During an appearance before a military review board, an attorney for Guantánamo Bay’s “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.
Photo: Department of Defense/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The prisoner, looking healthy at age 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.
Unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other alleged 9/11 plotters, Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with any crime. The U.S. assessment notes that he never swore allegiance to bin Laden because the Saudi militant leader focused on attacking the United States while Abu Zubaydah “had wanted to attack Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.”
Abu Zubaydah has the funds to support himself upon release, Shinerock told the panel. The detainee was awarded more than $200,000 by the European Court of Human Rights in 2022 as compensation for CIA torture at black sites located in Lithuania and Poland. In 2023, a United Nations human rights panel, U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, urged the United States to immediately release Abu Zubaydah.
“Bin Laden is dead,” Shinerock said, insisting his client “has no radical or violent tendencies.” He said Abu Zubaydah now believes that “violence is not answer to the problems of the oppressed.”
The fact that Abu Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian makes his case more complicated. He comes from a Palestinian Bedouin family whose village near Jericho was seized by Israeli settlers in 1948. His grandparents wound up in Gaza, where Abu Zubaydah’s father was born.
According to Cathy Scott-Clark, who communicated with Abu Zubaydah and his family for her book “The Forever Prisoner,” his father could not return to Gaza after the 1967 war, but the family visited his grandparents living in a house in Gaza near the beach.
Abu Zubaydah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1971. Of the five Palestinians detained by the U.S. at Guantánamo, he was the only one designated as being from Gaza. The other Palestinian detainees have been released to Hungary, Germany, and Spain.
Abu Zubaydah was captured by U.S. agents after a gun battle in a so-called Al Qaeda guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002. Over the course of four years, he was held prisoner at CIA black sites in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Lithuania, and Morocco, before being sent to Guantánamo in 2006. He was the first detainee to be waterboarded, and he endured that “enhanced interrogation technique” 83 times.
The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the U.S. torture program stated, “After taking custody of Abu Zubaydah, CIA officers concluded that he ‘should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life,’” which “may preclude [Abu Zubaydah] from being turned over to another country.”
The Department of Defense’s Periodic Review Secretariat — comprised of officials from across the federal government — reviews “whether continued detention of particular individuals held at Guantanamo remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”
Since 2016 — the first time Abu Zubaydah appeared in public after his capture — the board has reviewed his file or held a hearing to review with him present, nine times. After every review, the board has found that “his continued detention is warranted,” and “remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”
It took two years for a final determination to be made after Abu Zubaydah’s last full review hearing in June 2021. Now he awaits a determination on Thursday’s full review and the outcome of ongoing negotiations with an unknown country on his resettlement. If he ever was a threat to U.S. security, has that threat finally subsided?
