The defense lawyers want that information to seek the testimony of eyewitnesses to bolster their argument that the United States has lost the moral authority to execute prisoners who have been tortured.
Mr. Zubaydah, a Palestinian man whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and was initially thought be a high-level member of Al Qaeda. A 2014 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said “the C.I.A. later concluded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaeda.”
The Bush administration transferred Mr. Zubaydah, who is 50, to the Pentagon’s wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006, after more than four years in C.I.A. custody. He is held as a “law of war detainee,” whom interagency review boards have deemed too dangerous to release. He was granted access to a lawyer for the first time in his sixth year of U.S. confinement, but unlike the defendants in the Sept. 11 case, he has never been charged with a crime.
It is undisputed that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to brutal interrogations at one or more black sites.
“On 83 different occasions in a single month of 2002, he was strapped to an inclined board with his head lower than his feet while C.I.A. contractors poured water up his nose and down his throat, bringing him within sight of death,” Mr. Zubaydah’s lawyers told the justices. “He was handcuffed and repeatedly slammed into walls, and suspended naked from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time.”
“He was forced to remain awake for 11 consecutive days, and doused again and again with cold water when he collapsed into sleep,” they wrote. “He was forced into a tall, narrow box the size of a coffin, and crammed into another box that would nearly fit under a chair, where he was left for hours. He was subjected to a particularly grotesque humiliation described by the C.I.A. as ‘rectal rehydration.’”
Mr. Zubaydah has sketched graphic self-portraits of the techniques while at Guantánamo.
Dr. Mitchell testified last year in a court hearing at Guantánamo that in August 2002, he and Dr. Jessen concluded that Mr. Zubaydah was cooperating with his interrogators and that they no longer needed to waterboard him to force his cooperation. He said that C.I.A. headquarters insisted that they continue.
Source : Nytimes
