Abu Zubaydah (Arabic: ابو زبيدة, Abū Zubaydah; born March 12, 1971 as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn) is a Saudi Arabian citizen, sentenced to death in Jordan and currently held in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
Arrested in Pakistan in March 2002, Abu Zubaydah has been in US custody for more than nine years, four-and-a-half of them as a ghost detainee in the CIA secret prison network. The CIA transferred him between prisons in various countries as part of their extraordinary rendition program. During interrogation in that time he was water-boarded 83 times and has been subjected to numerous other controversial interrogation techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, confinement in small dark boxes, deprivation of solid food, stress positions, and physical assaults. Videotapes of some of his interrogations are amongst those destroyed by the CIA in 2005.
He was transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006 where he and other former CIA detainees are held in Camp 7 where conditions are the most isolating. He has never been charged, despite being accused for years by US authorities.
Ali H. Soufan (born 1971) is a Lebanese-American former FBI agent who was involved in a number of high-profile anti-terrorism cases both in the United States and around the world. A New Yorker article in 2006 described Soufan as coming closer than anyone to preventing the September 11 attacks, even implying that he would have succeeded had the CIA been willing to share information with him. He resigned from the FBI in 2005 after publicly chastising the CIA for not sharing information with him, which could have prevented the attacks. He is the CEO of the Soufan Group. In 2011 he published a memoir, which includes some historical background on al-Qaeda: The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.
Soufan was born in Lebanon. He is an ardent admirer of the poet Khalil Gibran. He graduated from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania (1995), receiving his B.A in Political Science. Soufan also studied for a Masters degree in International Studies at Villanova University.
Martin Bashir (born 19 January 1963) is a British journalist, currently with NBC News as a contributor for its Dateline program, and an afternoon anchor for MSNBC, hosting Martin Bashir. He was previously an anchor for ABC's Nightline and is known for his interviews with Diana, Princess of Wales and controversy surrounding his interview and conflicting statements in his reports on singer Michael Jackson.
Bashir was born in Wandsworth, South London to parents of Pakistani Christian origin and grew up in Wandsworth. He was educated at the state comprehensive Wandsworth School for Boys and King Alfred's College of Higher Education, Winchester (since 2004 the University of Winchester), studying English and History from 1982–1985, and at King's College London. He is fluent in English, Urdu and Hindi. He identifies as a committed Christian.
He started work as a journalist in 1986. He worked for the BBC until 1999 on programmes including Songs of Praise, Public Eye and Panorama and then he joined ITV, working on special documentary programmes and features for Tonight with Trevor McDonald.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and case officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counter-terrorism consultant for ABC News, blogger for Huffington Post, and author.
He is notable as the first official within the U.S. government to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, which he described as torture.
Kiriakou was born August 9, 1964 in Sharon, Pennsylvania and raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania, the son of elementary school educators. He is married and has five children.
Kiriakou graduated from New Castle High School in 1982 and attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies and a Master's degree in Legislative Affairs. Kiriakou was recruited into the CIA by a graduate school professor who had been a senior CIA official.
Kiriakou spent the first eight years of his career as a Middle East analyst specializing on Iraq. He maintained a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance. He learned Arabic and was assigned to the American Embassy in Manama, Bahrain as an economic officer from 1994-1996. He returned to Washington, D.C. and went back to work on Iraq until transferring to the CIA's Directorate of Operations in 1998. He became a counter-terrorism operations officer and served overseas in Athens, Greece, working on Eurocommunist terrorism issues. Kiriakou returned again to CIA Headquarters in 2000.
Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been highly influential, and he spent a decade as contributing editor of The New Yorker starting in 1992, where he also made a number of high-profile and sometimes controversial covers. He is married to Françoise Mouly.
Spiegelman's work first gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s. His work in this period was short and formally experimental, and often included autobiographical elements. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977. After Breakdowns, Spiegelman wanted to work on a "very long comic book". He settled on the theme of his father's experiences during as a Holocaust survivor. The book, Maus, would take thirteen years to complete. It drew both praise and criticism for depicting Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. The book won a number of prizes, most prominently a special Pulitzer Prize. It has come to be viewed as a pivotal work in comics, responsible for bringing serious scholarly attention to the medium.