A frighteningly normal man

After his release, Abu Zubaydah stopped writing down details of his activities for fear that his diary might be discovered and used as evidence against him. Nevertheless, he is astonished that the world press crowns him as a terrorist mastermind and makes ridiculous claims about him, namely his leadership role in Al-Qaeda, his control of Al-Qaeda operations and all Al-Qaeda newcomers. On the contrary, he was never a member of that organization, did not know about its operations and controlled newcomers only at Khaldan camp, a rival to Al-Qaeda’s Al-Faruq camp. On bin Laden’s advice, the Taliban closed Khaldan in the summer of 2000, funneling all newcomers to Al-Faruq. Indeed, it was not until that summer that Abu Zubaydah first met bin Laden, to plead for the reopening of Khaldan.

The diary, whose authenticity and truthfulness are indisputable, debunks much of the hysteria about Abu Zubaydah. He was never the operational Al-Qaeda mastermind that the U.S. government and the press made him out to be. Indeed, a look at the CIA’s remote psychological assessment, created to help in his interrogation and eventually his torture, shows that every summary statement on the front page turned out to be wrong. For instance, he was not “the third or fourth man in Al-Qaeda,” as is mentioned in the first bullet point. There is no doubt he was a terrorist mastermind, involved in several plots, but he was not part of the Al-Qaeda hierarchy, nor does he seem to have been involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, except to know that something big was going to happen. I agree with Ali Soufan, an FBI special agent who interviewed him and later wrote, “To this day, I don’t understand how anyone could write such a profile.” The FBI knew that the CIA’s assessment of Abu Zubaydah was false at the time of his capture; the bureau’s opinion was confirmed by information obtained afterward. The CIA assessment was an input to John Yoo’s notorious torture memos, which allowed the agency to torture alleged Al-Qaeda detainees, including Abu Zubaydah.

Interestingly, the CIA assessment found him to be psychologically normal, indeed resilient, without hints of any psychiatric disorder. Reading the diary, as a forensic psychiatrist and now an expert on terrorism, I completely agree. Apparently, this was not the opinion of a layman like FBI special agent Dan Coleman, who was quoted by journalist Ron Suskind as saying, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.” And so the rumor began that he might be suffering from multiple-personality disorder. Coleman seems to have based his unqualified guess on a literary artifact of Abu Zubaydah’s, addressing his diary as a fictitious person: his imagined self 10 years later. I’m not sure who is to blame for this widespread belief, Coleman or Suskind. This team had accused the U.S. government of failing to alert British authorities about Mohammad Sidique Khan — one of the men behind the 2005 London bombings — before that attack. At the time, this caused a furor. However, they had confused Mohammad Sidique Khan with another man, Mohammed Ajmal Khan, but refused to publicly acknowledge the error. Far from confirming their assessment of Abu Zubaydah as having multiple personalities, his diary shows him to be frighteningly normal, as the CIA mental-health professionals found.

The most egregious distortions linger about Al-Qaeda terrorists. These distortions and misunderstandings continue to fuel the U.S. government’s hysteria about them and help justify the assault on Americans’ civil liberties. In the debate on terrorism, political agendas trump empirical evidence, which is hard to come by in the government’s overzealous classification as secret of anything remotely related to terrorism. Not having access to primary sources allows the exaggerations and echo effect of the press to dominate our attempt to understand and prevent terrorism. Worse, when courageous journalists try to paint a realistic portrait of terrorists, many accuse them of glorifying terrorism. There are none so blind as those who will not see. The publication of Abu Zubaydah’s uncensored diary is a major contribution to any serious attempt to understand terrorism: Primary source material like this is far more enlightening than government spin. It is surely the hope of serious scholars that more such documents will soon surface to give us a more realistic view of the terrorist threat that has been haunting us for nearly two decades.