mean that the FBI have a clue what they're talking about.
Yeah, I think we can dispense with that.
I'll let you get back to your story, because you've got a hell of a story to tell here.
I just want to clarify a couple of those things to start us off.
Yeah, no, I think that's important, because that's the narrative out there.
So, excuse me, the first diary that I wrote about, this was the first installment, it's part of this series, you know, the diaries, the government translations are more than 800 pages.
And, you know, the first one, he's a computer engineering student in India.
You know, he's attending college.
He's very lonely.
Zubeda grew up in Saudi Arabia, he's of Palestinian descent, doesn't have many friends.
He sits around at night listening to Christeberg, the soft, you know, soft FM rock tunes of Christeberg, who is best known for the song, The Lady in Red.
I don't know if you recall that, but, you know, he says that, you know, his only friend is a cigarette, and you can get the sense that this is a person who's very depressed.
He decides, you know, at the urging of a friend, to one day go to Afghanistan for training.
This was in January of 1991.
And he gets to Afghanistan, and his plan was to, you know, go into this training camp and return to India, you know, to finish his studies.
And keep in mind that, you know, at this time, basically anyone could enter this training camp called Kalden Training Camp, which goes back to, you know, which was supported by the U.S. and goes back to, you know, the 80s, when, you know, the Mujahideen were, you know, fighting against the Soviets.
But he gets there, and suddenly he's sort of embraced by, you know, all of these other, you know, Mujahideen, and, you know, they welcome him in, and it's an experience he has clearly not felt before.
And so, he makes this decision that he's going to give up everything and go to what he calls the, or stay in what he calls the land of jihad, Afghanistan.
And you know, from there, you follow this unbelievable evolution of, you know, computer engineering student to student of jihad, you know, to a man who became this master forger, you know, forging documents, travel documents, passports, and, you know, encountering all of these infamous, you know, figures, including bin Laden, Mohammed Attaf, you know, former military, deceased military leader of Al-Qaeda.
I mean, he names names, Scott.
He writes down every, for the most part, every name, alias at least, of everyone he has encountered.
And you know, you get such great insight, first of all, into the, you know, this growth of Al-Qaeda, and the infighting between, you know, what Zubaydah wanted to do, which was what he called defensive jihad, and what, you know, bin Laden was promoting, which was offensive jihad, which is what he says.
And there's, you know, a lot of infighting, and there's competition, you know, among these, you know, among these groups.
And you know, you just follow this story, which is, I mean, truly, it's very cinematic in a sense.
Yeah, well, and what a scoop, I mean, what an inside view.
And now, so, as far as Bush arguing with Tenet about how important the guy was, he was important, but he wasn't bin Laden's lieutenant, is basically, I think, the point you're saying.
He was important in other ways.
That's right.
I mean, here, there are many instances throughout his diary, Scott, because he was, you know, I'm not sure what facilitator exactly means, but he was in charge of a guest house in, you know, Peshawar, Pakistan, and he called himself sort of an administrator.
He was basically the, you know, he would, he would more or less meet everyone who, you know, would, before they went into the training camp, they'd stop off at this, you know, this guest house.
And the guest house was, you know, called House of Martyrs.
And so he would more or less meet everyone.
He'd write down their names, write down some stories about them.
But because he, you know, was the sort of, you know, the person that everyone saw first, his name was, you know, mentioned often.
And he would often say in his diaries that the Pakistani media, and this is going back, by the way, to the mid-90s, that they're continuously identifying him as, you know, bin Laden's, you know, closely linked with bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and he's next in line to run al-Qaeda.
And he said in his diaries, I don't know why they're saying this.
Where are they getting this information from?
I'm not even a member of al-Qaeda.
How can I become their leader?
So, you know, he's, you know, he's critiquing these, you know, these news reports, and the fact that he is mentioned in these news reports, I mean, you could see, you could tell that he kind of likes it.
He kind of likes the attention.
But at the same time, you know, he's taking, you know, various security precautions.
