Word: zubaydah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Perhaps most significant of all, Abu Zubaydah was captured in March after a gunfight in Faisalabad, Pakistan, at the end of a police raid. He had played key roles both in the camps and in running al-Qaeda operations, and his arrest, says Roland Jacquard, a leading French expert on Islamic terrorism, was "an enormous, stupendous blow to al-Qaeda." Abu Zubaydah seems to have specialized in organizing al-Qaeda operatives based in Europe and North America. Ahmed Ressam, the Montreal-based "millennium bomber" captured at the end of 1999 while attempting to cross from Canada into Washington State with...
...British Royal Marines in eastern Afghanistan this spring ended without snaring the enemy. "Countrywide," says an intelligence source in Kabul, "it's probably safe to say there are no groups of armed Taliban and al-Qaeda bigger than 60." But that doesn't mean al-Qaeda is finished. Abu Zubaydah, some sources claim, has been replaced by Saif al-Adil, a former Egyptian army officer wanted in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. Some fighters have doubtless slipped across the border and are trying to regroup in the tribal regions of Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf has conceded that American communications...
...anatomy of one such alert is telling. Last Monday night, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force--a round-the-clock operation at the New York field office of the FBI--got a call from FBI headquarters. Abu Zubaydah, the highest al-Qaeda official to be captured by the U.S., had told interrogators that he had heard other Osama bin Laden loyalists discussing attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and other U.S. landmarks. But, a federal law-enforcement official told TIME, Abu Zubaydah had said the conversations took place a while back and claimed he knew...
...Zubaydah's statements jibed with claims made by other detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that landmarks may be struck during holidays--a strategy also endorsed by al-Qaeda training videos. Meanwhile, agents had noticed an increase in terrorist "chatter" picked up by telecommunications surveillance in recent months. "We couldn't just blow it off," says the senior intelligence official--especially given the firestorm over whether agencies could have done more to prevent 9/11. "How many times did someone get in trouble for issuing a warning that didn't happen?" a U.S. counterterrorism official asks rhetorically...
...Zubaydah resides in that aforementioned undisclosed overseas location, where the U.S. may or may not be using torture to extract information. The problem: How do we know if he's telling us the truth? This is, after all, Zubaydah's last dance: as long as he keeps tossing out things, stringing us along, he's useful, privileged, treated with respect by his interrogators, like a Cold War era captured agent. Once that's no longer true, his life will turn very, very nasty. Zubaydah has every reason to lie, to throw his captors off the trail, to sow fear...