Report says U.S. labels Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Islamabad as al-Qaida member

The U.S. government has labeled Al Jazeera's bureau chief in Pakistan's capital as a member of al- Qaida and put him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, an online magazine reported on Friday.

Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, a Syrian national long based in Islamabad, has covered the Taliban and al-Qaida throughout his career and made a number of interviews with senior al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, The Intercept said.

"A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a 'member of al-Qaida' as well as the Muslim Brotherhood," the report said, adding "It also notes that he 'works for Al Jazeera.'"

The report said the presentation was among the documents provided by Edward Snowden,a former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed the agency's mass domestic and global spying program in the summer of 2013.

It said Zaidan was cited in the document as an example to demonstrate the powers of Skynet, a program that analyzes location and communication data from bulk call records to "detect suspicious pattens."

In an interview with the magazine over the phone, Zaidan " absolutely" denied that he is a member of al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood. Endite