So, you know, seeing that in his diaries, you have to, you know, you wonder, like, why and how did we get it so wrong?
Well, then again, I mean, you talk about how he's riding with an eye toward an audience, an imagined audience, that will get their hands on this thing one day, in a sense, too.
So maybe he's just building in a little deniability.
Who the hell's bin Laden?
I don't know what you're talking about kind of thing.
Sure, you know, I mean, but he does say at the same time, you know, in an early volume, you know, remind me to tell you one day about bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda organization.
Then he goes on to say that I'm thinking of joining Al-Qaeda, and this is a thought I've had for about eight months since I arrived at the Al-Farouk training camp.
So you know, and he's very, he's also very vocal or, you know, writing about, I shouldn't say vocal, but he's writing about, you know, how he fears that maybe these diaries will fall into the wrong hands and be used against him.
So he is holding back, and that's much later on.
Oh, I see.
But no, this is Zubeda Diaries shed new light on Twin Towers and links to bin Laden, america.aljazeera.com.
And of course, Abu Zubeda being one of the big stars of the terror war, at least as it was portrayed by the Bush regime in the first, you know, couple of years, few years after September 11th, still being held down at Guantanamo Bay, was waterboarded.
I guess he was the one who was waterboarded three times and, or wait, how many times was he waterboarded?
It was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 187, right?
No, 83 times in a single month.
83.
Right, right.
But I also just want to point out, Scott, is that, you know, for people coming to this the first time, it'd be, you know, first of all, these are very lengthy stories, so anyone that's taken the time to read it, thank you.
But the first one, last week, I really enjoyed, I think it's really great journalism, I really hope that people do.
And you know what?
Sometimes you can just sit and read an article real quick, and sometimes you gotta devote a little bit of time to it, but man, this one is worth it.
This is really something else that you got here.
Thank you.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry, but go ahead.
Oh, I was just gonna say that the first installment will sort of, you know, sort of sets it up to really sort of understand, you know, this character, this person, Abu Zubeda.
So, you know, reading that first before going into this one today, which sort of, you know, jumps forward 10 years to 9-11, it's sort of crucial to sort of, you know, get a better understanding of, you know, of who he is, what was happening in his mind.
I mean, you know, he, I think, I'm not sure if I mentioned, Scott, but you know, one of his greatest fears when he went to Afghanistan, he writes about in 1991, was, what will I do if there's no more jihad?
Here I am devoting my life to jihad, but what will I do if there's no more jihad?
I don't have a college degree.
That was the problem they all had.
I'm sorry?
That was the problem they all had.
They couldn't go home anymore.
Their only job skills was how to blow up stuff.
Yeah, he was really worried about this.
I mean, he was, he was worried, he was, you know, fearful that, you know, he won't have anything to fall back on.
You fast forward about, you know, a decade, and this camp that he's closely associated with, Kalden Camp, you know, was shut down by the Taliban to sort of try and bring everyone under, you know, Osama Bin Laden's wing, or under his umbrella.
And you know, you get the sense that, you know, Zubaydah is suddenly, his greatest fear is about to come true.
What will I do if there's no more jihad?
And that's what they say every day in D.C. and Virginia, too.
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, and I think that's part of what's so fascinating here, is sort of bearing witness to his, you know, his desperation.
And he shows up in Afghanistan in mid-2001, around May or June of 2001.
He says he always loses track of time whenever he's in Afghanistan, but he has $50,000.
And he says, you know, not much for an operation, you know, against the Jews and against Israel.
But I've talked with some of the brothers, and they'll support me, or they promise to support me later on.
And you know, this is a real sort of change for him, at least the way he writes about it, because everything prior to that, it was really focused, so focused on, you know, the jihadist operations in Tajikistan and Bosnia, all the places where, you know, the, what he says, you know, infidels invading Muslim lands.
But obviously, you know, with Israel, it's, you know, if you understand, if you can sort of relate to what he's talking about, you know, that was his own sort of, you know, struggle as well.
