Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay prison camp. (photo: NBC)
By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept
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Despite promises to allow Guantanamo prisoners to speak more freely about their experiences there, the U.S. government is still blocking the release of over 100 pages of notes and diaries from torture victim Abu Zubaydah.
The U.S. had for many years taken the position that the prisoners could not describe their own experiences of torture and confinement because those activities were classified.
But in January, after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, the government changed its classification rules. In a brief filed in a military commission case, the government wrote that “general allegations of torture” minus specific details about the CIA agents involved or the location, were now unclassified.
The brief specifically lists 119 names of prisoners who could now discuss details about their treatment-and, according to Joe Margulies, a law professor at Cornell and lead defense attorney for Zubaydah, his client’s name is the first one the list.
Zubaydah, who the Bush administration incorrectly alleged was a key Al Qaeda operative and who has never been charged with a crime, has sent his lawyers hand-written letters, declarations, and other materials describing his torture and confinement in CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay.
Amy Jacobsen, Margulies’s co-counsel, laid out the specific steps the team took in submitting the Zubaydah material for review by the government’s Privilege Review Team in an e-mail to the Intercept. “The bulk of the material I submitted was taken from letters that [our client] had written to us, in which he described his torture, but there were also some notes from meetings with him, and some written declarations that he had made to us,” she wrote. “Sometimes these included physical descriptions of his torturers and indications of where in the world he was imprisoned, but I removed any such identifying information, leaving ellipses, such as this [ . . .] in their place,” she explained. “If he said what they were asking him about in the interrogation, I also removed that. The only information that I submitted for review was information regarding his torture, treatment, and conditions of confinement and transfer.” |
