Abu Zubaydah - Capture

Capture

On March 28, 2002, CIA and FBI agents, in conjunction with Pakistani intelligence services, raided several safe houses in Pakistan searching for him. Abu Zubaydah was apprehended from one of the targeted safe houses in Faisalabad, Pakistan. During his apprehension he was shot in the thigh, the testicle, and the stomach with rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle. He was not recognised at first, and simply thrown into a pick-up truck along with other prisoners by the Pakistani forces, until a senior FBI agent identified him as Abu Zubaydah. He was taken by the FBI to a Pakistani hospital nearby and treated for his wounds, where the attending doctor admitted to John Kiriakou, the co-leader of the CIA group that apprehended Abu Zubaydah, he had never before seen a patient survive such severe wounds. The FBI and CIA flew in a doctor from Johns Hopkins University to ensure Abu Zubaydah would not succumb to his wounds during transit out of Pakistan.

His pocket litter supposedly contained two bank cards which showed he had access to Saudi and Kuwaiti bank accounts, which was considered rare since most al-Qaeda members used the preferred untraceable hawala banking. According to James Risen, "It is not clear whether an investigation of the cards simply fell through the cracks, or whether they were ignored because no one wanted to know the answers about connections between al Qaeda and important figures in the Middle East – particularly in Saudi Arabia." One of Risen's sources chalks up the failure to investigate the cards to incompetence rather than foul play, "The cards were sent back to Washington and were never fully exploited. I think nobody ever looked at them because of incompetence." When American investigators finally did get around to looking into the cards, they worked with "a Muslim financier with a questionable past, and with connections to the Afghan Taliban, al Qaeda, and Saudi intelligence." He reported back that "Saudi intelligence officials had seized all of the records related to the card from the Saudi financial institution in question; the records then disappeared. There was no longer any way to trace the money that had gone into the account."

A search of the safehouse turned up his personal 10,000 page diaries, in which he recorded his thoughts in seemingly split personalities of a young boy, old man, and himself. What appears to be split personalities is actually how Zubaydah was piecing his memories together after his 1992 shrapnel head wound; as part of his therapy to regain his memories, he began recording the diary that detailed his life, emotions, and what people were telling him. He split information into categories, such as what he knew about himself and what people told him about himself, and listed them under different names to distinguish one set from the other. This was later incorrectly interpreted by some analysts reviewing the diary as symptoms of split personality disorder.

Abu Zubaydah was turned over to the CIA, and was allegedly transferred to secret CIA-operated prisons in Pakistan, Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Northern Africa, and Diego Garcia. Historically renditions to countries which commit torture have been illegal, however, a memo written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee days before Abu Zubaydah's capture, provided legal cover for renditions to places such as Thailand. In March 2009, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee launched a year-long study on how the CIA operated the secret prisons around the world.