© WikipediaAbu Zubaydah is a citizen of the Palestinian territories held in Guantanamo Bay.
Captured and tortured by the CIA after 9/11, then locked up in Guantanamo Bay without charges, Abu Zubaydah is now being called to testify as a witness in a case against inhumane treatment at the US facility in Cuba.
Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the five defendants in the 9/11 war crimes case, has long accused Guantanamo, or Gitmo, guards of subjecting his cell in the high-security Camp 7 unit to
constant noise and vibration, a method of a sleep deprivation meant to keep prisoners disoriented. In February, he testified to the military tribunal, where he specifically named Abu Zubaydah as someone who would back up his allegations.
Should Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian, answer the call to testify, it would be his first appearance in public since his 2002 brutal capture in Pakistan. "[Zubaydah]'s experienced the same kind of thing that Ramzi has with the noises and vibration," James Harrington, a lawyer for Binalshibh, told AP. However, the
US military has been denying that the noise, if any, is intentional. As a prosecutor Clay Trivett
suggested Binalshibh was "lying ... fighting the jihad against the guards in the camp."
The method that Binalshibh, a Yemeni suspected of financially supporting the German cell that went on to join flight schools in the US, described mirrors the sleep deprivation that some Gitmo detainees were allegedly subjected to as part of the
CIA interrogation program. That program was launched after Abu Zubaydah's capture and, since the Senate Intelligence Committee report on it, is
widely recognized as torture. According to the so-called "torture report" released in 2014,
Zubaydah was the first prisoner to endure the harsh CIA interrogation program.After Zubaydah was turned over to US custody, he was subjected to
83 waterboarding sessions, according to a CIA report. In addition to that torture technique, which creates the sensation of drowning, he was also
placed in a coffin-size box for a total of 266 hours (11 days, two hours) over a 20-day period. Additionally, he was
forced to remain in another small confinement box (21 inches wide, 2.5 feet in length) for 29 hours. Fourteen years ago, in Washington, Zubaydah was falsely believed to be a key Al-Qaeda leader in the lead-up to the September 11 attacks. Now, US documents have him as a "well-known al-Qaeda facilitator," according to AP.
Comment: As the expression goes: With friends like these, i.e. The United States... well, you know the rest. But do the ruling circles in Europe really understand that by continuing to support the imperial whims of Team America they will be sinking their people - and themselves - into an ever deeper quagmire of economic, political and martial woes? They have to see this by now, and as they most probably do, they must be either too cowed, too corrupted or too compromised (read blackmailed) to do a darn thing in contravention of U.S. dictates. This means that we will most likely see a far greater intensification of ALL the problems we now currently see facing Europe. Russia is smart and constructive and working hard to solve some major geopolitical problems, but it can only do so much to help the European psychos, sycophants and ninnies in power to help themselves.