Lawyers Expand Legal Fight for Longest-Held Prisoner of War on Terrorism

Legal professionals for the longest-held prisoner within the U.S. warfare in opposition to terrorism have begun a brand new authorized offensive in a number of courts aimed toward securing his launch from Guantánamo Bay.

The prisoner, often called Abu Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 in a raid by U.S. and Pakistani safety companies. He was the primary particular person held within the U.S. secret jail community often called the black websites and the primary to be waterboarded by the C.I.A.

The initiative follows the Pentagon’s disclosure over the summer time {that a} nationwide safety parole-style board deemed Abu Zubaydah too harmful to launch. He has by no means confronted prison costs at Guantánamo. U.S. intelligence concluded that whereas he was a militant in Afghanistan within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, he had by no means joined Al Qaeda and had no hyperlink to the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.

Abu Zubaydah, 52, is being held indefinitely as a detainee of the warfare on terrorism the US declared in response to the Sept. 11 assaults. He’s colloquially referred to as a “without end prisoner” due to the infinite nature of that warfare.

There are different prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who have been captured in 2002. However they’ve been accredited for switch to different nations, and one has been tried and convicted at a army fee.

Legal professionals in Europe and the US are searching for compensation and condemnations for Abu Zubaydah, who’s Palestinian however was born in Saudi Arabia. His true title is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn.

The brand new initiative started final month with U.S. legal professionals submitting a lawsuit in Spokane, Wash., in opposition to two psychologists who waterboarded Abu Zubaydah for the C.I.A. at a black web site in Thailand in August 2002. In addition they oversaw a program wherein he was disadvantaged of sleep, confined to a field and subjected to different “enhanced interrogation strategies,” because the C.I.A. euphemistically referred to as them.

One of many psychologists, John Bruce Jessen, lives within the federal jurisdiction of the Spokane district. It’s the similar court docket the place Dr. Jessen and his accomplice, James E. Mitchell, reached a settlement in 2017 with two former prisoners and the household of a 3rd who died in U.S. custody.

The brand new lawsuit on behalf of Abu Zubaydah alleges that he was subjected to torture and merciless, inhuman and degrading remedy, medical and scientific experimentation with out his consent, warfare crimes and arbitrary detention.

That effort is led by Solomon B. Shinerock, a former federal and New York Metropolis prosecutor who not too long ago joined Abu Zubaydah’s authorized workforce.

He mentioned the prisoner was used as “a guinea pig to check the bounds of human tolerance.”

The case has been assigned to Choose Thomas O. Rice, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama ended the C.I.A. interrogation and detention program upon taking workplace.

Legal professionals engaged on Abu Zubaydah’s case additionally filed a petition on Friday in Washington, D.C., asking a choose to rule that the C.I.A. disadvantaged him of highly effective proof when it destroyed videotapes of his interrogations in Thailand.

The submitting primarily seeks a ruling that the graphic torture depicted within the tapes would have favored Abu Zubaydah’s efforts to win launch.

“Ninety tapes, masking presumably a whole bunch of hours of interrogations, have been destroyed,” the 33-page petition mentioned. “The tapes have been related to terrorism investigations, prison investigations and the petitioner’s deprivation of liberty.”

Abu Zubaydah has largely been in a position to inform his personal story solely via paintings, when it has been declassified and launched by the jail. Renewed consideration to his case may increase his profile and assist his legal professionals discover a nation prepared to take him in.

The expanded authorized strategy is a part of an effort “to help the U.S. authorities in releasing Mr. Abu Zubaydah and discovering a protected and appropriate nation to resettle him peacefully and productively,” mentioned Lt. Col. Chantell M. Higgins, a lawyer with the U.S. Marine Corps who has represented Abu Zubaydah for six years.

“He’s a human being and clearly deserves an opportunity at freedom,” she mentioned.

The federal government’s interagency Periodic Evaluate Board final held a listening to on the prisoner’s standing on July 15, 2021. The panel concluded almost two years later that he was too harmful to launch. Such evaluations have sometimes taken a couple of month.

Later this month, the subject of Abu Zubaydah is on the agenda of a gathering of the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva. That effort is being championed by a human rights lawyer in The Hague and a legislation professor at U.C.L.A.

The U.N. physique has no enforcement authority. However in a quick submitted final month, Abu Zubaydah’s legal professionals requested the committee to endorse the prisoner’s launch and advocate that the US pay him reparations and situation a proper apology.

Hannah R. Garry, the U.C.L.A. professor and the director of a human rights institute there, described the temporary as a prong in a coordinated effort on behalf of Abu Zubaydah “to hunt justice for him on a number of fronts and a number of venues.”

U.S. and European legal professionals even have long-running lawsuits on his behalf in Poland, the place he was held in a secret C.I.A. jail after Thailand, and in Britain.

Each search damages and accuse these governments of complicity in his torture or detention from 2002 to 2006, when he was held by the C.I.A. past the attain of U.S. and worldwide courts and visits by the Worldwide Pink Cross.

“U.S. courts, together with some justices of the U.S. Supreme Court docket in 2022, the U.S. Senate and U.S. President Barack Obama have all acknowledged over time that strategies within the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation program in opposition to detainees represent torture,” the human rights legal professionals’ temporary mentioned.

“Regardless of this, to this present day, the U.S. authorities has by no means formally acknowledged this torture, supplied apology or supplied any efficient cures to Mr. Abu Zubaydah and different detainees subjected to its enhanced interrogation program.”