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FT. MEADE, Md. — A man initially accused of being a high-profile Al Qaeda figure and who was tortured in CIA custody appeared Thursday at a hearing to review his detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has been held for 20 years without charges.

A U.S. government official said Abu Zubaydah, who wore a neatly trimmed beard and glasses, had “probably” served as one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted facilitators. The roughly 20-minute hearing offered rare visibility into the secretive military court proceedings of a suspect who had been tortured at CIA black sites during the U.S. war on terrorism and whose case still has not been resolved 25 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Zubaydah’s unidentified government-assigned representative and his private attorney, Annika Conrad, both acknowledged he had known Bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind. But they said Zubaydah was never a member of the militant group that Bin Laden founded.

Conrad argued that Zubaydah poses no security threat to the United States and that it can no longer justify his detention. She said Zubaydah should be approved for transfer out of Guantanamo, which would kick off a multiyear process that includes finding a country to accept him.

Lawyer describes lasting injuries from torture and says Zubaydah could be monitored if released

Conrad said Zubaydah is prepared to accept a range of security measures, including continuous monitoring. Conrad said he has the financial and personal support of his family, has rejected any extremist views “and simply wants to live a life of peace.”

She also argued that a chief military prosecutor for U.S. military commissions, which oversees the 15 men still held at Guantanamo Bay, has said it is unlikely that Zubaydah will be charged. The Office of Military Commissions declined to comment.

Zubaydah’s attorney said the most the government can offer is a “probable association” to Bin Laden after more than two decades and noted that Zubaydah declined a direct request from Bin Laden to work for Al Qaeda.

Conrad also cited the torture that Zubaydah experienced, describing him as “a greatly injured man” who lost his left eye and his ability to write in English and “frequently struggles to recall words.”

Zubaydah’s detention is being reviewed by a U.S. government panel of senior defense, intelligence and homeland security officials. The Periodic Review Board was created under the Obama administration to evaluate prisoners and determine whether they could be released without posing a threat to national security.

The review panel did not immediately decide on the case

The review panel issued no immediate ruling Thursday. A live video feed of the unclassified portion of his hearing at Guantanamo was made available to reporters at Ft. Meade, an Army base in Maryland.

Detainees are not permitted to speak at their review hearings, and Zubaydah sat in silence next to his attorney and the government representative. Dressed in a gray suit jacket and patterned gray tie, he often pressed his left index finger to his left temple or fidgeted with something in his hands. A worn-looking book sat in front of him.

Zubaydah’s lawyers, Conrad and Ahmed Almudallal, said in a statement before the hearing that he may never face charges.

“For the first time in over two decades, the military’s chief prosecutor believes it is unlikely our client will ever be charged,” the attorneys said. “This is a major change in circumstances that warrants he be cleared for transfer.”

Almudallal and Conrad said Zubaydah has “no intent to engage in violence against the United States in the future.”

“Now, at 55 years old, he’s eager to reconnect with his family and live out the rest of his days as a free person,” they said. “Twenty-four years in prison plus being ‘patient zero’ in the U.S. government’s torture program has been punishment enough.”

He was first in the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ program after 9/11

Zubaydah was thought to be a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda when he was captured in Pakistan in 2002. A Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, Zubaydah was tortured abroad before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

The U.S. later dropped the claim that Zubaydah was one of the most senior figures in Al Qaeda, although it has continued to regard him as a security risk. Zubaydah’s lawyers have repeatedly said over the years that he was not an Al Qaeda member and point to waterboarding and other harsh treatment he experienced in the early 2000s.

Zubaydah was the first person in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program after 9/11 and subjected to what is now widely viewed as torture. He was held at CIA black sites in Poland and Lithuania, according to the European Court of Human Rights.

Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times in a month at one point and confined over 11 days in a coffin-size box, among a raft of other mistreatment, a Senate report found.

In 2022, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by Zubaydah, who was seeking testimony from two former CIA contractors as part of an investigation into his treatment when he was held in Poland. The court rejected his case because the government said it would expose state secrets, despite much of the information having been widely reported.

In January, a lawyer for Zubaydah said the British government had agreed to pay a “substantial sum” to settle a lawsuit that said U.K. intelligence agencies were complicit in his torture. Attorney Helen Duffy said the confidential settlement was symbolically and practically significant for the “intolerable suffering” that Zubaydah endured.

A British parliamentary committee found in 2018 that U.K. security and intelligence services were aware Zubaydah was being tortured but continued to provide questions for the CIA to ask him without seeking assurances of his condition.

Finley writes for the Associated Press.

Several dozen presidential briefing documents declassified Friday, the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, detail intelligence government officials had gathered about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda leading up to the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people and upended American national security.

The documents illustrate security analysts’ tracking of Bin Laden’s movements and support system, as well as concerns about possible threats to U.S. targets.

Proclaiming “an act of exceptional transparency,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the documents were the agency’s single largest release of declassified presidential daily briefs — the highly classified briefing prepared by the nation’s intelligence community for the government’s most senior leaders.

The documents range from a February 1998 file — prepared for then-President Clinton — titled “Terrorists seeking WMD capability” and mentioning “bin Ladin and other Islamic extremists” to a Sept. 12, 2001, report in which a source indicated the attacks had been planned for two years and had also targeted the U.S. Capitol.