He had no identity, and he talks about that, and you know, this was sort of the same thing, getting, you know, getting people out of Palestine.
And then so...
What he called the invaders out of Palestine, that is.
And then getting them out of there and just bring them to Afghanistan, but for what?
I mean, bin Laden had a purpose for his army.
What was Zubaydah training these guys to do?
Well, he said that he was basically, you know, what they were training for is just in case anyone came and, you know, invaded your land, you would be prepared.
You know, that's why he said that Kalden was this public camp.
You could come and go as you pleased.
You could come for a weekend, you know, participate in some training, you'd have that under your belt, and maybe down the road, you know, you're called for jihad, or you want to be ready for jihad, you'd be prepared, Scott.
And you know, so that was what he was really focused on, focused on as well as sort of hoping that there would be the creation of this, you know, Islamic state for Muslims.
Yeah, I mean, it did really become, ever since the Reagan years, and then all through the 90s, still, it was just sort of a rite of passage for, among some Muslim men, to go to Afghanistan, Arabs to go to Afghanistan, and go through the training camps.
And of course, people probably remember back in the, especially like the first Bush administration years, about how they would pretend that anyone who'd ever been to Afghanistan before, or who had laid eyes on one of these camps, were automatically all members of Al Qaeda, and working for bin Laden on his mission against us.
When really, you could have found people from towns all over the Middle East, who went to those training camps, sort of like Eagle Scouts kind of a thing, or being a private in the army, and then being discharged kind of a thing.
It didn't really make warriors, and crazies, and jihadists, and anti-American terrorists out of all of them at all, but it made for a great talking point that it did.
But so what you're telling me is that that was Zubaydah's roles, he just ran one of those training camps that Tom, Dick, and Harry would go and train in, but he was not really part of Al Qaeda.
I mean, but he knew a lot, and you say that he helped them all celebrate on September 11th, right?
Yeah, no, he did, and just to go into your last point, that's why these diaries are really important.
I mean, they really are an important historical document, and to really understand this world of jihad, I mean, you're getting it directly from a person who was there, and that's highly unusual.
I mean, we don't have anything like this out there, Scott.
There aren't any diaries floating around by a person of Zubaydah's stature.
But after 9-11, sure, yes, he talks about, he says that after the news came out on the radio, lambs were slaughtered, and juice and sweets were distributed to celebrate the attacks.
And then the U.S. invaded, and his job was, he said he was security, he was working security, but he also talked about various meetings that he participated in with Mohammed Attaf, who was killed in a drone strike, and he was the military leader at the time of Al Qaeda, and he said that the invasion had the unintended consequence of bringing all of these jihadist groups together, from Pakistan and various tribes, groups that never really got along with one another, but they all united against the U.S. after the invasion.
And then, when was he grabbed the beginning of O2, right?
In March of O2.
So, you know, what, as the Taliban, you know, regime started to come...
Actually, wait a minute, before we get to that, I'm sorry, I was thinking of this question, but I forgot it.
Before we get to the capture part, what do you know of his role in planning any at all of Al Qaeda's stuff at the time, whatever, because I thought, and I'm just going from memory here, this is not in your piece, but I thought I had learned that so many of these bogus orange alerts that were going on mostly to just scare everybody into letting them invade Iraq back in O2 was what it was really about more than anything else, but that most of those were beaten out of this guy, that he was the one who said, oh yeah, a bank in New Jersey, a school in Texas, a bridge somewhere in Minnesota, or whatever nonsense, just made up nonsense to try to, you know, that they would use all the time to raise the level from yellow to orange and back again, that they must have known wasn't true at the time, but am I wrong about that, or did he know anything about that stuff, or it was all just made up out of a whole cloth, or what?
Well, you know, of course the U.S. government will say otherwise, and Ali Soufan, who is the FBI special agent that wrote a book called The Black Banners and interrogated him, still maintains that that's accurate, but others just say, you know, this is not true, he sent everyone on a wild goose chase because they were, you know, torturing him, and they were also torturing him for, you know, intelligence on Iraq's connection, you know, fantasy connection to Al-Qaeda, in order to use that as more justification, you know, for the invasion.
