Abu Zubaydah — real name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, known to his attorneys as “Zay” — is a detainee held by the United States since March 2002, when he was captured in Pakistan by a Central Intelligence Agency team led by John Kiriakou. At the time of his capture he was believed to be a senior al-Qaeda figure. He was the first prisoner on whom the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques program was applied; the program had been pitched to CIA Director George Tenet by Mitchell and Jessen in late October 2001, contracted in January 2002, and was first deployed against Abu Zubaydah on August 2, 2002.[1][2]
Approved techniques
Among the techniques approved by the U.S. Department of Justice and applied to Abu Zubaydah was waterboarding.[3]
The cockroach-in-coffin treatment
CIA interrogators determined that Abu Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects. They placed him in a coffin, dumped a box of cockroaches inside, closed the coffin, and left him in it for ten days wearing only a diaper. The treatment was not among the techniques authorized by the Department of Justice or the President.[4]
Other unauthorized techniques
A number of other techniques applied to Abu Zubaydah and to other high-value detainees were similarly unauthorized:
Inadmissibility of obtained statements
Nothing obtained from Abu Zubaydah under interrogation is admissible against him at trial, because the CIA tortured it out of him. This is also the case for statements obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. “What do we do? We continue to hold them illegally without charge, or we let him go. The bottom line here is the CIA royally fucked this up.”[5][6]
Civil litigation against contractors
Abu Zubaydah was the named plaintiff in the 2025 case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in which he sought to sue the private contractors who had tortured him during his interrogation. The Ninth Circuit ruled — in approximately July 2025 — that contractors operating under written CIA contract are legally protected as agents of the agency under Executive Order 12333. See Ninth Circuit contractor ruling (2025).[7][8]
Recent contact and release that did not occur
As of the August 2025 source, John Kiriakou is in periodic contact with Abu Zubaydah’s attorneys. Per the attorneys, Abu Zubaydah first learned of Kiriakou’s December 2007 ABC News interview confirming CIA waterboarding from a friendly Guantanamo guard who came to his cell that day to tell him “a CIA man went public today about what happened to you.” Per Abu Zubaydah, “it was the first time he had experienced a sensation of hope.” He has subsequently asked his attorneys to convey to Kiriakou his hope that the two of them may someday have dinner “as free men.”[9][10][11]
Abu Zubaydah was, per Kiriakou, weeks from release at the end of the Biden administration; the administration had made the decision to release him and was in negotiations with foreign governments willing to take him, but had not closed any of those agreements before the November 2024 election. “And then Trump won. And so he’s not going anywhere.”[11][12]