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A former CIA officer was charged Monday with illegally leaking the identity of a covert officer and other classified information to journalists. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and author who defended waterboarding, was charged by the Department of Justice with one count of illegally disclosing a covert officer’s identity and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for illegally leaking classified national defense information. He was also charged with making false statements for allegedly trying to trick the CIA’s Publications Review Board to let him use information in his 2010 book, The Reluctant Spy. The investigation led by U.S....

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – A U.S. military jury debated the sentence on Friday for an admitted al Qaeda conspirator from Sudan who promised to help in the prosecution of other prisoners in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals. Prisoner Noor Uthman Muhammed pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism. The jury at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base began deliberating his sentence on Friday. The nine members of the military jury can send him to prison for 10 to 14 years in addition to the nine he has already...

....With the help of the American trauma surgeon, Abu Zubaydah's captors nursed him back to health. He was moved at least twice, first, reportedly, to Thailand; then, he believes, to Afghanistan, probably Bagram. In a safe house in Thailand the interrogation began: "I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think...

Thanks to the New York Times, we now know the dreaded torture methods the sadistic CIA used on captured Al Qaeda big shots shortly after the 9/11 attack. I warn you: Reading this column any further will subject you to unvarnished brutality. According to a front-page article in the Times on Sunday, Sept. 10, Pakistani authorities captured Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's personnel director, a few months after the terror attack five years ago. Zubaydah, wounded in the confrontation, was turned over to American authorities and whisked away to Bangkok, Thailand, where FBI interrogators began questioning him. According to unnamed sources...

Four of the nation's most highly valued terrorist prisoners were secretly moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2003, years earlier than has been disclosed, then were whisked back into overseas prisons before the Supreme Court could give them access to lawyers, The Associated Press has learned. The transfer allowed the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA "black sites" for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those...

It is rare to get an insider's perspective on the emergence of al-Qaeda. It is also rare to get a glimpse of the world of spies and agents. To provide both is incredibly unusual. Omar Nasiri - not his real name but one chosen to protect his identity - says he spent seven years working as an agent for European intelligence services and as an al-Qaeda operative, part of the time in the UK. He provides a unique insight into how al-Qaeda was far more organised, coherent and determined in the 1990s than was appreciated at the time. Jihad militants...

OTTAWA — Terror suspect Mohamed Harkat admitted in a March 1997 conversation that he knew al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah personally and did not fear being contacted by him at home, according to new court documents. A summary of that conversation — between Harkat and an unidentified Ottawa man — has been filed with the Federal Court. Prepared by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the summary is one of 13 added to the public record in the security certificate case. It’s not clear whether the summaries are based on wiretaps, obtained under authority of the CSIS Act, or on informants’ accounts...

Alleged arch-terrorist Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA waterboarded in secret overseas interrogations, has agreed to let two American attorneys challenge his detention. Chicago law professor Joseph Margulies and Washington, D.C. lawyer Brent Mickum said Tuesday that they secured the authority in 12 hours of meetings Friday and Monday at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was the first time a defense attorney has been allowed to see the captive, who once ran a military training camp in Afghanistan, in nearly six years of U.S. detention. He was captured, severely wounded, in a March 2002 firefight at an...

The Point | In defense of waterboarding By Mark Bowden No one should be prosecuted for waterboarding Abu Zubaydah. > Several investigations are under way to find out who ordered the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, apparently an effort to cover up evidence of torture. Leaving aside for a moment the wisdom of destroying the tapes, I'd like to take a look at what was allegedly done to Zubaydah, and why. > When captured in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was one of the world's most notorious terrorists. The 31-year-old Saudi had compiled in his young life 37 different aliases and...

CIA operatives taking over the interrogation of captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah [BBC News backgrounder] from FBI agents in 2002 had him stripped, exposed to extreme cold and subjected to loud rock music in an effort to extract sensitive information, the New York Times reported Sunday.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier when he had been captured. The events that unfolded at the safe house over the next few weeks proved to be fateful for the Bush administration. Within days, Mr. Zubaydah was being...

Guantanamo Inmates Despair of Ever Leaving Sunday, March 5, 2006 9:13 PM EST The Associated Press By MIRANDA LEITSINGER GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Ahamed Abdul Aziz has been in the Guantanamo Bay prison for more than three years and, by his account, has been interrogated 50 times without being charged with any crime. He waits with anguish for freedom but fears it will never come. "We are in a grave here," he told his lawyers, echoing the despair felt by many of the roughly 490 prisoners held as suspected terrorists at the U.S. naval base in eastern...

As one of the hundreds of thousands who has proudly worked for the National Security Agency either directly or as a subcontractor, I believe the New York Times missed the real story under its Dec. 16 headline "Bush lets U.S. spy on callers without courts." Here is why. The New York Times concedes the story starts with the CIA capture of top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. With Zubaydah's capture came a treasure trove of eavesdropping intelligence sources -- e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, and personal phone directories. These are prime intelligence sources that may...

ABC News is reporting that Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert. The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it : Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in...

Alleged Canadian al-Qaeda 'sleeper' agent set to testify October 25, 2004 OTTAWA - A man accused of being a member of al-Qaeda appeared in an Ottawa federal court Monday to fight deportation to Algeria, where he fears he may be killed. Canadian authorities arrested Mohammed Harkat nearly two years ago on a national security certificate, which allows Ottawa to deport non-Canadian citizens considered a security risk. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service says Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda member now in custody, told American authorities he helped train Harkat in Afghanistan. CSIS thinks Harkat was sent to Canada as a "sleeper"...

Intelligence agencies have had some success in tracking suspected al-Qaeda operatives. But the organisation is changing to continue its fight against the West. The West has never encountered an enemy like al-Qaeda before. The problem for the world's intelligence agencies is that it is not a unified organisation with an identifiable structure, like the IRA, but an amalgam of groups around the world whose members embrace Osama bin Laden's ideology of global jihad, or holy war. These Jihadi warriors share the belief that they have an obligation to fight the oppressors of their Muslim brothers, from Palestinians in the Middle...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Lebanese man who says he attended an al-Qaida training camp was charged Friday with lying to federal authorities about shipments of communications equipment seized by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, 41, was charged in a U.S. District Court in Minnesota, one of several places he's lived in the United States. A federal judge in New York, where Elzahabi has been held since his arrest in May, held a hearing for Elzahabi and ordered him transferred to Minneapolis to face two counts of making false statements to federal investigators. A criminal complaint by FBI...

NEW YORK (AFP) - A top aide to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) told CIA (news - web sites) agents in a drug-induced confession about secret connections between the al-Qaeda leader and top officials in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, according to a new book. Excerpts from the book published in Time magazine reveal that Abu Zubaydah, captured last year in Pakistan, told US interrogators that longtime Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz had secretly agreed to pay bin Laden as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting its political aims in the kingdom. He also said...

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) Pakistan's interior minister denied reports on Sunday that suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been handed over to the United States and said he was still in Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman Rashid Qureshi also said Mohammed was in Pakistan and was being jointly interrogated by Pakistani and U.S. agents. Earlier, a government official who did not want to be identified said Khalid had been handed over to U.S. custody shortly after his arrest, along with two other al Qaeda suspects, in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi on Saturday. Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat denied this:...

While intelligence officials are not certain whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead, they have found a tantalizing document that suggests he was living at least as recently as the last days of December. That would mean bin Laden survived last year's American bombardment of Afghanistan, including the assault on Tora Bora. The evidence, according to a source who has seen a French intelligence analysis of it, is a short handwritten letter, bearing bin Laden's signature, to al-Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah. The note, which was among the documents found on Abu Zubaydah when he was seized in a...