Leaked: The Secret Diaries of a Guantanamo Prisoner Linked to al-Qaida

By Allen McDuffee

Abu Zubaydah is currently held in Guantanamo Bay without charges. Illustration by Brigid Barrett based on Department of Defense photo

The secret diaries of the Guantanamo Bay detainee known as Abu Zubaydah, which the Bush administration heavily relied upon in its justification for many elements of the “War on Terror,” are no longer solely in government custody.
Al Jazeera America has obtained the U.S. government’s English translation of the diaries that span more than a decade from Abu Zubaydah’s time as a student to just days before his capture in March 2002 in Pakistan. Al Jazeera says it will publish reports and the six volumes of the diaries over the course of multiple installments, the first of which is available today.


The diaries are routinely used by U.S. officials as the justification for holding several prisoners in Guantanamo, but were never made available to experts or journalists despite several vigorous campaigns to obtain them through the Freedom of Information Act.
The sensitivity of obtaining the documents is underscored by Al Jazeera’s decision to send a company representative from New York to Los Angeles to retrieve the diaries from reporter Jason Leopold, who says he obtained the volumes from a former U.S. intelligence official.
The diaries by Abu Zubaydah — who the U.S. once considered to be al-Qaida’s number three operative, captured in 2002 and waterboarded 83 times in one month and subjected to other “enhanced interrogation techniques” — provide a more complete profile of the man, including his struggle with the meaning of jihad, his place in the Palestinian diaspora, his time in training camps and whether or not to join Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, and what followed once he did.
The diaries reveal Abu Zubaydah’s inner debate and resolution to join Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in 1993, a time when the U.S. was only just becoming aware of the terrorist leader, writing, “a thought I had for a long time, possibly … eight months or more. Now I might present my desire to the officials there.”
The value of the diaries to U.S. officials was, in part, his meticulous record keeping of everybody he met. That list included Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaida; Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber; Mohammed Atef, the late al-Qaida military leader; Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban; and Osama bin Laden.
When he was captured at a safehouse in Faisalabad in Pakistan in March 2002, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer identified Abu Zubaydah as “a key terrorist recruiter, an operational planner, and a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.”
“The other day we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubydah,” President Geroge W. Bush told a group at a Connecticut Republican luncheon in April 2002. “He’s one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He’s not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.”
Although, it was initially claimed by Bush administration officials that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded a single time for 35 seconds before he provided important information that led to the thwart of other terrorist plots, it was later revealed that he had been waterboarded 83 times in a single month and been subject to other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
But within a few years, the Bush administration had begun to walk back the importance of Abu Zubaydah as the supposed number three “very big fish” within the al-Qaida hierarchy to someone who operated a guesthouse in Pakistan.
“Zubaydah was a logistics man, a fixer, mostly for a niggling array of personal items,” wrote Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine. “Like the guy you call who handles the company health plan, or benefits, or the people in human resources. There was almost nothing ‘operational’ in his portfolio.”
Abu Zubaydah remains in detention at Guantanamo Bay without being charged with a crime.
For Abu Zubaydah, the capture of these diaries in addition to three more volumes he wrote while in CIA custody were just as torturous as the waterboarding.
“Another form of torture was when they wouldn’t give me my diary, which caused me to have nearly 40 seizures,” said Abu Zubaydah at this March 2007 Combatant Status Review. He also claimed that his diaries “can refute accusations against me and it can show that I am personally against the sort of acts that were committed.”