He never did implicate Iraq, though, did he?
Or did he?
As far as I know, he didn't, but the amir of the training camp that he was closely associated with, that he writes about, Ibn al-Shiq al-Libi, did, and he was, you know, he was rendered to, I believe it was Egypt, and then eventually, you know, died in a jail in Libya, supposedly he, you know, committed suicide, Scott, and, but it was everything that he provided that, you know, the U.S. used to show a connection, or to claim that there was a connection, so...
I guess part of the premise of my question that I didn't really state very well, Jason, was that it seemed like, you know, they would say, okay, here's an example of a different sort, but kind of sort of the same, where Bush said, yeah, there's a threat to the library tower in Los Angeles, and how, yeah, yeah, yeah, what he means by that is, once upon a time, a couple of guys sitting around talked about, well, maybe that could be one of the targets, but that, they were just taking it completely out of context, sort of the same thing with Libby.
It's like, yeah, we do have an Al-Qaeda guy that implicated Saddam Hussein, after we beat it out of him, and told him, just say the name Saddam, and we'll stop hurting you, you know?
Yeah.
Well, that's exactly what they did.
I mean, so...
But so then, but my point being, though, so was Zubeda, when he was saying, yeah, a bank in New Jersey, did they ever, was he involved in discussions like that?
Or he would have just been making things up out of nothing, because he really wasn't that close to the guys who would have been talking about those sorts of things, is what I'm trying to ask you.
Well, I'm not entirely clear about what he was involved with, with regard to those specific, you know, so-called threats that, you know, that he provided intel on, but it's pretty clear in his diary, Scott, that, you know, he knew certain things that were taking place.
With regard to 9-11, he doesn't write as if he knew 9-11 specifically, that there was going to be this attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but he said that he knew something big was coming.
Everybody knew something big was coming.
And you know, with regard to other operations, he also suggests, or seems to suggest that, you know, he's aware of what's happening.
But to me, it's not clear that, you know, with regard to the Brooklyn Bridge, because there was a threat there and on Wall Street, that he was involved in any of that.
But I'll just go, you know, again, go to Afghanistan.
He was, he talked about that he was in this meeting with the Secretary Tamala Omar, with Mohammed Attaf, and they were discussing, you know, you know, the strategy and security with regard to, you know, how to handle the U.S.
So he was privy to some meetings, maybe not all of them.
I don't know, but he definitely was in some areas.
And so, you know, certainly must have been a useful target for intelligence.
And you know, I don't know if they have a case.
What specific case are they trying to make against him in Guantanamo?
I guess I was going to make the case there before I interrupted myself, that maybe you could argue for the FBI interrogating him, if not CIA torturers, you know?
Well, I mean, yeah, and I think that, you know, the great question, you know, they brought up about Guantanamo, it's entirely unclear, Scott.
I mean, the government, the Justice Department says in court documents that the bulk of their case for the most part is contained in these six volumes of diaries, you know, that I obtained.
But these diaries were written prior to, you know, the 9-11 attacks, or rather, you know, and a little bit afterwards.
So what would be their case?
We've already seen how, you know, material support and conspiracy, you know, prior to 9-11 just, you know, was tossed out, that, you know, the D.C. Circuit said, you can't make that retroactive because it wasn't a war crime.
So we don't know what the case is against him.
I think the, you know, the fact of the matter is, is that he will never, ever be charged.
I mean, he will probably die in Guantanamo or another, you know, detention facility.
And, you know, that much seems pretty clear to me.
Now, so when the Americans invade, he didn't fight at all, he just ran to Pakistan?
No, he was fighting.
But his fighting, you know, he doesn't write about, you know, I, you know, was on the front lines here the way he does in the first volume and talks about, you know, how he was really on the front lines, you know, fighting in the Civil War.
Here, it actually, you know, what his descriptions of fighting is, is more or less retreat and hiding.
