Court to review Guantanamo torture case
The Supreme Court granted the government’s request Monday to review a ruling allowing lawyers for a Guantanamo Bay inmate who was subjected to brutal treatment at the U.S. prison and CIA “black sites” to question two psychologists who designed the government’s interrogation program.
Abu Zubaydah was wounded and captured in Pakistan in 2002 by U.S. agents, who labeled him a highranking Al Qaeda operative — a conclusion rejected in 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which said he was not a member of the terrorist organization. Held without charges as an “enemy combatant,” he was waterboarded 83 times and, according to his lawyers, held in a coffinsized box for hundreds of hours and deprived of sleep for more than seven straight days during interrogation.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in 2019 that Zubaydah’s lawyers could question James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, psychologists in Spokane, Wash., who were hired by the CIA as contractors, designed the interrogation program and, according to the Senate report, took part in waterboarding Zubaydah.
The government appealed, arguing that the questioning could reveal classified information and harm national security, a position first taken under former President Donald Trump and restated last month by President Biden’s Justice Department. On Monday, the Supreme Court granted review of the case and set
the appellate ruling aside. The case will be heard in the term that starts this fall, with a ruling due by June 2022.
The case focuses on efforts by the government of Poland, where Zubaydah was held at a
CIA “black site” from December 2002 to September 2003, to identify and possibly prosecute Polish citizens and government officials who took part in his interrogation. The appeals court ruling would allow a U.S. judge to decide which subjects Zubaydah’s lawyers could raise with the two psychologists, and how much information could be safely relayed to Poland.
The appellate ruling was also noteworthy for its blunt
description of the CIA’s treatment of its prisoner.
“To use colloquial terms, Abu Zubaydah was tortured,” Judge Richard Paez said in the 21 ruling. He also cited the 2014 conclusion of the Senate committee, chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., that torture in interrogations had produced little useful intelligence.
Zubaydah’s lawyers say he suffered permanent brain damage, multiple seizures and
the loss of vision in his left eye. The European Court on Human Rights found Poland complicit in Zubaydah’s torture in 2015 and ordered the Polish government to pay him $147,000.
The case is U.S. vs. Zayn AlAbidin Muhammad Husayn a.k.a. Abu Zubaydah, 20827.