US Supreme Court to hear Palestinian Guantanamo prisoner’s case

Abu Zubaydah wants to question two former CIA contractors who allegedly tortured him in Poland.

The Supreme Court will decide whether a Palestinian man captured in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, and detained at the prison on the United States base at Guantanamo Bay can get access to information the government classifies as state secrets. Abu Zubaydah, also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was initially captured in Pakistan in March, 2002 and imprisoned in CIA detention facilities abroad. The US government says he was an associate and longtime ally of Osama bin Laden. Zubaydah and his lawyer want to question two former CIA contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, about the operation of a secret CIA facility in Poland where they say Zubaydah was held and tortured. A Supreme Court document (PDF) details how Zubaydah was held in various CIA “black sites” and endured “a relentless regime of ‘enhanced interrogations‘” including being waterboarded 83 times in one month in 2002. Zubaydah was also “forced to remain awake for eleven consecutive days and doused again and again with cold water when he collapsed into sleep” crammed into small boxes, suspended naked from hooks for hours, and “subjected to a particularly grotesque humiliation described by the CIA as ‘rectal rehydration'”.