Does US Have to Deal with a Good Psy-Warrior? Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit [The US is now selectively leaking some exculpatory (dis?)information to the press so that their chicken-little wing flapping doesn't seem quite so cravenly manipulative and self-serving. If any of this is true, and Abu Zubaydah is playing with them as skillfully as they want it to appear, US government 'intelligence' will be shown up for the oxymoron that it is.] Reuters via Yahoo - May 23, 6:50 pm Eastern Time Bin Laden aide talks, sets off alerts in U.S. By Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) - Senior al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah is talking to his American captors and has sparked a string of warnings that everything from the Statue of Liberty to shopping malls may be the next target of attack. But some intelligence experts say he may be deliberately toying with U.S. authorities who are too jittery after the Sept. 11 attacks to ignore him, and in effect he has succeeded in terrorizing Americans merely with his utterances. U.S. officials say they are mindful that Zubaydah may not be fully truthful, but that some of the information he has revealed has been corroborated by other means and so they cannot just dismiss what he says. "While it is recognized by all concerned that sometimes when he says these things it could be an effort to try to mess with the emotions of Americans, it's simply not acceptable to just assume that he's making it up and fail to report it to people who have a need to know," one official said. So far, information from Zubaydah, a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle captured by the United States in Pakistan in March, has led to alerts about possible threats to the Statue of Liberty, apartment buildings, banks in northeastern U.S. states, supermarkets and shopping malls. He is being interrogated at an undisclosed location overseas. He has said that al Qaeda knew how to build a radiological dispersal weapon known as a "dirty bomb," and the hijacked plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11 was targeting the White House. U.S. officials say Zubaydah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia who is about 30 years old, knows about al Qaeda's operatives and attack plans. They say it could have taken up to two years to plan an operation such as the Sept. 11 attacks in which hijacked planes were used as weapons to destroy New York's World Trade Center towers and damage the Pentagon, killing about 3,000 people. The United States has blamed bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for the attack, which was a turning point for the United States in focusing on security vulnerability at home. 'PLAYING US' Zubaydah recently told interrogators that al Qaeda had talked about attacking the Statue of Liberty and "a bridge" in New York which he described but did not name, U.S. officials said. But he did not say there was a specific plan. "He's playing us. There are too many threats. It's got the ring of fabrication to me," Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, said. If Zubaydah was being forthcoming he would give specific details such as which safe houses al Qaeda was using, names of people involved in the plot and how they entered the United States, he said. "I would expect to see arrests in the wake of this information," Baer said. Zubaydah speaks excellent English, is well trained in the art of defeating interrogation and is being interrogated by the CIA, FBI and others, officials said. "Some things he's telling us, he's clearly trying to mislead us on," one U.S. official said. Other information, however, has been independently verified, he said. "So we know not everything he tells us is (false). Once you know that and he tells you something, you can't just ignore it," the official said. Zubaydah also was not aware of what has happened in the United States after his statements. While U.S. officials say the United States does not use torture to extract information, techniques being used probably included mind games, perhaps reducing the dose of painkillers used to treat his three gunshot wounds received during capture and threatening his family, intelligence experts said. Some intelligence experts said perhaps some foreign interrogators were helping gather information from Zubaydah. Long interrogations also have a tendency to loosen up a captive, but lie detector tests were probably not being used because of Zubaydah's weakened condition, experts said. "If I were interrogating him, I would not disabuse him of the idea that the less cooperative he is with us, the more uncomfortable his situation may be," one U.S. official said. "Even if you've got somebody who is the hardest of the hard core, which you have to assume Zubaydah is, there are things you can do," the U.S. official said. And despite the fact that Zubaydah was probably ready to die for the cause in the field, under captivity sometimes that changes, experts said. "A lot of these guys are tough as nails in terms of killing other people, but they're not so tough themselves, and they crack," a former intelligence official said. "Not everybody can be broken down." But one thing U.S. officials believe is that another attack on Americans is probably in the works. "I don't see the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty as the real targets," a former intelligence official said. "At the end of the day people would be angry if you blew up the Statue of Liberty, but it's not frightening." ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytmid-05.23.02-19:44:26-341