I have diaried on Abu Zubaydah before, here and here . The Orwellian lies vomited forth by George II and his minions as to Zubaydah's "role" in the War on Terra are set forth in both diaries; I will not repeat those mendacious delusions here.

The truth of Abu Zubaydah is this:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3"--a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality." Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics--travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

When CIA Director George Tenet told George II that Abu Zubaydah was grievously mentally ill, with no useful intelligence embedded anywhere in his sadly disordered brain, this is what occurred:

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety--against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

It seems that among his "plots of every variety," Zubaydah screamed out the names of four men he claimed were Al Qaeda contacts and/or involved in the attacks of September 11. These men were Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, and Mushaf Ali Mir. Since we know that "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target" identified by the tortured and mentally disturbed Zubaydah, we can presume that appropriate agents were dispatched towards these four "targets" as well.

Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of the more westernized members of the Saudi royal family, a nephew of the king, who ran the largest publishing house in the country and owned War Emblem, the winner of the 2002 Kentucky Derby, was one of the members of the Saudi royal family allowed to leave the US without interrogation after the 9/11 attack.

After he was identified by the tortured, mad Zubaydah as a man who had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz died at the age of 43 of a heart attack. Or maybe it was a blood clot. There doesn't seem to be a consensus.

The tortured, mad Zubaydah also screamed out the name of Pakistani Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir as a man with foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. In February of 2003, Mir's plane blew up in clear weather, killing him, his wife, and much of his staff.

While undergoing torture, Zubaydah screamed that Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd's, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a 25-year-old distant relative of the king's, were Al Qaeda contacts.

The day after Prince Ahmed died of his "heart attack/blood clot," that is, on July 23, 2002, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud died in a single-vehicle car crash. A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was also dead. According to the Saudi Royal Court, this prince died "of thirst."

We know that Darth Cheney used 9/11 to unearth all the forbidden tools of war waged on the dark side, and that these tools include targeted assassination. It is not impossible that these four men identified by the tortured, mad Abu Zubaydah were "heart-attacked," "plane-crashed," "car-crashed," and "dehydrated" into oblivion as a matter of state policy. As it is not impossible that, because Abu Zubaydah was tortured and mad, these men were innocent.

Such questions will never be asked, much less answered, so long as the George II regime controls all three branches of the American government.

Democratic Congress, anyone?