Another, from just weeks before the attacks, details how Al Qaeda’s “flexible operational decision making and broad definition of acceptable targets enable the group to adjust plans to changing conditions.”

Asked for comment on the release, the White House noted the release of another batch of documents by the National Archives, also Friday. That batch, including interviews with national security officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations, was a product of the commission that probed the attacks from 2002 to 2004.

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

Last week, a prominent Saudi Sheikh, Mohammed Al-Issa, visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation, which signalled the end of the Nazi Holocaust. Although dozens of Muslim scholars have visited the site, where about one million Jews were killed during World War Two, according to the Auschwitz Memorial Centre’s press office, Al-Issa is the most senior Muslim religious leader to do so.

Visiting Auschwitz is not a problem for a Muslim; Islam orders Muslims to reject unjustified killing of any human being, no matter what their faith is. Al-Issa is a senior ally of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who apparently cares little for the sanctity of human life, though, and the visit to Auschwitz has very definite political connotations beyond any Islamic context.

By sending Al-Issa to the camp, Bin Salman wanted to show his support for Israel, which exploits the Holocaust for geopolitical colonial purposes. “The Israeli government decided that it alone was permitted to mark the 75th anniversary of the Allied liberation of Auschwitz [in modern day Poland] in 1945,” wrote journalist Richard Silverstein recently when he commented on the gathering of world leaders in Jerusalem for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Holocaust event.

READ: Next up, a Saudi embassy in Jerusalem 

Bin Salman uses Al Issa for such purposes, as if to demonstrate his own Zionist credentials. For example, the head of the Makkah-based Muslim World League is leading rapprochement efforts with Evangelical Christians who are, in the US at least, firm Zionists in their backing for the state of Israel. Al-Issa has called for a Muslim-Christian-Jewish interfaith delegation to travel to Jerusalem in what would, in effect, be a Zionist troika.

Zionism is not a religion, and there are many non-Jewish Zionists who desire or support the establishment of a Jewish state in occupied Palestine. The definition of Zionism does not mention the religion of its supporters, and Israeli writer Sheri Oz, is just one author who insists that non-Jews can be Zionists.

Mohammad Bin Salman and Netanyahu – Cartoon [Tasnimnews.com/Wikipedia]

We should not be shocked, therefore, to see a Zionist Muslim leader in these trying times. It is reasonable to say that Bin Salman’s grandfather and father were Zionists, as close friends of Zionist leaders. Logic suggests that Bin Salman comes from a Zionist dynasty.

This has been evident from his close relationship with Zionists and positive approaches to the Israeli occupation and establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, calling it “[the Jews’] ancestral homeland”. This means that he has no issue with the ethnic cleansing of almost 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, during which thousands were killed and their homes demolished in order to establish the Zionist state of Israel.

“The ‘Jewish state’ claim is how Zionism has tried to mask its intrinsic Apartheid, under the veil of a supposed ‘self-determination of the Jewish people’,” wrote Israeli blogger Jonathan Ofir in Mondoweiss in 2018, “and for the Palestinians it has meant their dispossession.”

As the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Bin Salman has imprisoned dozens of Palestinians, including representatives of Hamas. In doing so he is serving Israel’s interests. Moreover, he has blamed the Palestinians for not making peace with the occupation state. Bin Salman “excoriated the Palestinians for missing key opportunities,” wrote Danial Benjamin in Moment magazine. He pointed out that the prince’s father, King Salman, has played the role of counterweight by saying that Saudi Arabia “permanently stands by Palestine and its people’s right to an independent state with occupied East Jerusalem as its capital.”

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Israeli journalist Barak Ravid of Israel’s Channel 13 News reported Bin Salman as saying: “In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given. It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.” This is reminiscent of the words of the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, one of the Zionist founders of Israel, that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Bin Salman’s Zionism is also very clear in his bold support for US President Donald Trump’s deal of the century, which achieves Zionist goals in Palestine at the expense of Palestinian rights. He participated in the Bahrain conference, the forum where the economic side of the US deal was announced, where he gave “cover to several other Arab countries to attend the event and infuriated the Palestinians.”

US President Donald Trump looks over at Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman al-Saud as they line up for the family photo during the opening day of Argentina G20 Leaders’ Summit 2018 at Costa Salguero on 30 November 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina [Daniel Jayo/Getty Images]

While discussing the issue of the current Saudi support for Israeli policies and practices in Palestine with a credible Palestinian official last week, he told me that the Palestinians had contacted the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to ask him not to relocate his country’s embassy to Jerusalem. “The Saudis have been putting pressure on us in order to relocate our embassy to Jerusalem,” replied the Brazilian leader. What more evidence of Mohammad Bin Salman’s Zionism do we need?

The founder of Friends of Zion Museum is American Evangelical Christian Mike Evans. He said, after visiting a number of the Gulf States, that, “The leaders [there] are more pro-Israel than a lot of Jews.” This was a specific reference to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, and his counterpart in the UAE, Mohammed Bin Zayed.

“All versions of Zionism lead to the same reactionary end of unbridled expansionism and continued settler colonial genocide of [the] Palestinian people,” Israeli-American writer and photographer Yoav Litvin wrote for Al Jazeera. We may well see an Israeli Embassy opened in Riyadh in the near future, and a Saudi Embassy in Tel Aviv or, more likely, Jerusalem. Is Mohammad Bin Salman a Zionist? There’s no doubt about it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.