Legal professionals for the longest-held prisoner in America’s struggle on terror have launched a brand new authorized offensive in a number of courts aimed toward securing his launch from Guantanamo Bay.
The prisoner, referred to as Abu Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 throughout a raid by US and Pakistani safety forces. He was the primary individual to be held within the US secret jail community referred to as the black websites and the primary to be waterboarded by the CIA
The initiative follows the Pentagon’s revelation final summer season {that a} nationwide safety parole board deemed Abu Zubaydah too harmful to launch. He was by no means criminally prosecuted at Guantanamo. U.S. intelligence concluded that though he was a militant in Afghanistan within the Eighties and Nineties, he by no means joined Al Qaeda and had no reference to the September 11, 2001, assaults.
Abu Zubaydah, 52, is being held indefinitely as a prisoner of the struggle on terror that the USA declared in response to the September 11 assaults. He’s colloquially referred to as a ‘perpetually prisoner’ due to the countless nature of that struggle.
There are further prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who have been captured in 2002. However they’ve been authorised for switch to different international locations, and one has been tried and convicted by a army fee.
Legal professionals in Europe and the USA are searching for compensation and convictions for Abu Zubaydah, who’s Palestinian however born in Saudi Arabia. His actual identify is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn.
The brand new initiative started final month when U.S. attorneys filed a lawsuit in Spokane, Washington, towards two psychologists who waterboarded Abu Zubaydah for the CIA at a black web site in Thailand in August 2002. Additionally they supervised a program wherein he was disadvantaged of sleep. , locked in a field and subjected to different “enhanced interrogation strategies,” because the CIA euphemistically referred to as them.
One of many psychologists, John Bruce Jessen, lives within the federal jurisdiction of Spokane County. It’s the identical courtroom the place Dr. Jessen and his accomplice, James E. Mitchell, reached a settlement in 2017 with two former inmates 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 experiments with out his consent, struggle crimes and arbitrary detention.
That effort is led by Solomon B. Shinerock, a former federal prosecutor and district legal professional in New York Metropolis who not too long ago joined Abu Zubaydah’s authorized staff.
He stated the prisoner was getting used as a “guinea pig to check the bounds of human tolerance.”
The case has been assigned to Decide Thomas O. Rice, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. Mr. Obama ended the CIA’s interrogation and detention program upon taking workplace.
Legal professionals engaged on Abu Zubaydah’s case additionally filed a petition in Washington DC on Friday, asking a decide to rule that the CIA 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 furthered Abu Zubaydah’s efforts to acquire launch.
“Ninety tapes, doubtlessly protecting a whole lot of hours of interrogations, have been destroyed,” the 33-page petition stated. “The tapes have been related to terrorism investigations, prison investigations and the deprivation of liberty of the petitioner.”
Abu Zubaydah has been in a position to inform his personal story largely solely by artworks after they have been declassified and launched by the jail. Renewed consideration to his case might elevate his profile and assist his attorneys discover a nation keen to take him in.
The excellent authorized method is a part of an effort “to help the U.S. authorities in releasing Mr. Abu Zubaydah and discovering a secure and appropriate nation to resettle him peacefully and productively,” stated Lt. Col. Chantell M. Higgins, an legal professional with the U.S. Marine Corps who represented Abu Zubaydah for six years.
“He’s a human being and clearly deserves an opportunity at freedom,” she stated.
The federal government’s Interagency Periodic Assessment Board final held a listening to on the standing of the detainee on July 15, 2021. Practically two years later, the panel concluded he was too harmful to launch. Such opinions have sometimes lasted a few month.
Later this month, the topic of Abu Zubaydah will likely be on the agenda of a gathering of the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva. That effort is championed by a human rights lawyer in The Hague and a legislation professor at UCLA
The UN physique has no enforcement powers. However in a letter filed final month, Abu Zubaydah’s attorneys requested the fee to approve the prisoner’s launch and advocate that the USA pay him reparations and subject a proper apology.
Hannah R. Garry, the UCLA professor and director of a human rights institute there, described the project as one step in a coordinated effort on behalf of Abu Zubaydah “to hunt justice for him on a number of fronts and in a number of places.”
U.S. and European attorneys even have long-running lawsuits on his behalf in Poland, the place he was held in a secret CIA jail after Thailand, and in Britain.
Each are searching for damages, accusing these governments of complicity in his torture or detention from 2002 to 2006, when he was held by the CIA past the attain of U.S. and worldwide courts and Worldwide Pink Cross visits.
“US courts, together with some 2022 US Supreme Court docket justices, the US Senate and US President Barack Obama, have all acknowledged through the years that strategies within the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program towards detainees represent torture,” the report by human rights attorneys stated . .
“Regardless of this, to this present day the U.S. authorities has by no means formally acknowledged this torture, apologized, or offered efficient treatments to Mr. Abu Zubaydah and different detainees subjected to the in depth interrogation program.”