So, you know, he talks about security, but it, you know, it's mostly, you know, just sort of, it seems to be protecting, you know, some of the senior al-Qaeda figures and retreating, trying to get, you know, up into the mountains, trying to just eventually by foot, you know, make his way, you know, into Pakistan and help many of these, you know, old-school Mujahideen jihadists escape.
So in a way, it sounds almost like they have a less of a case against him than they had against Cotter, which is, you know, Cotter at least was accused of defending himself.
Right, yeah, no, yeah, exactly.
I mean, you know, they're using the diary, Scott, as the evidence, there's nothing, there's nothing in there where he's saying, I threw a grenade, you know, at a U.S. soldier, I shot this person, there's nothing there.
The only thing that we, that he talks about is his, you know, feelings about this was the right time to wage a war against the U.S., but he's also critical about what, you know, bin Laden did, because it's simply just a declaration of war.
A real war would look much different, and then aside from that, it's, let's help, you know, he's helping everyone escape.
So that's pretty much it.
I mean, it's fascinating, because it's so, it really is action-packed.
I mean, it's very visual, where he's writing about, you know, the drone strikes, the civilian hundreds of civilian deaths, and, you know, and how they're trying to make their way out of Afghanistan.
And then, I'm sorry, because I tried to ask you before, and then I interrupted you and me, or maybe it was the commercial's fault or something, but about his capture in Pakistan, and then what happened to him after that, say, between there and Guantanamo.
Yes, well, he was, you know, after he was captured in Pakistan, he was in a, and by the way, his last diary entry is eight days before he's captured, and he writes, nothing new.
That's it.
That's it.
Almost like, hey, watch this, you know, glad you didn't just attempt to fake.
Exactly.
And he was captured on March 28th, and, you know, he shot three times.
He's near death.
A surgeon from John Hopkins, John Hopkins, is flown in to keep him alive, and he's whisked away to a CIA black site, believed to be in Thailand first.
And not long after he's, that he's brought to the black site, you know, they have his diaries translated, and they build a psychological assessment on him, and they exploit his fears, and they subject him to, you know, to all these torture techniques.
What kind of torture techniques did they subject him to, other than, we talked about the drowning there.
Waterboarding, you know, wall slamming, you know, he was hung in stress positions, you know, they proposed putting him in a coffin-like box.
One of the proposed techniques, Scott, was placing him in a box with an insect, because he had, they said he had a fear of bugs.
Well, they discovered his fear of bugs from his diary, because he writes about it.
And so, see, that's part of that, you know, the exploitation, that they knew what his fears were.
You know, they went through this very carefully, and so that was one of the proposed techniques.
Is it Jane Mayer's book that says that the reason that, really, the CIA got him from the FBI was because he really had told them most of what they wanted to know, or was in the process, but the CIA wanted more, and they just thought if they could torture it out of him, he could come up with more, but he didn't really have what they were looking for, and so it was in their frustration, really, that they resorted to that.
Or maybe, before it got to the point of frustration, I guess, Dick Cheney was in a hurry.
Yeah, you know, I mean, look, I think that part of this is that we still don't know exactly what they were doing.
I believe, I didn't report this, but I believe that they were, you know, this was their grand experiment, and I mean the experiment, that, you know, if they were looking through the diary, Scott, you know, sure, they would have known that there was a level of importance there, but they also would have known that, you know, he wasn't this, you know, number three in Al-Qaeda, and you already have this sort of disagreement between his level of importance between, you know, the FBI and the CIA, but, you know, using, having this, you know, these diaries to sort of exploit his fears and test out these methods that eventually were tweaked, were first used on him, and then tweaked in a way to sort of almost perfect them later on on other, you know, prisoners.
To me, that's, you know, the whole sort of like, oh, we need to get more intel.
I think that's, you know, that's just a cover story.
Yeah, well, it was the same kind of thing with Qatani there at Guantanamo Bay, whereas, let's put this guy through the paces and see which combination of these may or may not add up to lowercase a, abuse, or whatever technical term that they were trying to stay just within.
