U.N. Body Demands Release of Guantánamo Prisoner Who Was Tortured by the C.I.A.
The body, which has no enforcement mechanism, also found that Abu Zubaydah had been denied a meaningful review of his detention and so was being unlawfully held. “The appropriate remedy would be to release Mr. Zubaydah immediately and accord him an enforceable right to compensation and other reparations, in accordance with international law,” the group said in an opinion.
He was the first prisoner of a C.I.A. “black site,” a global network of overseas, secret prisons that held more than 100 men beyond the reach of U.S. law and the International Committee of the Red Cross from 2002 to 2006.
Two C.I.A. contract psychologists devised a torture program of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” specifically for use on him in an agency prison in Thailand, in which he was waterboarded, deprived of sleep and confined in a coffinlike box.
In 2019, Abu Zubaydah drew sketches of how he was tortured. His lawyers made the drawings public, with the face of an interrogator redacted behind a black box.
Image Abu Zubaydah.
The report criticized six other nations where the United States held Abu Zubaydah — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco and Lithuania. In 2018, the European Court of Human Rights censured Lithuania and Romania for their complicity in the C.I.A. program.
Source: The New York Times
