This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A heated dispute erupted on Friday at the pretrial hearings for the accused conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks over the use of the word “torture” to describe C.I.A. interrogations, and the military judge declared that he would need to consider the question before the start of the death-penalty trial next year.

The judge, Col. W. Shane Cohen of the Air Force, said it would be his role to decide before the trial whether what happened to the defendants in the C.I.A. prison network was “torture” or “cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” Jury selection is scheduled to start on Jan. 11, 2021.

“The opinion of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General or even the President of the United States is not binding on me,” Colonel Cohen said, referring to legal memos from the Bush administration that authorized brutal interrogation techniques like waterboarding that are now outlawed as torture.

With such a finding, a military commission judge could decide to exclude certain evidence from the trial, dismiss the case or prevent the prosecution from seeking the death penalty.