Yeah, I think that's exactly it, and I mean, you know, we see that to some extent with, you know, again, how this was all sort of, you know, perfected later on, when the torture memo was certainly, you know, changed a bit with, you know, instead of, I'm just sort of throwing this out there, instead of pouring, you know, 12 pours, they would do 14, and they based that off of the way Zubeda responded, so.
But look, here we are, 12 years after 9-11, and we're still learning about, you know, what was happening, and this is a person whose voice we have never, ever heard from.
We've never heard his voice, so the fact that we have this opportunity now, you know, to hear directly, to hear his voice directly, you know, people take the time to actually read the source documents, you know, I think that it's, you know, again, it's just an important part of history, and, you know, people draw their own conclusions about, you know, what they feel, what they think, but I think it sort of underscores how, you know, the narrative that the U.S. put out is not exactly the right narrative.
Right.
And now, you know, I'd hate to leave people with the false impression that Guantanamo is full of a bunch of guys who even had ever met bin Laden or heard of him necessarily, which most of those people, even still most of them, have nothing to do with, you know, the people who were formerly held by the CIA at their secret prisons and now serve as sort of the window dressing on what is really a warehouse for people who have already been cleared for release, and what's funny to me is, especially the way you put it about how many years ago this was now, that we're still going on with even the Democrats, as Obama put it, that, you know, some of these people, if they're acquitted, will still hold them, and some of them we won't even give them military trials on this made up, almost ad hoc basis of military commission act courts, because, you know, maybe we don't have anything against them, and so we don't want to risk that they'll be acquitted and then we'll have to hold them indefinitely anyway, and so we'll just not even give them trials at all.
And it seems like, you know, hey, this is America where it's pretty easy that, I mean, it's not like you're going to get a fair trial anyway, but it seems like if you just indict these guys on some charges and convict them, or let them go, because that's just the way we do these things.
And none of this implies any mercy for this guy, necessarily, if the government has the evidence that says he's the number three guy in Al-Qaeda somewhere other than these diaries, and let's see it, but that's what trials are for.
Exactly.
The fact that you would just sit here and tell me, and I know that you mean it, and I know that you're probably right, that, no, this guy will die of old age at the lawless American black hole prison in communist Cuba is just amazing, like, how could that possibly be?
Yeah.
He's still only like 40-something, this guy, right?
Yeah, no, he is, but, you know...
I mean, no, we gotta knock this off, it's crazy, indict him, how hard could it possibly be to convict this guy in federal court when they can convict anyone of anything in federal court?
Right.
I mean, it's like a fraud or something.
Tax evasion.
It would probably be easier, but, Scott, keep in mind that the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014 is coming up for debate again, and there are numerous, numerous provisions in there with regard to Guantanamo, and one of the most important ones is that the Senate, or rather this legislation, is directing the Department of Defense and the State Department, they want to be sure that Yemen is creating its own Guantanamo for any sort of transfer of prisoners.
So they want full reports on what Yemen is doing to detain, prosecute, and even rehabilitate Yemeni prisoners.
So, you know, we're looking to sort of continue the cycle, even as we transfer them.
So I mean, this is, look, we've been going through this every year, when this legislation is renewed, and we hear the same thing from Obama, my hands are tied, so, you know, here we are, probably hear that same narrative all over again.
So on paper, or rather what you're saying is true, how hard can it be?
But nobody seems to be willing to sort of, you know, step up and try and do that.
All right, well, we're already over time, we've got to leave it here and cut it off and all that, but thanks very much for your time, I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody, check out this great journalism at america.aljazeera.com, one exclusive Abu Zubaydah's journey from student to mujahideen, and then two, Zubaydah Diaries shed new light on Twin Towers, and links to Bin Laden, and then, along with that, is the secret diary of Abu Zubaydah, so far they've only published, I believe, the first volume, but the rest are coming up.
So check out this awesome scoop at america.aljazeera.com, the great Jason Leopold, and thanks for listening.
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